Most famous movie goof?

Cafe Society
121

It is not a gaffe. When the first Star wars film was shot, the actors used actual sword-like objects. They were handles with small motors and into them were set a rotating wooden rod. This rod was covered with basically Scotch-Lite Reflective Tape, wound up around it diagonally.

As the actor’s did battle, the rods rotated, catching hard light set off to one side and providing a bit of flickering. Of course, the light-saber effect is a matte of blue , red, etc. As the moment approached ( and I am well aware of this moment in the duel named above ), both actors crossed " lightsabers" and moved them down and towards the lens of the camera. For a few frames, the matte insert of the lightsaber simply didn’t track, they were inserting bars if different lengths to compensate for the perspective as the lightsabers moved around and circled in the air. For that brief moment, you do indeed see the end of the wooden dowels and just a flash of the Scotch-Lite Tape.

It seems to me that it wasn’t feasable to make an oval of " lightsaber" blue matte for those few frames, and so it wasn’t matted over and we all get to see a bit of movie prop magic. I love that shot, to be honest.

It makes me appreciate the simplicity of the prop, and the elegance with which our minds make the leap of faith, so that when an arm is severed by Obi Wan in that Cantina, we accept it as a powerful weapon.

:slight_smile:

Cartooniverse

122

I realize that I didnt’ address the remark made by tracer, apologies for that. I’d WAG that they knew about it all too well, and chose to leave it alone.

It’s not a bad thing to keep a project imperfect, it reminds one of how far one’s come. :slight_smile:

123

As he writes the note, Lawrence says something like, “Pay to the order of (Quinn’s character), one-thousand English pounds, payable on Her Majesty’s crown, blah blah blah”, so I assume he was writing out a British note which would have to be in English, no? Did Lawrence even speak Arabic?

124

An essay reprinted in the Journal of the T. E. Lawrence Society includes these sentences:

“Lawrence never acquired much Arabic or a good Arabic accent, nor, so far as I can ascertain, did [Charles] Doughty. The fluent, flamboyant [Sir Richard] Burton passed in his Islamic disguise almost effortlessly into Mecca. Neither Lawrence nor Doughty could have passed as Arabs with Arabs for an hour – disabilities which, far from diminishing, greatly enhanced their achievements.”

http://www.telsociety.org/journals/a7_1.htm

125

**In Matrix the cat backs up and walks again in the de’ja` vu scene. He tells the crew, turns back, and the red carpet has turned to black and white tiles.
**Morpheus shakes Neo’s hand. His left arm is behind his back. At another view, it is straight down, and a millisecond later, it’s behind his back!
**I could see metal or something replace Neo’s fingers, as they get him from the matrix. This is supposed to be a glitch, but it fits the plot just as well.

(Now I know this is a series, not a movie)
A scene with the very first cast members of Gilligan’s Island is used when the Castaways first wake up on the island.
There’s a car very obvious in the background.

(This is not even a glitch. It might be the most famous.)
When JF Kennedy died, the crew were filming the first episodes. These come in the intro telling how the characters were shipwrecked. Watch when the “tour” leaves the serene and sunny port. They had a flag in the scene - it’s flying at half-mast.

126

There’s a scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Germans convince Harrison Ford to put down the bazooka and surrender (shortly before they open the ark). They’re looking up at Harrison Ford on the cliff and a bug lands on the face of the French archiologist and then crawls into his mouth. He doesn’t react at all but I sure do, whenever I see it…

127

The same thing happens in The Matrix. The Wachowski Brothers are from Chicago and so the script is full of Chicago street names. The movie was filmed in Sydney though, and the city within the Matrix isn’t named.

You can take the quotes off that car. It really was there. It’s been deleted from the DVD though.

128

Girlfight, a low-budget but well-done movie about a schoolgirl in NY who takes up boxing, has an outdoor dialog scene in the middle of the movie in which the boom microphone is constantly dropping into view. It’s pretty damn distracting!

129

in FOTR, when they first arrive at the dock by the waterfall, you hear the waterfall going full blast in the background. When sam is standing on the dock watching frodo row, no waterfall can be heard.

130

Since famous seems pretty well covered…

There are two in ** Red Planet** that are rather glaring.

The first one is that the martian creatures that are eating everything are called “nematodes” by the cast. Someone writing this movie failed biology, since nematodes do not have legs and resemble cockroaches. Flatworms these beasties were not.

The second one is a rather bizarre continiuity error.

Spoilers!!
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Near the beginning of the movie, they crash land on Mars and realize, to their horror that the space station there has been eaten by the then-unknown creatures. This is a disaster, since they won’t be able to breathe once they run out of O2 that in their packs, etc, ect, but then, right as they’re supposed to run out of O2, they take of their helmets to die, and realize that the air is breathable after all.

Cut to 45 minutes later, when they are planning to use an old space vehicle (I believe it was actually a satilite, which is odd too) to get off Mars, and discover it only holds one person. One of the men is gravely injured, so he throws Val Kilmer his pack, telling him he needs it more on his attempt to leave the planet than he does. What the hell good is it going to do him if they already established that it was empty??
** Drive Me Crazy** has another fun one. In one scene the male lead, Chase, tries to convince his friend Dave not to go pick up drunks at a party, since the drunks are using him. Chase and Dave argue for a minute, then Dave peals out of the parking lot, leaving a sad looking Chase standing in the parking lot to stare after him.

In the next scene Dave pulls up to the house having a party, and Chase is sitting in back seat of the car!

131

NONE of these microphone problems are the fault of the movies themselves, they’re the fault of the theater showing the movie. Somebody THERE is screwing up. Properly framed, the boom mikes (which are in every movie) should never show. Blame the theater, never the movie.

NO director would ever allow their movie to printed and released with a microphone showing. Geez, people, give the directors more credit than that!

132

About the Red Planet goof mentioned by elfkin477 - as I recall, one guy ran out of air first and opened his helmet, to find out there is oxygen in the air. At that point, the other guys still had a few minutes worth of oxygen. It may have been enough for the later trip.

There are tons of other goofs in that movie though. For instance, the whole purpose of the mission was to determine why the oxygen level on Mars suddenly dropped. If they knew it suddenly dropped, why didn’t they know it went back up? And who would design a spacecraft that get destroyed by a solar flare? Even the Space Shuttle has survived a number of solar flares without damage. Who would send a habitation module ahead of the crew with no way of monitoring its condition? When that biologist got injured and asked to be left behind, why didn’t he give up his oxygen pack to the others? And the part about the insects producing (concentrating?) oxygen made no sense at all. Obviously the most efficient way to produce oxygen is to cover the whole landscape with green plants. You can’t do better by having insects eat up those plants. And who would put a user-friendly touch-screen control with color displays on an unmanned interplanetary probe? Not to mention the whole idea of terraforming a planet even before you send a manned exploration team - that’s just insane. And why would a terraformed planet solve the pollution (or was it overpopulation) problem of earth when it takes a multi-national team to launch a 6-person crew to Mars?

deep breath Sorry. There are some aspects of the movie which were very well done, which is why the goofs really drive me nuts.

133

The Matrix

In the opening scene, Trinity is using a computer in room 303 of the seedy Heart O’ the City Hotel. After she kills the four cops, she tries to escape and finds out the land line has been cut, forcing her to run to a distant phone booth.

At the movie’s climax, Neo is directed to this exact same room (note how Agent Smith recognizes the hotel and gets into room 303 ahead of Neo) but now the escape route is intact. If there was a repair, there’s no mention of it anywhere in the film.

Incidental observation on scr4’s comment: colonizing anther planet as a means to solve overpopulation is completely useless, as you stated. This also gets passing reference in ST2: TWOK during the Genesis Presentation when Carol Marcus suggests instant terraforming would solve overpopulation and food supply problems. Unless you have some kind of wormhole that lets people drive or walk from one planet to another (i.e. they don’t have to lifted into orbit and then hauled across space), you’re never going to be able to solve problems by terraforming. I sigh when this gets mentioned in sci-fi stories.

I remember one short story that featured some pilots chasing a wormhole across the sky. The wormhole’s opening was elusive and zipped around at random, making catching it (and being instantly teleported to the distant planet) a real challenge. The wormhole-generating technology was gradually improving, though, and the characters anticipated the wormhole would eventually be stable enough to let them park it on Earth’s surface and drive trucks through it. This is the only way I can see taking off some of the pressure of overpopulation and even then, getting hundreds of millions of people along a single highway would be an immense undertaking. It’s bugging me that I can’t recall the title or which of my books it’s in.

134

I don’t mean any disrespect, but you are 100% wrong on this one. It is indeed the filmmaker’s responsibility to see if anything is creeping into the frame that does not belong there.

FURTHERMORE, if you have a mic in the top edge of frame in a full frame projected image, it’ll be there in the theatre unless they use a slightly bigger mask. However, you cannot have a mic in the shot in the theatre, if there was NO Mic in the shot that day, on set, as it was being filmed. Life ain’t that way.

I’ve eaten a LOT of shots in 20 years because of mikes in the shot, reflections of people in mirrors and windows, a stray production person off in the distance, etc. That’s life. You try to keep the frame clean, and leave the drama to the actors.

A Director may or may not be watching full-framed dailies, he/she might very well be watching a masked monitor ( which is frequently the case ). If that is the case, then the Director might miss seeing an element along the top edge of frame. I understand your argument- that the theatre owner needs to ajust the mask down a bit so as to hide such evils. But, the mask and aspect ratio aren’t really something the theatre owner needs to be messing with.

It is the responsibility of the production to make sure that all of the shots and finished release prints are acceptable. So yes, a Director might miss it. More importantly, one needs to realize that it is NOT the Director’s job to catch such things. It’s the camera operator’s, the script supervisor’s ( he/she sits glued to a monitor on set at all times, during all takes to record information into his/her script notes. They’re notoriously reliable at catching mistakes like that AS they happen ). It’s the Editor’s job, the dailies projectionist’s job and the Lab’s job. In fact, the Director is ultimately responsible of course but he/she relies on a VERITABLE BEVY of folks around him/her, to catch such evils.

So to sum up, blame both the filmmakers AND the theatre. If it just kisses the frame edge in FULL frame projection, UNmasked then yeah perhaps a theatre owner might save the day. Otherwise? It came from the lab evil, it is projected evil. Don’t shoot the messenger. :slight_smile:

135

then how is it that we often see boom mikes on TV/Video/DVD released films? surely if the director was that fussed, he’d make sure they got these releases right?

136

Does the movie itself have to be famous for the goof to be famous? If not I’d like to pony up one of my favorites: Hercules In New York. The only thing remotely famous about it is that it is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first movie (as Arnold Strong). In a scene where he (playing Hercules) is strolling through a very ornate garden with Zeus you can distinctly hear a lawn mower in the background. Nice to know the Greek gods employ modern technology to keep everything looking spiffy.

137

Well, Raiders did win the Best Editing Oscar that year.

138

Warning, crude joke follows:

That wasn’t a lawn mower. That was Sappho, the original carpet-muncher.

139

That would be reasonable, but they make a point that there’s less than a minute’s worth of oxgen left in any of their packs before someone takes off a helmet in desperation.

140

It really irks me when these lazy directors can’t even get the gratuitous nudity right!

Kenneth Branagh’s version of Much Ado About Nothing has a brief scene near the beginning showing a bunch of naked women. Some of them have extremely sharp tan lines shaped like the distinctive high-cut bikinis that were in style about ten years ago, but probably not so common in Renassaince Italy.