Okay, in the grand scheme of things, it’s minor, but it annoyed me. Part of Patriot Games was filmed in Annapolis. (I got to see Harrison Ford in person…drool) Remeber that scene in the movie where his wife and kid get shot, and he drives out of Annapolis to meet them? Couple of issues:
One, the highway his wife was on was CLEARLY not in Maryland. There are no skyscrapers on Route 50. There are also no &^@#$( PALM TREES in Maryland.
Two, the route he “takes” to get out of Annapolis is impossible. In order to get from the Academy to the highway, you go down one road, then cut over. He goes into the heart of Annapolis, then back out. I admit it makes a better visual, but still…it annoyed the HELL out of me.
Okay, in the grand scheme of things, it’s minor, but it annoyed me. Part of Patriot Games was filmed in Annapolis. (I got to see Harrison Ford in person…drool) Remeber that scene in the movie where his wife and kid get shot, and he drives out of Annapolis to meet them? Couple of issues:
One, the highway his wife was on was CLEARLY not in Maryland. There are no skyscrapers on Route 50. There are also no &^@#$( PALM TREES in Maryland.
Two, the route he “takes” to get out of Annapolis is impossible. In order to get from the Academy to the highway, you go down one road, then cut over. He goes into the heart of Annapolis, then back out. I admit it makes a better visual, but still…it annoyed the HELL out of me.
I hate it when military uniforms are done wrong. This is SOOOO easy to get right, and there never seems to be a logical reason for things to be wrong… well, except when the women are showing cleavage.
I also want to scream when women in uniform are shown with flowing locks tumbling over their shoulders. I don’t recall a change in the reg that the hair may touch but not fall below the collar.
As if military bases are so lax that people can go flying any ol’ time they want! Yeager’s NF-104 flight was a test flight, not a joy-ride. (BTW: I used to work in Ridley Mission Control Center, and an NF-104 is on a pedastal at the Test Pilot School.)
Speaking of The Right Stuff, I have a particular gripe about a piece of editing. While Yeager is flying, Glennis is leaning on a truck. She looks down as if in reaction to Chuck’s (assumed) crash. It was obvious that this was a reaction shot, but the editor flubbed it.
Memphis Belle. Well, it was fairly accurate. There was indeed a B-17 flying out of England in WWII that was called the “Memphis Belle”. But the rest of the movie? Please!
But you mentioned uniforms. Did you notice the officers’ caps – accurate reproductions of which they could have bought off the shelf at Avirex/The Cockpit – were of the British pattern?
And there’s one extra who drives me nuts. They’re waiting for the Belle to come in. Everyone is worried. There, on the tower, a couple of guys are waiting. (I don’t remember who. Could’ve been Lithgow, one of 'em.) There’s an extra standing in the near background. Dressed as an officer, with Ray Bans on. I don’t know where they dug this guy up, but he’s a rotten actor. He needed to react to the returning aircraft. He was so unbelievable, I laugh at the scene every time I see it.
It still irritates me when Batman records the Joker (or the Penquin, maybe) on a CD and then when playing it back, “scratches” the CD as if it was a record. I mean scratchin’ in terms of rapping, not physically creating a scratch mark on it. A CD would just plain skip and not play anything, it wouldn’t like repeat and distort and shit like that.
I mentioned this in another thread, and the movie that springs to mind is “Cloak and Dagger”, but whenever anyone had a floppy disk in the 80’s, it would always work in any machine,and you could put it in a blender and with magnetic filings and it would still never crash, and the best way to carry it was by grabbing that little exposed hole with your grubby fingers.
And this isn’t a movie, but in the musical “Rent” there were two discepancies that irritated me so much I couldn’t stand it:
The heroin addict was bouncy, energetic, and never vomited. She did a bang-up number right after shooting up. Only heroin addicts I’ve ever seen can’t stand or say their name after doin’ the dope, much less do gymnastics in latex pants.
The lead guy was a filmmaker who carried what appeared to be a windup film (not video) camera, but then at one point it “ran out of juice” so he had to “stop taping”. Oh, so it’s supposed to be a video camera? But at the end of the play, they show the film he made, which is on a projector and is actually FILM film. Which is all the more interesting since they’re broke though the whole thing but he somehow manages to shoot color film constantly, which if my film school memory permits costs several dollars per second of shooting time, even if you don’t develop it.
The entire premise of Double Jeopardy starring Ashley Judd and Tommy Lee Jones. Ashley most certainly can be tried for killing her husband for real even if she’s been falsely imprisoned once. It would be a separate crime.
If I broke into your house on Aud 15th and was tried for it, I cannot then break into your house again 5 years later and say, “You can’t try me, I was already tried for breaking into the house once before!”
That’s why they say you are on trial for the crime and on which date the crime was committed. You do the same crime to the same person on a different date, it’s a diffeent crime and you will be prosecuted for it.
Y’ever see Die Hard II? Notice how Bruce Willis rides his snowmobile across the fields outside of Dulles Airport in Washington, DC? If you ever fly into Dulles, have a look around and tell me how much open space there is near that airport. To give me your report, call me on one of the Pacific Bell pay phones that Willis used there.
Also, check out Real Genius some time. Notice toward the end when a high-ranking U.S. Air Force officer enters the room and an underling bellows, “Attention! Superior officer in the room!” This is not part of Air Force protocol.
There’ve been several movies about Titanic. Which one are you referring to?
Anyway, of course the rear-most smokestack worked. It wasn’t part of the power plant like the other three stacks, but all the galley ovens and the ventilation systems exhausted through the last stack. You wouldn’t see smoke coming out of it, but in which movie was that error committed?
Again, it would be helpful if you referred to a specific movie. In the Tarzan novels it was established that Tarzan shaved with a big hunting knife he found among his parents’ effects. I’d be surprised if this wasn’t explicitly explained in any of the movies.
Crunchy, are you sure about this? Your analogy doesn’t hold, as I’m fairly sure I can murder someone once and only once, but I can break into a house multiple times. However, I’m no legal eagle, and not up on this.
Most of the stuff dealing with Gen. Yeager was badly “hollywooded.” They didn’t pick him the day before the supersonic X-1 flight in a damn bar. Cripes, why didn’t they just recruit a test pilot at Schwab’s drugstore soda fountain, sitting next to Lana Turner? I did get a kick out of Yeager’s cameo in the bar as Fred.
Bad editing there. It was leftover from the scene where Chuck and Glennis earlier visit the burned out remains of Pancho’s.
I almost had to unprogram TNT from my television so I wouldn’t accidentally tune into friggin’ Top Gun. No shortage of things to piss me off about that movie. A bimbo astrophysicist teaching ACM? Were they worried about planes getting sucked into black holes or flying too close to a supernova? A classroom setup in the middle of of the ^%$# floor in hangar 2 at Miramar?
The small satisfaction I got was knowing that Maverick would have been busted for riding his motorcycle on the road parallel to the runway. The only motor vehicles allowed were base security but I rode my bicycle there frequently.
The all-time recent champ for movie screwups has got to be “Die Hard 2”. Oh, where to begin…
[ul]
[li]The Airport was supposed to be Washington Dulles, but the phones all had “Pacific Bell” logos.[/li][li]Hercules aircraft don’t have ejection seats[/li][li]The whole premise is based on the notion that the terrorists will control the ILS to the airport. This mission was planned weeks in advance, when they had no idea what the weather would be like that day.[/li][li]Jumping off the wing of a 747 about to rotate for takeoff will kill you.[/li][li]There are no manhole covers in the middle of a runway[/li][li]An important plot point was that no one could communicate with the circling aircraft because the terrorists control the tower. What about all the airplanes parked on the ground with perfectly good radios in them?[/li][li]You can’t ‘lower’ an ILS and make an airplane fly into the ground.[/li][li]The security procedures around the airport were a joke.[/li][li]Another important plot point was that the airplanes were trapped because the weather was bad and the terrorists wouldn’t let them land. Guess what? There are at least a dozen airports within IFR reserve range of Washington Dulles. Hell, most big jets have enough reserve to fly to Florida from Washington.[/li][li]In one scene a reporter looks up and says, “I can see the airplanes circling overhead”. These are the same airplanes that can’t land because of a heavy snowstorm that has the visibility down to zero. Hello?[/li][/ul]
I’m sure I’m forgetting a bunch of things. The movie was just an unending sceries of ridiculous set-ups, continuity errors, and bad fact-checking. Coupled with a total disdain for the intelligence of the audience.
I was always tickled with one of the chase scenes in No Way Out, where Kevin Costner dives into a nonexistent Metro stop in Georgetown, hops a Boston train, and emerges in the Old Post Office.
The subtitle commentary on the DVD of The Abyss tells of a number of inaccuracies. Examples: at the extreme depth and pressure at which most of the movie takes place, lotsa helium is used to create a stable, high-pressure atmosphere, and as a result the crew members’ voices would be very Mickey Mouse-ish. But, that would have made the movie kinda goofy. Well, goofier than it turned out, anyway…
Ed Harris’s dive at the end of the movie is around 2 miles deeper than any diver has ever gone. All together now: “Yah, right!”
Not to mention that the real oxygen-rich liquid solution isn’t actually pink, as it is in the movie; they just dyed it to make it more visible.
In The Cell the main character (can’t remember her name) talks to the cop about the boy, and she says he has schizophrenia. A few seconds later she refers to the virus reaching his brain. Schizophrenia is a chemical imbalance, not a virus.
I’ve heard that Rumble in the Bronx contains to other Canadianisms: someone drinks PC pop, and a bus says issue de secours on the back.
If you want to nitpick tv shows as well as movies, commercials, books, etc, try http://www.nitcentral.com.
According to the disc, neither. Harris’s helmet was filled with pink water, and he just held his breath for the duration of the shot. They toyed around with a double-walled glass thingy with pink liquid between the layers, but it didn’t look right. During the diving scenes, they could get away with just a pink-tinged visor.
Problem is, breathing that oxygen-rich fluid strips your lungs of their protective mucus coating, and you have to go on wicked antibiotics for a while or catch pneumonia after breathing it. They didn’t want to do that to Ed. The rats received antibiotic shots, and were just fine.
I saw the X-Files movie in the theatre at Grapevine (half hour from Dallas) and the entire audience groaned when the scene came up that is supposed to be near Dallas. You see the Dallas skyline in the distance and the scene is a desert trailor park. Sorry guys, try heading west a few hundred miles if you want a desert.
I saw Gladiator for the first time on-campus this weekend. I thought it was pretty neat at the beginning to see the cavalry on their war horses without stirrups. And then later noticed that the horse Maximus wound up on in the chariot battle scence had them. Oh, well.
And while not an inaccuracy, I got a kick out of watching the “dead” Marcus Aurelius (sp?) breathing in the background in the post-murder scene.
(and yeah, there are a lot of historical inaccuracies, but we all know it was fictionalized anyway.)
I had hopes of doing a Die Hard II rundown when I opened this thread, but Sam beat me to it. So I’ll just point out that the whole two-way radio thing that Johnny LA mentioned drives me crazy whenever I watch the first Die Hard.
I did get a kick out of Yeager’s cameo in the bar as Fred.