I don’t see how any of these are “gaffes” when they’re done entirely intentionally. But especially the last one.
The “food” in a scene is often inedible. It may be a straight up prop, it may have been sitting under hot lights for hours, it may be disgusting or dangerous to eat.
Furthermore, for the sake of continuity, if an actor take a bite on camera, e might have to take a bite during every take, which could interfere with the actor’s health, well-being, or comfort, and make it difficult for em to act.
That one always gets me. The cop or soldier or good guy caught up in a horrible situation points his gun at the dangerous bad guy. Bad guy doesn’t do what he’s supposed to so now the hero racks the slide because now he means business. Why are you pointing an empty gun at the bad guy to begin with?
The job of a foley artist is to make things sound the way an audience thinks they should sound; not the way they actually sound. 99% of the audience “knows” the sound a dropped gun makes from film and TV; not real life, so THAT is the sound that needs to be used.
Any time a train is shown, it blows its whistle. Even if the train is travelling deep in the wilderness or desert, with no level crossings anywhere in sight, we’ll hear the train whistle if we see the train.
Trains blow their whistles for various reasons. They will blow a distinctive pattern when approaching a level crossing (two longs, a short, and a final long that lasts until the engine crosses the level crossing), and there are other patterns that are used for other situations. Of course, a train will blow its whistle if it sees something on the track anywhere (say, an animal), but a train will not blow its whistle in the middle of nowhere, just because the operator hasn’t heard it for a while.
I’ve been annoyed by the cup thing, except I have thought of it, and described it, differently. I think it is obvious from how people carry and move covered coffee cups, that the cups are empty. And it may not be a gaffe per se, but it takes me out of the show every time I see someone “drink” from an obviously empty cup. I think it happens far less in movies than in TV shows, so there must be an awareness that it’s better to at least put some liquid in the cups to make the actions more natural.
Soldiers’ gear doesn’t clack and rattle while they’re marching. This is especially true of their rifles. If they do, they’re either not made well or they’re poorly cared for, which would earn you a reaming from your sergeant.
Or how about when a semi-auto pistol is empty and they keep pulling the trigger to hear clicks. In real life the slide stays open after the last shot on most semi-autos, especially full sized models used by police/military. It really gets me when they do this with what appears to be a Glock. Glocks are single action with no second strike capability. The trigger wouldn’t continue to function after the first pull if no round were fired.
Or it’s distant cousin, when somebody is given an empty pistol and doesn’t realize it until they already have pulled the trigger and heard the click, especially people who supposedly should know better (like assassins or elite soldiers)
This means either they have never racked the slide of the pistol which means even if loaded wouldn’t have fired, or they did rack the slide earlier and somehow didn’t notice the gun was empty despite a lot of guns will automatically have the slide lock back when the gun is completely empty.
Or they just hit keys indiscrimately, as fast as they possibly can; yet still manage to produce grammatically-correct, correctly-spelled e-mails, make accurate flight reservations, write letters that are good enough after only a first draft, find the password to the villain’s computer, and so on.
Everyone knows that hacking is just being able to type fast. To stop hacking you have to type faster.
The second part I’ll give them a pass. I took it to mean there was an intrusion on the main network which was used to get data stored on that particular computer that was on the network. Not that all the data was stored on that one computer.
I knew the stock noise was the hawk, but I always assumed, given their similarities of appearance and habit, that the Bald Eagle would sound like the localFish Eagle’s call (AKA - the Sound of Africa)