The reality of movies isn't reality at all

Colm O’Regan is expressing his issues with the accuracy of movies this week ... or rather the lack of real life accuracy.

I’m going to come right out and say it. Films can be fierce annoying: many of them just don’t reflect our lives accurately at all.

It’s not the big things. I’m not watching the LEGO movie and saying – “But I don’t have a painted on nose and cylindrical hands”.

It’s the ordinary things of life that never appear on the big screen.

Things like the lack of a need to go to the toilet.

Male characters sometimes “gotta go take a leak” but only as a prelude to having their head slammed into the snotty tiles above the urinal by a bad guy or drunkenly stumbling out into the darkness before being consumed by Whatever’s Out There. Women only use a toilet to cry and think.

No one gets the runs unless it’s intrinsic to the plot and someone has slipped them a laxative and haha. But truly it is one of life’s most defining moments.

Machu Picchu might have been humbling and Burma changed your life but nothing is imprinted on your brain like the time you were on that bus stuck in traffic and you roared at the driver to let you off or you would have a major incident on your hands.

I don’t need a whole new genre of toilet-based plot. It just would be nice to watch “Fast and Furious 20: NCT RETEST” and hear Vin Diesel say “I’ll go now in case I’m caught short while driving fierce fast and making a hames of the tyres”

And cars provide another hard to believe moment: Explain On The Way. Call me normal but if I’m sitting down on the couch and someone says: “Let’s go. I’ll explain on the way”, I wouldn’t get up without a word and then travel in an hour of silence, before turning to the hero and saying “So, are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

I’d be straight away replying “But I just made tea! I’m going nowhere without a clear and obvious business case.”

It’s not just the tea that goes cold, it’s the food that’s wasted. There is only one moment when anyone eats a proper mouthful. It’s when the woman or child is rescued from the forest, is brought to safety and then rips into a chicken leg.

Apart from that, nothing gets eaten. Or if they do, it’s these prissy little mouthfuls of one pea on a fork after what seems like a minute’s passive aggressive ‘cutlering’. And with 98% of the food untouched, someone gets up angrily and leaves.

When they leave, they forget nothing. I’ve yet to see anyone realising it’s colder than they thought and coming back in for a bigger coat. Or spending ages getting out the door in the first place because they can’t find their keys.

I haven’t made a dramatic exit in years now. Having a baby means exits are planned a week in advance and still take two hours longer than intended. The one area where there have been moves towards realism is in the diction. But that’s no good to us. I used to assume the actors were going to tell us what was going on.

Now they just mutter and mumble their way through the plot as if they were teenagers replying about how the box of twenty John Player Blues ended up in their schoolbag.

So c’mon filmmakers, eat the food, go to the loo, speak up and please don’t explain on the way or I’M OUTTA HERE.

via GIPHY

Sorry, me again. I forgot my scarf.