When something that’s supposed to be taking place in the midwest is obviously filmed in California. Like Wayne’s World 2 showing giant palm trees in Illinois.
The original Halloween did a pretty good job of passing off South Pasadena as rural Illinois, but the outdoor lockers at the high school gave it away. It was pretty obviously not autumn either.
Among medical soaps, ‘House’ is particularly guilty of this.
Okay, with that setup, I just have to post this video.
As for the OP: I can’t think of any at the moment.
Every videogame is played by rapidly mashing every button
This taken to the most ridiculous extreme is a regular feature of Criminal Minds.
The FBI Behavioral Analysis unit works up a profile of the bad guy, then, because everyone’s contract demands that they get a certain number of lines, they assemble the local cops to tell them about it, and you’ve never seen a Broadway play this perfectly rehearsed:
FBI Person 1: The unsub is probably a man in his 30’s without much education who is angry at women.
**FBI Person 2: ** It’s likely that he lives with his mother, hangs drawings of kitties on the wall and masturbates to reruns of “Small Wonder”.
FBI Person 3: It’s highly probable that he works in a bakery or donut shop.
Fbi Person 4: He probably turns into a werewolf during the full moon, and then comes home agitated with a craving for dog biscuits.
FBI Person 1: He probably drives a van, which means he works for someplace with vans.
FBI Person 3: He is escalating, so we need to catch him in the next 35 minutes.
And so on until everyone has had their contractually guaranteed opportunity to say their lines. It is so ridiculous and I can never NOT notice it and how ludicrous it is.
As a lifelong native of Los Angeles, if I let this drive me too crazy I’d be crazy all the time. Not just because of the LA errors, but because I can so often tell that something that’s supposed to be somewhere else was filmed here.
OH… that reminds me: Are we supposed to believe that one particular police unit in Los Angeles has some special power to be assigned to crimes occurring everywhere from Malibu to Sylmar??? Look at the map; does anyone think one cop unit could reasonably be expected to handles cases all over like that? (It’s the first six episode locations) Because the distance between the furthest points is almost a hundred miles.
It may be in the very first episode of the original Hawaii Five-0–one of the first ones, anyway. We see a car passing through a shallow gorge, and the shadows of the film crew are seen on the far wall of the gorge as clearly as if they had been projected on a screen.
In the same vein, much as I adore Vincent D’Onofrio and his amazing chameleon-like transformations, I couldn’t buy him as Sherlock Holmes in an adaptation a few years ago. Look, it’s the guy from L&O, CI w/ muttonchop sideburns! Had to turn it off after I couldn’t stay ‘in’ it from the distraction.
That is how I play every video game…
Considered starting another thread but in the interests of conserving energy and thereby doing my modest bit to save the planet I decided to throw it in here.
Personally something that destroys my suspension of disbelief everytime in a movie, unless its very subtly done, are references and homages to other works or to contemporay politics in a film *(unless its a film about contemporay politics of course!).
It ain’t big and it ain’t clever.
But I realise I’m probably in the vast minority on this one!
There’s a multitude of things that pop me out of the movie, but the biggest one is terrain that doesn’t fit. Where the hell did that giant cliff come from in Raiders of the Lost Ark during the truck chase?
Overall I can put up with a lot though. I just saw Drive Angry, and I liked it as it wasn’t trying to be more than the goofy grindhouse flik that it was. Same with Machete. You let a lot pass by; it’s their sandbox, just watch them play.
And to add to the stupidity, they don’t wake up the whole neighborhood. When Bruce Willis walks away from the house, not a single person has come out to find out what all the commotion was.
Still missing the point aren’t you?
Have you ever seen a movie where a 555 phone exchange was a major plot point? I haven’t. So as I wrote in that other thread, it’s a trivial issue unrelated to the story.
What I described in this thread illustrates that. As I wrote here, I can accept it when somebody gets shot and no blood is shown because that’s just a convention of television. It’s not how real life works, but you just let it slide to stay in the story (like a 555 telephone number).
But the show I mentioned here violated that convention. It had somebody getting shot by fake bullets and then tried to pretend that nobody would notice the guy hadn’t really been shot. That’s when I call foul - a body shot by fake bullets doesn’t look like a body shot by real bullets so don’t make that a plot point.
I watched the *Last House On The Left *remake last night (thoroughly unpleasant movie, BTW), and the dad is a doctor. I was so proud of the writers that after he bashed the big bad guy over the head, he reached down and checked his pulse to make sure he was dead. But then they fucked the whole thing up with a scene after the whole family has taken their boat to safety… for no reason whatsoever, and contrary to both the feeling of the pulse and the driving away in a boat, there’s a scene right at the end in which the dad has paralyzed the big bad guy somehow and microwaves his head till it explodes. It may have been a dream/fantasy sequence of some kind, but it didn’t give itself away as such, and was just odd and out of place.
There was a funny counter-example in an episode where PPTH has a documentary film crew around. Chase points out something extremely obvious for the benefit of the filmmakers, and House simply says, “Yeah, we know…” It was funny on another level because the show is constantly guilty of the same thing, but the way Hugh Laurie delivered the line was perfect.
I always hope that threads like this will be read by someone in the industry, and they will take it on board and we will be spared such glaring errors in future productions.
I think that some of the complaints upthread are “nitpicky” and are not really about being taken out of the movie.
But here are mine.
Though a Brit whenever an American gives a 555 telephone number that does it.
Its not a rational reaction but you know that its all smoke and mirrors.
Poor accents, the worst that I have encountered (due to my local knowledge) in Hollywood movies are, English, Scottish, Australian, Jamaican, South African, American deep South, and most particulary …
American attempts at Irish.
Many British attempts at American are also particulery awful.
The other major mood killers are …
Fucking PLUCKED EYEBROWS !
Whether its a thirteen year old girl, a medievil peasant or a Victorian London beggar, they DON’T FUCKING HAVE THEM .
Or bleached teeth …
Or nose jobs.
Sorry the medications wearing off.
Also historical anachronisms.
But those are the things that take me out of an enjoyable suspension of disbelief back to, “this is all made up.”
Sorry to double post , but have just remembered, uncannily clean and ironed clothes in historical dramas,eg. Sharpe and Dr. Quinn medecine woman.
And one of the worst, people in the Wild West with incredibly clean, conditioned hair.(Also Dr Quinn.)
How about women with hairy legs and underarms (ewww!)?
Yeah, I don’t actually need that much realism.
Thinking of the blue eyeshadow in Dr. Zhivago also. Also women with false eyelashes in lots of '60s science fiction stuff.
Clea Duvall is rather conspicuously absent from your list. IIRC she originally got second billing on the film; it was only after the movie launched Jolie’s career that the promotional material was revamped to feature her instead. Are you omitting her because you don’t consider her to be Hollywood attractive, or because the revamped publicity was so utterly successful in the promotion of Jolie over Duvall that you and everyone else has completely forgotten about her?
Couple scenes in the latest Indiana Jones film. Of course, the infamous fridge - when the door opened Indy should have poured out. But for me, the flesh eating ants were nearly as bad. The mass of a body has to go somewhere. Maybe the ants’ stomachs were in another dimension.
Independence Day - Hijacking our satellites to co-ordinate a global countdown. If it’s just a countdown, don’t they have clocks? Obviously the result of some alien kid’s history of computing project and nespotism.
Return of the King - CGI Legolas does gymnastics on a mammoth. And then to kill it he does the stupid double arrow thing, halving the force imparted on each of them. Not ideal when trying to fire through an inch-thick skull.