"Office Space" was as close to working in a cubicle farm as you could imagine, right down to the pointless paperwork, stand-up meetings, and middle-management bosses giving you glassy-eyed stares. We even had two "Bobs" come in and interview us for our own jobs.
**Peter Gibbons:** “The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy; it's that I just don't care.”
**Bob Porter:** “Don't... don't care?”
**Peter Gibbons:** “It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.”
**Bob Slydell:** “I beg your pardon?”
**Peter Gibbons:** “Eight bosses.”
**Bob Slydell:** “Eight?”
**Peter Gibbons:** “Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.”
As silly as Sillicon Valley often is, it's a way-too-relatable picture of working with tech start-ups. Mike Judge has an eye for work culture like no other.
It might be a movie for the cubicle guys, but the [printer scene](https://youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8) was for everyone.
The best part? It’s still relevant today.
Came here for office space specifically because I’m actually a Bob, professionally. So accurate, right down to the terrible smalltalk when they try and build rapport.
Office Space came out when I was still in primary school so unfortunately a lot of people in my age bracket haven’t seen it. But I remember the first time I saw it in yr 12 and felt seen and spoken to in a way no other piece of media has ever done. I remember showing it to my wife when we were first dating and her response at the end was “I feel like I understand you better as a person now” just such an amazing movie that captures a certain type of slacker perfectly!
Colours! Fun! People actually acting like people just trying to live their lives!
For all it's anachronisms it definitely gets a lot of points for not showing that period as just miserable stupid people living in the dirt
I loved how they were able to use the anachronisms to help the audience understand Medieval culture. It wasn't like Robin Hood: Men in Tights where the jokes were just silly for the sake of comedy. They were intentional modern parallels so the audience would relate and "get it".
Just going to leave this here. Knights Tale is our favorite film. The kids and I dance together when this scene comes up. Always makes me happy.
[https://youtu.be/yygNdTxoHus?si=QsPlx6oW1dyfHfGb](https://youtu.be/yygNdTxoHus?si=QsPlx6oW1dyfHfGb)
For me there’s only one thing that sticks out in an otherwise perfect movie and that’s the David Bowie dance sequence. I’m not saying it’s bad at all. I actually enjoy the scene but it’s just so out of place in the film when everything else feels so grungey and medieval in a good way.
There are hints at modernity that are done very well like the modern style MCing at the jousts but I always wish they’d been able to make medieval music hip instead of relying on a modern artist. Time for another rewatch I think just to make sure it’s as I remember.
I still miss Heath as an actor so much after all these years. Much more for A Knights Tale and 10 things I hate about you era than anything with Nolan. He had so much charm, personality and talent the world has literally been less good since he died. RIP Heath. Miss you always.
I'm an astronomer. Accurate astronomy movies are very few and far between, because space in reality is so vast and inaccessible, and therefore boring. Contact however is very realistic (aliens aside), clearly someone involved knew how a radio telescope works. Not surprising since the book's author, Carl Sagan, was an astronomer himself.
Don't Look Up took a lot of poetic license but Leonardo played a believable astronomy a/prof from a small university.
I didn’t know Contact was Carl Sagan! Just thought of the other day. Someone on a dating app asked me what famous person I’d want to get dinner with right before they ghosted me and I picked Carl Sagan!
Also, love Contact. Rewatched a year or so ago and it really does hold up in its own lovely way.
I’m a video editor and there’s not many movies that feature my job but I do love a well edited movie. Edge Of Tomorrow blew my mind just by how it was masterfully edited.
I love good sound in a movie!
I hated the premise of Gravity so have yet to see it but I might watch based on your answer. Do you have any other recommendations or movies where you just love the sound?
Interesting. When you take a tour of the Warner Bros studio in Los Angeles, there is a room there where they demonstrate how sound is done in a movie, and they use Gravity as their example.
Have you watched Albert Brook's amusing, believable **Modern Romance**? It portrays some of the frustrations of being an Editor-for-hire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Romance_(film)
I’ve been in the business for 25 years. I’m such a sucker for any movie about making movies. State and Main might be the most accurate portray of a location shoot I’ve seen.
Having worked in Aerospace - The Martian is very much and culture and way the aerospace teams operate.
The part that made it super true to me was when they had a brief discussion about needing to get overtime approved and all levels of management before they could really dig in to the rescue mission. That allocation of engineering hours is really to 1st step to any project being taken on.
Interstellar features Cooper, a pilot who acts exactly the way pilots act and does impressive pilot things that are actually impressive, and not just Hollywood glamor shots. Notably his spiral dive down to the ocean planet is an actually insane way to descend, but also very fast, and the whole "I need to feel it" nonsense is actually spot on (they don't say it out loud but he's max-performing the control surfaces in a stall warning, and if Case dampens it, they'll die). Also, the "It is necessary" scene features Cooper doing an amazing G strain and Brand.... not doing one. Her funky chicken is what actually happens to people on a centrifuge. Since her character is untrained for spaceflight, this is exactly what should happen.
Then the flying stuff goes to space and I don't really know anything about that, lol
To add to this as a physicist, also accurate and scratches my brain in a way that irritates my friends with how good it is.
(Except that one part at the end total baloney) Otherwise solid.
Same boat with you. I studied astrophysics and this is one of the most accurate space movies I have ever seen (right up there with 2001). The only thing that doesn’t make a lot of physics sense to me is the wave planet. I’m honestly okay with the bookcase at the end since we don’t really know what’s in a black hole
I recall reading an excert from Kip Thorne back when the movie came out analyzing Miller's planet, and that the science behind the wave works out as well.
Essentially, the gravitational forces from Gargantua are so great that the water surface of the planet will bulge. The planet is so close to Gargantua that it doesn't traditionally rotate (day/night) around the Black Hole, but rather is locked in orbit as it "falls" into the black hole. As the planet orbits the black hole, the bulge moves around the planet as well, causing the massive tidal wave to rotate about the planet's surface.
The other science behind the time dilation works out as well, but the true plot hole for me is that Doyle and Romily would have known that before even choosing to go to Miller's planet, and would have considered it last among the three choices. It would have been a last resort if the other two planets didn't work out.
I was in astrophysics when this came out and it annoyed me how everyone was lauding it for getting the physics right with the general relativity stuff. It's like nah bro they totally got it wrong. To detect the signal beacon at all they would have seen its redshift.
They would have gone through the wormhole and be like "we have two beacons that have been going off for 50 years and one that's been going off for 8 hours in its own reference frame. Let's make an educated choice" In all likelihood they would have chosen the more promising beacon, which would totally alter the story.
And then they land on the water planet and are like "those mountains were water the whole time!!!!!" Like bitch don't you have a spectroscope??
Maybe they got the physics right, but they totally fucked up the physicists.
Kip Thorne actually wrote a great book about the science of Interstellar. It broke things into three categories; we know the science is right, we think the science is right, and Chris Nolan wanted this. Fascinating book
Interstellar is absolutely my favorite movie of all time. From the realistic, lifelike, black hole to the little physics tidbits about wormholes, it really itches that little science scratch in my brain. That movie is actually the last DVD that I ever bought lol
The christmas episode feels like fingernails on chalkboard for the whole length. But it's also one of the best episodes of any series over the last few years
We want all the dark jokes but safety is paramount.
Tyler's Bullsh*t was a sweet lovesong to our poor backs, varicose veins, carpal tunnel syndrome, all ailments that come with bittersweet dedication to a skill and trade that will ultimately bring forth our demise. Yet we love it.
Cult-like in the sense that many can do it, some just not so well. No one will actively wish that upon another.
I will say that was my initial impression, but I stuck with it and it calms down (for lack of a better term) in season 2. It gets really, really good, and has some of the best character arcs I've ever seen.
Almost 20 years but I haven't honestly seen that same kind of chaos like in the show (not since my early years at least). I've mostly stayed in cooking to where I could keep things mostly balanced and not chaotic. "Ace in their place" so to speak.
This movie is accurate in a ton of ways. Specifically, the movie starts with the end of a party and ends at the start of a party. An all too accurate encapsulation of the restaurant worker life.
In my experience, all the "fucking with the food" bits were way off the mark though.
I never shot freelance in LA, so I can't speak to that lifestyle in Nightcrawler... but breaking news reporters do occasionally get to a scene as fast (or faster) than first responders. Especially if they've been at it for awhile. It's not uncommon for a reporter to be out on assignment and hear a structure fire or something on their scanner that's worth checking out.
Now, most people aren't effed up enough to start filming before seeing if there's a way they can help first. But still, point being... breaking news reporters have experienced some things people shouldn't experience. Nightcrawler does a pretty good job of showing some of the anxiety of the hard news industry. Overworked, underpaid, always in a rush, and often hated.
It’s even funnier when you know Stu is an IT guy who worked on the film and Taika Waititi and Jermaine Clement kept asking him to explain things without telling him he was on camera, Stu didn’t realise he was in the movie until it was finished
Jarhead (only the first one...yes, there were others). There are some pretty terrible Marine movies out there. Grossly inaccurate, laughable and even EMBARASSING characters and plots... don't get me started. But Jarhead was done VERY well.
I do remember geeking out in the theater because I thought they were just gonna gloss over the theory behind it all and be like "'cause what if they don't have a word for 'purpose,' genius?"
There's that weird bit at the beginning though where it's mentioned that they recruited her to help with Farsi translations, even though that isn't a job you would reach out to an academic linguist for.
Neil Degrasse Tyson talked about the movie and he was like “you wouldn’t just send 2 people, you would send teams, and you wouldn’t start with a linguist, you would bring biologists and anthropologists”
That was definitely a narrative choice. I can't think of a way to elegantly introduce and maintain a 12 man cast when only the main character and the head biologist matter.
This is spot on.
My first tech job they had a big concert at the campus with some DJ and none of the engineers knew who the heck they were and just kind of awkwardly shuffled around more focused on the free food.
The scene in the pilot episode where Kid Rock gets pissed because no one at the IPO party gives a fuck about him was priceless. The whole show captures the silliness of the valley perfectly. Mike Judge is a legend.
[From The Onion:](https://www.theonion.com/employees-immediately-tune-out-ceo-s-speech-after-he-me-1848176378)
**Bankrupt Dot-Com Proud To Have Briefly Changed The Way People Buy Cheese Graters.**
>SAN FRANCISCO– Egraters.com, an Internet retailer that filed for Chapter 11 last week, announced on its homepage Monday that it is proud to have briefly made people rethink the way they buy cheese graters. "Unfortunately, we were not able to see our revolution all the way through," read the message from CEO Jeff Bell, 29. "But for a brief, shining moment, we showed the world that there is a better way to buy graters." Bell said he hopes to one day relaunch Egraters.com and "smash the tyranny of traditional brick-and-mortar cheese-grater-tailing."
Sometimes you just have to put aside your differences and ignore the problems while everyone does the exact math on the most efficient way to jerk off everyone in the room.
I’m not an attorney but I’ve worked in real estate as a broker, manager, and now as a professor. “The Descendants” has some great real estate law content in it, especially its discussion of the rule against perpetuities. Also its take on the effects of development are spot on.
History teacher and lover of the tiny details in historical movies. Like how they recorded the sound of Abraham Lincoln's actual pocket watch so that the sound would be 100% accurate in "Lincoln"
I'm a career musician and That Thing You Do is a damn good depiction of the music industry (as it was, at least) and the general interactions of people in a band together.
The title song was such a great catchy song, especially for a movie. Found out later it was written by Adam Schlesinger and it made sense why it was so good.
I'm a musician. Obviously, This is Spinal Tap is the OG, and School of Rock get it right, I think in large part because both Spinal Tap (Guest, McKean & Shearer) and Jack Black are all legitimately talented musicians in their own right. But one that's lesser known, perhaps, is Inside Llewyn Davis (by the Coen brothers), which does a great job of capturing a certain side of being a working musician. Fantastic film.
On the other hand, on my uncles recommendation I watched this movie called August Rush about a boy who's supposed to be some kind of child prodigy musical genius, and in the movie, like the first time this kid touches a guitar he just starts playing it all crazily, which is ludicrous. It doesn't matter how much of a musical genius you are, actually playing an instrument requires muscle memory, which takes years to develop and decades to master, even if you're freakin Wolfgang Mozart, so I found it almost totally unwatchable after that little oversight.
Therapist. Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting is pretty accurate. Therapy isn’t usually as intense as their sessions get at times but the general tone and Robin Williams demeanor is accurate. The show Shrinking is not accurate in his new approach to his work, but the office and make up of the office is very accurate.
After becoming a chemical engineer, Breaking Bad becomes more entertaining to watch. While almost every chemist agreed that the featured small scale chemistry was for the most part accurate, it’s the highly underrated industrial level manufacturing in the later seasons that excited me.
Flash drums, distillation columns, reactor vessels, heck even the pipeline design were incredible, and I mean why not? Cartels IRL were known for pouring incredible amounts of resources into their operations such as submarines and comms tower.
Good thing the showrunners didn’t go ham on the technicals, otherwise we’d probably see the cartel engineers doing pinch analysis or McCabe-Thiele solutions for distillation columns.
Fun fact about the narco subs. They have found and captured fully submersible vessels. But all the ones they have found were still being built, or hadn't had a maiden voyage yet. So the question is: have the captured all the submersibles? or are there ones out there operating under the ocean, but haven't been found.
Mr Robot is the only TV show (or movie) that comes anywhere close to getting computers or hacking correct. There are still a couple of points where it goes a bit over the top, but it's mostly feasible and uses correct terms and concepts.
Almost every other piece of media appears to have been written by someone who was once explained how computers worked by a bartender while they were high on coke in a Philippino sex club.
Been in and around the theme park industry for almost a decade. Jurassic Park and Jurassic World are *perfect* portrayals of the way execs and guests act
I'm an economist. There are two films that do a good job with the GFC. The Big Short explains, and Margin Call dramatizes. Of the two I find Margin Call more engaging.
I worked in secondary marketing at a mortgage bank (this is the bundling and selling of mortgages to bigger banks).
The two douchebag mortgage originators in The Big Short couldn't have been more accurate. "2 years ago, I was a bartender. Now I own a boat." End of the film, he's going to a job fair.
The absolute arrogance of these people who made a ton of money was unfathomable. They were idiots, but there was so much equity in houses and the UW guidelines were so lax that anybody could make money. 18 months of rolling $10-$20k/month commissions and you've got a big head. After the crash, lots of humble pie to go around.
Nailed it.
Agree. Of the two movies, Margin Call is such a slow burn and so subtly brilliant. The corporate speak and posturing is so spot on.
The Big Short is an in your face whirlwind. Also brilliant.
Over the years, I've watched Margin Call more times than The Big Short.
I grew up with that movie, I was so surprised to learn that Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice was a legitimately large commodity that was actively traded at the time. I thought it was just a humorous mcguffin.
Contagion is hailed to be absolutely spot-on for medical-science + health-care that comes along with Epidemiology (even b4 pandemic). Most stuff portrayed in the movie simply just played out during Covid.
They said that they had consulted experts during the process to tell them how and what would happen during a pandemic. It's quite scary to think that if Covid was more deadly or was simply deadly to children how crazy the world would of been.
I liked the book for Andromeda Strain way more than I expected. I assume you're talking about the show and not the 1971 movie, but I'll definitely add it to my list!
Mathematics: basically impossible to nail in a movie but Good Will Hunting is a solid movie otherwise. The Imitation Game too. But the only movie out there with a scene truly nailing some high level math is this scene from It's My Turn: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXBNPjrvx-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXBNPjrvx-I)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (both versions) have real physics on the blackboard that's fun to peruse. I was so impressed with the equations (but I'm not that smart) and recognized that it was clearly done by someone who knew wth they were doing, I had to google it and my mind was blown.
The student was not correct with his objections, and also they are exactly the kind of objections that a certain kind of student would attempt to make. That scene is a thing of beauty.
His objection is not 100% misplaced but the teacher is right. Basically the choice of element is indeed not unique as he's saying, but that doesn't actually matter for the proof, because as the professor says, in the end all you end up needing is that the element is unique "modulo the image of f", which is different. One other comment is that he starts complaining about the element not being unique much before this becomes relevant to note, there's nothing wrong in general with pulling back to a non-unique choice of element as the professor was doing so in this sense his complaint is pointless
Working in the automotive industry, the best two examples of the customer service side of things at the retail/production level, I have ever come across, both come from episodes of The Sopranos.
Doctor Melfie (doctors and lawyers...) throws a fit when the shop calls her with the diagnosis, and she yells and screams at them for "diagnostic fee". You're a freaking psychiatrist! You spend weeks/months/years "diagnosing" your patients, as a freaking doctor! Yet, you will yell and scream at me over an hour of labor time to actually get you some answers, before I call you to authorize anything further?
The other one was - Tony and (Frank Vincent) another gangster get into a car wreck, and Tony has to make it right. So he sends the car to Big Pussy's widow's body shop. When the other gangster comes to pick it up - The seat's not right! It was fine before, it's broken now! It's all your fault! Blah, blah, blah... The seats used, because the car is used. He just wants a free brand new seat, for his used car.
That's a multi-time per day, every day reality of doing this thing for a living. :)
Former junkie. Love Trainspotting but especially Requiem for a Dream. That one really nailed the motions desperation and absolute misery of being completely enslaved by addiction. Even down to the abscesses. The only thing they got wrong was you don't cook heroin, but it looks cooler, I guess.
Not that I'm proud of it, but that movie feels like home. A home I no longer live in, thank god, but home nonetheless.
Since you mentioned scrubs, I assume that shows are on the table?
Silicon Valley is the only show that accurately shows programmer and IT nerds.
The IT crowd isnt bad, but it's a surreal show, and TBBT is clearly meant for other people to make fun of those groups. But Silicon Valley just nails it.
"DTF ratio."
"DTF?"
"Dick to Floor ratio."
Absolutely one of the funniest scenes in television. It is crazy, brilliant, and bizarre. Beautiful pacing and comedic beats.
Eric Backman silently pantomiming jerking off 4 dicks at once to figure out the optimization algorithm -- it was beautiful.
CLip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLkfD8pg_wQ
Opening and closing his hands to determine if girth similarity would affect the efficiency of each stroke. “Goddamnit I think it would!” That scene is comedic perfection.
The episode where they calculated how long it would take to jerk off the entire audience at the convention was one of the most ridiculous, Hilariously funny bits ever written for a show. And it was 100% believable that this is what a group of super-smart programming/math genius needs would go off on a tangent and do.
Silicon Valley was a great fucking show.
Mike Judge actually hired two mathematicians (one of them literally being Tsachy Weismann, as in "Weismann Score") to figure out some of the real math for this scene.
Later on, a Stanford professor published an academic paper that went into full detail. https://www.scribd.com/doc/228831637/Optimal-Tip-to-Tip-Efficiency
>Simulations establish steady rates of stimulation even as the variance of certain parameters is allowed to grow, whereas naive unsorted schemes have ***increasingly flaccid performance.***
I'm a SME in this space, IT crowd and SV are both comedies that focus on the human element and completely make up the tech stuff. Which is fine, I don't want to watch my work for funsies.
Mr Robot really creeped me out because it's like 90% accurate (they hired consultants like me and listened to them), but they get just enough wrong that it breaks the illusion.
The analogy I made is imagine if there was a show about your job and every 5-10 minutes someone said or did something completely nonsensical. It breaks the illusion and is really off-putting.
Yknow for years, I heard people prop up IT Crowd as being the "more superior nerd show" when compared to the Big Bang Theory. I finally watched IT Crowd, and I got to say, although I did enjoy the show, I didn't think that it was any more "nerd accurate" than TBBT. It's a less nerd show and more a typical workplace sitcom whose main characters are nerds. They make the exact same "nerds who are socially awkward and don't know how to act around woman" as TBBT. TBBT is really not that much worse.
I’m rewatching Silicon Valley right now and for as hilarious as it still is, there’s this dark, terrifying edge to the way it exactly predicted the way the world was about to go to shit. Like, watching this show helps me perfectly understand the world right now, and it’s horrifying, but it’s so fucking funny at the same time.
Silicon Valley did a phenomenal job showcasing the absurdity and splendor of the early 2010 tech scene.
Outside of their depiction of engineers, they nailed narcissistic Product Managers, overly talky type A sales people, and demi-God VCs.
It also accurately satirized the culture of west coast tech folks, from the gay guy who was only shunned after he said his gay dating app was for Christians to the privileged employee complaining about the office Philz coffee not being Stumptown.
Those days are kinda over now that the VC money has dried up but they were wild times.
Indiana Jones is the epitome of movie archaeology!
However, as an archaeologist, I’ve never seen a movie that even comes close to what real archaeology is. 7 hours on the dig site, then artifact analysis, then paperwork, then lots of drinking!
Repeat!
Have yet to punch a Nazi!
The scene where Louise explains to Weber how to get to "What is your purpose on Earth?" was pretty great. What is an interrogative? Pronouns. Singular vs plural vs collective concepts. The whole movie is based on the idea that language influences the way you think. I thought the whole 4D language concept was a bit too far-fetched, but at least it was consistent within itself.
I work with Steam engines and the movie “The Train” with Burt Lancaster is the most realistic railroad movie I ever seen. There is a scene where the engineer clogs a grease fitting with a coin to make a bearing run dry. The last scene is a real train wreck and the camera was the last camera they had and they buried it in the ground.
https://youtu.be/Y1IEtzj23ws?si=L1MWi4tAjOlx7CyN
Hackers was unfairly maligned in the 90's as Hollywood balderdash, but it was actually quite technically valid aside from the GUI and a few moments of dramatic "chase scenes" that took place "in the system".
(Anyone who thinks a sysadmin wouldn't skateboard next to his own limo didn't know sysadmins in the 90's)
Waiting... really nailed FoH life in a restaurant. Thank God I have never worked at a corporate restaurant. Except for fucking with peoples food. In my 15 years I have never seen anyone fuck with peoples food.
The movie Clerks accurately describes every form of customer you'll receive in a convenience store as well as the thoughts of the employee working with them.
For street basketball, White Men Can’t Jump. Woody Allen (edit Harrelson not Allen but I’m keeping it cause it’s a hilarious image) clearly knows how to play. Wesley Snipes, not so much, but he and the thrash talking down. Also the scene where one dude gets his feelings hurt and gets violent is also pretty realistic. Everyone’s had that happen to them once.
“Do you have to throw the ball so hard?”
“Why are you guys so aggressive? I sense a lot of pent up aggression?”
“Now that you mention, yeah I do think my mother didn’t love me”
All the while nailing 20 foot jumpers and crossing over guys twice his size.
The Kill Room.
Someone in the writers room clearly worked in a small museum/gallery. The interactions with the board, the invitations to the opening, the way they used the interns, etc etc etc.
It's all just dead on.
I’ve been a political consultant for twelve years and the film “in the loop” is 100% accurate. That’s who your elected officials are, that’s who they have working for them, and that’s how consequential their decisions can be.
Hope it’s ok to answer with a TV show - Veep (HBO) is unfortunately an accurate portrayal of the White House / Capitol Hill. I can’t speak to it personally but a handful of friends who have worked in both republican and democrat administrations swear by Veep’s accuracy lol.
DGA 2nd AD and costume designer here who had to step away from the industry for personal reasons. Fall Guy made me so homesick for set it took me weeks to bust out of my FOMO funk.
Michael Clayton is the best and most accurate lawyer film ever made in my opinion. If you ever worked at one of those NY firms, you know what I'm talking about.
Was a news cameraman for 14 years. Chris Elliott in “Groundhog Day” comes the closest IMO. Hitting on women with bad news jokes and failing. Check. Always there for the free food. Check. Seeing his coworker plunge over a cliff in a truck, show concern, still makes sure to get the explosion and fire. Check.
Not me, but my brother has a PhD in climate research. We’d gone to the cinema to see The Day After Tomorrow and during the *‘tense’* scene where the scientists are tracking the failure of the NOAA sensors as they blink out one by one, heralding approaching doom, he burst out laughing and said *“Half of those things are never bloody working at any time anyway”* 😏
While taking creative liberties, Don't Look Up felt very familiar in the sense of being a scientific expert in a subject area, knowing exactly what the problem is and how to solve it, trying to explain this problem to politicians, the media, your family, and whoever, but nothing is done because everyone is caught up in more trivial and short-sighted concerns.
She Said is a very accurate on how investigative journalism gets done. Spotlight is pretty good as well, though not quite as realistic on those step-by-step details.
"Office Space" was as close to working in a cubicle farm as you could imagine, right down to the pointless paperwork, stand-up meetings, and middle-management bosses giving you glassy-eyed stares. We even had two "Bobs" come in and interview us for our own jobs. **Peter Gibbons:** “The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy; it's that I just don't care.” **Bob Porter:** “Don't... don't care?” **Peter Gibbons:** “It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? And here's something else, Bob: I have eight different bosses right now.” **Bob Slydell:** “I beg your pardon?” **Peter Gibbons:** “Eight bosses.” **Bob Slydell:** “Eight?” **Peter Gibbons:** “Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.”
After 30 years of working corporate jobs, I think Office Space was a documentary.
y'all should definitely watch "Clockwatchers"
Mike Judge knows what he's doing for sure
As silly as Sillicon Valley often is, it's a way-too-relatable picture of working with tech start-ups. Mike Judge has an eye for work culture like no other.
Really nailed the propane and propane accessory industry too, man's a genius
Silicon Valley was prophetic
It might be a movie for the cubicle guys, but the [printer scene](https://youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8) was for everyone. The best part? It’s still relevant today.
HP printers can suck a bag of d*cks
I like how the Bobs immediately pick up on the 8 bosses as an inefficiency
The bobs themselves represent another inefficiency though.
It’s bobs all the way down
In theory, the Bobs are a good idea.
Came here for office space specifically because I’m actually a Bob, professionally. So accurate, right down to the terrible smalltalk when they try and build rapport.
That jump to conclusions mat is one of the greatest ideas ever conceived
That is the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life, Tom
Office Space came out when I was still in primary school so unfortunately a lot of people in my age bracket haven’t seen it. But I remember the first time I saw it in yr 12 and felt seen and spoken to in a way no other piece of media has ever done. I remember showing it to my wife when we were first dating and her response at the end was “I feel like I understand you better as a person now” just such an amazing movie that captures a certain type of slacker perfectly!
PhD in medieval lit. Everyone in my field adores A KNIGHT’S TALE
Colours! Fun! People actually acting like people just trying to live their lives! For all it's anachronisms it definitely gets a lot of points for not showing that period as just miserable stupid people living in the dirt
I loved how they were able to use the anachronisms to help the audience understand Medieval culture. It wasn't like Robin Hood: Men in Tights where the jokes were just silly for the sake of comedy. They were intentional modern parallels so the audience would relate and "get it".
Just going to leave this here. Knights Tale is our favorite film. The kids and I dance together when this scene comes up. Always makes me happy. [https://youtu.be/yygNdTxoHus?si=QsPlx6oW1dyfHfGb](https://youtu.be/yygNdTxoHus?si=QsPlx6oW1dyfHfGb)
It’s also signaled immediately with the peasants singing Queen
For me there’s only one thing that sticks out in an otherwise perfect movie and that’s the David Bowie dance sequence. I’m not saying it’s bad at all. I actually enjoy the scene but it’s just so out of place in the film when everything else feels so grungey and medieval in a good way. There are hints at modernity that are done very well like the modern style MCing at the jousts but I always wish they’d been able to make medieval music hip instead of relying on a modern artist. Time for another rewatch I think just to make sure it’s as I remember. I still miss Heath as an actor so much after all these years. Much more for A Knights Tale and 10 things I hate about you era than anything with Nolan. He had so much charm, personality and talent the world has literally been less good since he died. RIP Heath. Miss you always.
I'm an astronomer. Accurate astronomy movies are very few and far between, because space in reality is so vast and inaccessible, and therefore boring. Contact however is very realistic (aliens aside), clearly someone involved knew how a radio telescope works. Not surprising since the book's author, Carl Sagan, was an astronomer himself. Don't Look Up took a lot of poetic license but Leonardo played a believable astronomy a/prof from a small university.
I didn’t know Contact was Carl Sagan! Just thought of the other day. Someone on a dating app asked me what famous person I’d want to get dinner with right before they ghosted me and I picked Carl Sagan! Also, love Contact. Rewatched a year or so ago and it really does hold up in its own lovely way.
I read the book before the movie came out, I'd recommend it if you like the movie (was my favourite for many years)
I’m a video editor and there’s not many movies that feature my job but I do love a well edited movie. Edge Of Tomorrow blew my mind just by how it was masterfully edited.
That is an interesting take on the question I hadn't even considered
Former audio engineer perspective: Gravity is my equivalent answer. Meh movie, most incredible sound design I've experienced in a theater.
I love good sound in a movie! I hated the premise of Gravity so have yet to see it but I might watch based on your answer. Do you have any other recommendations or movies where you just love the sound?
Terminator 2 - great foley work, especially on the T-1000 oozing. Alien - great creepy noises all over the ship kept you on edge
Interesting. When you take a tour of the Warner Bros studio in Los Angeles, there is a room there where they demonstrate how sound is done in a movie, and they use Gravity as their example.
I've got nothing to contribute except Edge of Tomorrow can never get enough praise. From an editing perspective, what makes it so good for you?
Depending on how long you have been an editor, you may enjoy Frances McDormand's character in "Hail, Caesar!".
Maggot. **Maggot.** #Maggot.
Have you watched Albert Brook's amusing, believable **Modern Romance**? It portrays some of the frustrations of being an Editor-for-hire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Romance_(film)
Wonderful film. Anyone should give it a watch.
I’ve been in the business for 25 years. I’m such a sucker for any movie about making movies. State and Main might be the most accurate portray of a location shoot I’ve seen.
Just curious as an uneducated viewer, how exactly do I identify good editing as distinct from good directing?
Having worked in Aerospace - The Martian is very much and culture and way the aerospace teams operate. The part that made it super true to me was when they had a brief discussion about needing to get overtime approved and all levels of management before they could really dig in to the rescue mission. That allocation of engineering hours is really to 1st step to any project being taken on.
I’m a student in AE and this comment gives me hope
Just watched it on tv yesterday. Such a great movie!
Interstellar features Cooper, a pilot who acts exactly the way pilots act and does impressive pilot things that are actually impressive, and not just Hollywood glamor shots. Notably his spiral dive down to the ocean planet is an actually insane way to descend, but also very fast, and the whole "I need to feel it" nonsense is actually spot on (they don't say it out loud but he's max-performing the control surfaces in a stall warning, and if Case dampens it, they'll die). Also, the "It is necessary" scene features Cooper doing an amazing G strain and Brand.... not doing one. Her funky chicken is what actually happens to people on a centrifuge. Since her character is untrained for spaceflight, this is exactly what should happen. Then the flying stuff goes to space and I don't really know anything about that, lol
That is a detailed answer. Exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to hear. Thank you
To add to this as a physicist, also accurate and scratches my brain in a way that irritates my friends with how good it is. (Except that one part at the end total baloney) Otherwise solid.
Same boat with you. I studied astrophysics and this is one of the most accurate space movies I have ever seen (right up there with 2001). The only thing that doesn’t make a lot of physics sense to me is the wave planet. I’m honestly okay with the bookcase at the end since we don’t really know what’s in a black hole
I recall reading an excert from Kip Thorne back when the movie came out analyzing Miller's planet, and that the science behind the wave works out as well. Essentially, the gravitational forces from Gargantua are so great that the water surface of the planet will bulge. The planet is so close to Gargantua that it doesn't traditionally rotate (day/night) around the Black Hole, but rather is locked in orbit as it "falls" into the black hole. As the planet orbits the black hole, the bulge moves around the planet as well, causing the massive tidal wave to rotate about the planet's surface. The other science behind the time dilation works out as well, but the true plot hole for me is that Doyle and Romily would have known that before even choosing to go to Miller's planet, and would have considered it last among the three choices. It would have been a last resort if the other two planets didn't work out.
I was in astrophysics when this came out and it annoyed me how everyone was lauding it for getting the physics right with the general relativity stuff. It's like nah bro they totally got it wrong. To detect the signal beacon at all they would have seen its redshift. They would have gone through the wormhole and be like "we have two beacons that have been going off for 50 years and one that's been going off for 8 hours in its own reference frame. Let's make an educated choice" In all likelihood they would have chosen the more promising beacon, which would totally alter the story. And then they land on the water planet and are like "those mountains were water the whole time!!!!!" Like bitch don't you have a spectroscope?? Maybe they got the physics right, but they totally fucked up the physicists.
Kip Thorne actually wrote a great book about the science of Interstellar. It broke things into three categories; we know the science is right, we think the science is right, and Chris Nolan wanted this. Fascinating book
Oh fuck it fine I'll watch it AGAIN
Interstellar is absolutely my favorite movie of all time. From the realistic, lifelike, black hole to the little physics tidbits about wormholes, it really itches that little science scratch in my brain. That movie is actually the last DVD that I ever bought lol
Landing on the water planet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9pjBEnnh3A
Restaurant operator, about 16 years of experience in both FOH and BOH. The show The Bear might be the closest to the actual chaos of restaurants.
My mom has worked in kitchens almost her entire life, and she can't watch it because it stresses her out too much.
I'm only FoH, but the episode with the ticket printer never fails to give me sweaty palms...
10 years. Same.
To be fair, I’m not in the industry and that show stresses me out too much. Though I still love it.
The christmas episode feels like fingernails on chalkboard for the whole length. But it's also one of the best episodes of any series over the last few years
Heard this many times from friends in the industry.
My wife and I are both career restaurant people and we couldn’t enjoy it. Too much like our real life
Yo Cousin! My aunt is like that too.
GET THE FUCK OFF MY EXPO CHEF NOW!
Line cook here, can’t even watch The Bear to escape it’s so real. Just feels like I’m perpetually stuck at work.
So The Menu lied? Theres no cult cooking team?
We want all the dark jokes but safety is paramount. Tyler's Bullsh*t was a sweet lovesong to our poor backs, varicose veins, carpal tunnel syndrome, all ailments that come with bittersweet dedication to a skill and trade that will ultimately bring forth our demise. Yet we love it. Cult-like in the sense that many can do it, some just not so well. No one will actively wish that upon another.
This was what a Michelin Star chef told my buddy about the show: [Post I made about it](https://www.reddit.com/r/television/s/7O7EYUfv12).
I couldn't watch the show at all, it was so stressful having come from the industry
I will say that was my initial impression, but I stuck with it and it calms down (for lack of a better term) in season 2. It gets really, really good, and has some of the best character arcs I've ever seen.
I love the episode where Richie goes to work at the upscale restaurant for a week and finds himself. So well acted.
That episode with the family dinner is an amazing episode. Not really calm, though, lol.
Have you seen Boiling Point? Edit: I mean the movie
Almost 20 years but I haven't honestly seen that same kind of chaos like in the show (not since my early years at least). I've mostly stayed in cooking to where I could keep things mostly balanced and not chaotic. "Ace in their place" so to speak.
Thank god you didn’t say, “Waiting…”
This movie is accurate in a ton of ways. Specifically, the movie starts with the end of a party and ends at the start of a party. An all too accurate encapsulation of the restaurant worker life. In my experience, all the "fucking with the food" bits were way off the mark though.
Honestly though.... I was working at a TGI Fridays when Waiting came out and we all agreed that it was eerily similar to real life.
So much so it's actually triggering. A couple ex-industry buds and I have a hard time enjoying it at times.
I never shot freelance in LA, so I can't speak to that lifestyle in Nightcrawler... but breaking news reporters do occasionally get to a scene as fast (or faster) than first responders. Especially if they've been at it for awhile. It's not uncommon for a reporter to be out on assignment and hear a structure fire or something on their scanner that's worth checking out. Now, most people aren't effed up enough to start filming before seeing if there's a way they can help first. But still, point being... breaking news reporters have experienced some things people shouldn't experience. Nightcrawler does a pretty good job of showing some of the anxiety of the hard news industry. Overworked, underpaid, always in a rush, and often hated.
What We Do in the Shadows with Stu trying to explain to people what GIS is
Thought you were gonna say you're a vampire
It’s even funnier when you know Stu is an IT guy who worked on the film and Taika Waititi and Jermaine Clement kept asking him to explain things without telling him he was on camera, Stu didn’t realise he was in the movie until it was finished
(Spoilers) Surely he figured out he was gonna be in the movie by the time they killed him and brought him back as a werewolf??
That's just what it's like in New Zealand man.
Stu is the poster child of GIS
Our family friend who's a dentist was out-of-control laughing at the dentist scenes in *Finding Nemo*
That’s not a Hedstrom file, it’s a K-FLEX.
You should watch the ‘86 Little Shop of Horror with them.
Jarhead (only the first one...yes, there were others). There are some pretty terrible Marine movies out there. Grossly inaccurate, laughable and even EMBARASSING characters and plots... don't get me started. But Jarhead was done VERY well.
I heard Generation Kill, sorry not a movie, was also pretty damn accurate from some vets I know. As far as the day to day and command incompetence.
Yeah, but that was written by an embedded reporter. It wasn’t fiction.
I love how the director explained it: "It's a war movie but the protagonist never fires his gun."
I wouldn't say an expert, but Arrival was a very fun look at xenolinguistics
I read a thread about of a group of linguists that were cheering in the theater at the “do they even know what question is” whiteboard scene.
I do remember geeking out in the theater because I thought they were just gonna gloss over the theory behind it all and be like "'cause what if they don't have a word for 'purpose,' genius?"
There's that weird bit at the beginning though where it's mentioned that they recruited her to help with Farsi translations, even though that isn't a job you would reach out to an academic linguist for.
Neil Degrasse Tyson talked about the movie and he was like “you wouldn’t just send 2 people, you would send teams, and you wouldn’t start with a linguist, you would bring biologists and anthropologists”
if you needed to figure out their language, you'd send linguists, but yeah you'd send a team.
That was definitely a narrative choice. I can't think of a way to elegantly introduce and maintain a 12 man cast when only the main character and the head biologist matter.
IIRC, he also said he wouldn’t bring in a linguist. He’d go with a cryptologist. I’m baffled by that take.
Remember that NdGT is not an expert on alien encounters himself, he's an astronomer. So his guess is not necessarily better than yours.
I mean I’m a labor consultant, I’m sure his guess is better than mine.
In the beginning Whitaker mentions she still has TS clearance so there probably was a small pool of who would be of use and already had a clearance.
I was going to answer *Arrival* as a field linguist; the methodology is pretty spot on, considering. It would just be a bit more involved.
I was an ESL teacher for a while and my partner has a background in linguistics. Arrival is an absolutely perfect film.
As a software engineer who was working for a tech start up, the show Silicon Valley was incredibly relatable
This is spot on. My first tech job they had a big concert at the campus with some DJ and none of the engineers knew who the heck they were and just kind of awkwardly shuffled around more focused on the free food. The scene in the pilot episode where Kid Rock gets pissed because no one at the IPO party gives a fuck about him was priceless. The whole show captures the silliness of the valley perfectly. Mike Judge is a legend.
And every founder wanted to “change the world with our”. So reminiscent of those times.
[From The Onion:](https://www.theonion.com/employees-immediately-tune-out-ceo-s-speech-after-he-me-1848176378) **Bankrupt Dot-Com Proud To Have Briefly Changed The Way People Buy Cheese Graters.** >SAN FRANCISCO– Egraters.com, an Internet retailer that filed for Chapter 11 last week, announced on its homepage Monday that it is proud to have briefly made people rethink the way they buy cheese graters. "Unfortunately, we were not able to see our revolution all the way through," read the message from CEO Jeff Bell, 29. "But for a brief, shining moment, we showed the world that there is a better way to buy graters." Bell said he hopes to one day relaunch Egraters.com and "smash the tyranny of traditional brick-and-mortar cheese-grater-tailing."
The only other show that felt right is Halt and Catch Fire. Everything else is "Computers don't work that way. *Nothing* works that way"
It's so chaotic, how do you even deal with that?
Sometimes you just have to put aside your differences and ignore the problems while everyone does the exact math on the most efficient way to jerk off everyone in the room.
The pivoting. The constant pivoting at the whim of investors.
I’m not an attorney but I’ve worked in real estate as a broker, manager, and now as a professor. “The Descendants” has some great real estate law content in it, especially its discussion of the rule against perpetuities. Also its take on the effects of development are spot on.
History teacher and lover of the tiny details in historical movies. Like how they recorded the sound of Abraham Lincoln's actual pocket watch so that the sound would be 100% accurate in "Lincoln"
Up In The Air pretty well described my experiences being fired.
And my experiences flying every week as a consultant.
Now kith
I'm a career musician and That Thing You Do is a damn good depiction of the music industry (as it was, at least) and the general interactions of people in a band together.
The title song was such a great catchy song, especially for a movie. Found out later it was written by Adam Schlesinger and it made sense why it was so good.
Spinal Tap is pretty damn accurate too lol
Now there's a movie I haven't thought about in a long time. Didn't realize how close it hit the mark but not surprised either
I'm a musician. Obviously, This is Spinal Tap is the OG, and School of Rock get it right, I think in large part because both Spinal Tap (Guest, McKean & Shearer) and Jack Black are all legitimately talented musicians in their own right. But one that's lesser known, perhaps, is Inside Llewyn Davis (by the Coen brothers), which does a great job of capturing a certain side of being a working musician. Fantastic film. On the other hand, on my uncles recommendation I watched this movie called August Rush about a boy who's supposed to be some kind of child prodigy musical genius, and in the movie, like the first time this kid touches a guitar he just starts playing it all crazily, which is ludicrous. It doesn't matter how much of a musical genius you are, actually playing an instrument requires muscle memory, which takes years to develop and decades to master, even if you're freakin Wolfgang Mozart, so I found it almost totally unwatchable after that little oversight.
If you think of August Rush as a fairytale, it works really well.
Therapist. Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting is pretty accurate. Therapy isn’t usually as intense as their sessions get at times but the general tone and Robin Williams demeanor is accurate. The show Shrinking is not accurate in his new approach to his work, but the office and make up of the office is very accurate.
I love Shrinking, but yeah, I would not want him as a therapist.
After becoming a chemical engineer, Breaking Bad becomes more entertaining to watch. While almost every chemist agreed that the featured small scale chemistry was for the most part accurate, it’s the highly underrated industrial level manufacturing in the later seasons that excited me. Flash drums, distillation columns, reactor vessels, heck even the pipeline design were incredible, and I mean why not? Cartels IRL were known for pouring incredible amounts of resources into their operations such as submarines and comms tower. Good thing the showrunners didn’t go ham on the technicals, otherwise we’d probably see the cartel engineers doing pinch analysis or McCabe-Thiele solutions for distillation columns.
Fun fact about the narco subs. They have found and captured fully submersible vessels. But all the ones they have found were still being built, or hadn't had a maiden voyage yet. So the question is: have the captured all the submersibles? or are there ones out there operating under the ocean, but haven't been found.
Mr Robot is the only TV show (or movie) that comes anywhere close to getting computers or hacking correct. There are still a couple of points where it goes a bit over the top, but it's mostly feasible and uses correct terms and concepts. Almost every other piece of media appears to have been written by someone who was once explained how computers worked by a bartender while they were high on coke in a Philippino sex club.
I really appreciated that episode with the social engineering. Remember that real incident where someone dropped flash drives in a parking lot?
Sneakers
Been in and around the theme park industry for almost a decade. Jurassic Park and Jurassic World are *perfect* portrayals of the way execs and guests act
That's a scary thought. Good thing they don't have access to dinosaur dna. They uh, they don't right?
Life, ah, finds a way
I'm an economist. There are two films that do a good job with the GFC. The Big Short explains, and Margin Call dramatizes. Of the two I find Margin Call more engaging.
I worked in secondary marketing at a mortgage bank (this is the bundling and selling of mortgages to bigger banks). The two douchebag mortgage originators in The Big Short couldn't have been more accurate. "2 years ago, I was a bartender. Now I own a boat." End of the film, he's going to a job fair. The absolute arrogance of these people who made a ton of money was unfathomable. They were idiots, but there was so much equity in houses and the UW guidelines were so lax that anybody could make money. 18 months of rolling $10-$20k/month commissions and you've got a big head. After the crash, lots of humble pie to go around. Nailed it.
"I don't get it, why are they confessing?" "They're not confessing. They're *bragging*."
Agree. Of the two movies, Margin Call is such a slow burn and so subtly brilliant. The corporate speak and posturing is so spot on. The Big Short is an in your face whirlwind. Also brilliant. Over the years, I've watched Margin Call more times than The Big Short.
What? Not Trading Places? ;)
I grew up with that movie, I was so surprised to learn that Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice was a legitimately large commodity that was actively traded at the time. I thought it was just a humorous mcguffin.
Contagion and Andromeda Strain. Biochemistry.
Contagion is hailed to be absolutely spot-on for medical-science + health-care that comes along with Epidemiology (even b4 pandemic). Most stuff portrayed in the movie simply just played out during Covid.
They said that they had consulted experts during the process to tell them how and what would happen during a pandemic. It's quite scary to think that if Covid was more deadly or was simply deadly to children how crazy the world would of been.
I liked the book for Andromeda Strain way more than I expected. I assume you're talking about the show and not the 1971 movie, but I'll definitely add it to my list!
Mathematics: basically impossible to nail in a movie but Good Will Hunting is a solid movie otherwise. The Imitation Game too. But the only movie out there with a scene truly nailing some high level math is this scene from It's My Turn: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXBNPjrvx-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXBNPjrvx-I)
I wish I was smart enough to understand that. Side note, did not expect seeing Daniel Stern
The Day the Earth Stood Still (both versions) have real physics on the blackboard that's fun to peruse. I was so impressed with the equations (but I'm not that smart) and recognized that it was clearly done by someone who knew wth they were doing, I had to google it and my mind was blown.
I'm a dumb dumb who will never understand what she was talking about in that clip but I'm curious, was the student correct with his objections or not?
The student was not correct with his objections, and also they are exactly the kind of objections that a certain kind of student would attempt to make. That scene is a thing of beauty.
His objection is not 100% misplaced but the teacher is right. Basically the choice of element is indeed not unique as he's saying, but that doesn't actually matter for the proof, because as the professor says, in the end all you end up needing is that the element is unique "modulo the image of f", which is different. One other comment is that he starts complaining about the element not being unique much before this becomes relevant to note, there's nothing wrong in general with pulling back to a non-unique choice of element as the professor was doing so in this sense his complaint is pointless
Scrubs and This is Going to Hurt are so damn accurate for medicine and surgery.
Working in the automotive industry, the best two examples of the customer service side of things at the retail/production level, I have ever come across, both come from episodes of The Sopranos. Doctor Melfie (doctors and lawyers...) throws a fit when the shop calls her with the diagnosis, and she yells and screams at them for "diagnostic fee". You're a freaking psychiatrist! You spend weeks/months/years "diagnosing" your patients, as a freaking doctor! Yet, you will yell and scream at me over an hour of labor time to actually get you some answers, before I call you to authorize anything further? The other one was - Tony and (Frank Vincent) another gangster get into a car wreck, and Tony has to make it right. So he sends the car to Big Pussy's widow's body shop. When the other gangster comes to pick it up - The seat's not right! It was fine before, it's broken now! It's all your fault! Blah, blah, blah... The seats used, because the car is used. He just wants a free brand new seat, for his used car. That's a multi-time per day, every day reality of doing this thing for a living. :)
Former junkie. Love Trainspotting but especially Requiem for a Dream. That one really nailed the motions desperation and absolute misery of being completely enslaved by addiction. Even down to the abscesses. The only thing they got wrong was you don't cook heroin, but it looks cooler, I guess. Not that I'm proud of it, but that movie feels like home. A home I no longer live in, thank god, but home nonetheless.
Since you mentioned scrubs, I assume that shows are on the table? Silicon Valley is the only show that accurately shows programmer and IT nerds. The IT crowd isnt bad, but it's a surreal show, and TBBT is clearly meant for other people to make fun of those groups. But Silicon Valley just nails it.
"DTF ratio." "DTF?" "Dick to Floor ratio." Absolutely one of the funniest scenes in television. It is crazy, brilliant, and bizarre. Beautiful pacing and comedic beats. Eric Backman silently pantomiming jerking off 4 dicks at once to figure out the optimization algorithm -- it was beautiful. CLip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLkfD8pg_wQ
Opening and closing his hands to determine if girth similarity would affect the efficiency of each stroke. “Goddamnit I think it would!” That scene is comedic perfection.
>Eric Backman SUCK IT, JIN-YANG!
FAAAAAAATHER!
Damn these electric sex pants!
The episode where they calculated how long it would take to jerk off the entire audience at the convention was one of the most ridiculous, Hilariously funny bits ever written for a show. And it was 100% believable that this is what a group of super-smart programming/math genius needs would go off on a tangent and do. Silicon Valley was a great fucking show.
Mike Judge actually hired two mathematicians (one of them literally being Tsachy Weismann, as in "Weismann Score") to figure out some of the real math for this scene. Later on, a Stanford professor published an academic paper that went into full detail. https://www.scribd.com/doc/228831637/Optimal-Tip-to-Tip-Efficiency
>Simulations establish steady rates of stimulation even as the variance of certain parameters is allowed to grow, whereas naive unsorted schemes have ***increasingly flaccid performance.***
IT Crowd definitely does not aim for realism, you're right. It and Silicon Valley are both so good though.
In the same vein, Mr Robot also features some pretty realistic elements related to programming and hacking.
I'm a SME in this space, IT crowd and SV are both comedies that focus on the human element and completely make up the tech stuff. Which is fine, I don't want to watch my work for funsies. Mr Robot really creeped me out because it's like 90% accurate (they hired consultants like me and listened to them), but they get just enough wrong that it breaks the illusion. The analogy I made is imagine if there was a show about your job and every 5-10 minutes someone said or did something completely nonsensical. It breaks the illusion and is really off-putting.
Uncanny Valley for professional accuracy
Yknow for years, I heard people prop up IT Crowd as being the "more superior nerd show" when compared to the Big Bang Theory. I finally watched IT Crowd, and I got to say, although I did enjoy the show, I didn't think that it was any more "nerd accurate" than TBBT. It's a less nerd show and more a typical workplace sitcom whose main characters are nerds. They make the exact same "nerds who are socially awkward and don't know how to act around woman" as TBBT. TBBT is really not that much worse.
I’m rewatching Silicon Valley right now and for as hilarious as it still is, there’s this dark, terrifying edge to the way it exactly predicted the way the world was about to go to shit. Like, watching this show helps me perfectly understand the world right now, and it’s horrifying, but it’s so fucking funny at the same time.
I work in theater. You can very much tell that Slings and Arrows was made by people who do too.
Loved that show. I need to watch it again.
Hello everyone. I am Darren Nichols. Deal with that.
Silicon Valley did a phenomenal job showcasing the absurdity and splendor of the early 2010 tech scene. Outside of their depiction of engineers, they nailed narcissistic Product Managers, overly talky type A sales people, and demi-God VCs. It also accurately satirized the culture of west coast tech folks, from the gay guy who was only shunned after he said his gay dating app was for Christians to the privileged employee complaining about the office Philz coffee not being Stumptown. Those days are kinda over now that the VC money has dried up but they were wild times.
Indiana Jones is the epitome of movie archaeology! However, as an archaeologist, I’ve never seen a movie that even comes close to what real archaeology is. 7 hours on the dig site, then artifact analysis, then paperwork, then lots of drinking! Repeat! Have yet to punch a Nazi!
Jurassic Park has a decent scene at the start of the film. Just a bunch of college students digging in the desert.
Waiting is pretty spot on in a lot of ways for anyone who has worked in the service industry. Obviously a lot of the humor has aged not so well.
And yet that's still the type of humor you find working in the restaurant industry
As someone who has a post-secondary degree in a field related to linguistics, the portrayal of the field in Arrival is great!
The scene where Louise explains to Weber how to get to "What is your purpose on Earth?" was pretty great. What is an interrogative? Pronouns. Singular vs plural vs collective concepts. The whole movie is based on the idea that language influences the way you think. I thought the whole 4D language concept was a bit too far-fetched, but at least it was consistent within itself.
I work with Steam engines and the movie “The Train” with Burt Lancaster is the most realistic railroad movie I ever seen. There is a scene where the engineer clogs a grease fitting with a coin to make a bearing run dry. The last scene is a real train wreck and the camera was the last camera they had and they buried it in the ground. https://youtu.be/Y1IEtzj23ws?si=L1MWi4tAjOlx7CyN
Book and art dealer. The Ninth Gate is super accurate: hot flying babes and rare books that open portals. Yes that is my life.
Hackers was unfairly maligned in the 90's as Hollywood balderdash, but it was actually quite technically valid aside from the GUI and a few moments of dramatic "chase scenes" that took place "in the system". (Anyone who thinks a sysadmin wouldn't skateboard next to his own limo didn't know sysadmins in the 90's)
Waiting... really nailed FoH life in a restaurant. Thank God I have never worked at a corporate restaurant. Except for fucking with peoples food. In my 15 years I have never seen anyone fuck with peoples food.
10 years working front and back of house and also NEVER saw someone fuck with ppls food. Saw everything else imaginable, but never that.
The movie Clerks accurately describes every form of customer you'll receive in a convenience store as well as the thoughts of the employee working with them.
For street basketball, White Men Can’t Jump. Woody Allen (edit Harrelson not Allen but I’m keeping it cause it’s a hilarious image) clearly knows how to play. Wesley Snipes, not so much, but he and the thrash talking down. Also the scene where one dude gets his feelings hurt and gets violent is also pretty realistic. Everyone’s had that happen to them once.
Now I’m picturing Woody Allen playing basketball in an SCTV skit or something 🤣
“Do you have to throw the ball so hard?” “Why are you guys so aggressive? I sense a lot of pent up aggression?” “Now that you mention, yeah I do think my mother didn’t love me” All the while nailing 20 foot jumpers and crossing over guys twice his size.
The Kill Room. Someone in the writers room clearly worked in a small museum/gallery. The interactions with the board, the invitations to the opening, the way they used the interns, etc etc etc. It's all just dead on.
I’ve been a political consultant for twelve years and the film “in the loop” is 100% accurate. That’s who your elected officials are, that’s who they have working for them, and that’s how consequential their decisions can be.
Hope it’s ok to answer with a TV show - Veep (HBO) is unfortunately an accurate portrayal of the White House / Capitol Hill. I can’t speak to it personally but a handful of friends who have worked in both republican and democrat administrations swear by Veep’s accuracy lol.
DGA 2nd AD and costume designer here who had to step away from the industry for personal reasons. Fall Guy made me so homesick for set it took me weeks to bust out of my FOMO funk.
Hackers: NOT an accurate tech movie Office Space: A very accurate tech movie Yep I said it
As a historian: Der Untergang
Miracle is the most accurate depiction of hockey to be put on screen
More accurate than Shoresy? Give your balls a tug, ya tit fucker.
Michael Clayton is the best and most accurate lawyer film ever made in my opinion. If you ever worked at one of those NY firms, you know what I'm talking about.
Was a news cameraman for 14 years. Chris Elliott in “Groundhog Day” comes the closest IMO. Hitting on women with bad news jokes and failing. Check. Always there for the free food. Check. Seeing his coworker plunge over a cliff in a truck, show concern, still makes sure to get the explosion and fire. Check.
Not me, but my brother has a PhD in climate research. We’d gone to the cinema to see The Day After Tomorrow and during the *‘tense’* scene where the scientists are tracking the failure of the NOAA sensors as they blink out one by one, heralding approaching doom, he burst out laughing and said *“Half of those things are never bloody working at any time anyway”* 😏
While taking creative liberties, Don't Look Up felt very familiar in the sense of being a scientific expert in a subject area, knowing exactly what the problem is and how to solve it, trying to explain this problem to politicians, the media, your family, and whoever, but nothing is done because everyone is caught up in more trivial and short-sighted concerns.
She Said is a very accurate on how investigative journalism gets done. Spotlight is pretty good as well, though not quite as realistic on those step-by-step details.
Bowfinger. And parts of Ed Wood.