I was watching a bit of the 1968 Frank Sinatra pic Lady in Cement this weekend just to see what part Welch played. There is a scene in the cop friend’s backyard where Sinatra and a boy play catch with a baseball.
Except there’s no baseball. You watch three or four volleys were both Sinatra and the boy are pretending to throw and catch a baseball, including the kid smacking his glove on the “catch.”
Now, I easily caught this on my television, so imagine how much more obvious it would be on the big screen. I was, oddly enough, genuinely insulted that the director and actors “went cheap” on this, thinking the public wouldn’t notice. This wasn’t a continuity mistake or a less-than-convincing fist fight - this was a conscious decision to avoid a couple of extra takes that using an actual ball might have required (I can think of no other reason). And this is a movie, for Pete’s sake, not a daily soap opera.
Are there movies where you noticed some cheap, intentional shortcut that insulted you?
ALSO RAN: not exactly the same offense, but also watched a bit of Irma La Douce (1963, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Lemmon) and was astounded that someone would make a movie with “French” characters set in France where no one - NO ONE - spoke with even an attempt at a French accent.
Lots of films do this. In Enemy At The Gate the Russians all have British accents. It depends on what sort of ‘authenticity’ you want. They are, after all, actually speaking in English no matter what.
Not to completely hijack this, but yeah, that’s always bugged me too. Old movies where Germans would speak English to each other: with a fake German accent!
But there would be no point in doing that since every character in the movie is French. You usually only have a French character who speaks English with a French accent if most of the other characters are English speakers (e.g., “Why do you think I have this outrageous accent you silly king?”)
In Mel Brooks’ remake of To Be or Not to Be, most of the characters were Polish so the dialogue was in Polish during the first few minutes. That was quickly abandoned however.
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank is a terrible movie, which is why it ended up on Mystery Science Theater. But it’s still got the worst cheat I can think of, which goes like this:
The hero, Aram Fingal, is trapped in a computer simulation and if he doesn’t get out soon, he dies or some other bad thing happens. But he’s been screwing with the programming, so he world-running corporation that maintains the system is mad at him. Eventually they change the access codes, so he can’t mess with the programming anymore. So they’re probably going to leave him in there for a few more hours, at which point, he dies.
I don’t know if this is how it goes in the original story, but clearly, the writers wrote themselves into a corner and had no idea what to do. There is really no way for him to figure out the code he needs. We have no idea how long it is or anything, but his time is short and he can’t just try every combination. So what follows is a line like this:
“Wait a minute, why don’t I just reverse the access code! [Bad guy] probably thought I’d never try something so simple!”
It works, things happen, movie sucks more, then ends. You can’t expect much from a movie this bad, it’s just the obviousness of the cop-out that makes it memorable. The only reason the hero was able to save himself is that the bad guy was so hopelessly lazy that he only reversed his access code instead of making up a new one, and the only reason he did something that stupid is the writers needed him to do it.
I probably shouldn’t have thrown in the Irma La Douce comment, as I sidetracked my own OP. I think in Hunt for Red October some of the actors made an attempt at some sort of accent…an accent other than Scottish, at least.
But as far as cheating, I’m thinking more along the lines of, say, someone “fake dialing” a phone (stabbing the air) rather than taking the extra effort to actually push buttons. I haven’t seen it in a movie, but to me that’s the level of in-your-face insult that I felt with Lady in Cement.
It isn’t what you are looking for, but the description of the game of catch reminded me of a scene from the Cat’s Meow. Two young ladies are playing ping-pong on a yacht, and there is a maid standing behind each one retrieving balls.
Why are the maids in the scene?(According to the director on the commentary) Because the two actresses were horrible at ping-pong, and there was a lot of dialogue in the scene, which got interrupted/obscured when they had to chase the balls themselves. So two maids were brought in, and the scene worked much better.
In the comedy Wet Hot American Summer some kids need to be saved from dangerous rapids. A counselor runs towards them and then the film cuts to another counselor on shore supposedly watching him and remarking at what an amazing rescue is taking place. It’s a funny movie.
In Mission Impossible III, the heroes remark about how some plot device needs to be stolen from a skyscraper and that it’s more well guarded than the NOC list they stole in the first Mission Impossible. As they were having that discussion I was wondering how they planned to top that scene. And then they pulled a Wet Hot American Summer. Tom cruise enters the building. Ving Rhames looks at a computer and remarks that amazing shit must be going down and then Tom crashes through a window, plot device in hand.
In Super Troopers, there’s a bit where Farva (Kevin Heffernan) types a licence plate number into a computer to do a background check. He’s clearly not even trying to move his fingers in a realistic manner. On the DVD commentary, when Heffernan and director Jay Chandrasekhar watch that scene, Chandrasekhar asks: “Would it have killed you to take a typing lesson?”
Not sure if this is a shortcut, but in terms of accents…Memoirs of a Geisha. It would be one thing if you had them speak in Japanese with subtitles. Or if you had them speak regular unaccented English. But broken, heavily accented English? It was just offensive to my sensibilties.
Poker Alice, a TV movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and George Hamilton.
One scene takes place at night, in a room lit by an oil lamp. At the end of the scene, George Hamilton’s character puts out the light and they cut to the next scene.
Now, oil lamps are a fire hazard, so I can see why the prop department would want to use an electric light instead. They got one that looked just like an old kerosene lantern. The wick-adjustment knob operated a dimmer switch, so it would even act sort of like the real thing. But Hamilton did not even attempt to mime blowing out a flame. He simply turned the knob all the way down.
Since most of the principles were not American and most did not work in American cinema I don’t think it was a shortcut. Or fake. In fact IIRC the main actors were Chinese so they couldn’t do it in Japanese let alone unaccented English.
According to the people at IMDb, he’s only turned off the monitor, and may have even saved his work between shots. I haven’t seen the movie in ages, so I don’t know.
However I was very amused by another idea in that section: the movie was set in Oregon because the filmmakers picked up on the mentions of Portland in the story - and didn’t realize that the original, like most of King’s work, is set in Maine.
And that’s the real mistake in the scene: that he shuts off the monitor, instead of the computer itself, and so doesn’t deliberatly erase the story he’s just written. Which was the entire point of that scene, if not the entire movie.
About Geisha–I guess that makes sense, if the actors themselves didn’t speak English as their first language. Still, kind of grates on me, but whatever.
I saw a TV adaptation of David Copperfield long ago that had one of those shortcuts. One of the best chapters of the book involves a storm and a shipwreck and daring rescue and all kinds of cool action like that that would be difficult to stage on a shoestring budget. So the TV version had DC trip over a rock and fall, hitting his head, knocking him unconcious. The next scene has him coming to as the other characters describe all the excitement he just missed.
