I watched Bloodsport again the other night. Yes, I know - but I usually tune in during the Kumite, and this was the first time I’d seen the beginning.
At the beginning there’s a scene where a young Jean-Claude (different younger actor, same dubbed voice) gets caught at his future master’s house trying to steal a Katana sword.
Obviously someone in the art department got a memo saying “Have him wearing Sports paraphernalia!” since he’s wearing a Giants hat and jersey. Unfortunately they didn’t do much research, as he’s wearing a NY Giants NFL jersey and an SF Giants MLB hat.
Curious, since they live in LA and he’s got a Belgian accent.
Even curiouser, seeing as how the Giants baseball logo doesn’t even include the word Giants, and the jersey he’s wearing looks as though it was created on the spot. The text “GIANTS” on the front looks painted on, and the number on the back is 65 whereas the number on the sleeve is 5.
Yes, I know, what do I expect from a movie this hilariously bad, but this error required some kind of effort. Why bother?
So what are some other horrible errors by movie art departments? I’d bet military insignias are wrong all the time, I just don’t know anything about them…
I always wonder why, in movies where the protagonist needs to do some simple, everyday computer task, like answering an e-mail, they never show an actual e-mail client running on an actual operating system. Instead they construct some hilariously fake-looking interface that probably took a day to build, is onscreen for like 10 seconds and only serves to distract the audience. Is there some kind of copyright issue that prevents them from just showing the guy using Outlook?
As long as we’re doing martial arts movies: for a movie set in 1909, the haircuts, clothes, and plastic barettes in “The Chinese Connection” sure look a lot like the height of early 70’s fashion…
Oh yeah. Hate that. There’s no copyright issue, but they would have to get permission for the product placement. You almost never see a Windows logo but my most memorable was in True Lies when they boot up to the Windows 3.11 login screen and I was really impressed, until they played the Mac Startup sound. :smack:
Another computer head-scratcher was in Mission: Impossible when he searches the Internet for “Job” and it returns “Job not found.” So, darn, he can’t find her on the Internet. Why not show the actual result - hundreds of millions of hits - his frustration would have been the same and the plot wouldn’t have suffered one iota.
And her Email address is “Job 3:16” - that’s it - a colon, spaces, no domain name. Bear in mind this is a movie that is trying to impress you with its computer knowledge.
(Yes, those are the only things about Mission: Impossible that bother me :))
One of the reasons for HollywoodOS (as this is often called) is that the movie will eventually be ported to a standard definition television screen. Even if the image on the computer takes up the whole screen, in order to make a standard OS or program display text/graphics that are readable at that size, you’d have to vastly increase the size of everything, which would look obviously disproportionate and strange to any actual Windows/Mac users. But if you make a cartoony fake OS that’s very simple and readable, it’s not as noticeable.
In Mission Impossible, for example, when he’s typing, it looks like his computer will only display about ten lines of text at once. Look at your computer. It probably would display a hundred lines of text at a normal resolution.
Lots of movies (Capote, for example) will show a close-up of a photo in an old newspaper of yearbook. It’s usually diffusion-dithered (the way things are printed from an inkjet printer), and not half-toned, the way it should be.
Personally, If I was making a bomb, I would put a fake count down timer on it, with a display that had NOTHINg to to with the duration remaining until the expected kaboom. Deep down, under all the fake tech, would be a simple 555 IC timer merrily ticking its way to oblivion…
That being said…
Car tires must Squeal when cornering, even on sand, gravel or other non frictional surfaces.
A person using a quill or nib style pen to write only needs to pause and dip the pen when a dramatic pause is required. They Usually are shown holding / using them like ball points/pencils too.
3)Halloween costumes. Remember the “Halloween” scene in “ET- The extraterestrial”? Every time halloween occurs in a movie, you can just hear the costume designers “Squeee-ing” with delight. The kids are generally shown in eleaborate, profesionally crafted costumes. Not once do you see simple store bought masks, or any of the sort of “real” halloween costumes one see’s in real life.
Telephones. People never seem to start with the standards greetings, pleasantries… (“Hello… Oh Hi Joe, how’s things… yeah… that’s nice… Oh… I am good…” (etc). Instead its Ring Ring… “Joe! Meet me at the shark tank at 7, bring the Flashlite and the computer chips!” Then hang up with out saying good bye, or even waiting to make sure their instructions were understood.
A lot of these are just the standard “things they do wrong in movies”, not related to art and prop stuff as the original poster asked for. So I’ll take it back on track with these; the presents that have the box lid and box bottom wrapped separately so the recipient only has to lift the lid off to get to the inside rather than tear through the wrapping. Saves having to wrap several boxes for each take, I guess. The “hand painted” protest signs carried by a varied group of demonstrators that are all in the same font, same size, ect. Obviously produced by the same prop department.
My son was in a student-produced one-act play at his high school last spring. In one scene, a group of prtesters are standing around with signs that say “PROTEST SIGN.” in big red block letters.
Between the 70s hairstyles and the 60s cars in the background of street scenes, I didn’t realize this was supposed to be a period piece until about halfway through. I thought the anachronistic part was the over-the-top racism. :smack:
(And I wrote up a completely separate post as a complementary response to yours, until I realized that Fist of Fury is The Chinese Connection. :smack: :smack: )
ETA: Oh yes, and the Japanese guy has his hakama on backwards the whole time. Baka!
It wasn’t a bad error, but it was really a silly one - We were flipping around the other day, and landed on the Bill Engvall Show. In a closet off the kitchen is where their clothes washer and dryer are. The set people did up a very nice laundry area, complete with the wall-mounted box for the hoses to connect to.
Except there were no hoses. If they left the valve box out and just had the washer and dryer in the closet, we’d think nothing wrong, but adding the un-connected box screams out “Hey, we’re dorks!”
The variation on this theme that I recall was in Ransom: Mel Gibson turns on his Mac lapop, we hear the Startup chime, and he starts typing insanely fast – and we all know how long it takes a modern computer to boot. Of course, in HollywoodOS, computers boot instantly, and randomly flicking keys very fast produces accurate input.
Yeah, it always bugged me in Independence Day when that stripper had a too-well-done “WELCOME - Make yourselves at home” sign all made up for the alien-welcoming shindig. The “Welcome” on the sign, in particular, is just too nice. It’s a perfect wave shape. Found a picture of it here. Seriously, who makes a sign like that, that quickly? More to the point, what stripper could whip up a sign like that just before going to work?
There is an episode of “McMillan and Wife,” the 70s-era mystery TV show starring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James, that still bugs me 34 years after I first saw it. In it, the McMillans go to Scotland on holiday and visit the ancestral home–getting into the middle of a murder mystery, of course.
Putting aside most of the many glaring errors that are obvious to someone familiar with Scotland and piping competitions but not of interest to the general viewer (lovely California Coast Live Oaks in the background, inappropriate pipe tunes for competition, incredibly stupid plot point resting on a professional-level piper being “out of breath” a day after running a few hundred yards, etc.), the capper was the clothing used in the formal ball put on by the local laird.
The prop department dragged out all the kilts and related accessories they had, but did not seem to have much of a clue as to how they went together or if they should go together. Kilts were worn inches above the knee or inches below the knee. Regular tuxedo jackets were worn ('way too long), plaids were draped over shoulders every which way, military horsehair sporrans were worn, as well as plain leather daywear sporrans, hose was worn way too high, and on and on.
Well, so what. Like I said, to the general viewer it wouldn’t much matter. But to me it was like watching a show where someone was trying to depict a formal, high class event in the US, and had the “sophisticated” partygoers wearing white high-tops with their tuxes, or wearing their cummberbunds over their jackets, or wearing their pants lowrider style, or wearing an Army garrison cap.
Not a movie, but the old TV show, Dragnet. I remember one episode where they were tracking down a welfare fraud scam. The suspect was receiving welfare checks under lots of fake aliases and cashing them.
As part of the evidence, they did a handwriting analysis on the checks and determined that they were all signed by the same person.
However…
When the handwriting analyst showed the checks to Friday and Gannon, the signatures being analyzed were not on the back of the check, where the recipient would have endorsed them, but on the front of the check, where the signature of the issuer (presumably somebody at the welfare dept.) should have been.
Close-ups of newspaper headlines. With digital high-def wide screen, you can actually pause these and read the articles with them now. Some of them are pretty funny. The headline will say something like SEATTLE FAMILY MURDERED IN SLEEP, and the accompanying article will be about a prize squash someone grew in Florida. Or sometimes, they actually compose a lead-in, but then it all repeats after a couple paragraphs.
