My WAG for this would be that they have to show some light in scenes meant to represent total darkness in order to see what the characters are doing. If the scene were made to truly represent absolute darkness, then of course it would be all black.
When a movie spends a massive amount of money on special effects and stunts, but does a screw-up worthy of a C.H.i.P.s. episode. A perfect example is Mission Impossible 2 where a car flips and you can see the hole in the bottom of the car where they fired the telephone pole stub to make the car roll-over. Hello!** How much trouble would it have been to CG that out?
Another one is where a hero let’s the bad guy do all kinds of nasty things to him until the bad guy damages some minor thing, and the good guy suddenly whips out his über weapon and finishes the bad guy off. Why the hell didn’t you do that to begin with???
One that you don’t see too often anymore is when someone jumps out their car and leaves the headlights on. (Can you say, “Dead battery?”) It’s even better when they come back to the car later on and the lights are off, but you know its a model that doesn’t have “auto-off” lights.
riboflavin, now that you mention it, it is pretty odd that Harrison Ford doesn’t carry a back-up piece, since all the cops I ever met had at least two or three of them on their person at any time.
Ahem
Raiden for the Atari Jaguar. Lotsa shooting, but no autofire. Button-mashin’ city.
… like when they make movies based on novels and don’t stick to the main plot. Hello? That pissweak version of Les Mierables with Uma? What a piece of crap.
You’d think they could at least stick a little to the novel’s plot…
The vertical overhead shot of a city (day or night) that tells you nothing. Yes, you have a camera pointed at the ground from the helicopter you’re flying over the city. So? This kind of shot rarely adds anything to the movie. It’s not an establishing shot of a recognizable skyline to tell you where the action is set. Only occasionally does it transition directly to the actors in the scene coming up. There’s usually a real establishing shot of the building/alley/street/car/whatever after this. This kind of shot always comes across as showing off. Look, we could afford to film from a helicopter; or we found some cool stock footage.
This would be fine by me, except that I’ve seen several movies where the character then looks down at their feet, says “Hey, what’s this?” then picks something up and starts examining it, all in supposedly total darkness!
This is something that I’m more astounded by than peeved about…in “monster” movies, like Godzilla and such, whenever people run away from the beast, they always run DIRECTLY IN FRONT of said monster! I could understand it if this flight took place in a vast desert somewhere but it’s always in a city like Tokyo, New York or London. Come on people! Duck down an alley or a doorway or something and in no time you’ll be BEHIND said rampaging beast where he/she has already wreaked havoc and you’ll live to tell your grandchildren about your experience.
In the same vein, if you’re in a high-rise or an apartment building, DON’T run to the window, stick your head out and scream bloody murder! You won’t scare it away but most likely will become a late night snack.
cant believe nobody mentioned the “car going over cliff and spontaniously blowing up”… sometime cars crash and blow up too… if cars where this dangerous i’d stop driving!
This happens to everything that crashes in the Simpsons. 
I am so very tired of hearing characters in movies and TV shows say this line or something very similar to it:
“I don’t know who you are anymore.”
Or who I am anymore
Speaking of fat, well-groomed Civil War soldiers…
I know it shouldn’t get to me, but it bothers me when characters in period movies have perfect teeth. Take Heath Ledger in a Knight’s Tale. If he had teeth that white and perfect in that time period, he would be renowned in several countries as Heath the White Tooth or something similar. I know that it must be hard to find actors in Hollywood today who have bad teeth, but what if they used English actors?
Yeah! Like A.I.
IMO the movie should have ended shortly after Jude Law’s character made his final exit, being lifted into the helicopter —
The last scene in the movie could have been:
pan back
(I know, “pan” isn’t the correct term here, but I can’t remember the right one–you know what I mean)
to a wide view of the continuing chaos, while you hear a voice-over repeating that line from earlier in the movie, about how if we create self-aware beings that are programmmed to love us, “…don’t we have an obligation to love them back?” (or something like that)…
Fade to Black. Roll Credits.
Now wouldn’t that have been better?
Why’d they have to lengthen it, incorporating that “happy ending” onto what was really a very dark and thought-provoking film?
Conversations while driving, or should I say, while OBVIOUSLY NOT DRIVING. And it is never like the scene must take place in a car.
I will never, ever understand the motivation for this.
It seems that the “555” telephone number thing could be easily solved. Why don’t the studios simply buy a small block of real telephone numbers to use in movies? It seems awfully simple, and costs almost nothing.
I like how Paul Thomas Anderson actually bought some phone numbers to use in Magnolia, to avoid using the cheesy 555 numbers. In one scene, Tom Cruise has an infomercial that lists a toll-free number. You could actually call this number in real life–I did, and I got a hilarious message recorded by Cruise’s character. I wish more directors were this clever.
This isn’t necessarily a problem. There’s evidence that a lot of 14th century Europeans (as in A Knight’s Tale) had less tooth decay than their modern counterparts, because of less sugar in the diet. So if you were lucky enough to have straight teeth and not get a gum disease, you might have a nice white smile.
Certainly bothers me less than having the 14th century crowd singing Queen songs.
I just saw the trailer for Chris Rock’s new movie Bad Company, and the trailer itself has one of those stupid chess situations: Rock plays a chess hustler in the park who plays for $20 a game. It looks like they’re maybe two moves into the damn game, when he starts grabbing the other player’s pieces and saying “You’re gonna do this, and I’m gonna do this, so why not save yourself the time and just give me twenty dollars?” and the schmuck actually gives him the twenty, instead of a) demanding that Rock forfeit for having touched the other player’s pieces, or b) thanking Rock for showing him his entire strategy, and then proceeding with the game. Also, the moves Rock is making while talking to the guy didn’t make any sense to me; he seemed to be saying that his opponent was going to ignore a check and allow Rock to actually take his king, which is impossible.
Frankly I’m far more baffled that anyone could consider the ending to A.I. to have been a “happy ending”…
And something else that really kind of cheesed me off. Saw Blade II last night (don’t worry no spoilers here) and Snipes is fighting a horde of vampires, and he’s doing all these fancy martial arts moves and occassionally stabbing or shooting one of the vampires with a silver tipped weapon, and I’m thinking, “Why the hell doesn’t he have silver studs on his gloves and boots? If these guys explode when they get hit by silver, I’d think you’d want everything you might use as a weapon with some silver in it so you wouldn’t have to waste all your time fighting these guys.”
In one scene he chases them through a building and they go out a window, they then commence to scramble down the fire escape in a mad dash for their lives. Snipes, on the other hand does some fancy aerobatics and “wafts” down to kick more vampire butt. Why the hell didn’t the vampires do the same damn thing? It certainly would have prevented the one guy from getting friction burns on his hands as he slide down the ladder.
What’s great is that the vampires then hop on motorcycles (without wearing helmets) roar off camera, Snipes drops to the ground and the vampires circle back around on the bikes and come at Snipes only this time they’ve got helmets on! Oops! It wasn’t a horrible film, but those flubs and a few others kept me from enjoying it as much as I could have.
(After all, how can you keep a low profile in Eastern Europe if you’re driving a late '60s Charger?)
I think this is just there because it looks better, although unrealistic, it just looks, better.
Especially in those scary moments when someone is like running through a scary forest and then BAM scary lightning/thunder to scare the crap outta u.
I can’t believe no-one mentioned this: giving glasses to a character for that knowledgeable Poindexter the PhD look, even though they are just flat glass (i.e. no curvature, no corrective effect). You can easily tell from the way light reflects from them.
viz. Scully in every episode of X-files, usually at the end when she is typing up a report on her computer (with the too-bright monitor reflecting back and probably a bogus OS etc etc)