How Stupid is an Audience?

Why then, pray, is the passage of a space craft accompanied by a loud hissing noise, complete with accoustic Doppler effect?
And why must every one of the many explosions, be they of disintegrating space craft or of stars, be accentuated by a loud bang?
It may be excused as an "effect" that is expected by the audience to go with every explosion. Still, I feel left behind.
While computer-generated graphics have developped a high level of realism, the sound track has not.

I know of only one example, where the director has insisted on the realistic absence of sound:
Stanley Kubrick in "2001: A Space Odyssey".
Silence was used there as a means of enhancing the eerie atmosphere.

Let's stay with the sound track for a moment.
CDs have replaced the magnetic tape, but in a movie dating back to tapes and cassettes, the sound technicians (Foleys, I think they are called) invariably add a bit of engineering nonsense.
They seem to consider it absolutely neccessary to help the audience understand when the tape is being rewound. Every time the rewind button is being pushed, you will hear a rapid squawk of the sound played backwards.
In reality, every tape being spooled back, is lifted off the heads so as to avoid abrasion.
While the below average viewer may actually need this unrealistic sound to identify the rewind, I am sure that many of us object to be taken for technological morons.

Glasses that reflect an undistorted outside world are not spectacles, but mere window glasses.
You can easily identify optical glasses, by the way the eyes behind them show.
Yet window glasses are worn by protagonists intending to portray short- or longsighted persons.
Are they worried about the look of their eyes to viewers, or are they afraid to lose their way walking on stage?

Meow, Moo and Quack

Along the same veins lies the help Hollywood offers its audience to identify a cat as a cat by making it meow every time it appears in the frame or purr every time it's caressed.
It seems superflous to point out that a frog is a frog by having it quack.
Quacking is a mating call, not a sound of identification.
Occasionally an amphibian, not known to make quacking sounds is in the frame, such as a toad.

Hollywood Monsters

Other persistent goofs involve the scary creatures we so love.

But Boas, Anacondas and Pythons do not hiss or growl like large cats.
They are quite silent.

And please, dear film directors, remember when making sharks, spiders, snakes, octopus or even ants into "monsters", that the only creature capable of real atrocities is the one made in God's image: Us.

Foggy Realism

Dry ice (CO₂) is often used to simulate steam or vapour.

Either in order to identify a bath as hot, or because of so-called sexual decency, the bather must be hidden.
A good thing we have carbon dioxide!
Anyone taking a bath or shower while the water is evaporating into visible steam, would instantly suffer third degree burns. Water turns to visible steam at 100 degrees C!

Low-lying fog covering a forest floor is a very rare meteorological event indeed.
In Hollywood it is used quite frequently to create "atmosphere".
At night, fog is often made visible by an unwarranted back lighting (Steven Spielberg excells in it).
Only carbon dioxide will give this effect.
Aren't we already releasing too much CO₂ into the atmosphere? Should we forget "atmosphere" for the sake of the environment?

Why do actors touch faces on photos nearly every time they take the picture of a loved person down from the mantlepiece?
Are those photographs in relief or does touching glass bring them relief?

Sloppy Acting

Have you noticed how people sitting down to a meal hardly ever consume their food. Sometimes even in the absence of dialog. All they do is poke around in their mashed potatoes.
Drinking in movies fares much better.
Whether it is real alcohol or just caramel-coloured water, here the actors seem quite capable of conversation while gulping down staggering quantities of liquids.
Remember the scenes where a man is supposed to help in the kitchen? As soon as a dialoge starts, the help simmers down to nothing at all. The same chinaware is turned around in a towel, the knife stays poised over a tomato waiting to be cut. Any person of average dexerity is capable of talking while doing a simple task.
It's not only in B - movies you are bound to find an annoying neglect of showing normal banal human activities. They occur in blockbuster productions as well.
This sloppiness may be acceptable to those who think dialogs are infinitely more important than getting simultaneous banal activities right.
I disagree. Being slightly more interested in what average people do than what they say, I tend to find the inactivity rather bothersome.
Are some actors too much occupied memorising their lines to free cerebral capacity for wipeing a plate or cutting a steak?

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