this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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anybody have examples of the opposite? American hollywood movies/shows that nonchalantly presented something common in the USA, but was jarring when you watched it?
I always find it jarring when the actors get out of a car and it moves. Not a lot, just a small jolt, but quite noticeable. Apparently this is normal if you put an automatic transmission in park and get out quickly. Everyone I know here (mostly manual transmission) always pulls the parking break when parking, so the car only moves up because of the weight of the person getting out.
Whenever we park (in an automatic), we set the parking brake, because we do Not like feeling that small jolt.
A surprising number of new cars these days just... don't seem to have a parking brake control? at all?? anywhere???
And the rest have it as a button instead of a manual thing you can pull if the computer goes haywire. What is the state of cars coming to.
-- Frost
I always though that when heros fought and through things and people thought walls it was an extra strong anphasise of how strong they were. As if they were close to supermen because of their rage/determination/skills. I recently realise that american home have super fragile wall. Like a normal human can punch it through if they want to. So movie makers didn't meant what I thought.
They're made of gypsum most often, so they're fragile but not that fragile. I don't know that I've ever accidentally broken drywall.
https://youtu.be/_FJ8fG1pAzg
I currently have my foot leaning against some drywall and am tilting back in my chair. Not at all worried about it breaking. I can bounce about as much as I can without falling and it's solid.
We use it because it's cheaper, faster, pretty durable, easy to repair and paint, a decent insulator, sound blocker and most importantly fire resistant.
For almost all uses it's a better material.
It's less common where houses are older than the 50s.
I'd normally avoid correcting spelling, but these ones were confusing until I realized what you were trying to say. "I always thought that when heroes fought and threw things and people through walls it was an extra strong emphasis (I think?) of how strong they were." English is a stupid language.
Though walls aren't quite that easy to go through. Drywall is brittle enough to punch a hole through (though it probably won't be a clean hole), but there's still the frame and a second layer of drywall (for an interior wall, even more to go through if it's exterior) you'd need to go through for most north American walls. Movies will use prop walls, I'm guessing designed for that specific crash through them (like with a specific shape precut so it just tears away as desired when whatever passes through it) and extra effects like dust and debris added in post or thrown in from outside the frame.
Thank you. I'll check that and correct it later. I felt I was making mistake even as I was writing this...
Flags in front of random houses. It's technically illegal in my country (India), although no one will bother you over it.
Wow, really? Is it just country flags?
No, just the national flag. There are some strict rules for flying national flag which are very easy to violate. Some countries don't even allow the national flag to be flown by citizens only the government. The citizens get a different flag for non-official purposes.
AFAIK flying a tiny but long ass flag is normal in Denmark. You are however only allowed to fly a Danish, Norwegian, Swedish or German flag.
In Germany it is forbidden to fly a German flag with the state emblem (yellow shield with black eagle) as that is the official German flag and may only be flown by federal goverment entities.
Also flying the wrong flag or the right one incorrectly on a boat or ship im Germany can get you fined up to 10k€
Only the Indian flag. You can freely fly the flags of states, organisations, or other countries.
There are a lot of complicated rules about flying the Indian flag. No one knows all of them, so if you break them (and someone notices), you'll just get asked not to do it again. But when some politician or govt officer accidentally breaks one, it becomes very embarrassing for them.
A teacher needing to sell meth to pay for his cancer treatment.
Tbf he didn't have to do that.
He liked it and was good at it (debatable)
Yeah I never really understood that part of it. He was a chemistry teacher so I suppose supposedly he knows how to make meth in principle, but it wasn't like he was a super genius or anything, why could no one else produce a product as good as his. All he was doing what's the following basic chemistry steps.
In the show it's suggested that it's mostly down to him using the right glass beakers and stuff. But if that's all that's required then how come there isn't loads of high quality product on the market?
In addition to the cleanliness of the lab, Walter also decided to cut the pseudoephedrine from over the counter drugs out, along with the steps required to extract it from the other ingredients in the cold medicine and instead synthesised his own from methlemine.
No idea which one is easier to get a pure result from, but that was his first "level up" to the blue meth he became known for.
Though what set him and Jessie apart from Gail is hard to say, other than Walter sabotaging Gail instead of just teaching him his techniques (iirc, been a while since I saw it).
The series does seem to be taking the stance that "before Walter White, professional chemists worked for legitimate companies doing legitimate work in professional labs while drugs were made by hobbiest chemists in ad-hoc labs that were neglected even if they had professional equipment and the people running them had no idea about the single most important factor when targeting high purity: the purity of everything else along every step of the process or some way to extract purity before the end step".
I haven't watched it in years but IIRC he was kind of a genius. He founded a (medical?) research group but he left before it got successful. I think because his son was born and had special needs so he had to get a more stable income.
The friend he co-founded it with is the one who offers to pay for the treatment. He still holds Walt in high regard but Walt feels like a failure in comparison.
The show is fairly explicit about Walter White being an extremely gifted chemist, and only being a teacher rather than a multi millionaire because he'd left the company making money from his innovations because he was in a sulk that his co-founder was dating his ex, and he just assumed that he was going to be able to make a second multi million dollar company on his own and that his friends hadn't contributed at all.
The meth was better quality not just because he used the right equipment, but also because he put what other people considered an unreasonable amount of effort into avoiding trace contamination, and intuitively knew which unwanted reactions he needed to worry about and take measures to avoid. In a later episode, Jesse has to demonstrate how to make comparable quality meth to some professional chemists who have been failing to do so, and the only thing he can find that they've been doing wrong is not keeping things clean enough. After meticulously cleaning things that were already deemed clean, he gets something close to Walt's results.
How it was written, it came down to the care taken in the process and cleanliness of the gear being used. You can see part of this when Pinkman show the cartel their method.
Breaking indoor walls so damn easily, thought it was a Hollywood thing like exploding cars, endless mags etc. Took me a while to get that such thin walls are just common in the US
They make them out of literal cardboard now because drywall is too expensive. I wish I was joking. Look up cyfy on YouTube, he's a home inspector in Arizona and some of the million dollar+ homes he inspects are actual temu quality shitholes from big name builders.
I was astonished to see that they sometimes do stucco walls in Arizona by just putting the wire mesh directly onto the wood framing and applying the stucco. It doesn't even have cheap OSB behind it. Stucco is shitty enough even when it's done "properly".
Yeah and they don't even fully cover the wire mesh most of the time so it rusts and your entire stucco wall falls off a few years later (out of warranty lol get fucked)
Pledge of allegiance in school is quite unusual.
And how you have flags on everything, including outside people's houses.
"Central air" is a term I only learned the meaning of recently, but American TV assumes everyone knows what it is. Which is fair, if you all have it. Same with the hand blenders you have in your kitchen sinks.
It's why no one has air conditioning in a lot of Europe. You'd have to have a separate system for each room, it would get very expensive very quickly, or I can buy a fan for the equivalent of $20. I know in places like the south of Spain they actually do this, but it's not common.
In Spain we often have an air pump (sometimes two) in the house that can pump cold or hot hair depending on what you set it to. Mostly for cold in summer, but it comes handy when radiators aren't enough in winter.
Air pumps will become the norm in Germany in a few years to phase out gas heating in private homes. Some also use it for cooling in summer. Although the one family I know that has it cools a water tank that is circulated in the ceilings of the house to cool it down without wind or noise
When I was in public elementary school we had old textbooks and one of them was trying to talk shit about the Soviets by saying that their educational system was creating robotic, unemotional children who obeyed instructions unquestioningly. They juxtaposed a picture of Soviet students standing uniformly with a picture of American students all doing different things. I questioned it at the time and said if they took a picture of us doing the pledge it would look the same as the commies. I sound 100 years old but this was only 20 years ago.
Central air and garbage disposals are amazing and should be the norm
Your garbage disposals are absolutely terrible. They offer a little convenience for the individual at a far greater, unseen cost than people realise (so, very American)
Central aircon isn't uncommon in modern houses in my country, but it's difficult to retrofit to hundred-year-old homes in the major cities
What issues with garbage disposals have you seen?
Why, because it fucks up the plumbing? I haven't seen an issue with it and don't shove huge amounts of food down it regularly. My least favorite household maintenance task is sticking my hand in the sink and picking up little scraps and gunk so I'm attached to mine.
After juxtaposition with Soviets this one got me real confused, thinking what kind of central garbage disposal you meant? And air disposal? Surely you must've meant central (i.e. district) heating and garbage chutes? And I was like no you do not want these, only then I realized you referred to the things from previous comment.
Ha you went through a whole thought journey
Someone didn’t grow up in the Cold War era. They drilled that shit and followed it up with “duck and cover” in case the Soviets nuked us. As if your desk provided cover from the nuclear holocaust.
ATLA ironically may have desensitised me to the pledge thing by trying to show it as a creepy thing in the Fire Nation school. Instead, it just became part of the narrative flow, which was somewhat opposite the intent.
Then again, I've probably come to associate it with singing shitty school songs and national anthems in Australia anyway.
I hadn't said the (US) Pledge of Allegiance since the 1970s but I attended my local school board meeting last year and they kicked off with it. I couldn't even remember which fucking hand to put over my heart, let alone the actual words of it.
I tried to refuse to say it because it was unconstitutional with the under God part and they made me do it anyway, which I tried to dispute because it has been upheld as a right under the First Amendment but I didn't really care enough to pursue it. That teacher was a geriatric veteran and would have been stubborn too.
It's burned into my brain now.
a hand blender in my sink? TF?
Are you referring to a garbage disposer?
On the pledge, some of us know.
Hollywood celebrities and writers all have "Central Air". The rest of us know what it is, but we don't all have it.
In this sci-fi film with Tom cruise's clones that are some kind of watchmen over the planet, there's a flashback scene. Tom cruise is reminded of his human life before the cloning because he sees an American gridiron football goal.
That scene immediately broke my immersion and I was like, yeah that's Hollywood, it's a film by Americans. I was no longer in the story.
The same happened to me with other forms of media. There's a song that would translate to "favourite person" and has a line "even the traffic jam on the A2 is quickly over when I'm with you". But I never use the A2. It's at the other end of the country. That made me stumble when I listened to it the first time.
That's a bit too...I dunno, I think both of those are on you lol
Do you not enjoy stories about things you've ever experienced?
I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it or that I stopped it. It just breaks the immersion briefly and I'm reminded that I'm experiencing media made by people.
Fair enough!
every american police movie