I saw First Knight on TV last night with Richard Gere and Sean Connery. It was a story using the characters from Arthurian legends, though never pretended to be a pure product. Two-word review: it sucked. One thing about it that’s bothering me more than anything else (and perhaps more than it should) was when Lancelot and Guinevere rode this huge waterfall. What the hell? There are no huge waterfalls in England. Maybe I’m being a little pedantic, but that looked more like a California waterfall than an English waterfall. I realize that there are technically waterfalls in England, but nothing huge like this one.
Another thing that bugs me is how in the movie Born on the Fourth of July, the opening scene has President Kennedy speaking on TV. The opening scene is set in 1956, and Kennedy wasn’t elected until 1960! I felt like standing up in the theater and screaming this to everyone, but I doubt too many people would care. What really pissed me off was that I found a book about movie anachronisms, and you know what it lists for Born on the Fourth of July? It mentions that someone was wearing a pair of Reeboks before they ever hit the markets. Imagine that! They put Kennedy in office four years early, and all this book can come up with was a pair of sneakers!
Anyone else have any good ones? Go ahead and say 'em. There’s no way you can come off as more pedantic than me. (Excuse me—than I.) So cut loose!
I heard that in The Horse Whisperer, they used different horses to play the same one, and you could tell they were different by how the horses would mysteriously change facial marking throughout the movie.
Almost all movies based on “actual events” are fiction. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre happened in Michigan, didn’t use chainsaws, wasn’t a big scary guy, etc, etc, etc.
Films are not in the fact business, but entertainment. I do feel for you though. I get bent over the idea that many people buy the falsehoods as fact and won’t believe otherwise. "It’s gotta be true, it’s in a movie!: :rolleyes:
Do not speak the name of First Knight. Any “version” of the Arthurian Legend without Merlin, Morgan, Mordred, Excalibur or the Grail, and in which Lancelot and Guinevere live Happily Ever After, is heresy. Everyone involved should be burned on the stake.
That’s a good site, one for the permanent bookmarks. Firearms mistakes are a pet peeve of mine so I frequently check the Movie Mishaps at recguns.com The most common mistakes are committed by the Foley artists adding cocking noises to pistols that can’t be cocked such as Glocks and the “chunk-chunk” sound of a pump action shotgun to all shotguns. The Internet Movie Database also has a goofs section in the database.
I haven’t seen the movie in the OP, but I have seen a few big waterfalls in england, well Wales to be exact but there are clains that some of the Arthurian legends took place in parts of Wales.
At least two of the waterfalls are big enough to walk/ride through/under although there isn’t a cave behind etc.
The Film Excalibur was made in Ireland and I think they used a big waterfall in it.
Seen Armageddon? I’m sure you realize that if they’d actually waited as long as they did before setting off the bombs, Earth would have been wasted anyway? If I recall, they’d have to have burrowed much deeper, and traveled to at least past the moon to have a chance at diverting the asteroid.
As a pilot, I tend to notice aviation-related stuff. For example in Always when Richard Dreyfuss is out of fuel at the beginning of the movie, his altimeter is unwinding steadily to zero. Except the altimeter reads the altitude above mean sea level (MSL), not above ground level (AGL). I liked Always, but very few pilots run out of fuel; and pilots I know think a person who runs out of fuel in flight is stup… foolish.
Also in that movie, and many other movies, radios are used like telephones. You don’t transmit and receive at the same time, so “cutting someone off” while you’re talking to him just doesn’t happen. You’ll only miss what he said, and he won’t hear you at all. (Of course, other people can “step on” a transmission, but you all know that’s not what I’m talking about.)
Then there are things that are just plane stupid! Like in the aweful re-make of Godzilla a couple of years ago, they had attack helicopters flying through the concrete canyons of NYC. Wouldn’t it have made more sense if they had flown above the buildings? It would have made it a lot easier to find the pseudo-Godzilla.
I realize I’m too much of a nitpicker because the part of Always that sticks in my craw is John Goodman referring to the A-26s as B-26s. Most folks probably couldn’t tell them apart side by side so I should lighten up maybe. Perhaps Dreyfuss’ bonehead, death with stunt was in character but if he was out of fuel he sure as hell wouldn’t have had any retardent left. I knew someone who engineedred the bombing systems on those and they normally can only dump the entire load at once.
I’ve always enjoyed the NF-104 scene in The Right Stuff even though it was a misrepresentation of what actually happened to Chuck Yeager. It would have taken too long to explain what actually caused the spin but for the average audianc member hearing the engine stop is good enough.
There are good aviation movies like The Great Waldo Pepper where they tried to do a good job but those are few and far between.
I watch license plates in every movie, just to make sure the movie makers have the patterns down correctly. In Bonfire of the Vanities they got it right: New York plates have three letters, two numbers and one letter, and in that order. There are exceptions, but this was right in step with the patterns the plates follow.
Groundhog Day is different, though. Bill Murray’s car has a Pennsylvania plate which has the letter Q in it. Standard-issue Pennsylvania plates do not use the letters I, Q or O (except for buses, whose plates begin OB. Granted, you can request to have any letter put on your plate on a personalized plate, but Murray’s plate was not supposed to be a personalized one in the movie. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is another movie that messes around with the license plates. Gilbert’s truck has the Iowa sesquecentennial plates on it, but the pattern is all messed up on those, I remember.
I’ve seen a number of license plates in movies and on TV that break their states’ rules for alphanumeric patterns. I’ve always wondered whether this is intentional or not. It seems that some states might have laws forbidding the use of an actual license plate or even a potential license plate number in a movie or TV show. On the other hand, it could depend on a studio’s individual policy. Or maybe it’s just laziness. After all, I’ve never seen a California plate with an invalid sequence on it. Does anyone have any idea?
My pet peeve in movies is when a single cable breaks in an elevator sending it plunging dramatically down the shaft.
The whole POINT of the Otis elevator (demonstrated in 1876) is that if the cable is cut it doesn’t fall. When the tension in the cable disappears, it causes brakes to deploy against the side of the shaft.
They had been lifting things with elevators for centuries beforehand, usually in mines. But they didn’t want to use them for the general public because of the disastrous consequences of a cable failure. Otis changed that.
The one I hated was in 2010 (the sequel to 2001). During a discussion in the multinational spaceship that goes to find out what happened to HAL and the gang, the people are sitting in the spun up gravity section of the spaceship discussing how to link their ship to “Discovery” in order to outrun the impending blast.
There, among the cups of coffee and paper on desktops and all of this stuff neatly pinned by gravity, one of the cast members “floats” a weightless pen in midair to demonstrate how the ship will link up. Gag me with some Tang will you. What a desecration of all that 2001 stood for in terms of accuracy.
