On the other hand, this is me taking a phone call while asleep.
What’s that noise?
There is is again.
The phone?
The phone!
What do I do?
Pick it up!
Which end goes to my ear?
I don’t remember!
Try one.
Now what?
Say something!
What?
“Hello” That’s it!
Someone is talking.
What do I do?
Make noises until it begins to make sense.
What if it doesn’t?
Maybe you won’t look too stupid.
The bedside lamp thing that I always notice is when the lamp is actually being controlled by an electrician off-camera and the actor is just miming turning the light on or off. Usually about as convincingly as they mime handling “full” cups of coffee, mentioned upthread.
YES. The god damned Wilhelm scream.
The only time I thought it was clever was in one of the Transformers movies–one of the tiny smart ass bots gets smacked and the Wilhelm scream is played at like 2x or 3x speed. Super fast and high pitched. Turns out, once you’ve become sensitized to it you can hear it played backward in the background noise of a heavy metal concert.
Hawk the Slayer is a painfully low-budget, extremely cheesy movie that shamelessly rips off J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and every D&D game you ever played in junior high school. That did not bother me at all.
The elf was clad in buckskin clothes. Apparently, they could not afford to buy him a pair of moccasins. He wore penny loafers. That bothered me a lot.
Peter Jackson’s version of King Kong spends much of the film on an uncharted island populated by dinosaurs, giant arthropods, and a 40-foot-tall ape. That did not bother me at all.
Naomi Watts spends a long time running around New York in the middle of winter, on a night cold enough to make several inches of ice on the pond in Central Park, wearing a strapless evening gown, and shows no sign of hypothermia. That bothered me a lot.
Gold is waaaay heavier than movies think it is. You can’t: [ul]
[li]Pick up a gold brick with one hand and throw it at Oddjob[/li][li]Have it bounce off of you with no effect, even if you’re Oddjob[/li][li]Fill up a dump truck under the Federal Reserve and expect that dump truck to go anywhere[/li][li]Fill up a Mini Cooper and expect it to go anywhere, even with a “beefed up suspension”[/li][li]Swim through an avalanche of gold items inside a Gringotts vault without being crushed[/li]Expect a bag of sand to effectively replace the weight of the Golden Idol of the Hovitos[/ul]
[quote=“Morbo, post:185, topic:838319”]
[li]Expect a bag of sand to effectively replace the weight of the Golden Idol of the Hovitos[/list][/li][/QUOTE]
Well, how’d that work out for him?
In Klingon:
“jIHvaD chenmoH pretzels 'oj!”
Someone did the math and figured it was nearly 6000 pounds of gold, or 2000 pounds per Mini. All in the back. Plus one or two occupants up front, so add another 150-400 pounds to that tally.
The difference between curb and gross weight for a stock mini is about 700 pounds. :eek:
Seeing a familiar actor in a different role can take me out of a movie briefly. Case in point, Star Wars The Force Awakens. I love Star Wars because it feels so otherworldly and fantastic, but seeing Greg Grunberg from Alias threw me off a bit. JJ Abrams directed both so not too surprising. I’m sure Greg loved being in Star Wars, but I think I prefer my Star Wars actors to be unknown.
But at least they made the effort to try to justify it, they didn’t just go with stock minis right out of the dealership. I recall one scene when they’re modifying the minis, and one character asks about a rack of parts that were removed, and is told, “That’s 200 pounds of unnecessary engine parts”.
Still not enough, but give them some credit for at least addressing it, unlike all the other examples.
Yeah. I kept wondering why Ellie Sattler would dye her hair purple.
William Shatner:
"These … pretzels. Are making me … THIRSTY!
War movies or documentaries where aircraft are in combat, its always the same aircraft noise, its usually continuous even when it is diving or climbing - sometimes you’ll get a single engine sound on a multi engine aircraft or a multi engine sound on single engine.
Different aircraft have very different sounds.
I appreciate a good special effect. Early movies like “forbidden Planet” did this well. Everything from the 3 axis lock to the robot were well done.
Something like the moving wall in Diagon Alley (Harry Potter) is nicely done and adds to the movie.
IMO the art of special effects is on life support. I suspect so much money is spent on computer generated imagery that it can’t be left on the digital cutting room floor.
Bad special effects immediately take me out of a movie.
(Turning on lights in a warehouse, etc.)
Sounds like turning circuit breakers on or off. click…click…click…click… I used to work in a 2,000 foot industrial space, and at the end of the day, five clicks followed by the squeak and clank of closing the door on the breaker panel, and the lights were out. No big ka-WHUNK, and no mechanized chack-chack-chack-chack-chack as the lights are sequenced on or off down the length of the building.
What pulls me out of a story is wrong telephones. Things like a phone with modular plugs in the 50s or as happened in Rocketman, phones on the wrong continent. As I wrote in the Goofs section at IMDB: “The phone next to the bed at Mama Cass’ house is British - a GPO 722, which would not work in the US as among other things, it has the wrong kind of plug.”
Didn’t posh restaurants in the '50s (and even earlier) offer to bring phones to the tables of their hoity-toity patrons if they needed to make (or take) an important call? I know I’ve seen this in old movies, and it seems to me the phones could be plugged in and unplugged.
As for foreign phones, why wouldn’t they work? I’ve had them in both the US and Russia with no problem. All I had to do was tweak the wiring (with or without a plug).
Geographic fuck-ups (or plain “I don’t cares”) can really pull me out of a movie, for a short time at least. Two examples spring to mind:
Lethal Weapon - One scene has Riggs chasing a Bad Guy in a car while on foot. He starts the chase in the San Fernando Valley, turns a corner and is suddenly on Sunset Blvd, miles from where he started. This is only evident to people who know the area and would fly completely under anyone else’s radar.
Last Vegas - For that matter just about any film set in any city. In Last Vegas, it’s the leads walking down Las Vegas Blvd. from Hotel A to Hotel B. Going the opposite directions, and passing by hotels that are not even close to where they are headed. See disclaimer in Example #1.
Old Westerns were, of course, terrible about this. John Ford had multiple movies that bounced around Monument Valley like pinballs on acid. Let’s not even get started about Vasquez Rocks.
Films set in New York City must drive some people around the bend.
An episode of Monk did that once. Monk and Natalie were trying to determine whether the suspect could have made it from her home in Richmond (where she had an alibi) to the victim’s house in Novato by the time the murder took place on a motorcycle. Cut to a montage of them riding through… downtown San Francisco. Anyone who actually knows where Richmond and Novato are knows you would never drive through San Francisco to travel between the two cities.
The only geographic difference that took me out of the movie was when I recognized a waterfall in North Carolina in the Last of the Mohicans which is set in New York State. Even though I dislike the genericness of the southern Appalachian region in person and I love the New York State outdoors since it is where I grew up, that wasn’t the reason I was taken out of the movie: I spent several minutes trying to convince my friend that I was seeing it with that yes, it was actually in North Carolina because I’d actually been to that waterfall.
ETA: yes, technically, I guess it did take me out of the movie in that it temporarily stopped my suspension of disbelief, but I didn’t care all that much about it at first until my friend wouldn’t listen to me.
In Val Kilmer’s The Saint, people ran from the Hotel Ukraina to Red Square in about ten seconds. The two are separated by a distance of around 2 1/2 miles.