I’m sorry, I just don’t buy it. A well-made movie shouldn’t have its ragged edges showing, regardless of the clumsiness of the projectionist. To me, a boom mike that’s left anywhere in the film frame is a “flub”. The link to Cecil’s column doesn’t actually discuss the issue of unwanted elements creeping into the frame – it just discusses film formats and conversions.
Terrible movie, but this bit made me laugh.
You can clearly see at the bottom of the screen where the animal trainer is waving a stick in the bear’s face to get him all riled up.
I believe there’s a cut shot in Saving Private Ryan that show’s Corporal Huffam from one side with a belt of machine gun ammunition around his neck, points in (ouch), and then immediately from the front with the points out (ah, much better).
Another classic one (this time on purpose), is the bit in Men At Work where the camera cuts all around the table, but the beer labels are always uncovered and facing the audience . . .
None of these ever “ruined” a movie for me, though.
Now, computer and scientific bullshit always piss me off.
You sure that’s Uncle Buck? I don’t remember a bear in that film. Are you maybe thinking of The Great Outdoors with John Candy and Dan Aykroyd?
Another nitpick - His name is Upham, not Huffam.
But you know what ruins Saving Private Ryan for me?
[warning - Saving Private Ryan spoiler]
The writing ruined that movie for me. Well acted, well-drected. Great camera work. Could have used some clean-up in the script department. The bookends with the old man are entirely unnecessary. In addition, at the beginning you are led to believe that the old man is remembering all this, then at the end of the film, we discover the old man is Private Ryan. What the fuck? Ryan wasn’t even there for most of the film, why is he remembering this? If any character is remembering all of it, it should have been Ed Burns’s character, the only one who lived through the whole thing. (No, we don’t count Upham, because he wasn’t there during the D-Day invasion, he was added later.)
Plus, as someone who has been the military, when a Captain gives you an order, you follow it. None of this “No, sir, I’m staying with the only brothers I have left” bullshit. If Captian Miller didn’t want to stay, then he didn’t have to. Private Ryan was given a lawful order he should have followed. I just can’t get past that and buy the whole final battelscene, because none of the Rangers should have been there. Ryan would be dragged off if need be, but an order was given, and he would follow it (IRL anyway).
Like how they were able to program a computer virus for highly-advanced computer systems in Independence Day? That wasn’t a flub, that was just a painfully idiotic deus ex machina.
Another thing that REALLY gets on my nerves is how they’re seemingly able to “clean” a blurry image taken from a security camera. They zoom in on a collection of five or six pixels, and after a few seconds the computer is somehow able to turn that handful of pixels into a high-detailed image of the Bad Guy’s face. Anyone who’s used Photoshop/Paintshop Pro knows this isn’t just improbably, it’s impossible.
In the movie “Airplane”, what ruined it for me was that every time they showed a wide-angle shot of the jet flying, they would have the sound of propellers and pistons humming.
After I noticed that, I just couldn’t watch it anymore.
Also, when they were doing the sequence where they were teaching some natives to play basketball, if you look closely, you’ll notice the rim height of the basket is no more than nine feet, when it should be 10 feet.
Get me Rex Kramer!
No offense, but I think, given the genre of the rest of the movie, that that was intentional. I think that Zucker/Abrams/Zucker planned those sound effects, just because it’s a stark contrast of the actual jet. It’s just a bit more subtle than some of their other jokes in that movie.
Well, they were in the jungle, and neither Robert Hayes nor Julie Haggarty are very tall. They had to make due with what they could build. Also (and I’m gonna nitpick here), shouldn’t that be a metric measurement? I thought only the USA didn’t use metric. How tall would a basketball goal sit in Africa?
The one that sticks out most to me is in A Few Good Men.
They just go through this very dramatic scene at the climax of the film where Cruise finally gets Nicholson to admit that he ordered the “Code Red.” Nicholson is trapped and the MPs come to take him under arrest and he snaps, leaping at Cruise and the MPs restrain him.
At that moment pay attention to the knot of Nicholson’s tie. In one scene it is straight and in the other it isn’t. AAARGH!
It bothers me every time I see the movie. Not only was it sloppy, but it distracts me at exactly the wrong moment in the movie!
While on the subject of A Few Good Men, watch for the scene where Cruise’s partners are leaving his house. Cruise opens the door for them; then, the angle changes, and he opens the door for them again.
And the Independence Day virus thing is doubly stupid because, as you will recall, mention was made earlier in the film of how the scientists, working since 1947, hadn’t been able to replicate the aliens’ power and get the crashed ship working. Given that, how did they even connect the computer to the mother ship? Not only is it not 10baseT, it’s not even regular electricity, and yet communication works?
I guess there’s only one possible answer: he used an Apple. hehehe
As someone who examines motion picture film for a living, trust me–it’s quite common. Cinematographers often frame their shots not according to the borders of the 35mm frame, but to the borders of the aperture plate in the projector housing that will mask these production artifacts. Therefore, it’s not a “flub” to shoot something they know won’t show up in the movie (after all, you’ve seen dozens of movies with this, but never noticed because the aperture plate was situated properly).
Given the many logistical problems that film crews run into on the set, sometimes they have no choice but to shoot those items since, if properly projected, nobody’s gonna know anyway. 5 feet can make a difference in a boom mike placement, or they may be shooting an outdoor period scene and not want to include TV antennaes. The 35mm frame may pick this up, but it’s no big deal because if everyone’s doing their job on the exhibition end, it won’t make any difference in the final image.
Superdude, navigating the SDMB without a thorough understanding of what constitutes sarcasm can be a hazardous undertaking. 
In The River Wild, the whole premise of the movie is that Meryl Streep has to raft through these incredibly dangerous rapids to allow some bank robbers to escape. However, the greenhorn husband, who got separated from the raft, walks down the river and arrives below the rapids hours before they do.
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*Originally posted by SPOOFE Bo Diddly *
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Naw, this is nothing compared to that scene in Enemy of the State. You know, the one from the lingere store. More specifically, the one where they look at Will Smith’s shopping bag from security camera footage, then somehow manage to rotate around to take a look at it from another angle (done in a Matrix-like fashion), and then (the rotating was done despite a presumably fixed security cam) somehow manage to extrapolate that the bulge in Smith’s bag was caused by the video tape (or whatever it was) that they were looking for.
Mea Maxima Culpa. I saw Body Heat at a college, and it is possible they forgot the plate, or they didn’t have it. But I didn’t see any boom mkes in any other scene in th movie, nor did see any extraneous stuff in any other movie I saw there. But I didn’t realze this was a common practice, and I mised it when I scanned Cecil’s article.
It *still[/] seems sloppy to me. I’ll bet Lucas and Spielberg don’t do it.
Independence Day–they didn’t use in the entire move the one communication tool specifically designed for situations the Earth found themselves in–The Internet!!!
Speaking of the Internet, how come there’s NEVER a movie that depicts lag times online? Except, of course, for a cheesy plot twist to build the suspense…
I think Hollywood fucks up computers in general. Every time you press a button on the keyboard, the computer beeps. Every time you open a window, it makes this “swooshing” noise. Every time you get an error message, it’s a BIG RED SIGN that sounds a blaring alarm and screams “ERROR!”
You’d think they’d have $1000 in the budget to actually go down to the local computer shack and buy a REAL computer to see how it behaves.
The movie Commando. I seem to remember that there were several flubs, but I can only remember this one: Ah-nold and Chong are chasing Scully(sp?), they in her car, he in his yellow Porsche. The Porsche spins out, flips over and slams into a telephone pole. They show the damage to the car door and fender. Shortly afterward Ah-nold rights the car and drives away, giving a perfect side view of the totally undamaged car. Always bugged me.
Then there is that volcano movie with Pierce Brosnan, so unmemorable that I cannot even remember the name of it. There is a scene where he and his family drive over freshly spewed molten lava for several hundred yards. They even have time to go out of their way to get the dog. They manage to escape with nary but 4 flat and smoldering tires. Throughout the entire volcano’s eruption, there are so many sequences where people are in such close proximity to the lava without suffering ill effects, it’s ridiculous.
I’m willing to suspend a certain amount of disbelief, but there is a limit.
Dante’s Peak. Another major flub came at the very end, after the “pyroclasmic cloud” (or whatever) destroyed the surface. They had driven deep into an abandoned mine to avoid being eradicated. Anyway, they get out of the car and walk a bit deeper into the cave… after a while, Brosnan’s character forgets that they left an ultra-powerful GPS tracker back in the car, so he goes back to turn it on. When he gets there, the cave begins to collapse around him, smashing in the sides of the car and leaving him with maybe six cubic feet of space in the car (he also breaks his arm so badly that the bone pokes through the skin).
He’s then left in this tiny, compact space for about three days… for some reason, he doesn’t suffocate or die from shock or bleeding from his arm.
Sully was the character’s name. That particular scene is just rife with errors. Besides what you mentioned:
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When Ahnuld is holding Sully by one ankle, dangling him over the cliff, a safety wire attached to Sully’s other leg is visible.
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In another shot looking down into the canyon, someone’s arms, presumably those of a stunt wrangler, are sticking out from under the ledge.
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Chong asks Ahnuld: “So what’d you do with Sully?” Sully never told her his name, and if she’d heard Ahnuld call him that, she would have known how the discussion ended. Beyond Anyway, she would have heard him howling as he plunged to his death.
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So Ahnuld has the motel key, and therefore the room number, but did the key tag also have the motel’s address on it? Okay, it might have, but…