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Movies and television shows are full of blunders, some more noticeable than others, and each with their specific guild of victims. Ornithologists fume when British period dramas are overdubbed with American birdsongs. Government employees will tell you that the supposed main White House staffer in Contact has a nonexistent job. Archeologists hate movie shipwrecks, and marine biologists are already mad about the zombie sharks in the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean installment, which, as cartilaginous fishes, should not have ribs—even ghostly ones.
But these are merely occasional grievances. There's one group of experts who can barely flip on the television without being exposed to egregious, head-on-desk mistakes: chess players.
"There are a ton of chess mistakes in TV and in film," says Mike Klein, a writer and videographer for Chess.com. While different experts cite different error ratios, from "20 percent" to "much more often than not," all agree: Hollywood is terrible at chess, even though they really don't have to be. "There are so many [errors], it's hard to keep track," says Grandmaster Ilja Zaragatski, of chess24. "And there are constantly [new ones] coming out."
[...] Peter Doggers of Chess.com notes another Dramatic Checkmate move: the felled king. "Tipping over your king as a way of resigning the game is only done in movies," he says. (See Mr. Holland's Opus, in which Jay Thomas slaps his king down after being owned by Richard Dreyfuss).A normal chess player will just go in for a good-game-style handshake. "This falling king thing has somehow become a strong image in cinematography," he says, "But chess players always think: 'Oh no, there we go again...'"
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Thursday March 23 2017, @11:31AM
Sometimes you need to adjust reality slightly for narrative purposes. Sometimes you do it simply because you're lazy. The first kind is fine, even laudable. We watch films for entertainment and that always includes some fantasy and escapism: if we wanted to experience a world exactly like the one that we live in, we wouldn't be watching the film.
The second kind is the annoying one. Morse is one good example of this: it's really tedious to watch someone transcribing morse, but it's not that hard to edit the film in such a way that it's clear that some time elapsed. Not doing so is lazy. The Matrix was another good example: the original scripts talked about humans being used as a distributed computing system, but they replaced this with some nonsense about perpetual motion machines made of humans (oh, and some fusion, so why do you need the low-power-output humans anyway?) because they thought it was less confusing. It's insulting (anyone who passed science at school knows that you can't generate power from nothing like that) and it's also lazy (if you can't write a couple of sentences of dialog to explain that concept to an audience, then you shouldn't be writing scripts).
sudo mod me up