See, after they covered the maze walls they had all this leftover ivy… (Maze Runner movie poster)

If you know a lot about one subject, maybe gardening, or law, or the history of Roman armaments, or police procedure, or whatever, you will probably have noticed that the film and television industry gets a lot of the details wrong. I understand. They’ve got a lot to do to get a story on the screen, and most people don’t care about the details, but sometimes, it gets to be too much.

One of the worst areas of screen offense is in the depiction of vegetable gardens. I would love to gather a bunch of stills from all the ridiculous vegetable gardens I’ve seen on screen, maybe make a Tumblr of them.  (Let me know if any come to mind!)

[Erik here: see the Meryl Streep vehicle It’s Complicated for a vegetable garden that combines cool and warm season veggies all at once.]

I’m on this rant because Erik and I saw the worst garden last night in the film Maze Runner. Now, I’m embarrassed to even admit we went to see Maze Runner–but–well, there’s no excuse. Let’s just leave it at that. Yet I’m going to ‘fess up to doing so because I have to talk about this garden

[Erik here: the plot is, basically, a Gnostic Crossfit Gym overseen by evil archons and patrolled by the same biomechanical spider thingies seen in Starship Troopers.]

A part of the plot involves a pack of feral teenage boys tending a survival garden. The garden seems to consist mostly of an extensive trellis system made out of twigs. Vertical gardening! OK!  The set designers had probably picked up on some of the recent vertical gardening hoopla and were using that to make for interesting use of visual space. But what was growing on the trellis?  Cloth ivy fronds, my friends. Cloth ivy. The sort used to festoon wedding tables, or is sometimes found creeping dustily along the molding in B&Bs.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to offer a pack of hungry teenage boys a bowl of cooked ivy, much less fake ivy.

Now, of course, the intended audience, teenage girls, are NOT looking at the ivy as the hot boy leads discuss their survival problems in the garden. They are, in fact, at this moment, laughing riotously at my boring middle aged concerns. (“Plants? You were looking at the plants?”)  Yes, I was analyzing  the background foliage while yummylicious Dylan O’Brian and Thomas “Elf Boy” Sangster were talking about…something. But yeah, I was looking at them, too.

But seriously, ivy??? This may be an all time low.

And to add insult to injury, they also have an upside down tomato planter strung between two of the trellises. It’s like those plastic ones the big box stores sell, but it is instead constructed of suspicious vine material, a la Gilligans Island. To its credit, though, it did seem to be a real tomato plant, a yellowish, straggly one (and that, at least, is a realistic detail) and it has a couple of tomatoes hanging off it–though those tomatoes may well be clipped on. These were the only edibles in the scene. Seems the boys can have a tomato garnish on their ivy bowls.

I wish I had a still for you, but for some reason the garden is not featured in the publicity stills.

Since I’m rolling on this rant, after the jump here’s a few of other things that perpetually peeve me in film. Please do contribute your own!

1) When providing art for historical dramas, cannot somebody bother to glance at an art history survey book, and see what the visual of the period was, and make a faint attempt to replicate that style?

Yes, only crusty old art history majors (ahem) are bothered by this, but heck, we’d tell you for free. Just give us a call. Run a couple of things past us. We don’t mind–it’s not like we’re employed or anything.

The set designers do an okay job bringing in random paintings that match the historical furnishings, but the real problem comes when something new has to be made. Say they need a portrait painting of one of the characters, or God forbid, a portrait statue, or say one of the characters is sketching. Then they have to create original art for the scene, and this is always a disaster.

The paintings always look modern, and are usually quite bad, technically speaking. They look like thrift store paintings, or the work left forgotten in the art department hallways after the school term has ended. Ghastly. The statues are always hyper-realistic, created perhaps by casting someone’s face, or modeling them in CG.  The result is dang creepy, and not at all historically accurate.

As far as sketching goes, drawing styles change over time. It’s really interesting, actually, the evolution of line. I can identify the rough period in which a drawing was made simply by looking at the line quality–and I only have a BA. It’s not like I work at Christie’s or something.  For example,  I’ve been watching Outlander recently (I am all about the highbrow entertainment these days) and last episode on of the characters sketched someone. The show is set in the 1740’s. The sketch looked like a drawing by Nagel.

Patrick Nagel c. 1980 vs. Joshua Reynolds, c. 1740

And let’s just say that the real disaster in Titanic was not the iceberg, but Leonardo DiCaprio’s drawings of Rose.

2) Rampant misuse of candles

Historically speaking, candles are a luxury item. Rich people used beeswax, the lower orders, tallow, or rush lights. Beeswax and fat were both expensive, and useful in many other ways, so lighting was expensive. It was not uncommon for an entire family to work around a table lit by a single candle at night, sharing that candle, and I’m not talking about impoverished families.

What was that Elizabeth Gaskell story (Cranford?) where the spinster had two candles on her mantle, and would burn one per night, carefully monitoring them so the tapers were always the same length, so that no one visiting would suspect her little economies?

All this is to say that unless your name was prefaced by His or Her Majesty, you did not fill every room with scads and scads of candles. Nor did you leave those candles burning so that you entered an already lit room. Nor did you make love surrounded by six flaming candelabrums–that’s just a fire hazard!  Nor were you issued a candle for your jail cell. And I would really like to see a rush light deployed somewhere, sometime, by the by.

Same goes for oil lamps. They weren’t cheap to fill, either.

Hey, Reign of Fire, was Yankee Pedlar open after the dragons laid waste to the earth? (New fall scent: Despair)

And hello! Producers of post-apocalyptic film and television? How long do you think the candles are going to last once the candle factories stop running? How many candles does the average person have squirreled away in their house? I’m looking at you, Jericho. And you, the abysmal Revolution. And…well, I’m looking at just about everybody. I think I’ll do a Tumbr on overlit post-apocalyptic rooms along with my gardening exposé.

3)  I am still steaming over a bit in Prison Break where a man who is being held captive in a remote compound is told by his captors that he better not try to escape because “three types of mountain lions live in these woods.”  Three types? You mean, chocolate, vanilla and strawberry mountain lions? There are not three types of mountain lions.

Do you perhaps mean mountain lions, cougars and catamounts, Mr. Writer? Because these are three words for the same animal. And anyway,  if someone threatened me with lurking mountain lions, I’d just shrug at the bad guys and make my escape because humans are not the natural prey of mountain lions. I sound like I’m being picky, but this is just evidence of our perceived collective ignorance that we’d be expected to swallow a line like this.

4) Costuming details.  No. Actually, I’m not going there. I know many things are wrong, but I might get the details of how they were wrong, wrong, and then get in trouble with the re-enactors. So you let me know what peeves you. To get the ball rolling, I’m just going to say: Makeup. Corsetry. Men’s shirts. That is all.