Getting It Right

[stoutfellow]

Many people have examples of movies or television shows getting something egregiously wrong: bad science, bad linguistics, bad history, whatever. Rarer are examples of getting something unexpectedly right.

In the otherwise forgettable movie It's My Turn, Jill Clayburgh plays a math professor, and there is an early scene in which she gives a lecture, proving a theorem, a rather abstract result called the Snake Lemma. (It really deserves Theorem status - it's absolutely central to its sub-branch of mathematics - but it's always been called a lemma.) Now, in the proof of the Snake Lemma, there is a step where an alert student will look up and say, "Wait a minute...": something fishy has just been done. The professor, having probably been that alert student, has the response prepared: it is fishy, yes, but there's a justification for it in this case. ("Good. You are quick, but not yet quick enough." Brownie points for sourcing that one.)

In the movie, Clayburgh comes to that step. One of the students immediately raises the right objection; Clayburgh gives the right response. Letter-perfect. I didn't watch the movie much past that, but that scene has my love forever.

So, what's your favorite Getting It Right example?

Comments

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

Large swathes of Apollo 13 do that for me. But oddly, the one that stands out most in my mind is a scene where Tom Hanks's character is taking his wife out to dinner. The point of the scene is a conversation in the car, but there's a throwaway reference to Pe-Te's (the restaurant they're going to).

I believe Pe-Te's has gone out of business in the past few years, but back in the early days of the Johnson Space Center there wasn't much of *anything* in the vicinity. Pe-Te's was one of the few eateries out there in the Texas coastal bayou/swamp, and it was sort of "adopted" as a semi-official Astronaut Hangout.

For some reason, that's more meaningful to me than all the places where they get the tech details right.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

I wish I could think of a movie where the librarian isn't a badly-done stereotype, but I can't.

That said, I do dearly love the part in The Mummy where Evie is drunk as a skunk and proclaims her profession, then collapses face first into the sand.

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

There's a wonderful discovery motion scene in Class Action. It's the only part of the film I've seen.

[filkferengi]

When I was at BYU in the mid '80s, they did Moliere's _Misanthrope_ using the Richard Wilbur translation. I had just studied it in French, so it was an added thrill when the translation not only rhymed, but *got it right.*