Yet another tangent off the original thread. What little things did a filmmaker get
correct that only a few people in the audience would notice?
I always like the line in “Stargate” (original movie) when the Daniel Jackson character says to another not-so-cunning-linguist “Your translations are terrible. You must have been using Budge. I don’t know why his books are still in print.”
I really loved a few details in the latest Pride and Prejudice attempt (the one with Keira Knightly). There were smudges of oily soot on their walls, especially at the corners, where one might naturally pause while carrying a tallow candle, and the dance scene was overcrowded and stuffy with sweaty, out-of-breath people having a great time. The general level of dirt was good, and not something you often see in a period piece.
Of course, their teeth were still way too straight and white, but what are you going to do? Not every actor is as [del]insane[/del] dedicated to his craft as Jonny Depp.
In Red Dawn near the beginning, characters are standing by the gas station when there is an explosion in the distance. We see the explosion first, and the sound follows after. I don’t know whether it was a conscious decision, or if they just used location sound and called it good. But I appreciated the delay.
I’m very impressed with the accuracy of the costumes and props in Heaven’s Gate. Michael Cimino and/or his crew did an excellent job of researching the period.
In the movie Contact, when Dr. Arroway looks through binoculars, her POV is represented by a single circular field of vision. Which of course is what one would see when the lenses are properly adjusted, instead of the lamebrained overlapping-circles cutout that lazy filmmakers normally toss up. A little thing to be sure, but here they got it right.
Indeed. That’s another one I notice when they get it right.
In Hayao Miyazaki’s movies, all the vegetation is carefully drawn and botanically accurate, even to the climate and the season. Even when it’s just backgroudn texture.
In Training Day, even though the third act sucked the goat ass, I very much appreciated how much trouble Ethan Hawke had jumping around rooftops while carrying a gun. You think it might be hard, huh? Imagine that.
In Heat, they got the sounds of gunshots in an urban area just right. They also had the robbers chamber rounds in their CAR15 carbines via the bolt release rather than pulling back on the charging handle.
In Proof of Life, they had excellent small unit tactics and realistic grenade explosions.
Getting the little details right is what often makes or breaks a movie for me.
There are tons of good examples:
Apollo 13 - the accident and the rescue were done to incredibly accurate detail. The actors spoke their lines word for word from the original transcript of the flight recordings. All of the little technical details of the inside of the craft were perfect, exact replicas, and in some cases I believe the original equipment. And of course, they actually filmed most of the weightless scenes in weightlessness, and that one little detail made that movie. You really felt that they were deep in space, because people on Earth just don’t move like that, even when they’re trying to fake it.
They portrayed Gene Kranz perfectly, right down to the same haircut and that lucky vest was a dead ringer for the original. And mission control itself was done in such accurate detail that Kranz has said that it was absolutely eerie walking on to the set, because it felt and looked exactly as it once did. No difference. He said he was shocked when he walked off the set and expected to see the old outdoor terrain at Canaveral.
Rom Howard said it was critically important to get every historical detail correct, because several astronauts and Kranz himself came to him when the film production was first announced and said, “You realize that what you make here will come to be regarded as historical fact, right? It may become the main public record of what happened on that flight. So you make sure you get it right.”
I think it may be the most technically accurate film of all time.
Thief. The safecracking scenes in this movie were amazing to watch. And it turns out, what they filmed was the actors actually breaking into real safes, using real safecracking tools that they borrowed from their ex-con technical advisors, who were actually master safecrackers.
There’s a scene Where they’re breaking into a building and one of the team is looking for the alarm wiring in a large bundle of various other wires. So he drags out a multimeter and starts stripping wires and measuring the voltages. He’s look at the meter and go, “Phone”, and they’d show the voltage on the meter. And for everything he called out, inluding phones, the meter showed the correct value. How many people in the audience know what the voltage is on a phone line? Someone tool the time to actually provide the correct source to the meter.
In another scene, James Caan clears a house with a gun, and it looks very authentic. The production hired Jeff Cooper, one of the foremost authorities in the world, to train Caan to do it exactly right.
Those little touches and others just make that movie drip with authenticity.
The movie Year of the Gun, unwatchable except for the Sarah Silverman cameo in the prologue, supposedly has very realistic gun handling and firing scenes, which goes to show that sometimes inaccuracy is better for the viewer.
TV gets it right sometimes too. In this week’s Kidnapped, a character is shot in the upper chest. He’s wearing a bulletproof vest, but it took him awhile to catch his breath. He felt it, and it showed.
There was a nice moment in a Steven Spielberg movie, of all things - Raiders of the Lost Ark - when Indy takes a single solid punch from the bad guy, stops, wobbles for a second, then actually falls down and takes a moment to recover. A nice change from the usual ten minutes of hammer-like blows to the face shrugged off by the hero before he decks his glass-jawed opponent with a single good left hook.
Do you perhaps mean The Way of the Gun? The intro scene is hilarious in that movie, but the rest is pretty bad. Some of the gunfight scenes are far more realistic than normal movies, with the actors being very careful to cover each other and try to minimize their exposure to gunfire. Looked cool, but some may not find it as entertaining as the Rambo type gunfights that we’re used to.
In The Transporter (an otherwise silly but entertaining cartoony action movie), the Chinese captive girl receives a large-denomination bill (50 quid?) and inspects it thoroughly, including scratching part of the bill. Mirrors how almost everyone here in Kunming (and me too now!) receives 50 or 100 RMB notes 
FYI, you’re both wrong* about this movie; I love it. One of the first DVDs I actually purchased.
Not a show, but in The Shield, towards the end of season 4, there is a scene in which Lemonhead is left alone to guard four or five dangerous Salvadorian gangsters. He looks away for a second, and immediately they all start attacking him. He manages to shake some of them off and beat them up, and then one of the gangsters aims a huge shotgun right at his face. Lem grabs the barrel and manages to deflect the shot away from him. Using the leverage of the gun, I guess, he knocks the guy over and then smashes him in the back with the shotgun.
The four guys are all on the floor, and Lem is short of breath. He just came extremely close to having his head blown off, and managed to neutralize all four of the bad guys. He begins to run from the guys, into the corner, stumbles and falls backwards, still keeping the shotgun trained on the guys.
I was really impressed by how real the whole scene seemed. It was the fact that he stumbled and fell (probably by accident, in reality) that made me believe that the guy had just fought four guys and completely expended himself physically in the process.
Fighting is a pretty intense workout. It’s really unrealistic in movies when someone is not even a little winded after a fight.
I thought the Civil War flick Ride with the Devil was very good with details. One example: Confederate guerillas shown wearing scavenged belts from Union uniforms, but with the “US” beltbuckle turned upside down (as was actually the custom). (This detail is also seen in Gods and Generals.)
In The Machinist, they really nailed the look and feel of a machine shop (gave me freakin’ chills) as well as accurate capturing the interplay between employees. I have to wonder if Bale doesn’t have experience with machine tools as in Batman Begins he’s holding one of his little metal bats properly as he deburrs it on a grinding wheel. (He’s not wearing safety glasses, but he is wearing leather gloves, which in my experience is more important than the glasses.)
I don’t understand this – I thought mission control was in Houston?