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5 things that are easier in real life than in the movies
Topic Started: Sat Jan 25, 2014 8:30 am (172 Views)
wissaboo
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[5 Things That Are Way Easier Than They Look in Movies
By Jack O'Brien September 08, 2011 1,907,606 views

When we debunk movie myths, it's usually bad news for lazy people. We've found that movies often undersell the difficulty of activities like saving lives, fighting crime, seducing women and even shooting people. And I've verified through independent research that doing all four at once is not a realistic career goal.


The dream will never die.

Fortunately, it turns out there are some fairly idiot-proof tasks that movies pretend are difficult. Story structure demands things like clever arguments, plot twists and wealthy billionaires dancing through shifting fields of laser beams, and it turns out reality is decidedly less crazy about those things.

#5. Art Heists


The Myth:

In the world of heist films, art thieves are the Ivy League. The job requires a thief who appreciates culture, has the balls to steal something famous and, most importantly, possesses the skill set necessary to navigate complex fields of laser beams.


Not only do they outclass bank robbers -- with their regional American accents and bargain basement ski-wear -- not caring about money seems to be a prerequisite for stealing art. "Bored by how rich I am" is the only discernible motivation of the titular billionaire in The Thomas Crown Affair, who has presumably turned to this diversion after tiring of hunting humans for sport.

More than anything else, the art thief is drawn by the challenge. In Entrapment, another retired Bond finds himself in a love triangle with Catherine Zeta Jones and Catherine Zeta Jones' ass, and the mismatched trio have to spend months preparing to steal a painting even though the movie makes it clear that they both have superpowers (typically used to disappear behind moving trains for some reason).




In Reality:

Art heists are like bank robberies graded on the easiest curve possible. When two men stole Munch's Scream in 2004, the crime was considered shocking because they bothered to bring guns. Earlier this year, French officials marveled at the "extreme level of sophistication" displayed by a thief who stole $100 million of art by breaking a glass window that wasn't alarmed, and remembering to wear a ski mask. We don't expect people who work at museums to be on top of the latest trends in the criminal underworld, but those are all things junkies remember to do when boosting stereo equipment.

The main attraction seems to be the money, but according to experts, thieves typically have to "wait until news of the theft is reported in the newspaper to see the value" of the art they've stolen. Just like a teenage shoplifter, art thieves steal whatever is closest to the door, and hope it's valuable.

That's not the only move they've borrowed from criminal masterminds like Wynona Ryder and elderly Japanese people. The shoplifter's method of pulling stuff off the wall and shoving it inside your jacket seems to be the go-to method for swiping art from museums. As we've covered elsewhere, a French guy named Stephane Breitwieser stole $1.4 billion worth of art from over 170 different museums by sticking paintings in his over-sized coat. And a maintenance worker managed to steal the freaking Mona Lisa by hiding it inside his smock.

The most successful heist in the history of the art world happened in Boston, has never been solved and could have been planned by a 5-year-old. After using police costumes and fake badges to get into the museum, the two thieves had to subdue a grand total of two security guards, both 20-something "musicians," one of whom admitted to showing up for work stoned.

At one point, the thieves accidentally tripped an alarm that they somehow hadn't prepared to pole vault around. Fortunately for them, the alarm only sent a signal to another part of the museum like a glorified baby monitor.

I'd suggest that museums start taking their jobs a little more seriously, but their solution would probably involve charging late fees to any thief who keeps the art for too long, instead of the hidden machine guns the situation clearly calls for.



#4. Police Interrogation


The Myth:

The interrogation room is a chess board where mentally dexterous cops try to punch holes in the carefully constructed alibis of master criminals. The police will often pair physical intimidation with clever mind games like "good cop/bad cop."

Of course they've got their work cut out for them, since most criminals can talk their way out of anything. In Usual Suspects, the most untouchable criminal in the world weaves an elaborate tale just to mess with the cops' heads, and in Basic Instinct, Sharon Stone's character masterfully uses the complex psychology of the interrogation room to show everyone her vagina.

In Reality:

From a suspect's point of view, police interrogations are incredibly simple. If you invoke your right to an attorney, the police have to stop interrogating you. Invoke your right to remain silent and again, you might as well have caught the Golden Snitch, because it's game over. The interrogation room is less like chess than like an episode of Pee Wee's Playhouse ...


"The secret word is ..."

What's even stranger is that, when a suspect doesn't know his rights, the interrogation process often looks more like a therapy session than what we see in the movies. As this videotaped murder confession demonstrates, the interrogating officers don't try to bully the confession out of the suspect so much as give him a safe place where he can freely express his feelings (of guilt).


That's The Reid Technique, which uses emotional bonding, repetition and empathy to convince the suspect that everyone in the room totally gets that he had his reasons for shooting that dude in the face. Hey, we're not here to judge.

While the suspect is waiting for the bad cop to show up, he starts trusting the guy who keeps slapping him on the ass and telling him good hustle (I'm assuming). The longer it goes on, the more likely to suspect is to come around to the cops version of things, and the cops can keep it going as long as they want.

This is why the justice system decided to give suspects the interrogation room equivalent of Mike Tyson's uppercut. Research indicates that interrogations that go the distance yield confessions in up to 76 percent of all cases. While that might not sound all that impressive, that includes people who aren't even guilty. For instance, the guy the cops massaged and emotionally supported into signing a detailed murder confession in the video was later proven innocent.

From the justice system's perspective, that is the main problem with police interrogations: it's so easy to get a criminal to confess, you can't tell if they really did it or not, and the only way to even the playing fields is to make the whole thing turn on a few magic words.

#3. Dating

Where You've Seen It:How to Lose a Guy in 60 Seconds and every other Chick Flick, Romantic Comedies like Old School and Wedding Crashers, Teen Movies, 80s Movies, The Part in Rambo II where he falls in love with a Vietnamese lady while blowing up her country, Any film that involves a romantic relationship

The Myth:

If you've ever seen a romantic comedy, you know that when two people first meet and fall in love, the world immediately begins conspiring to make them hate each other. Dating is the movie equivalent of the unfair obstacle course at the end of American Gladiators, except instead of steroid-fueled monsters with names like Fuel and Steroid, it's your jealous ex and sleazy best friend. And instead of having human souls, they have flame tornadoes that devour everything good in their path for no apparent reason.

When people accuse movie romances of being unrealistic, they're usually talking about the happy ending where the male and female star survive the craziness, and make it across the finish line to marriage or starry-eyed monogamy. The 90 minutes of conflict and misunderstandings leading up to the happy ending seem to suggest that you'll need to be good looking, quick witted and extremely lucky just to marry someone who doesn't hate you.

In Reality:

Don't get me wrong. Every relationship presents its own unique challenges. But dating just happens to be the time that you're not going to notice any of them. The part of relationships that movies tend to fill with catastrophe is the part that's more likely to leave you wondering where the last week went, and how you two ended up moving to Australia together. That's because people who are in love with one another are swimming in the same brain chemicals that fuel cocaine addiction, and dating is the portion of the relationship right after the addict first tries the drug, and before they've experienced any of the negative side effects.


Romantic comedies and love stories have to invent obstacles like assignments from man-hating magazine editors, and bets with sleazy best friends, and walking in on the person you love at the moment and from the precise angle that it looks like they're cheating on you with a domestic animal because they have an impossible job. They're telling an a twisty, turny underdog tale about good relationships, and as Chris Rock put it best, "Good relationships are boring."

The problem is that good relationships are also almost always an inverted spectrum of the rocky courtship, happy marriage process we see in movies. In fact, any list of reasons why people get divorced suggests that dating is too easy. The problem is not that good couples get screwed over by circumstances. Love, like a cocaine addict, will find a way. The real problem is that couples pass through the dating process, arrive at the part where they're supposed to live happily ever after and find themselves blindsided by things like differences over money or the fact that one doesn't want kids and the other is a Mormon.


And it's not just the high of new love that movies don't account for. The real world rarely gives you a clear cut reason to break up with someone. At some point, you will have to decide whether to stay with someone who you really like, but don't think you love. There will be no "inciting incident" that serves as a convenient breaking point. You won't cheat on each other or fight. You'll enjoy spending time with each other because dating is easy. The hard part is delivering the, "it's not you, it's me" speech knowing that the person who says that in movies is always a date rapist.

#2. Cold War Era Spying



The Myth:

International relations during the Cold War were one long chase scene starring men in trench coats trying to kill each other with weapons disguised as things that aren't weapons. If you've only seen one James Bond film, you know that being a Cold War era spy was freaking awesome. If you haven't, the movie posters for You Only Live Twice should do in a pinch.

.

Bond was created by a real spy: Sir Ian Fleming, whose work with the British intelligence community provided the real world experience necessary to create a character who could steer experimental aircraft with his penis.

Fleming wasn't the only creator of spy fiction with street cred in the intelligence community. John le Carre was a spy turned author responsible for most of the cloak and dagger stuff that made its way into movies. He was actively spying on the Russians when he wrote classics like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

In Reality:

Ian Fleming did indeed have a boss career in military intelligence. He once concocted a plan to crash a plane into the Thames to smoke out enemy soldiers. But as with most military careers, all the cool stuff happened in WWII -- the six year period when the entire world turned into a far-fetched, big budget action movie that Michael Bay would call indulgent. In the post-war period, the world's two most powerful nations found themselves in a Mexican standoff, so all the creative energy that had gone into killing Nazis was funneled into designing insane weapons that we couldn't actually use, except in novels and movies. We may not be privy to classified information, but if America had gone through with their plans to nuke the moon, or build a military base there, we probably would have heard about it by now.




According to John le Carre's account of his time in the British intelligence community, the cloak and dagger spying that we've come to associate with the Cold War was also mostly imaginary. The job was often so boring that spies would go on fake missions, and basically play act the sort of stuff that made it into his books.

He tells a story of the first "secret mission" he went on across enemy lines in East Berlin with an older Intelligence Officer to meet a covert agent that never showed up. As the years passed, le Carre realized that the older agent "was not an undercover officer of M.I.6, his work was just as tedious and useless as ours." He goes on to talk about a form of madness that infected Cold War intelligence communities where agents chose paranoia and flights of imagination over the boring reality that nobody was trying to kill them.


Jay-Z has had an equally difficult time accepting this reality.

And you only need to look at the CIA spiking each other's drinks with LSD and other madness associated with Project MKULTRA to see that the American intelligence community was also guilty of letting their imagination get away from them. Sure, it might have led to some awesome stuff we don't know about yet, but it also led directly to the birth of the hippies (seriously). Nice job, spies.

#1. Being the World's Greatest Hacker



The Myth:

According to the movies, hacking requires you to speed type in a foreign language that you can't understand unless your brain is half computer. The opening credits of the movie Hackers gives us a peek at what that looks like when the world's greatest hacker looks at New York City from a plane.



In Swordfish, Hugh Jackman proves he's the world's greatest hacker by speed typing his way into the Department of Defense with a gun to his head and while a woman gives him a blow job. That might sound easy to those of us who need both of those things just to write a comedy article, but he's typing such utter gibberish at such an incredible rate, you can't help but be intimidated.


Also, you apparently must be objectively handsome and get your hair done at the same place as early '90s boy bands.

In Reality:

Kevin Mitnick was the real world's most wanted hacker around the time most hacker movies came out. Prior to his arrest and sentencing in 1999, Mitnick managed to hack the L.A. bus system to get free rides (as a 12-year-old no less), and hack into Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu Siemens computer systems using a technique called social engineering. Then when he got out of jail, he became one of the nation's foremost experts on computer security. So essentially he was like that guy in Catch Me If You Can, except using some advanced hacker technique that probably involved fluttering away at keys you didn't even know your computer had, right?

Actually, Mitnick's career suggests that becoming the world's greatest hacker doesn't require you to know how to use a computer at all. For instance, "social engineering" is just telling well researched lies. In an excerpt from his new book Ghost in the Wires, Mitnick recounts the time he "compromised the Social Security Administration through an elaborate social engineering attack." Sounds complicated right? Actually, he just found the agency directory, called up a lady who had the information he wanted, pretended to be her superior and asked her for it. In an excerpt from the audio book, he recounts another social engineering attack that basically amounted to making a fake badge at Kinkos, and sneaking in the door behind someone returning from a smoke break.

Of course Mitnick is only one man, and there are certainly hackers out there creating viruses using code you'd need a degree in computer programming to understand. They just aren't the guys that you go to when you absolutely need to get inside Nokia's database. The world's greatest hacker needs to understand how to use the tools they create to get the information you want. Or you could do it the old-fashioned way and create fake badges at Kinkos, and prank phone calls. Either way, you don't need to learn a new language, or see computers everywhere you look, or even be able to type particularly fast. You just need what all good con-men have always needed: balls and a good poker face.

Also, the real hacking community appears to be willing to look the other way if you don't qualify as classically handsome, or have early '90s boy band hair.




http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-that-are-way-easier-than-they-look-in-movies/

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ThankYouGeneR
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I 'will' remember.

Brilliant find. Rereadable. New interesting entertaining information for 'me'. Enjoyable to the max. This is a keeper.
I will remember.
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jespah
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Oh, I can definitely agree on the interrogation bit.

I used to take depositions. I estimate it was around 300 in three years, no lie. My secret weapon was being nice. I was the sweet young girl (I was in my mid-twenties then, folks) who would say please and thank you and would ask people if they wanted a break or water. I would nod and smile and be encouraging.

My body language was open, my voice pleasant, and my demeanor nonthreatening. Of course I took extensive notes but I got very fast at writing, plus I used to bring with me a printed sheet of questions and half the time I would just circle Y or N to take notes. This enabled me to look people in the eye and smile at them a lot.

And this is why I was sent for depositions all the time. In New York, they're called EBTs (Examinations Before Trial), and my peers in the firm called me the EBT Queen. I got results (and I wrote really good reports).

Why was I so good at this (when they tried to have me do trials, I failed miserably and ended up quitting the business, BTW)? It was because most people being deposed think they are going to get yelled at. No matter what their lawyer might say to them, they think it's going to be this adversarial horror show. I knew lawyers who really did act that way, and here's what happened - witnesses would clam up. They would not offer information at all.

Me? I got people so relaxed that, in the bathrooms at the courthouse, I would sometimes see female deponents walking without the aid of their canes. Or people who would claim that they couldn't sit for an hour would magically be able to hang out for a three-hour EBT.

I have no doubt that it is the same way in the criminal field (I did insurance defense), in spades. Plus we always see people being smacked around on TV and in the movies. Hell, we've seen the Rodney King video. Criminals are expecting quite literal pain.

The other bit of this is that the criminal element is no smarter than the general population. In fact, they're often dumber. These are, after all, often people without sufficient inner resources to figure out a solution to their problems that doesn't involve violence or theft. Mess with their preconceptions and they will fold.
Once Ixalla was ready, Tathrelle cornered her. “Before we leave for work, I just want to tell you, I’m sorry. I guess I sort of shut down last night. I know you were in pain and I wasn’t too terribly supportive.” There was a wall covering in the main part of their chamber, something that Tathrelle hadn’t noticed before. She stared at it for a second and then shook her head.

Outside, a disembodied voice announced from a hidden speaker, “It is time to travel to all daytime places of employment. Transportation sleighs are available and ready. Citizens are encouraged to thank the sleigh drivers at the end of a successful transport. The government recommends haste, and requests that all pregnant persons be given preference for seating in their designated areas.”

A little distracted, Ixalla just asked, “Pain?”

Untrustworthy - by me, actually. It's for sale on Amazon
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Posted Image Posted Image I blog about Startrek fanfiction..

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wissaboo
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AWOLangel
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from what i know of the cloak & dagger stuff during the cold war, (admittedly very little) it was sometimes like the movies.
but it was mostly watch & wait, i think.
All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.--Abraham Lincoln
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spocklet
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There's certainly some interesting fact-ets* being raised here, would be interesting to follow them to a conclusion !!

*fact-ets - maybe they're true, maybe they're not, would be fascinating to find out though !!
R.I.P. Gummy, we'll miss you bro
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Mojochi
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...........................

Add getting into a fraternity/sorority. Not all of them are going to haze you, scrutinize you & treat you like shit. In fact, I'm pretty sure in the post-Columbine, ultra-sensitive, bullying watchdog age people keep a close watch for anything objectionable going on, that's affiliated with schools
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jespah
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I am a sorority gal(Pi Beta Phi, Massachusetts Alpha chapter). No hazing; you'll get your charter pulled by the National Office. Plus our main activities weren't parties. We did charity work, used to do intake for blood drives or work with the Revere League for Special Needs. We did have parties, but we were also required to be dry, as the drinking age was (still is) 21 in Massachusetts.
Once Ixalla was ready, Tathrelle cornered her. “Before we leave for work, I just want to tell you, I’m sorry. I guess I sort of shut down last night. I know you were in pain and I wasn’t too terribly supportive.” There was a wall covering in the main part of their chamber, something that Tathrelle hadn’t noticed before. She stared at it for a second and then shook her head.

Outside, a disembodied voice announced from a hidden speaker, “It is time to travel to all daytime places of employment. Transportation sleighs are available and ready. Citizens are encouraged to thank the sleigh drivers at the end of a successful transport. The government recommends haste, and requests that all pregnant persons be given preference for seating in their designated areas.”

A little distracted, Ixalla just asked, “Pain?”

Untrustworthy - by me, actually. It's for sale on Amazon
- Yeah, I'm a published author
jespah
My author page on Facebook
Author of Untrustworthy



Posted Image Posted Image I blog about Startrek fanfiction..

Honk if you love silence.
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Mojochi
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...........................

Being on a jury. It almost never entails endless bickering, drawn out sequestering, threats to the jurors' lives, etc... In fact, it's is the epitome of the dullness of government in action, & people are usually just hoping it will end so they can go on with their lives away from utter boredom

If juries were as complex, & interesting as movies make out, the vast majority of the populace wouldn't try like hell to get out being called up

I'm pretty sure that my name must be back in the lottery by now :waiting:
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CaptainJaneway
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The Captain's back...

Getting in your car, locking the doors, starting it and driving away.

At least in horror movies that is.
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