Movie Flaws that no one should notice.

Cafe Society
61

Not always. I’ve seen examples of corsets from the sixteenth century made of iron bands, covered by cloth. A wood or ivory busk would be inserted in the front to further stiffen the bust line. Styles of corsets/stays/“bodys” varied widely according to the time period. If a more “natural” female line was fashionable, corsets/stays became softer, and when a ridgid line was fashionable, they became torture chambers.

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.
[/QUOTE]

I can take a few modern touches as long as they’re clearly intentional-- “creative anachronism” and all that.

62

I caught the end of Tin Cup on TV the other day, and there are a couple things I think might be errors but I don’t know golf well enough to be sure.

Unboxed spoilers to follow:

Roy McAvoy (Kevin Costner), a headstrong, low-rent golf pro, qualifies for the U.S. Open. The 18th hole is a par-5, with water just before the green. The first three days of the tournament, Roy tries to reach the green with his second shot, but it falls short and goes in the water. Determined to make the shot, he tries again on the fourth day. He makes it and the ball falls gently onto the green a few feet from the hole; but then rolls backwards down the slope and into the water again. In a fit of pique he drops a new ball at the same place as the previous spot.

The problems:

He hits a 3-wood from the fairway, and I don’t see how it’s possible for a shot from a low-trajectory club like that to roll back toward the player and off the green. If it were, every ball on the front half of the green would be in the hazard. Putt a few inches past the hole; splash. Also, isn’t the rule that you can drop a new ball where the previous shot entered the hazard? Since his rolled in from the green wouldn’t he be able to drop on the far side of the water, meaning that he actually made the shot that got him so angry?

63

In Prison Break, an establishing shot shows an aerial shot of a small city, with a domed building, and says “Illinois State Capitol, Springfield, Illinois.” That establishing shot was neither of Springfield nor of the Capitol building.

In a later episode, an establishing shot showed a big mansion and said, “Governor’s residence, Chicago, Illinois.” Rod Blagojevich notwithstanding, the governor’s residence in Illinois is in Springfield, NOT Chicago.

64

You can drop no closer to the hole than where your ball enters the water, meaning you can go right up to the edge of the hazard and pitch it over the water onto the green. Many places have a designated drop area where players take their drops, and this is what Roy had done in the first three rounds. But in the last round, Romeo (his caddy) says “Let’s go take a drop” and Roy says “We’re dropping it here” in a fit of stubbornness.

65

An episode of Will & Grace showed an exterior shot of Footlight Records in NYC, then the interior of a store the size of Macy’s. The real Footlight on 12th was about 15 feet by 60 feet (now Internet-only, alas)

66

I’m sure I’m not the only one here who, on seeing a movie or TV character play a guitar, intently studies the actor’s chord hand to see if he/she knows what he’s doing. Actors in these scenes fall into three categories: a) the actor who genuinely knows how to play; b) the actor who doesn’t play, but who picked up enough authentic-looking chord shapes to at least look like he’s trying; and c) the actor who doesn’t have a clue and makes no effort to disguise the fact. (Top Secret, by the way, has a hilarious visual gag in this vein, in which Val Kilmer actually stops playing while the guitar on the soundtrack plays on.)

I imagine a similar thing exists for pianists, but a canny director will take advantage of the piano’s architecture and hide the hands of an actor who can’t play.

67

james bond , ‘The World is not Enough’ our hero drives through the oil field down by the coast in Baku azerbaijan, which is a mess of old derricks and asorted junk.

  1. The roads are barely suitable for a 4x4 let along a BMW (they built a tarmac section of road specifically for that sceen through the field)
  2. our hero drives south through the field, which basically ends in a big cliff
  3. He then drives out of the oilfield into a pine forest. The nearest forrest is a good few hundred KM to the north. Everything around there is sort of dry and scrubby.

Oh and Armageddon, and oil rigs and drilling, just no no no no no. Mind you it is probably fairly daft to try and nitpick anything in that film.

cheers

68

One other thing, that I forgot in my previous post: I always notice when an Apple computer in movies/tv is running a non-Macintosh UI, or when an Apple computer appears but is disguised in some way (by having the logo covered or digitally erased).

69

Rule 26-1 provides three options, each with a one-stroke penalty:

[ol]
[li]Play a ball as nearly as possible at the spot from which the original ball was last played[/li][li]Drop a ball behind the water hazard, keeping the point at which the original ball last crossed the margin of the water hazard directly between the hole and the spot on which the ball is dropped, with no limit to how far behind the water hazard the ball may be dropped[/li][li]If and only if the hazard is a lateral water hazard, drop a ball outside the water hazard within two club-lengths of and not nearer the hole than (i) the point where the original ball last crossed the margin of the water hazard or (ii) a point on the opposite margin of the water hazard equidistant from the hole[/li][/ol]

70

Virtually none of the establishing shots in “Will & Grace” are remotely plausible when matched up to the supposed interior set. Most ludicrous of all is the establishing shot of the building where Grace supposedly has her design business office - the “Puck” building (named for the exterior statue which is occasionally shown on the show), a landmarked building that Grace could not possibly afford to rent office space in.

Another exceptionally implausible gaffe on “W & G” is the episode with Matt Damon as a straight guy pretending to be gay in order to join the gay men’s chorus (so that he can score a free trip to Europe.) Slight nitpick - On the show, the GMC tryouts are supposedly taking place at the LGBT Center (again, in an interior set that doesn’t in any way resemble the real inside of the Center), they don’t actually. Major nitpick - although the GMC does tour Europe occasionally, individual members have to pay their own way. Nobody gets a free ride.

Another episode has Grace & Karen attending A.A. meetings for free therapy and for the ‘fabulous’ free food that the ‘moderator’ would bring. A.A. ain’t psychotherapy and there’s no ‘moderator’ to lead discussions; doesn’t (in my experience) take place in posh offices with leather sofa chairs; and as for the food - it tends to be Oreos and coffee that tastes like motor oil.

In fact, I’ve often wondered why the producers / writers of this show bothered to set it in NYC. Virtually nothing & no-one depicted on the show seems remotely like NYC (Even “Friends” seemed slightly more plausible). I’ve heard people from the west coast tell me though that it IS very much like gay life in L.A.

71

I don’t know if you remember this, or maybe it’s epical in the birder comunity, but several years ago, CBS was piping in bird sounds to show over nature shots during the Masters golf tournament. They were presenting it as if it was actual bird sounds being caught live.

Some birder busted them for a bird sound that couldn’t have come from there, and CBS issued a mea culpa.

72

For reasons I can’t fully articulate, I find this very, very disturbing. The simple fact that they’d think to fake such a seemingly trivial detail…ack.

73

Since Portland has become a fairly popular spot to film movies I’m now enjoying the dubious pleasure, as a former Californian, of being able to critique location irregularities in a whole buncha places, yay! “Zero Effect” has an especially hilarious set of scenes, as the hero goes one way over the Burnside bridge, lands somewhere on the side of the river he started out on, then gets magically transported several miles north to the St. Johns bridge–travelling once again the wrong way across the river. Had to laugh my butt off on that one!

Then in “The Hunted,” not only do they have a doctored up TriMet bus masquerading as a Max train going across the Hawthorne bridge (which I can forgive, since it’s a cool looking bridge and the fakeup train looks pretty good–even though there’s nothing but span and water under where it seems the train is travelling) but in at least two shots it’s very clear there are no TRACKS underneath that train! Silly, just silly…

Don’t get me started on anything set in the Middle Ages, there aren’t enough :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: in the world! Shiny polyester dresses, costuming from a span of hundreds of years and thousands of miles, armor inaccuracies are particularly rife, and people say “okay” a lot… Sheesh, get it straight! In “Timeline,” very much is made of the fact that they need to bring along someone who speaks French–to 1357. Hey, dummies, it doesn’t matter! The French speaking guy will have about as much luck understanding those who speak Medieval French as the English speakers will have understanding the English of that period–don’t believe me? Read “The Canterbury Tales” in the original, tell me how far you get with that…

Viking helmets with horns… This one just will NOT go away! Sure wish someone would essay to show a proper blood eagle, though, that would be cool!

I hate watching anything having to do with computers in movies–we all know why, it goes without saying.

It’s also really difficult for me, being a voracious reader, to accept with aplomb gratuitous departures from source material when translating to the screen. I don’t mean normal editing for time and to tighten story line, I mean those really annoying changes that make no sense and totally jar me as I’m watching. Too many examples to even essay beginning a list here!

74

I just found a money link. That was 6.5 years ago. I have no idea why it stuck with me.

75

I thought that there was disagreement over whether the iron ones were supposed to be corsets, or an early form of brace.

In my experience (hauling out Nancy Bradfield’s Women’s Costume in Detail) Tudor through 18th century stays pushed the bust up and flattened it, and also slightly changed body shape via compression, from the normal oval to more of a circle. From the front, that slight compression makes your waist look thinner. They weren’t painful, because unlike Victorian corsets they weren’t meant to dramatically slim the waist. Cite- Janet Arnold and Nancy Bradfield. Wish I could find the specific page.

Period clothes in movies are almost always wrong, and now I want to make a 1740s gown and stomacher.

Drat.

76

In the movie “Wedding Crashers” they gay brother of the pretty girl gets a crush on Vince Vaughn and paints a picture of him. Well, this young man supposedly goes to Rhode Island School of Design and there isn’t a RISD student alive that would make such a shitty painting. :smiley:

77

In my expert capacity as someone who actually understands cause and effect, I was almost constantly offended by the unintentionally surreal way the characters in Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line are totally unable to function in terms of cause and effect.

I could go on at length…and might, some day…about the scenes where men standing up are being hit by bullets and men right beside them evince fear, but do not somehow figure out that they ought to GET DOWN…about the scene where they are ordered to attack right now, at any cost, and then make coffeee, and read letters…and the sun rises…and later in the day they’re chatting…and uh, what happened to the big attack?

But there was one scene that caused me to physically eject the DVD and go do something else.

The soldiers are fording (wading) a river. Mortar shells begin to fall around them – they’re under attack! Not a LOT of mortar shells, mind you – this is no Saving Private Ryan. But enough to cause one of the waist-deep-in-leech-filled-water soldiers to scream “We can’t stay here!” as if anyone would, without his timely warning, set up camp in the middle of fording a river.

So what do they proceed to do? Of course. They stay there.

In fact, they proceed to make a phone call. They are carrying a field telephone, the kind that works by uncoiling a cable all the way behind you as you walk. They decide to call headquarters, presumably to ask if they should stand there in the water and be shelled, or do something else.

But the cable’s cut. That happens – you send someone back along the cable, retracing your steps, and he mends the break.

There’s a stupidly tense moment in which two rookies are picked for the dreaded job no one wants – to follow the cableback toward safety while the rest of us get to stand here and get shelled. An experienced soldier takes pity on them and agrees to accompany them in their terrifying trip to safety.

They look back at the woods we just watched them walk out of and say, “There’s no way we’re getting through there.”

:eek:

Repeat: everyone in the theater, everyone watching the DVD, the actors themselves, the director, the film editors…we all JUST WATCHED THEM WALK OUT OF THOSE WOODS MOMENTS AGO.

So they turn at right angles to their path – along the river – directly perpendicular to where the cable lies – and set out, away from any physical possibility of finding the cable break…to look for the cable break.

I don’t know what happens next, because I ejected the idiotic thing.

Sailboat

78

Ever since Seinfeld and Friends, producers seemed to think no one will watch a “wacky young people in apartments” sit unless it’s set in New York.

79

The opening shots of the fictional Princeton/Plainsboro Medical Center where House is supposed to work are aerial views of the new Frist Campus Center at Princeton (OK, at least it’s the same town). My father had to point that out to me because while I do read the alumni weekly, I shield my eyes from pictures of the new buildings they are putting up. They had to gut Palmer Hall to construct Frist, and Palmer was the site of many a grueling hour in Math and Physics class. Good times.

80

The Chase with Charlie Sheen & Kristy Swanson, which is supposedly set in Southern California, was actually shot in Houston, on the Sam Houston and Hardy toll roads.

It never fails to make me snicker when they first get on the freeway, they get on at the northbound entrance to the Sam Houston Tollway at Bellaire Blvd. If you watch, they cut the shot off about when the car gets to Westheimer.

(I know this, because I remember them shooting in Houston when I was home from college one summer, and because I’ve driven that stretch a couple of hundred times).