Revolvers used in conjunction with silencers. You can’t silence a revolver because part of the blast exits through the gap between the cylinder and the barrel. And when a silencer *does *work, it doesn’t go Pffft! It sounds more like a champagne bottle popping its cork.
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Street scenes with vintage cars from the 1930s or 40s that always look showroom new, beautifully clean, waxed, and perfect even though the scene is depicting a normal street of that era or a decade later. It always reminds me that these are collector cars they rented for the day and there’s no way the owners are going to let you dirty it up and make it look like an average car of that era.
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Obviously empty suitcases. People pick up even large suitcases with ease and swing them around. Just put some bricks or old books in there so the actors handle them realistically.
More police things (I went with a cop for ten years):
When two cops go up to a suspect’s door marching up the path side by side with no guns drawn. Nothing like giving the suspect a easy way to open the door and blow both your heads off. They go up from opposite sides in a V-formation with guns drawn.
Idiots who go off to meet the suspect without telling anyone where they are going, and meeting them alone. I wold call the cops, tell them what I know, and then hide inside with my door locked.
Lugers or M-1911s with their slides locked back, indicating the gun is empty, but the users never bother to reload them and just keep on firing.
Battles like Poltava, Monmouth, and Manassas taking less than five minutes before the Swedes, British, and Yankees are completely routed.
And suddenly the baby looks 6 months old. Newborns do not look like that. But the new mother is holding a happy, clean, smiling, 6 month old baby!
“He’s got your eyes!”
One that does it for me is spotting a car that’s obviously too new for the era the piece is set. I know vintage cars can be hard to come by and sometimes the best they can do is try to get “close enough” and assume most people probably won’t notice, but I do notice and I suspect most people who are into cars notice. I noticed this a lot in The Americans. While I commend them for the effort they obviously put in to try to get era appropriate cars, there were a few times I spotted late 1980s or early 1990s cars in scenes that were supposed to be taking place in the early 1980s.
Another related one is where they get a car that is technically appropriate for the year the movie or TV show is taking place, but they portray it as an old beater when it would actually have been a new or nearly new car at the time the piece is set. The Wonder Years was guilty of that once twice.
*I know, all my examples are from TV shows, but I don’t really watch that many movies so TV shows are what I know.
Gads, Clint Eastwood’s recent film, The Mule. The plot is he gets to transporting narcotics across the US as he’s never had a traffic ticket, and must be such a safe driver he’s not going to get pulled over.
Not once was he ever shown wearing a seatbelt. I don’t think there’s a single state left that won’t pull you over and ticket you for driving without wearing one. :smack:
Also, swords that go “schwing!” when you pull them from their scabbard are dumb. Swords that go “schwing!” when you swing them through the air are inexcusable.
My favorite example of the latter was in Daredevil’s second season, when the titular blind superhero is fighting undead ninjas, and is defenseless against them because he can’t hear their heartbeats! I’m like, “Dude, just listen for their swords! Every time they swing one, it sounds like they’re operating a leaf blower!”
M1911s (or similar) with the hammer down, and the guy is threatening to shoot someone. Dude, you can pull the trigger all you want – it’s not going off.
Military uniforms in combat where they don’t have any spare ammo pouches or other gear on their belts, and their uniforms are pristine clean.
Supposedly ‘live’ ammo where you can see the dented primer in the base, or fired cartridges which are obviously crimped blank rounds. This is just so fucking lazy you can tell they didn’t care.
A semi-auto or full-auto firearm that goes clickclickclick when empty. The slide is locked back – it’s not going to click! And full-autos go clickclicklclickclickclick :smack:
Any show where a trained professional has his finger on the trigger and they’re pointing the gun everywhere. You see this in cop shows all the time.
With modern automobiles, they virtually never fail to start right up no matter how hot or how cold the weather might be. My car started every single time for 3 1/2 years until it didn’t, and that’s because the battery went bad. I replaced it, and it has started every single time over the last year.
So, why then, when terrified people are fleeing someone or something totally horrid, do the cars in Hollywood movies invariably FAIL to start?! That is so old, so hackneyed, and so outdated, that it makes one wonder why it is still used in any movie at all.
The thing that frosts my gourd the most (sorry, I can’t help it, I’m an aviation buff) is when a movie set in the WWI time frame tries to show either German or Allied aircraft by making a few cosmetic changes to a DeHaviland Tiger Moth biplane, and then applying the appropriate insignia to the plane. The problem is that there is no way in God’s green earth that a Tiger Moth can be made to look like anything except a Tiger Moth. Even as good a movie as “Lawrence of Arabia” fell into that trap.
And another is showing a WWII movie in the 1941 time frame, and hoping that the viewers will not notice that they are using a movie clip of a Grumman Hellcat to portray a Grumman Wildcat.
Maybe with the improvements in CGI this will become less of a problem.
And I remember in “Flyboys”, they even got the CGI wrong. They showed all the WWI fighters as powered by a radial engines, while most of them in fact used rotary engines. Vast difference.
Oddly, it’s when a movie/TV show has too much vintage merchandise on store shelves, or they have too much vintage TV/radio. I find myself trying to recall if it’s accurate or not.
Stranger Things is notorious about this, but so far, everything they show has been just about spot-on with my memories of being about the same age (I think I’m a year or two younger than the main kid characters). But I end up watching the store shelves/stuff on the kitchen counter more than listening to the characters.
Heh. Watching Preacher the other day, and two cars are playing chicken, ya know, squealing tires as the jump off the line towards each other…in a dirt quarry.
Speaking of adjuncts, in Bull Durham, Crash Davis asks Annie Savoy what she does for a living. She replies that she’s a part-time professor at a community college.
An actual adjunct professor at a community college in NC might’ve made about $1000 per course back then.
Sort of similar is when someone calls up a character to tell them, “Turn on the TV!” and they do to find a news report about them or their situation starting at that exact moment (as opposed to having missed most of the story).
So are rifles (or any other piece of military equipment) that rattle when soldiers march.
“What’s that noise, maggot? You not takin’ proper care of your gear, maggot? Drop and give me 200 pushups NOW, maggot!”
When “doctors,” “EMTs,” and other “medical personnel” who should know better shock flatlined patients.
“Captain! Here come the Panzer tanks!!”
Except they’re Sherman tanks with German crosses.
Yeah, I know. They didn’t spend the money to make 10 Panzers.
And this was probably in the '50s or '60s.
But, I’m briefly taken out of the movie.
They at least could have done something else to alter their appearance. I mean, I saw Kelly’s Heroes three times before I realized the Tiger tanks were cleverly disguised T-34s.
I understand the same tanks were used twenty-some years later in Saving Private Ryan. They’re very convincing until you see them from the side, when it’s obvious the proportions are all wrong.
Or, they could just make dummies out of wood and canvas. Most of the planes parked on the runway in Tora, Tora, Tora were mockups like this.