Excuses, Excuses.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece (complete with a nice roundup of clips from some misbehaving films) on the dodgy relationship Hollywood-produced movies have with technology in general and the Internet in particular. The WSJ blames several factors for most movies getting the tech wrong: real ‘Net tech isn’t flashy enough, people wouldn’t understand the technical stuff, branding issues keep filmmakers from using Google, MSN, etc., all of which miss the point entirely. Movie studios don’t get it wrong because of the reasons listed, they get it wrong because they’re lazy. A decent technical consultant could clear up a lot of the stupid mistakes and shortcuts studios take short-order and thus please both the technically-illiterate movie viewers as well as the geekery. It’s infuriating, I tell you.
[Editor’s note: Aron, Andy, Brad and I have often talked of forming our own movie technical consulting agency. Any directors interested in our services, feel free to contact us – we’ve all graduated from engineering schools and can easily advise studios as to how to avoid uncomfortable physical realities, such as the fact that Arnold’s arms would have been accelerated backwards off of his body at roughly 0.8c while firing the railguns in Eraser.]