SCIENCE!!!

In case you’re wondering, the answer to monday’s question was a resounding "No"


What was monday's question? I wasn't paying attention.


The question was whether or not Will Ferrell could break the Curse of the Double-Feature. Sadly, it was not to be. In fact...he made it worse. In most recent instances, the first film has been totally enjoyable, and the second (historically, Splice, Shutter Island, Knight and Day, Don't Mess With The Zohan) has been lousy. This time, both movies bit the big popcorn box.

Suffice to say that if you are particularly enamoured with Will Ferrell's type of humor (that being no-sell fish out of water goofiness and long-winded jokes that don't know when they're over) you may enjoy "The Other Guys" but since it's not my cup of tea, I didn't think much of it.

"Salt" on the other hand, I actually had higher hopes for...for some unknown reason, and it disappointed. Here's where I divert into a physics lesson. Believe it or not, Newton was right about that whole "laws of motion" thing. He was a pretty smart guy. Here's how it applies to action thriller movies with a chase scene. We've all seen it before in movies, and it's moronic. Our hero is on a bridge and sees a tanker truck travelling at 50MPH beneath them, they jump down, land on the truck and travel harmlessly away. Here's where Newton comes into play. When you jump off a bridge, your forward speed is precisely zero. You're only going one direction and that's down. In order for you to start going 50MPH on top of a truck roughly instantaneously, something has to hit you and propel you sideways...and hit you pretty hard, for that matter. There is nothing on top of a tanker truck to do that that won't break everything you need to remain solid. The same physics apply in all directions. You have a net velocity change of 50MPH in one direction...it doesn't matter if you're going from 0 to 50MPH sideways, or 50 to 0MPH down; the force needed to pull this off is the same force you would feel if you jumped off a 7 story building and hit the sidewalk. Do the math.

In reality, what would happen is you would slide off the top of the truck, maintaining your own lateral velocity of nearly 0 while the truck speeds away and you get splattered on the grill of the next vehicle coming down the highway. Yet, people do it all the time in movies with nary a scratch. This is nonsense, and it happened in "Salt" causing me to go into a nerdy rant on my website. Take that, Hollywood!