Back to Reality!

I constantly find myself getting annoyed at certain books and movies. Because I bet you couldn't answer me when I ask, "What are the chances?"

For example, books that have magic make sense, because if magic did exist, it could explain anything. Anything would be possible! So those would, in a way, be realistic. But books like, oh, I don't know, Dork Diaries - they're about "normal life, but seriously - mean girl, crush, 3-best-friends group (you never have Chloe and Zoey without the other! Their names rhyme . . . it's all in the favour of making them look like one person.), which is VERY stereotypical, and something going on each month, with something very exciting happening at exactly the last day of every month, and every problem solved by the end of the month? What the hey? That's sooooo not realistic.
...
Don't get me started on the blog.

So Yesterday
Not Scott Westerfeld's best book, with a very predictable ending, but it's about consumerism and the travel of cool from the Innovator to the mall, and it's darn near real life. I've never been to New York (which will change this year! ;) ) so I don't know what "cool" is like down there, but up here in good old Canada, there's no real definition of what's cool and what's not. Still: the cool pyramid is real. Innovations are real. Business is real. Thus, this book is realistic.

James Bond: [insert name of movie here. Ex: Diamonds Are Forever]
Don't get me wrong. You know I love the concept of spying. But gunfights? Taking info by force? Gambling on the mission? Always some random Bond girl that never reappears? Main character, who is supposed to be incognito, always (supposedly - I totally don't get what all the fuss is about!) is attractive?
Seriously?
What.
A.
STEREOTYPE!
I mean, hello, you're talking to Twist? A spy? Real, if amateur, spy of my own kind? Spying is about collecting information. It isn't about killing, shoulder-rolling, and debonair good looks. Cat, I'm talking to you. Really. Spies do have to kill sometimes, but seriously - in just Diamonds Are Forever, in the first scene, Bond took on three guys who came to get him after he killed a guy who was scheduled for a nose job by pouring thick surgery stuff on him in the tub. The first guard reached inside Bond's jacket for what he assumed was a gun that Bond was supposedly reaching for before they told him to put his hands up, but instead, pulled his fingers out bloody, broken, and most thoroughly mouse-trapped. The second was killed when Bond stuck a bunch of knives in him that were oh-so-conveniently there, in the surgery room. Bond tied up the third onto a stretcher and rolled him into boiling hot viscous stuff that was oh-so-conveniently there in the surgery room, and quipped, "Welcome to hell."

Why didn't the guards just shoot him? In movies, the bad guys always seem to raise the axe higher and higher, slowly, so as to give the good guys more time to escape/retaliate. Humph!

Harry Potter and the [insert topic of book here]
Magic explains everything here. And if magic did exist, it would explain all the world's oddities, and also why us ordinary folk don't have a clue about it. It's just kept a secret by those who are not so ordinary. Period.

Twilight Saga
Again, it's just meagrely possible that vampires exist - again, secrets! - but one crucial thing neither I nor Passerby did understand: why did Edward fall in love with Bella, anyways? Sure, he can't read her mind like he does with every being else, but what else? When he explained to her how he fell in love with her in Twilight, he said that when she was nearly crushed by an out-of-control car, and he saved her with . . . super vampire strength . . . he thought "Not her." Page 272.

Well, excuse me, but before that, they were just disagreeing with each other. And suddenly - literally - he starts brushing her cheek, asking questions, and driving her to school. Is that the path that led to his confession in the sunny meadow? Having never been in love before, I'm a little skeptical. Then again, maybe this is some sort of soul-mate deal and one might be disappointed when one falls in love and it isn't like it is in the Twilight Saga.

One other thing: in Breaking Dawn, Bella becomes a vampire. Super speed, mind, and strength. Stone-hard skin, no need to eat, sleep or even use the bathroom. When she jumps out of a two-storey window (not that they would be hurt if they jumped higher) - don't ask - she says that "It was simple to place my foot 'just so' against the stone to absorb the impact..." That's approximately how it went. But "simple" and "just so" are totally relative things! No explanation? Just that when she was human, she wondered at vampire physical abilities, and now that she's on the secret, it can't be explained?

Any Futuristic Books. Ex: Uglies trilogy
No one knows what the world will be like 300 years in the future. So who knows whether something will be realistic or not?

Barbie movies/Tales
I watch/read these sometimes with siblings. Ever since sometimes, I've been looking out for proper proportions. In Barbies - zilch. At first glance everything seems okay, but when you really look for anything that might be wrong, you can see the details. The head and eyes are far too big, the waist tiny, feet too tiny to hold up anything, legs far too long to correspond with the rest of the body, and most noticeable, the hair is huge, curlicued - like she's packed fifty toilet-paper-roll-sized curlers and left them there for twenty-five hours - hangs longer than the Barbie's behind and most definitely BLOND. Waaaay too blond. Either slightly golden, slight tinge of brown, or platinum blonde (hiss! Not Natural!) but always straight as an arrow.
You know, for example, in "The Princess and the Pop Star," a blond and a brunette are the two main characters. Conveniently the blond is the princess, the dream of many a little girl, and on the cover, the brunette pop star was in the background while the smiling princess took up the whole cover with bouncing, disproportionate blond curls. Anything wrong with this picture?!

The whole world would be much happier if Barbie were a brunette.

So - do any of you see a pattern in this stuff? I'll leave it for you to figure it out. Leave a comment if you have any examples of bad  porportions or annoying/ unrealistic scenarios!