Paranormal Activity (2009)
The Movie Life Lesson: If you happen to live in a haunted house, you’ll fall sound asleep every night.
Why It’s Impossible In Real Life: No one with any semblance of smarts would stay in a haunted house, home to a demon with a penchant for tearing unsuspecting slumberers from their bed at night. How on Earth do these two manage to actually fall asleep?!
Swordfish (2001)
The Movie Life Lesson: To hack into a government network you only need 60 seconds, a gun to your head and the ability to type rather fast.
Why It’s Impossible In Real Life: A true hacker takes time to accumulate the relevant data, going through any information the intended network has in the public arena to find a weak link which can then be exploited.
The Machinist (2004)
The Movie Life Lesson: You can survive (albeit with cheekbones that’d cut glass) without sleep for a year.
Why It’s Impossible In Real Life: There’s no fathomable way for a human being to still be alive after not sleeping a wink for 365 days. You’d be dead after six weeks.
Big (1988)
The Movie Life Lesson: Be careful what you wish for. In this case, the desire to be a grown-up.
Why It’s Impossible In Real Life: Wishing you were older is something we’ve all dallied with on occasion. Alas, the passage of time is the only method for achieving such. You can’t pop a quarter into an arcade machine and make it so.
Footloose (1984)
The Movie Life Lesson: Dancing about like you’ve got an electric eel down your shorts can appease religious zealots.
Why It’s Impossible In Real Life: Unless that dancing is in conjunction with some sort of Church benefit fundraiser, it’d take a lot more than the quick step of a young whippersnapper to change the rigid mind of John Lithgow’s staunch Reverend.
Oblivion (2013)
The Movie Life Lesson: To cure a person shot in the abdomen, the bullet simply needs to be removed and they’ll be in the mood for carnal activity later that night.
Why It’s Impossible In Real Life: A bullet to the gut would undoubtedly hit your digestive tract which can be fatal. A simple extraction would not remedy the internal devastation.
The Twilight Saga (2008 - 2012)
The Movie Life Lesson: It’s perfectly acceptable for a teenage girl to marry a man who’s more than a century old.
Why It’s Impossible In Real Life: Why this wasn’t made more of an issue in the series is beyond belief. Edward might look twinkly and Adonis-like in the sun, but that old timer has more war stories than you can shake a stake at.
Young women are more likely to go gooey-eyed over lads their own age who won’t regale them with tales of the time they caught the Spanish flu.
Drop Dead Fred (1991)
The Movie Life Lesson: Imaginary friends can become integral to solving a life dilemma.
Why It’s Impossible In Real Life: Talking out loud can help clear your mind by clarifying your thoughts, but even if you’ve got an imaginary friend listening to your rant they can’t actually interact with the world, i.e. wiping doggie waste onto the furniture to infuriate parents.
Mildred Pierce (1945)
The Movie Life Lesson: A good home cook can automatically run a successful restaurant chain.
Why It’s Impossible In Real Life: A firm grasp on the fundamentals of cooking and baking are key. But a business background is entirely absent in Mildred’s world! You’d need at least a smidgen of experience in running a restaurant.
Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason (2004)
The Movie Life Lesson: Incarceration in a Thai jail really isn’t that bad - as all female prisoners really want is to do bad Madonna impressions and be patronised by Westerners.
Why It’s Impossible In Real Life: Far from being able to parade around the cells flinging your old bras at your fellow inmates, foreign prisons (especially in Thailand) are notoriously harsh on drug crime.
