I was watching the old 1966 film The Naked Prey, with Cornel Wilde running naked through the wilds of Africa to escape the pursuing tribesmen intent on hunting him down and killing him. A fun (and very dated) film that was shot in Africa, with lots of fuzzy wildlife documentary film spliced in to give it flavor, and starring a lot of local tribes people. From the look of the weapons and the conversation about slave trade, the time period is clearly the 1800s.
Anyway, in one scene our desperate hero is running half naked and starving across an open area with the pursuers somewhere behind, supposedly in the row of trees far behind him. Suddenly, I glimpsed something white moving behind the trees from left to right. It kept flashing on and off, but at different locations. I backed up to where it started, and noted that it was moving at constant velocity as it appeared and disappeared, moving from left to right. Holy crap, it’s a motorized vehicle on the road behind the trees! I guess the editors either missed it, or assumed nobody would see it.
What glaring errors or anachronisms have you noticed on review?
I haven’t seen this since the big screen, but it was pretty freakin’ sloppy in its editing. I recall one scene where Shia LaBeefcake is driving his car in a port-side city. Cut and he’s climbing some hills. Cut and he’s almost to the top of the mountain. Cut and he’s in some woods somewhere.
Then there was the scene where they went to the Smithsonian in downtown DC and walked out of the building to step into an airplane graveyard with mountains in the background.
And the battle around the Pyramids, the one that essentially wiped Cairo off the map.
I suppose it depends on how it actually looks on the screen, but to me that sounds like it could be effective editing to convey ‘Shia drives a really really long time and covers a lot of ground, but we’re not going to waste time with the whole trip because it’s not that important.’
Anaconda has a scene where a boat is backing away from a waterfall during an escape - if you look closely at the background, you can tell that they just reversed the film, as the waterfall is flowing upwards.
The Expendables, which had the potential to be a great action flick in the vein of such '80s classics as Commando and Rambo: First Blood Part 2. But the editing was so rapid-fire, and the overall look of the film so dingy, that in the action scenes it was hard to tell what was going on, or even who was fighting who.
Man, those are too funny. And here I was proud of myself for spotting the moving vehicle. I also had to laugh at the shots of cheetahs emitting lion roars. Anybody who is even remotely familiar with these animals knows what a lion sounds like.
Back in 1972 when I visited my now wife in Williamsburg VA, she took me to see “Story of a Patriot” in the visitor’s center. The last shot, of the main street of 1775 Colonial Williamsburg, clearly showed a CW bus turning into the scene. Maybe they left it in to make sure the William and Mary students kept coming to fill the auditorium.
In IQ Walter Matthau as Einstein is taken on a motorcycle ride around Palmer Square, chock full of present day stores. Odd because they went to great expense to take over a gas station in Hopewell and redo it as a vintage 1955 one.
My wife lived in San Francisco for about 25 years. When we watched Bullitt, she was amused by the car chase scene, which kept changing from one side of the city to another in a moment’s time. And then, of course, there’s the VW bug that keeps popping up.
Inaccurate geography is fairly common because a movie is concerned with what looks good, not if they’re following an actual map. It’s harmless. Sticking with the actual city layout would be dull.
I did get a kick when in the Robert Downey Sherlock Holmes, they went from the House of Parliament to the Tower Bridge in 30 seconds; the two landmarks are at least two miles apart.
In Moulin Rouge, during the Roxanne number… there’s one point where, for about a full second, you can full-on see a second camera, complete with crew around it, in the shot. It’s a medium shot, and you can’t see the camera until several seconds into the shot, by which point your attention is fully focused on the couple dancing, who are in the left hand side of the screen. The camera and crew are on the right hand of the screen.
I’m sure the editor saw it, but figured no one would notice, since, like I said, the eye should naturally be on the dancers on the other side of the screen. I’d seen the film several times before I’d noticed it.*
You can see it in the following clip, although it’s a bit difficult to see, because of the low resolution. It’s VERY clear when you watch it on dvd. In this clip, at the 1:26 mark, as the guy lifts the woman up in the air, keep your eye on the right side of the screen.
*Yes, I’ve seen Moulin Rouge several times. I like it. Shut up.
When the airplane with Orlando Bloom lands, it’s supposed to be Louisville International Airport. Elizabethtown is due south from there, straight down I65, which runs right by the airport. The landmarks Bloom passes in his car indicate that he is travelling north rather than south. At one point, he passes Slugger Field, the baseball field for the minor league affiliates of the Cincinnati Reds. As he passes it, it’s on his right. That means that, once he hit downtown Louisville (again, the opposite direction that he needs to go), he took the ramp onto I64 east, and is now heading towards Lexington.
I know the rationale for why Cameron Crowe did it. He used some of the Louisville locales to help build the illusion of being in KY. But, to someone who lives in that area, it drives me up the friggin’ wall!
In X-Men 3, during the attack on the island at the end of the film, it is midday one moment, and then dark the next. Presumably one of Magnetos mutants has the ability to make time jump by 12 hours/
Not only that, but during the chase one of the cars (it’s been a while so I don’t remember if it was Bullitt’s Mustang or the Charger) loses about six hubcaps.
My contribution is Dr. Strangelove. I thought that the story was largely supposed to be taking place late at night or in the early morning hours, yet many of the outdoor scenes appear to have filmed in broad daylight. Considering that Kubrick was such a perfectionist, I have to believe this must have been intentional and not an “editing problem” but it seems like a glaringly obvious error.
There’s a light blue car, maybe a LeMans, that keeps reappearing as well. Plus, the dents in both cars are incongruous with the chase sequence.
Bit of trivia; the original car(s) to be chased were Ford Galaxies but they couldn’t stand up to the San Fran hill jumps so two 440 Chargers were bought outright from a Glendale dealer and used, then scrapped post production. The wide open V8 you hear in the soundtrack isn’t from a Mustang but instead comes from a GT40.
No, I mean it makes perfect sense that they circled around and drove through that same intersection multiple times from different angles to make it look good.
No point being in a chase if it doesn’t look good.
And that’s not even bringing up the way Bond flipped the car on both sides going through the narrow alley at the end. Then drove through that same damned intersection afterwards.
Hmm, Kubrick’s handheld camera work has always seemed to me to be lit as if it were very early morning, which would make sense considering that it would take at least a few hours to get the Army read to invade the base. The scenes over Russia were in daylight, but that was a lot of timezones away, and I’m not sure which end of Russia they were attacking. I’ve always thought it was the East, but I’m not sure why.
In any case, overly lit night scenes are common for obvious reasons.
