I saw the latest Friday the 13th movie this last weekend. It’s supposed to be set in New Jersey- that’s what all the license plates and the cop cars say.
However, I could tell in the first scene that it was filmed near Austin. I didn’t even need any landmarks- all I could see were the live oak and mesquite trees. It bugged me so much during the entire movie that I had to stay for the credits to see where it was filmed- sure enough, Bastrop and Austin.
All I could think during the movie was, “Does New Jersey look just like central Texas?”
Oh, and it also bugged me when some of the character were arguing over who had to pump the gas as the gas station. In New Jersey and Oregon, you can’t pump your own gas.
I spent 14 years in high-rise office building management. I’ve been in and on active construction, tenant build-outs, in and out of mechanical spaces and elevator shafts, and I have yet to see my first one of either that’s bright enough to see your hand in front of your face without a worklight.
Oh, and if you crawl inside ductwork, it’s not lit up, everyone under you will hear the tin crackling from bending under your weight and the sharp edges on the inside of the ducts will slice you to ribbons. Also, they’re dusty as hell, but no one ever comes out dirty.
And when fire sprinklers go off and people stand there looking bemused? Nope. That water’s been sitting in those pipes a while and the very first thing you notice when a sprinkler head goes is that the water smells like ass dragged through rancid meat. If the sprinkler goes, you run, because it makes you want to puke.
My wife refuses to watch Die Hard with me anymore.
You should try living in LA. I’ve long ago placed locations-I-know on the same shelf as computers-can’t-do-that - you gotta shrug it off and move on. (Nip/Tuck and Monk are shot where I work, which doesn’t make it easier.)
Other stuff:
Explosions tend to be way too big. Grenades, lethal as they are, don’t make giant fireballs. They make mean-looking grey smoke-and-dust puffs.
Rockets or recoilless weapons are fired with no thought for backblast.
Foreign languages. For instance, making the point that the bad guys are German by having them speak a bit of German among themselves is decent moviemaking technique. However, having them speak first-year student German spoils it. Germans do have other words than “Los, Los!” or “Mach schnell!” - it is a rich language, and German speakers are known to finish entire sentences from time to time.
Well, this didn’t take me out of the movie, but it took my father out and he mentioned it to me. He is an architectural technologist and he always notices errors in movies that are about building designs (like Mr Bus Guy mentioning air vents earlier).
In Casino Royale:[spoiler]At the airport when the bad guy sets of the “master sprinkler control” by using a key: 1)this isn’t possible because sprinkler systems don’t have central control like that, 2) because fire sprinklers are individually activated by part of the sprinkler head being melted by heat - you can’t set off sprinklers remotely; and 3) even if you could set off all the sprinklers at once there wouldn’t be sufficient water pressure to all go off fully at the same time for a long length of time.
[sub]I don’t think this really needed a spoiler box, but I just learned about this kind of box and I wanted to try it out.[/sub][/spoiler]
Since that was a Mel Brooks film, I wonder if the “continuity error” was, in fact, a mistake. Remember the scene in Young Frankenstein where Dr. Frankenstein comments to Igor, “Didn’t your hump use to be on the other side?” While I don’t recall the detail you describe, from your description of it I suspect the “error” was intentional.
To the OP: for me continuity errors are usually just a brief (and usually amusing) distraction. What will cause my eyes to roll over to the back of my head are errors of fact - dialog or action that I know to be flat wrong. So, sometimes, will errors of logic.
Iron Man - the scene where Rhodes is on the phone with Tony, asking him if he knows what’s flying around Afghanistan blowing things up - he’s got his Brass Rat on the wrong hand. No one ever wears their ring on the left hand - as a friend of mine who had to stop wearing his for a while because of an injury said - “You can’t put it on your left hand - it would mean you’re married to the 'Tute.”
I’m always bugged by incorrect pronunciation of place names by supposed locals. How hard is it to call up some town and ask how they pronounce it?
One I always hear wrong is Lompoc. If your character has supposedly done time in the Lompoc Penitentiary, then he’s definitely going to know it is lomPOKE not lomPOCK.
Also, Jack Bauer’s mispronunciation of Visalia on 24 threw me out of the moment - especially when other characters around him were pronouncing it correctly.
All the silliness in the movie Speed, and the one that took me out was toward the end where the officer on the ground is talking to the news crew guy with the stack of VCRs behind him about capturing the video feed they’ve pirated from the bus camera:
Officer: Can you record 30 seconds of that, and then run it so it plays over and over in a continuous loop?
News crew guy: Sure.
Me: …Not with that equipment you can’t. Not in the two minutes it takes them to actually do it in the movie anyway.
Oh, yeah. And not just in Speed either. Almost every show I watch has these time-impossible actions all the time. If you haven’t gotten into Fringe or Flash Point or Eleventh Hour or especially 24 then you need to watch an episode of any one of them and odds are better than 75% that you’ll be treated to the marvelous techies performing in a matter of seconds what a real person in a similar situation would take minutes or hours to do – with similar equipment. Almost every series relies on this willing suspension of disbelief and I, for one, am not always so willing.
BTW, go to IMDB and do a title search on “flash point” (I wanted to check if it’s one word or two) and see if you get sent to Dou fo sin (2007) and if you do, help me figure out why!
So I just watched “Journey to the Center of the Earth” last night. The new one. I really wanted to enjoy the movie. I tried to shut off all my physics knowledge and did my best to suspend disbelief.
I couldn’t do it. I could accept the plot - there’s holes that go to a pocket 1000s of mile below the Earth’s surface that has grass and stuff growing. Sure, I’ll buy it - it was good enough for Jules Verne.
But the physics of it - I couldn’t take it.
You are not going to be able to fall 1000’s of miles down a hole that’s about 20’ in diameter without hitting the sides and getting ripped to shreds. Maybe if you were an experienced skydiver and were completely by yourself - but not likely.
If a grown man, a woman, and a 13 yo kid were to fall into this hole and magically avoid the walls, they will all have different cross sectional areas - which means different wind resistance, which means different terminal velocitys, which means that they would not may the 1000 mile trip in EXACTLY the same amount of time. Nor would they be able to talk about it on the way down due to the 200ish MPH wind rushing by.
That part killed it for me. There was much more to follow, but that’s what took me out of the movie.
I followed up on this oddity at IMDB and it’s Flashpoint (one word) for the TV series and since I hadn’t known that “Dou fo sin” means “flash point” IMDB was trying to educate me in a subtle way. Oddly enough, when I keyed in “flashpoint” but without the quotes I got one of those “did you mean?” lists that has Dou fo sin at the top and then all the actual flashpoint and flash point entries below that.
At least I know that IMDB ain’t broke, just funky.
Could you please elaborate on that comment. Usually the film Andromeda Strain rates high praise on it’s scientific merits. The team uses electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, isolation protocols, growth cultures under various conditions and many more. What in your view are it’s glaring errors, given the movie’s premise.
My pet peeve, having worked with the U.S. military my entire career, involves any scene in a movie where officers are shown wearing Class A/service dress uniforms (i.e., the uniform with the jacket, the ribbon salad, the funny hats) in environments where they are not worn, i.e. 99% of the working day.
Testifying to Congress, briefing the President, sure-- but your average day at the Pentagon or on a base, it’s shirt sleeves, BDUs, or flight “bags”.
Still, movie after movie (and TV show after TV show) uses the jacket as shorthand for “look, this guy/gal is in the military, they’re important.”
Ditto wearing cover (hats) indoors, which isn’t done. Ditto saluting indoors, which is rarely done (never done at the Pentagon, but maybe at certain bases/deployed areas, I can’t speak for all of them-- but I will say it’s the exception, not the rule).
I saw Jurassic Park on opening night with a friend who is a major computer geek. When that scene came up, he took one look at the screen and said “that’s Unix” a few seconds before the girl on screen said it.
I’ve heard other people complain that no one could recognize it like that, so I asked my friend how he did it. He said it was the “/bin” and “/home”, etc., that gave it away.
Okay, I was a little older, but… no, at that age, I did. Pre-Win95, after all. You knew computers, you knew computers. And, you have to admit, /usr/bin is identifiable anywhere.
In The Chronicles of Riddick, one of the mercenaries makes a remark something like “Look at you now, all ‘back of the bus’”.
In present day Earth that makes perfect sense. In a futuristic world of lasers and spaceships I doubt they even know what a bus is, let alone know why the back of the bus is an insult.
I suppose a reasonable analogy, just for the skeptics, you know, would be to go around telling Roman galley slave jokes to folks at work, using as many Roman catch phrases and slang expressions as possible.
