Sorry, mlees was right, anachorism is the correct term. Point I was making is that these detail errors aren’t fundamental to the film (although they can be jarring if you notice one), unlike historical revisionism.
He was working for a tobacco company, and the executives were all freaked out by the Surgeon General stating that cigarettes were dangerous, and that they couldn’t tout the health benefits of smoking in ads anymore. So Don came up with a slogan to set their company apart from others: “It’s toasted.”
“Anachronism”, if you please. 
Yeah, I thought it was a nitpick, but thought I should dutifully report it after reading it in the doctor’s waiting room. Although accuracy-wise, a soldier who is a rogue like the lead character in that film would not pull that sort of shit more than once without being relieved of duties (at the very least).
Sorry for my nitpick. I only included IMDB’s definitions just for clarity. I don’t expect anyone to adhere to them if they don’t feel like it.
Also offensive to my eyes was the shrimpy little guy they had playing Henry VIII.
I don’t care how good an actor he is, for Great Harry you need a big, huge, ‘eats-the-whole-turkey-leg-in-one-bite’ kind of dude.
Not to mention a redhead. How freaking hard is that? Miss Clairol probably makes a hundred shades of red - they couldn’t hop the bus to Walgreen’s?
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My feeling on this is simple: I don’t mind minor inaccuracies if it makes for a better story. The only time I object is if these become major plot points. It’s no big deal if, say, the Little Big Horn Massacre is moved to Arizona (e.g., Fort Apache, but if Custer is saved, then there is a problem.
[QUOTE]
No doubt Fort Apache was meant to recall Little Big Horn, but since it was not actually claiming to portray that event, I wouldn’t have been bothered if Colonel Friday had survived the final massacre. It would’ve defeated the purpose of the story though, since the crux of it was meant to show how unworthy men can become folk heros. So it made a better story when Colonel Friday perished, but not because otherwise would’ve been historically innaccurate. The story was fictional.
Yeah, it’s always entertaining when someone meets our Scottish group and wants to talk about Braveheart!
I don’t know if it counts, but The Other Boleyn Girl couldn’t even get the adaptation of the novel right.
One thing I hate is when film makers distort real historical people to something they never were. Like First officer William McMaster Murdoch who was depicted in James Cameron’s Titanic as a killer and a coward when there’s no proof he was any of the sort.
One Million Years BC
The dinosaurs had all been extinct long before Home Sapiens came on the scene. The early invention of a bikini for Ms Welch is an inaccuracy I can live with though.
Well, if we’re doing low-hanging fruit here, what about The Passion of the— no. No. Mustn’t go there.
I would think that seeing Amadeus the play–in a slightly abstract production–would make Schaeffer’s point clearer. But the movie seduces viewers, with beautiful unbombed Prague standing in for Vienna. It all seems so real. I knew enough to realize artistic liberties were taken & could understand what Shaeffer was trying to say. But, in the end, the music did it for me. And it was all real.
Mad Men is not a documentary on the early 1960’s. (I was in high school back then & learned about Mad Ave from Mad Magazine.) It’s art. (And the 4th season begins this Sunday night!)
I’d think the greatest culprits might be movies not based on plays or novels–original stories that purport to inform us about historical events. I enjoyed Tora Tora Tora but haven’t bothered to see Pearl Harbor.
Mutiny on the Bounty:
Yes, there was such a mutiny. They got the locales and basics right enough.
Then the film portrays Bligh as a sadist and Christian as a hero.
The facts: Bligh and Christian were friends before and during the voyage. Bligh was not regarded as a sadist and in fact did not flog nearly as often as many of his colleagues did. The reasons for the mutiny are more complex and mysterious than the original film would have us believe.
That bugs me as well. In the film Cinderellaman they made Max Baer out to be a heatless arrogant bastard unconcerned about killing other boxers. His son says that’s a long way from the truth and the death of those boxers haunted him for years. I believe him, cause he’s Jethro.
The two worst distortions/inventions of history on my list are JFK and Birth Of A Nation (wherein the South is rescued by the KKK from the depredations of sex-crazed Negroes). Virtually all Civil War movies (with the exception of the most recent ones) are glaringly inaccurate in their moonlight and magnolia-colored views of the antebellum South.
Obligatory U-571 correction: This film is fantasy, not mainly because Americans were the heroes, but due to the fact that nothing like the incidents portrayed in the film ever took place. A prosaic (if risky) recovery of an Enigma machine IRL from a captured sub (something the British accomplished first and most crucially, but Americans also did later) gets turned into an elaborate military deception operation that never actually existed.
Oops. I wasn’t referring to you as the nitpick, but rather the article I read. Sometimes me Engrish no bueno.
I kind of give them a pass for that since it was not important to the main theme of the plot.
Little known fact: breasts the size of Ms. Welch’s hadn’t been invented in One Million Years BC.
And, as far as I could tell, they were the point of the plot.
I broke the rewind on my VCR for her. That’s devotion.
Any movie set in the Middle Ages has about 500 years and multiple nationalities of plate mail armor styles in any one scene. Always bugs me.