This isn’t really a little mistake, so I suppose I’m cheating here, but Helen Whatsherbucket in “As Good as it Gets” and her intermittent (Brooklyn, was it?) accent really chapped my hide. Seriously, lady, get it together. And why did the director never yell “Cut!” and have her fix whatever mess she was creating with her voice?
My favourite example of this is from The West Wing. There’s an episode where the president is giving out chess boards as gifts to members of his staff, and he ends up playing games against several of them. One scene has him playing against a character named Toby, and it goes something like:
So this is basically nonsense. What he says about the Evans Gambit is true, but you have to get to White’s 4th move to recognize that the Evans Gambit has been played. That’s fine, so when I was watching this I just assigned it to the “TV nonsense” category. The odd thing is, though, that the two of them do play the moves of the Evans Gambit as the game goes on. It seems that they did go to the trouble of planning this out, but either put the dialog in too early relative to the game, or played a very obscure joke that hardly anyone in the audience would notice.
It does sometimes happen that scenes get rearranged a little for dramatic effect during the editing process. It’s possible the writers had that line come later in the game, when the gambit had actually been played, but someone else decided that the line worked better earlier in the episode.
I suspect this is a case of a little knowlege being a dangerous thing; the writers (or whoever) did a little research and found the Evans Gambit. (It wasn’t uncommon for President Bartlett to wax intelligently about rather obscure things.) But they didn’t know enough to realize how many moves it would take to reveal the Evans Gambit.
I’m still impressed. Most of the time chess is shown in movies or TV they don’t even bother to turn the board right. (Well, if it’s right half the time I’m willing to bet that’s just luck.) The folks at The West Wing went two steps beyond what anyone else would have bothered with.
Most of the time lately, my willing suspension of disbelief comes to a screeching halt shortly after the words, “could you enhance that?” are uttered (or sometimes “zoom that in”).
Yep. We all know that fuzzy video from cheap 20-year-old black & white security cameras can be enhanced to the point where a fuzzy blob all of two scanlines high becomes a readable license plate.
Oh my gosh, yes. Enhancing pictures and rotating video from satellites always makes me wince.
Oh, then there was the time Knight Rider had KITT track a suspect, and the video was clearly from an auto racing game on the Intellivision console. I had played that game many times, and there’s no way it was anything else.
It doesn’t actually take me out of a movie because it’s so common, but it frosts me every time. Evidently nobody in Hollywood has EVER looked thru a pair of binoculars. You idiots, you don’t see the scene in two round views, but in one round view. Probably everyone in the country over the age of six knows this but not in Hollywood.
To be fair, it is difficult to predict what words will stick around and what won’t. And if you are going to be that pedantic, you should also complain about how the English is so close to current day English, instead of correctly representing 200+ years of changes. English from 1809 and 2009 are distinctly different, I’d imagine 2209 will look very different as well 
Teeth do it for me. You want to portray a pirate ship/old west/ Victorian Era and they’re just back from the dentist for a whitening? nah. I’m not buying it.
Quite true. You see the notion of the language having evolved in Firefly, for instance. Malcolm’s stylized speech isn’t him being idiosyncratic or uneducated; the language is just slightly different.
But (assuming we don’t suffer some apocalyptic calamity) I don’t think that 2209 English will be as different from 2009 English as the latter is from 1809. Though the greater prevalance of printing and standardization of dictionaries hasn’t stopped linguistic evolution, it certainly has slowed it.
I couldn’t disagree more. I worked graveyard shifts for four years and never have I seen such a good representation on how I felt some days.
Sunlight everywhere. Any crack any break and it would creep in and fill the whole room with light. I would cover my windows in tinfoil then have to go back and re-do the job if I left any space. I had to learn to ‘live’ with the sunlight coming from under my door. I shuddered a little when the desk clerk turned on the light and the whole world went white for a second I’ve had that experience many times when flipping on a light after a particularly restless day.
Though I’ve never had it quite as bad as he does in the movie I could certainly relate.
LOL GTG BRB!
Are you sure? ; )
Yeah, I thought of that. But that’s more of a change in written language thing than a spoken one. When I see “LOL GTB BRB” I “hear” the phrases “laughing out loud, got to go, be right back.”
I recall a Bond movie where a spook team sky dive onto the Rock of Gibraltar and seconds later they’re all running around with their parachutes repacked on their backs.
It ruined my involment in the story because I kept thinking how the hell did they do that?
NUMBERS
A math problem that takes PhD’s weeks to solve that in reality a high school calc student could solve in 20 minutes
It really bothers me that Hollywood writers are convinced the entire country thinks state and interstate route numbers take a definite article. As far as I know Southern CA is the only place in the country that thinks so. I’m willing to accept that they’re not alone, but it really gets to me when the movie takes place where I know the locals would say “take 95 to the airport” not “take the 95 to the airport”.
I was watching an otherwise forgettable move on the Sci-Fi channel which got this one right the other day.
Seeing the view through the binocs as just a single circle was so unexpected…that it took me out of the movie!
The movie was 2005’s It Waits, and otherwise unremarkable monster-of-the-week. The leading lady looked quite spectacular in a tight white tank top…
Off-topic, but not by too much, is a similar IRL memory.
A work buddy mentioned at lunch one day that the night before he had been startled out of his sleep by a strange noise: silence. His apartment complex was right next to the interstate and apparently there was a lull in traffic long enough to jolt him awake.
Good God! I might just have to rent that movie so I could see this. Been watching movies since 1936 and have NEVER seen a binco view done correctly!
I hate to keep on the OT subject of the moment, but it might be a reasonable twist on the theme to indicate movies where the little thing that took you out of the movie was something like, “Hey, wait! This [name of actor who usually sucks] movie didn’t suck!”
Maybe not.