This is a constant in Monk, as well. We’ve lived in both southern California and in the bay area. When Monk is investigating a murder and visiting those big fancy mansions, almost always they’re in Pasadena/Glendale/Los Feliz/Hollywood, etc. I can spot the neighborhoods a mile away. The only bay area neighborhoods like that are way down the peninsula from San Francisco, like Palo Alto or San Jose. Also, most of the parks in which the characters find themselves are nowhere near the bay area. Rarely, they’ll film a location shot that’s actually in San Francisco, which we never fail to point out to each other. This happens about every other show or so.
Oh, let’s not get started on San Francisco movie locations. Bullitt, Dirty Harry, Play Misty For Me, The Graduate, Charmed…I could go on and on. (Come to think of it, I think I have. Feel free to search for posts by me with “Francisco”).
As a developer, I can’t tell you how many times computers in the movies crack me up. Probably my favorite is Swordfish, where the guy cracks an encrypted government machine in 30 seconds using one hand with a gun to his head while getting a blowjob.
I recently saw The Squid And The Whale. Pretty good flick, but damn, they didn’t even freakin’ give a shit about using period vehicles. Probably the most blatent I’ve ever seen.
That’s what makes it a "high speed race car chase"! DUH!
Navy uniforms drive me crazy. Whites in the summertime, blues in the winter, everybody switches on the same date. Seeing a mix and match makes me want to scream. Hell, I’m not even an expert, I only did four years enlisted and I notice this stuff. Medals, ribbons and hats are the same thing. I imagine Army and Marines dudes notice the same thing.
Misidentified Aircraft Carriers and other ships are the same idea.
For a birder like me, I’m always hearing the songs of species where they don’t belong. Lately
a lot of films and TV shows use a clip of an Eastern Wood Pewee, which is found in the Eastern
US and Canada (natch), even if the setting is Europe or someplace. [Remember the Australian
Kookaburras heard in old Tarzan movies?] The various Star Trek series always had Robins on
their soundtracks (“So that’s where they are in the winter!”). Last of the Mohicans wasn’t filmed
in the Adirondacks, but somewhere in the southern Appalachians, because you can hear
Carolina Chickadees, and not Black-capped Chickadees (I was actually at that filming location,
Chimney Rock, this past summer).
In Linklater’s SubUrbia, the gang walk from the parking lot of the convenience store and past a Whataburger (this is in Austin, by the way).
However, I used to live in both of those areas. While you could, theoretically, walk from that particular convenience store over to that particular Whataburger, it’d be HOURS, as they’re in completely different parts of town.
I don’t really remember too much of the story- I was too distracted by all the areas that I knew.
Wow, I’d love to watch movies with you. I mean it, no sarcasm…how cool would it be to know what kinds of birds you’re hearing?
The 1942 film Air Force, an otherwise quite enjoyable story about the crew of a B-17 in the Pacific, has at least one combat scene where the plane switches between US and British markings. There just wasn’t that much combat footage (if any) of US B-17s that early in the war.
It’s fairly obscure but, being a chorister, I tend to notice it. In movies/television shows where there are scenes in Catholic churches, the musical details are often wrong, with incorrect music being sung in the background. A standard “religious music” track has been inserted without any relevance to what’s going on in the church. The vestments are often the wrong colour too.
Along the same lines, but much more obvious, would be plane footage in the movie Midway. IIRC, Charlton Heston’s son in the movie takes off in a Douglas Devastator, attacks the Japanese in a Dauntless, and crashlands back on the carrier in an Avenger!
That’s true, like the endless magazines, the alleged off-camera reloads, the tough guys firing .50AE Desert Eagles accurately with one hand, stuff like that.
Still, some things are so egregious that they beg to be ridiculed. For example, there was a scene in Daredevil where Elektra’s father is killed and she thinks that the Daredevil did it so she picks up one of her father’s bodyguard’s weapons, which happens to be a GLOCK. She then proceeds to shoot it dry. That is not the problem. The problem is that the weapon has what is known as “Safe Action”: it has no external hammer and while it behaves like a DAO pistol it isn’t, exactly. Anyway, not to bore you with the details, when you run out of ammunition the slide locks back. To dry-fire it you must rack the slide every time. Well, our movie GLOCK not only doesn’t lock back, but you hear and see numerous clicks as she continues to pull the trigger. This, of course, is patently ridiculous, and utterly impossible.
Of course, we also have the immortal GLOCK 7 from Die Hard 2, a porcelain gun that cannot be picked up by airport radar and costs a mint. In actuality, the GLOCK 7 is the designation for one of their hand tools that they were manufacturing before they got into the handgun business (their first weapon was a GLOCK 17). And how about the Beretta Model 93 that has a cyclical rate of fire of 1100 rounds per minute and can only fire three round bursts, yet somehow these cats in the movies are simply holding down the trigger (with one hand, no less) and rarely need to reload even though the largest magazine holds only 20 rounds.
Oh, the ignorance about guns that movies spread. It’s no wonder people are scared shitless about them.
Mr. S and I, who have both worked in printing, guffawed at the big scene in The Paper where Glenn Close and Michael Keaton are arguing over bothering the Big Boss Publisher of the paper to get the key to shut down the press. Um, hello, every commercial printing press has at least one big shiny red EMERGENCY SHUTOFF switch. Ya know, in case a press operator gets his arm stuck in there, or if there’s a paper jam, or or or . . . ?
Lord, where to start? 
Anything involving airplanes or aviation or pilots in general; I’ve gotten to the point of just going with the flow and trying my best to not let it bug me (especially if the movie is otherwise enjoyable).
One that still stands out: it was years ago and I’ve blocked the name of the movie from my memory. Anyway terrorists want to steal an F-117 Stealth fighter. So they wait until one is being transported in a C-5 (not possible), and then instead of just stealing the F-117 itself while on the ground, or hijacking the C-5 inflight…they hijack a KC-10 tanker that the C-5 will refuel with while airborne. OK…
They then hijack the KC-10, manage to fool the C-5 into believing that a real Air Force crew is at the controls of the KC-10 and then while the airplanes are hooked up and refueling…crawl down the INSIDE
Sorry about that!
INSIDE of the refueling boom! You know, that pipe that is about 5 inches across and pressurized with many PSI of JP-4 flowing from one aircraft to another? Yeah, let’s just crawl inside that thing and we’ll magically appear on the flight deck of the C-5!
I was yelling at the screen during that one, but I was also younger then!
Speaking of nonsensical car chases, how about that well known classic “Drivel” with Rocky Balboa? First the rookie hero has some kind of fit, jumps into his ChampCar and roars off down the street, then Rocky follows. Only Champ cars don’t have starters. You stick a portable starter motor in a hole in the transmission case and fire it up, then during the race if a car stalls they either push start it or haul it off with a towtruck.
Two other screwups that always bother me: starry skies never, and I mean never, look like anything but a bunch of holes poked at random in a black sheet. As an old sailor/celestial navigator, I can almost always tell directions and relative latitude by a quick glance at the sky, and it makes me kind of uncomfortable when I can’t because there aren’t any constellations where there ought to be.
And suitcases- you can always tell from the way the actors move that the suitcases are empty. Don’t know why that bothers me so much, but I always notice it.
On occasion I’ve watched ER and after 18 years in Chicago I always find it amusing how many street corner teleporters there must be around here that I can’t find. A person will be at - for example- Clark and Fullerton and when they cross the street suddenly they’re walking into a building at State and Monroe. I wish I could do that!
One of the worst offenders in my memory was on the show Facts of Life (okay, I know, :rolleyes: ) the character Blair was supposed to be visiting her boyfriend’s parents’ farm in Iowa. Naturally of course, the mountains in the background were just stunning. :smack: Well, maybe they were outside Mount Pleasant.
Well, the weapons screwups get to me too…especially the fucking “cocking sounds” (lifted from a Colt Single Action Army cowboy 45) that they use EVERY TIME someone even handles a weapon…as if guns all have little gears in them that wind up every time you shake them.
As someone who was in the Army infantry, I have some experience with military weapons, and the thing with grenades gets me the most. I’ve thrown live grenades, shot them out of launchers and seen them hit targets. There’s a BANG!, a puff of smoke and, if you’re close enough, you can hear “spang” sounds as the coils of metal that are the grenade’s payload ricochet off other metal (mostly that was shooting 40mm grenades from a launcher at hollowed out APC hulks on a range). There’s no fireball and the explosion wouldn’t blow apart a small wooden building in a gout of flame.
One of those airborne snakes was a harmless milksnake. It closely resembles the poisonous coral snake, but it has no venom whatsoever.
My college film professor started out studying zoology, before he decided he didn’t like animals that much. He always said that he just couldn’t get into the scene in the snake pit in Raiders of the Lost Ark, because he recongized most of the snakes as being species that weren’t native to North Africa.
It always bothers me that the calls of a peacock (an Asian bird) and the Kookaburra (an Australian and New Guinean bird) are always–always always always–on the soundtrack during any jungle scene, in any movie, although those jungle scenes are usually sposed to be in South America or Africa.