This is really a follow up post to the Leviathan post. After most of you read that post you probably wondered why I watched the entire thing. Basically, it had some issues. Yes the town and buildings looked like the run down things we all expect to see in Russian coastal towns which aren’t showpieces for “the Party,” but some things just seemed wrong.
Early in the movie when the property owner came out and started his beater SUV it “looked” like a Ford product and sounded American. He got in on the right side too. That started me wondering if this was actually filmed in Oregon or Washington. Then I started thinking that if Russians drive on the right side of the road we really have more in common with them than those wrong side of the road countries. Turns out some Web sites say they really do drive on the right side of the road in Russia. Now if most Russians earned a living wage the country would be the perfect dumping ground for used American rides, especially since Mexico is starting to close the border to American beaters nobody wanted.
Of course I didn’t search the Web for the answer until writing this post. What really shocked me was the black SUVs driven by the corrupt politicians. They were Toyota not Mercedes as in many American movies about corruption. The interior shots rather freaked me out. They had what looked like nav/infotainment systems in the dash.
Note to film makers: Never show a dash with a built in nav/infotainment system. Your film is going to look really old before it even makes it to DVD. If you don’t believe me just take a look at a 2007 ride with a nav/infotainment system in the dash. It has become such a problem many auto makers are starting to remove all of the knobs and buttons people like putting in just a touch screen and forcing automatic updates. Of course, you need to test forced updates better than Lexus did.
At some point in the near future the dash of any car is simply going to be a series of touch screens. I actually worked on a project to do something like that for one auto maker some time ago. We had one big instrument cluster sized display and were trying to make it user configurable. There was a series of different sized display cells and you chose what went in them. Some version of that will eventually replace all of the custom gauges making the dash cluster a whole lot simpler. Ever take the dash apart in a modern vehicle? I’m not talking about swapping a radio, but pulling the entire dash out to replace a gauge that wasn’t supposed to fail.
Last time I personally did that was on a 1990 Jeep Grand Wagoneer. When the dash had to come out to replace the HVAC system in my 2002 Jeep Grand Cherokee Overland I took it to a mechanic. No way was I going through that Hell. There are way too many custom tricks and tools these days.
This movie had other issues as well. While the paint was washed off the buildings and plaster was coming off of walls, they had fairly nice looking furniture and bedding. I mean, if it is your house, wouldn’t you fix the plaster so it doesn’t trash your furniture? I expected broken down leave-it-on-the-curb ghetto type furniture given the state of the dwellings.
Yes, rather than turn me away, these nagging little things actually pulled me in. I had a twisted interest in seeing what else would be “off.” Well, thankfully the translation team didn’t let me down. When the land owner is in police custody being told of all the evidence they have of his guilt the inspector (or whatever he was) said, according to the subtitles
we are going to take a sample of your sperm to verify
I couldn’t help myself. Even though I was watching it alone I blurted out “just how ya gonna do that?” Either the Russian language version went for the shock factor by actually saying that OR, more likely, it was supposed to be translated to “a sample of your DNA.”
Many films have battalions of set and costume designers not to mention show runners and other titles in place to make certain things like these don’t slip through. Oddly enough these things slipping through kept me watching a movie with subtitles I would have otherwise stuck back in the envelop less than 5 minutes after it started.
As writers we often talk of “character flaws” helping to frame our characters, but how many of you have honestly considered “set flaws.” It doesn’t matter if you are writing a novel instead of a screen play. Your fingers at the keyboard design the set. You paint the storyboard in the readers mind. Ideally you frame a character lightly so the reader can paint them as they wish. Did you ever consider deliberately painting a scene with something wrong? Yes, you strive to make your work perfect and are devastated when someone catches something, but what if you deliberately hid that Easter egg?