A recent one in season one of Lost that actually made me laugh out loud was a scene where a character picked up a Glock, which was quite visibly a Glock, and you heard the sound of a hammer being drawn back. Twice. A hammer! You have to wonder what the Foley guys think the sound effect is actually supposed to represent.
And don’t even get me started on characters who are supposed to know how to handle guns who walk around with their fingers on the trigger.
You forgot the worst part: they stole showcars, which normally don’t even have drivetrains in them. Assuming for some reason they did, they wouldn’t have more than a few ounces of methanol in them, so those cars wouldn’t have gotten more than a couple of hundred feet before sputtering to a stop.
For those of us who aren’t experts on many things, but watch lots of movies…a new thread. 
In Maria Riva’s biography of her mother Marlene Dietrich, Riva writes about watching her mother film a scene with animals:
The behavior of almost any therapist in almost any film should result in complaints to licensing boards, ethics complaints to professional organizations, and jail time.
A good friend of mine is a silversmith and has done blacksmithing. Watching any movie with blacksmithing in it with him is a joy. Even I, who have no blacksmithing evperience at all, can tell that during the reforging of Narsil into Anduril in RotK they’re doing it all wrong. You don’t just jam the pieces back together and bang on them with a hammer! He’ll mutter things about no decent blacksmith ever hitting metal that hard, and the metal temp being off because it’s not glowing the right colour, and too many sparks.
I’m sure lots of costume aficionados noticed this, but the line in Pirates of the Carribean 1 when Elizabeth talks about pain, and wearing a corset. They weren’t called corsets- they were stays.
While I agree with every thing else you said about this movie, but this statement is incorrect.
F-117 were built by Lockheed in Burbank and flown inside a C-5 to either Groom Lake or Tonopah. The C-5 would arrive late at night usually on a Friday or Saturday at odd times to avoid observation by Russian satellites. In fact the LA Times did a story on people who would show up at a gas station just off the end of the Burbank Airport runway in the middle of the night just to watch a C-5 land and then take off again less than 90 minutes later. Nobody knew why for several years.
Cite
Oh, no . . . now you’ve got me started.
My Hubby is almost to the point of refusing to watch any movie which has a historical setting with me. I’m constantly griping, “They didn’t have those! They weren’t wearing that during that time period! Oh, Christ, that hairstyle is all* kinds* of wrong.”
I’ve promised to keep my mouth shut if he takes me to see Marie Antoinette. I can just picture myself, hands clapped over my mouth, writhing in my seat, but I won’t say anything, even if the shoe styles are twenty years out of date.
Not only that, it’s really hard to get the kind of compression necessary to make corsets painful to wear with 18th-century stays. The maximum waist reduction you can get is about 4", and that’s if you’re a very compressible person. Prior to the 1870s, most corsets were more along the lines of sports bras. Tightlacing was never as widespread as most people believe, especially among the middle and lower classes.
Lissa, you’re going to cringe throughout Marie Antoinette. There are a pair of Converse sneakers in it. Though the ladies’ dresses are very good for a movie, especially the deshabille.
No kidding - the doctors in the hospitals I worked at just chucked requisitions at lab techs and expected results in a timely fashion. We wouldn’t have let the doctors run the tests - they would have botched them royally, probably breaking the machines in the process. Yeah, we’d let each doctor come in and run his one particular test, and to hell with the rest of the samples waiting to be put into the batch…
She probably also enjoys how doctors are able to tell anything about someone’s blood chemistry by just looking at a drop of blood on a slide under a microscope. 
In the movie Contact, There is a scene showing reporters milling around the group of scientists just leaving a “comittee meeting” which was evidently held at the Lincoln Memorial!
Also, in Hollywashington, one has only to “cross the bridge” and find oneself in the heart of Virginia’s rural horse farms. Lovely two lane roads, winding into the wide pasture lands, with their picturesque background of rocky hills, and perhaps the distand view of the desert.
Tris
Drives me crazy to watch any movie involving Sign Language.
Either the movie only shows part of what the person is signing (Children of a Lesser God), or has actors signing who are supposed to be fluent, but sign horribly (Mr. Holland’s Opus)
When they’re good signers I want to see what they’re saying, but the shots invariably cut away from the Deaf person after about 4 signs.
When they’re bad signers, the realism just isn’t there for me… “THEY’RE supposed to have Deaf parents? HA!”… It tends to ruin the movie for me AND everyone around me while I complain…
In Rounders, no one ever cuts the deck. And Mike says something along the lines of “Sometimes you’ve got two overcards to an underpair, and then it’s 11-9 or even money. Then you’ve got to go with your gut.” This is in the middle of a speech on how there’s no luck in what he does, and he’s talking about how good he is at predicting the outcome of a coinflip! Any poker pro would know better.
I complained about this just now whil watching Law & Order:SVU. I yelled “He didn’t say all of that!” about 2 seconds ago. You’re not alone.
As a metro buff, I giggled all the way through the climactic chase scene in The Jackal, in which Richard Gere chases Bruce Willis from Capitol Heights to Metro Center in D.C. Of course, those are a couple miles and ten stations apart. But the best part is that they’re really Radisson and Lionel-Groulx stations in Montreal; they look completely different from the DC stations (aside from both being 70s modernist all-concrete structures) and the trains are blue and have rubber tires.
Likewise, in the Quebec film Maelström, the main character is sitting in a metro station, disconsolately. She asks a nearby character what time it is, and he says it’s 12:15 a.m. Trouble is, she’s at Acadie metro on the blue line, and at the time the film was made, that line closed at 11:10 p.m.
Similarly, in Jésus de Montréal, the climactic scene occurs at Place-Saint-Henri station. Supposedly Daniel has just gotten out of hospital, but there’s no hospital anywhere near there. Later on he collapses and his companion dashes up the (very long) escalator to get help - why didn’t she just use the red emergency phone? Then in the last scene, two women are singing a hymn near where Daniel collapsed, but there’s no busker station there.
Linguistics: I couldn’t even watch Enterprise because of Hoshi Sato and her constant meaningless pronouncements. Astrophysicists and space scientists anywhere received my retroactive condolences.
The monarchy: The Queen was quite well done in general, but there were two annoying things: at one point Prince Charles refers to his son as “the future King of England,” when he should know there hasn’t been a king of England since 1707; and (although it would be reasonable for the character to have made a mistake) Tony Blair refers to Charles as His Highness when it should be His Royal Highness. (kung fu lola thought that the china they were using was wrong, as her mother apparently has the same pattern they use at Buckingham Palace; I pointed out that they’re at Balmoral, so naturally the china would be different.)
I can attest to the jumping all around locations in movies. In the 1996 movie Fled the climax of the movie takes place in Stone Mountain Park, right outside of Atlanta. First the car chase shows going from one location in the park to another, which is really obvious if you’ve even been there. But the worst part is the end of the film, when the final fight takes place on the tram to the top of the mountain. They get off the tram on the top, and there is the train station, the one on the bottom :smack: PLUS there is a playground across the “street” from it… THERE IS NO PLAYGROUND THERE! ITS A PARKING LOT! (at least it was at the time, now its a village)
As for guns in movies, the main thing that gets me is when people have shotguns, they cock those things all the time. Don’t they realize they are just wasting the rounds?
I used to date a hair stylist and she would get a kick out of noticing the sudden changes in length of the actors’ hair from shot to shot.
But I believe it was Eraser that had a bad guy tapping Arnie’s phone call to a pager–and tracing the pager’s location from the phone number. 
As a medical professional, it always bothers me when they show someone dying on screen. The person ‘flatlines’ BEEEEEEEEEP and they get the defibrillator paddles out to shock the guy. Then he wakes up and talks to them.
Any movie with any technical thing is going to be riddled with errors that people in the field immediately pick up on. We’ve had countless threads about errors in science and science fiction, medicine, forensic science, police work, legal issues, the military, and so on. The movies don’t care anywhere near as much about accuracy as they do about pretty shots, easily grasped situations, and dramatic setups.
But some errors are so outrageous you can’t help it. My all time favorite is still the armadillos in Count Dracula’s Transylvanian castle in the 1931 Tod Browning film. It’s not as if you have to be an expert in zooology. You don’t say things like “that’s not a Transylvanian armadillo! ou can tell from the size!” Because they don’t have armadillo’s on the entire freakin’ continent. Who did Browning think would let this one slip? (The Spanish-language version, shot at the same time on the same sets, but with different cast and crew, notably does not feature armadillos. even if they entertained the thought – unlikely, I know – I’m sure they realized that the Maxican audience that had to be part of their target group would have laughed it off the screen.)