I was watching “Wayne’s World” again about a week or so ago, and I noticed two errors in it that may possibly ruin it for future viewings. As the movie fades in, Brian Doyle-Murray (as Noah Vanderhoff) says, “At Noah’s Arcade, we have two of every game. That means two of Zantar, two of…” (I can’t tell what he says there. Anyway, when Rob Lowe meets with him to promote his sponsoring Wayne’s World, Noah says “I don’t mention the games in the ads. The technology moves so much faster than the advertising.” HE JUST SAID THE NAMES WHEN IT FADED IN! And! When Wayne and Garth are in the donut shop, taking about beaming the transmission of Cassandra’s band into Frankie Sharp’s limo, Garth says, “Remember what the security guard outside of Alice Cooper’s concert said? He said Mr. Big (Frankie Sharp-same person) was coming back through Chicago on Friday!” But the actualy scene (with Chris Farley as the guard) says, and I quote, “coming back through Chicago on his way to Detroit.” He never ONCE mentions WHEN the limo would be passing through Chicago, only that it WOULD be. Has anyone else had an otherwise good movie ruined by a mistake?
Boiler Room. A pretty good film except for the part where, at the request of the feds, he backs up the contents of his entire hard drive onto a single floppy disk!
I really can’t think of any movie that was ruined by a “flub” – by which I mean an out-and-out error. (Many are ruined by poor plotting or lousy characters, but those aren’t really flubs.)
If a movie can be ruined by a flub, it can’t be all that good to begin with. And if you’re upset by some obscure error so much that it ruins the movie for you, I feel very sorry for you.
I think it may depend on what your specialty is. Incorrect details that would bypass the population at large can really annoy someone who is close to the subject. A former boss who is a geologist of geophysicist got really annoyed at Titanic because it stated that Molly Brown got her wealth from gold mining, when it was really silver mining. And we’ve had whole threads about computer goofs in movies.
I really, really disliked Requiem for a Dream, and I’m not sure how many people saw it, but on top of the unrelenting misery piled onto the characters I noticed a couple of flubs that annoyed me:
(spoiler space)
-When Harry the Junkie is taken to the hospital for the festering wound on his arm, the emergency room doc immediately palms the cubicle’s medicine vials and slips out to call the police. Harry is then shown in prison with his arm apparently untreated. What hospital would let him go without treatment, even if the doc did see evidence of injections on his arm and decide they were from narcotics? Even in Darren Aronofsky’s world, would any hospital risk a lawsuit like that?
-Harry’s mom, taken to a mental institution because of her diet pill habit, receives electroconvulsive therapy. Granted my substance abuse treatment knowledge is limited, I’ve never heard of this as a treatment for drug addiction.
Titan A.E.
In the scene immediately following Cale putting his father’s ring in the mechanism that activates the Titan and creates a new Earth, the ring is still drawn on his finger. Grr.
I know, I know, Titan A.E. wasn’t a great movie. But because of that goof, my concentration on the movie was shot. So, in my book, it counts. 
Audrey, you want to talk about Titan A.E.? Did I ever tell you my biggest gripe with that movie? You remember what that alien race did in the first part of the movie? They blew up a planet. What do they fear the most? The Titan space ship. What does that ship do? It makes planets.
I mean, hell, it’s like being afraid of a bunny because it can poop on you! Man, I hated that movie…
You obviously never had a bunny poop on you.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park was a pretty bad movie. There is still no explanation to what killed the crew of that boat. And many others that hurt the plot.
I think I actually physically felt my suspension of disbelief snap at the point of Armageddon where they decided it would be just a really keen idea to–for the sake of comfort, I suppose–put the Mir space station into a spin fast enough to give it gravity via centripetal force. And the poor thing didn’t immediately come apart at the rivets.
That hardly “ruined” it though–not really a film that could be. If anything, it got much easier to watch afterwards.
I just watched this over the weekend. If I was smart I would have set the DVD to the Japanese language and put on the subtitles because the voice over acting of Clair Danes and Billy Crudep was horrible and really brought down the enjoyment level of the film.
In the Talented Mr. Ripley
Spoiler
it really brought me down when Matt Daemon did not kill Gwynth Paltrow.
/Spoiler
Deep Impact I thought that the Elijah Wood character was such a weenie loser that it ruined the film for me. Here is this kid who discovers a comet and then later in the film he goes to his sweethart and gives her this offer. “marry me or die” She has to think about it and says only if you save my parents. Why dosent this kid say “I’ll go see if Kate Moss want to live.” Later in the film he goes back for he on a dirt bike. She is stuck in traffic with thousands of other people who are all gonna die becasue they are stuck in traffic. He moves through the traffin on the bike. When he sees he he jumps of the bike and goes and hugs and crap. What?! Nobody stuck in traffic jumps on his bike and takes off?!?!!
Double Jeopardy
The entire premis of the film is based on an incorrect interpetation of the Double Jeopardy rule.
Jurassic Park
Late in the film when the little girl is booting up the system Sam Neil has a shotgun. We hear, over the phone, him fire four shots at a raptor. When we come back to the room we see four small bullet holes in the glass as if he shot an entirely different weapon.
Also early in the film when they first arrive on the island the lawyer is talking to Hammond. The lawyer is there representing the investors and he wants to see why the park is taking so long ect… He says to Hammond “If they’re (the investors) are not convinced, I’m not convinced. I’ll shut you down.” What he should have said is “If I am not convinced, they’re not convinced.” The line is flat out wrong.
Zebra I always heard the line in JP as “If they’re not convinced {that) I’m convinced, I’ll shut you down”. Obviously, I could be wrong.
Lego in the Lost World it was worse than you thought - and this thing made us all universally say “oh, come on”. The crew were eaten by the T-rex - remember the half eaten arm? we’re supposed to believe that the t-rex got out of the hold, rampaged the ship (leaving it remarkably unbloddied), got back into the hold just as the doors were closing on it, all, just before the ship was due to dock (otherwise it wouldn’t have been pointed to the dock etc.).
I’ve never bothered seeing that one again because of that piece.
Mine is more in the vein of a category than a specific example, but I really lose my interest in a movie when the director has called for a shot he can’t pull off. It’s a question of judgment.
Example:
In just about any disaster pic, but I’ll use The Poseidon Adventure, the shots of the disaster itself are almost always accomplished using models. Here’s a suggestion, Mr. Director-Man: if the quality of your budget and/or your imagination limit you to a box-kit model in a swimming pool, then just don’t show us the thing. I believe it was Hitchcock who proved that a great deal more can be done with suggestion and implication than can be done with demonstration.
I am not ragging on directors who are doing all they can with what they have (I’m thinking Lucas in the mid-70s pushing ILM to do things no one had ever done before), just the ones who ruin an otherwise good movie with bad effects when they should have seen right off that they couldn’t make it look right. Think of all those “monkeys” you’ve seen who were so obviously dwarves (little people?) in costume, or all the valiant soldiers who’ve died on Flanders fields in WWII movies as the result of being strafed by a Zero because the director didn’t recognize what kind of plane was in the stock footage he used.
KKBattousai, I have another gripe with Boiler Room. At the end he’s given the option of a “get out of jail free” card if he goes along with the Feds’ plans and copies the stuff (to one disk as you pointed out). But the police come raiding mere seconds after he’s done copying and has gotten safely out of the building.
So…either they needed him to gather information for them to make their case (which obviously isn’t the case because they managed to arrest the traders without his help) or they don’t need his help (which also can’t be the case because they wouldn’t let him go out of the kindness of their hearts).
Also, not a movie per se, but the very last episode of ST:TNG(All good things). Captain Picard helps create a temporal anomoly that gets bigger as it travels backwards in time. But in the “future” Picard, they don’t see the anomoly, they leave, they come back, and there it is! In other words, it travels forward in time which completely destroys the entire scenario they set up in the first place.
Yeah… that All Good Things one had me thinking too. I never quite figured that one out. Pretty good episode other than that though.
In both The Green Mile and High Fidelity, boom mikes are visible several at the top of the screen in several scenes.
And in Fargo, Marge calls through the radio that she has found the perpetrators’ car, but it’s not the same car, really. Steve Buscemi stole license plates from that car at the airport and put it on the other one, so it shouldn’t have the same description as what Marge is looking for.
…I’m no Trekker by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a question concerning “Generations.” Since the Enterprise crashed, and Picard went into the ribbon to team up with Captain Kirk, and the ribbon basically created a reality of each person’s choosing (I’m oversimplifying a little), doesn’t that mean that the Enterprise really crashed, and that the bad guy really won (I’m counting on the diehards to know exactly what the hell I’m talking about. It’s difficult to explain)?
Speaking of Lost World, didn’t Malcom (or whatever the chaos mathematician’s name was) die in the first movie? Or was that in the book?
Either way, Crichton decided to resurrect him for the hell of it (even if this was “just” in the book).
It was just in the book. He lived in the movie, escaping the jaws of the T-Rex but getting his leg badly wounded.
Return of the Jedi - All the Imperial officers have the same rank insignia… from Admiral Piett all the way down to lowly crewmen-of-supposedly-low-rank.
Starship Troopers - This movie is so full of shit, but there’s one goof-up that even a kid with a moldy testicle for a brain could spot. Near the end of the movie, when an escape pod crashes through the mountain and into “Bug City”, it shows the hole created by the pod as it penetrates the ground… all six inches of it. Apparently, the Bugs made their cave by hollowing out the mountain within six inches of the surface, and magically found a way to keep the place from collapsing. That flub (and the whole hour of “Beverly Hills 90210” going on at the beginning of the movie) keep me from ever bothering to see this pile of crap (even though I love the battle scenes).