This one’s probably famous. In Commando, Arnold runs a yellow Porsche off the road. You see the driver’s side all banged up before it tips over on its side. After Arnold takes care of the driver (“I lied”), he rights the Porsche and it’s undamaged.
That was a silly movie in so many ways.
In an episode of the original Star Trek, Spock, in a fit of anger, bangs his fist down on top of a computer monitor. The monitor started to deflate. :eek:
This sort of thing is pretty common (c.f. the red pickup toward the end of Twister).
Never heard of a flat-screen display?
I sometimes get gifts wrapped that way…where are the hidden cameras :eek:
If it’s the shot I’m remembering, I think the idea was that Spock, having super Vulcan strength, and being especially pissed, smashed the device when he hit it. That’s not to say that the prop wasn’t inflatable.
I haven’t seen the movie, and am no expert on aircraft, but in the still accompanying the movie Jet Attack in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, it shows the heroes attacking some North Korean guards in order to steal their MiG and make a daring escape. If you look at the MiG, you can see the star and bar on the fuselage.
I would assume the plane isn’t a MiG, either.
Heh. I came in here to post the reasons for this, and I realized that I already had, above.
But I thought of another reason that this is done. It’s done for clarity. The typical shot of the computer screen is very brief. Unless you’re very familiar with the layout and use of the program in question, you’re likely to miss whatever cue the director thinks is important.
Computer programs are generally designed to work silently and fail noisily. If you instruct a computer to do something like send an email, it will only alert you if something goes wrong. You know it sent because you just hit the send button and got no error. But the audience often needs to be notified of successful actions, not failed ones. Someone watching an email in a movie is probably paying attention to the content of the email. All of a sudden the email window goes away (because the user moved the mouse and clicked send), and if they weren’t paying close attention, the viewers have no idea what happened.
In I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, you often see the firefighters in a blaze or doing salvage and overhaul after a fire without their SCBA on. Bad idea.
In the new Indian Jones movie
they travel to Peru - Cuzco, I believe, maybe Lima - and when they’re walking through the ‘city’, it’s shown as dilapidated and falling down, and all the people there are dressed in traditional clothes, which is certainly NOT the case in either of these cities.
Jurassic Park is loaded with prop/art errors. For example, in the scene where Nedry is stealing the embryos, the Stegosaurus specimen is misspelled as “STEGASAURUS”. And the Tyrannosaurus specimen is labelled “TYRANOSAURUS REX” (images).
This happens all the time and it isn’t a mistake, really. It’s to show the characters faces, but I still hate it. It’s like in any movie where they include paintball. Inevitably the characters take off the masks.
You’re right, I guess I mean it isn’t true to how it’s actually done.
Poor Tiffany doesn’t get any respect. When she left home at 16 because her mother’s new husband kept making lewd comments about her developing figure, she thought she’d put the worst of her life behind her. She stayed in Las Vegas for six months, until someone noticed that her birth certificate had white-out on it, then was back on the road. Los Angeles seemed like the place for this poor farm girl from Iowa to make a stab at getting somewhere with her life, and she was lucky enough to find a way in to a runaway shelter there. They got her back in school, and within a year she had her diploma and an academic scholarship to study graphic design at UC-Irvine.
Sadly, that didn’t mean the road ahead was paved with gold. Her mom died. Her step-father started leaving her creepy telephone messages. Her grades suffered. Before long, she was out one academic scholarship and in desperate need of funding. A friend told her about exotic dancing. It was hard, given her rocky emotional state, but she found she had a knack for it, and could earn more than enough money to keep herself in school.
The morning everyone woke up to the spaceships, she had been putting together a portfolio for class and happened to have some poster board and paints left over. Her first draft was, sadly, a bit of a mess. She kept looking out the window of her small but tastefully-furnished apartment at the spaceship hovering over downtown, trying to imagine what kind of people they would be, and so she smeared a few letters and didn’t quite get everything laid out just as she would like. But the second time around, she managed something really nice, and she was really proud of it. She couldn’t wait to get to work and show it off to the girls.
Jasmine was there, and gave her a big lecture. That was a bummer, and it really hurt Tiffany’s feelings. But not long after Jasmine left, Randi came in from doing her set and she really lifted her spirits. Randi always had such kind things to say to her, and she really praised the sign she’d made. She told her flat out, that if she didn’t go downtown and have a good time and show her sign off, she’d regret it for the rest of her life. “How many times you think something like this is gonna happen, girlfriend?” she had said.
Of course, it didn’t turn out so well, but that’s another story. My point is, you really don’t need to give the poor girl a hard time just because of her job. She had a lot of good qualities, and deserves to be remembered better.
Though they make mention of Cuzco, the place they end up visiting is, I believe, the town of Nazca, which isn’t much of a “city,” even today.
That movie is so chock full of ridiculous errors that it can’t really be considered to be attempting realism, though.
There’s the traditional “map route behind superimposed plane” sequence errors (I think every Indy movie has had one, and had it have a glaring error in it – this one has Belize on the map, which was still British Honduras in 1957. And the plane itself is a Soviet-made aircraft (though that might be an intentional joke, given the movie’s Red Scare themes.)
I think they travel to Nazca after they arrive in Cuzco, but that also reminded me of another scene in which you can see the Nazca Lines behind them, larger then life, and seeingly glowing. Sorry folks, it definitely doesn’t look like that!
They’re going to have to start looking into a compromise soon, because even technophobe Grannies are starting to notice and get distracted by this kind of unrealism.
I think if they reduce the scale of the flashing text a little, to something less than 35px high, and start having windows open in a logical, user-motivated way, instead of just flashing up in a “haphazard yet conveniently matches what they’re talking about” way, then people might start accepting the silliness instead of it taking them out of the story.
In Hard Boiled, before the big climax at the hospital, you see a bilingual road sign. I don’t know what it says in Chinese, but in English it says:
SCARED HEART HOSPITAL
In “House of 1000 Dolls” Diane Bond is being whipped by the bad guys while chained with her arms over her head, and one of her manacles springs on. Bond instinctively grabs it and hangs onto it for the rest of her whipping scene. I have no idea why they didn’t just reshoot the scene. You want to talk about stupid-looking …
I grew up watching old movies and it seems to me that up until the 70’s, scenes that took place at night look remarkably just like daytime. With perhaps a blue filter placed over the lens to make it look kinda dark. I mean, it’s so bright that everything has the same sharp shadows it would have at three in the afternoon.
I’ve never seen moonlight THAT bright.
This is really bad in “American Grafitti.” All the scenes with whats-his-name and the blond slut are clearly shot in the day-time, but with some kind of “filter.” I asked my friend, who I was watching it with at the time and who is a big movie buff, why they did this, and he just said “they had a very small budget.” Really? That small? So small that waiting eight fucking hours for nighttime for one more day would have made the movie so bankrupt that it wouldn’t have been made? The scenes total less than 20 minutes, all in the same backdrop, so I can’t imagine it would really have taken more than one night to film them all.
Just seems lazy to me.
