Movie plot holes

Aw, dammit, I should have said, "That is a very good point!"

 

Plot holes from Major League:

* Phelps tells Charlie of her plan to sabotage the team, Charlie tells Lou of the plan after 121 games, and Lou tells the team. Nobody thinks about how Phelps is hurting the integrity of the game and thinks to either notify the commissioner or leak it to a reporter?

* Where is the players’ union to complain about the crappy plane or the bus?

* How does Suzanne Dorn know which bar Ricky Vaughn is in during the same night that they clinched the tie?

* Lou managed Toledo for ... 30 YEARS? No call up, no demotion, no deciding at one point “I probably should find a different organization because the Tigers are never going to promote me.”

 

I think I've got answers for the last two.

It may be that there was one bar that the players would go to in those situations.

Wasn't part of the gag with Lou at the beginning that he really didn't care that much about getting to the majors? He even hesitates to take the job.

 

Good point on the first one.

As for the second one, I thought part of the gag was that he didn't think being hired by the Cleveland Indians was any better than being in Toledo, because they were the Cleveland Indians, as opposed to a "real" major league team.

 

That one doesn’t bother me because the movie was clearly written for an audience that may never have even heard of Hold ‘Em, much less one that would be sophisticated enough to pick up on a subtle tell. They exaggerated it for the film audience. Not really a plot hole as much as a plot device.

 

Didn’t one of the cars also lose five hubcaps?

 

How Andy got clean and pressed in "Shawshank" has been discussed here before, but that still bothers me. Also, how did he get to Buxton to bury the QEII box, and how would he know from prison that the treen and rock wall were still there?

 

A tree and long rock wall on the outskirts of a small town would have been a semi-permanent fixture. He's mostly lucky it was still there, as opposed to it not being there. Same with that one specific rock that no one had stumbled across or kicked up in 20 years.
As for getting to Buxton, we see that he bought a car to drive to Mexico with. So he drove and stopped there on his way out of town.

A better question is how did he get to Portland and visit all the banks before an APB went out? The timeline is a bit screwy.
I guess we can assume he hitchhiked, but a guy in either prison clothes or a muddy T-shirt a couple miles from the state penitentiary is probably not going to get picked up. And unless Shawshank was located in Portland or very close to it (a few state prisons are or were in cities, so maybe) he wasn't walking into town.
And if he changed into his suit then he'd be soaked when visiting the banks. And, even with bathing in muddy water, he still would have stunk to high heaven after spending a couple of hours in the sewer pipe. That smell is not coming out very easily. Maybe people were too polite to say anything with him otherwise looking the part.

But then the timeline...
Let's say it's lights out at 9 p.m. and he enters the sewer pipe around 10. It takes him two hours to crawl to the exit and bathe in the rain. That leaves somewhere between six and eight hours before he's discovered missing in the morning, and then maybe another hour before they find his escape tunnel.
So at best he's visiting his first bank in Portland around the time Norton finds the hole. Andy visits a dozen banks, which would have taken until early or mid-afternoon to conduct all of his business. Then he still has to buy a car and flee town while the manhunt ratchets up for an escaped murderer. He tried to cover his tracks with the package he sent, but that's not hitting the fan for a couple of days at least. Meanwhile, that first 24 hours he's still in the shadow of the prison with half the state looking for him.
So maybe he tied it all together by camping out under his tree in Buxton and burying the box for Red, and then leaving Maine for good the next morning.
Still a lot of holes in that escape, though.

 

First, it's probably not gonna take him two hours to crawl 500 yards.

And 95% of the area would have no idea there'd even been a prison escape. News traveled at a snail's pace in pre-Internet, pre-computer times. He had numerous forms of valid ID in a completely different name. The most recent photo of him would be at least 20 years old. And they certainly wouldn't be looking for him in banks.

 

He had the suit in a plastic bag that was tied to his foot. So it's possible that the suit stayed dry during his trip through the pipe. He also had a bar of soap with him, which Red said they found when they found the rock hammer. Plus, Red says he came out "clean on the other side", which is probably a metaphor, but can also be taken literally.

So maybe he starts visiting banks at 8 a.m. If he takes 20 minutes per bank, that means 3 per hour, so he gets done at noon. I think 8 a.m. is a solid bet for a starting time. Let's say 7 a.m. is the wakeup call. Andy doesn't appear. The guard yells at him to get out or he'll thump his skull. A couple minutes later, the guard discovers Andy is not in his cell. They take a few minutes to figure out where Andy could be (Let's say, until 7:10, before arranging to sound the alarm. Norton takes off his shoes and hears the alarm at 7:15. They lock down the prison, someone tells Norton it's Andy who is missing, Norton walks through to Andy's cell, and finds the hole around 7:50 or so. Which Red kinda confirms when he says right around the time that Racquel was spilling her secrets, a man nobody knew walked into the bank.

Now, it's 8 a.m., and Shawshank has to not only notify the guards, but notify the police, who begins to search, and find his stuff in the water around 9 a.m. But at that time, there might not have been very much communication with Portland, as they would have to call the TV and radio stations and put out the word that there was an escaped prisoner. And it's not likely that bankers and tellers would be listening to the radio while they were working.

Also, found a cool story about a retired state trooper who was the guy holding up the rock hammer in the photo taken of the search party when Andy escapes.

Retired Ashland state trooper immortalized in Shawshank history

 

Weeks and Banks were both past their draft age. The current league rule is that,any player can be drafted that year if they are of 18 years of age on or before September 15. In theory, they both were older than that.


OK, answer one ... ask one.

How long does Professor Quill just sit around waiting for Ron to finish the game of Wizards Chess at the end of Sorcerer's Stone.

 

Fair, but was the maximum age circa 1998? I ask because I think it was 22? (Now, it is 20).

My counter to quill, did the chess board fix it itself after quill played?