I was trying to come up with a well worded thread title. Pretty sure I failed.
What I mean is, what moments take you right out of the movie. I don’t mean continuity errors. Sure seeing a Roman Senator with a digital watch or an Apostle with a cellphone will destroy your suspension of disbelief. I am not talking about geographical errors. I’m not talking about mistakes at all. I am talking about things purposely put in the movie that pull you out the way a continuity error would.
My examples: Full Metal Jacket. After the Tet offensive begins Jokers PAO group is sitting around the table. The LT tells Joker that he was sending him into the field during the fighting. He tells him “Captain January will need all his people”. The way he said it made me think that there was some deeper meaning to this. I thought there was a Captain January in Marine lore that I was unaware of, maybe a lite version of Chesty Puller. I saw the movie several times before I looked deeper into it and found that Captain January was a major character in the movie that Kubrick left on the cutting room floor. The line I found mysterious was totally unimportant.
Godfather 2. When I first watched it I was confused. Who was this Frankie Pentangeli? Why is he now the head of the New York family? If he was so important why wasn’t he in the first movie? The answers are obvious when you find out that Richard Castellano wanted more money than Coppola wanted to give him to play Clemenza again. Now when I watch it all I can think of is how much better it would be with Clemenza. The movie is structured to show Vito meeting Clemenza in the past and then to show Clemenza and Michael. Frankie says lines that were obviously meant for Clemenza. Clemenza is the one in the first movie that is interested in ancient Rome not Pentangeli. For me it lessens the impact of a great movie.
In the movie Heat, how did Wayngro wind up back on the tail of Neil’s crew? And, if they were on the lookout for “heat,” how did they NOT spot Wayngro sniffing up their backtrail? Nate was “plugged in” and should have had something to give Neil and his crew wrt Van Zant and Wayngro.
Now the DVD extras explains this (edited for time), but still, it is a jarring moment in the movie.
*The Umbrellas of Cherbourg *is unquestionably one of the most beautiful, lush, romantic, and heart-breaking movies ever made. In one key scene, Catherine Deneuve, at her most beautiful, is in her gorgeous apartment singing a wistful love song and in the middle of it she takes out a cigarette, lights it, and spends the rest of the time alternating between singing and puffing on the cigarette. A total mood breaker. It took me completely out of the movie; I ignored what she was singing and tried to figure out what the director had been thinking!
Product placement always does it for me when it’s gratuitous. I’ve mentioned this particular movie before, so I’ll just link to my previous post on the scene in question.
For me, it’s very specific words that throw me off.
In the remake of I Spy, Owen Wilson said the bad guys could steal an invisible jet and put a “Weapon of Mass Destruction” on it. Invisible jet, I could handle. The WMD seemed added in because we were in Iraq at the time.
In Phantom Menace, Naboo person saying “We’re a Democracy”. It just seemed so shoehorned; like it was too specific a term for a galaxy far, far away.
I was watching Falling Down the other day, and I was struck by a scene in the police headquarters. The main character (Robert Duvall) is a police office on his final day before retirement, and as part of good-natured ribbing, one of his fellow officers says something to the effect of, “Yeah, be careful…you don’t want to be like Johnson…sucker was on his last day and got killed on a routine call!” and then all of the other officers are cracking up and high-fiving each other and stuff. It just struck me as something that would never be joked about by cops under any circumstances.
That reminded me of another one, in Attack of the Clones:
“I’m Anakin Skywalker.”
“Owen Lars. This is my girlfriend, Beru.”
Girlfriend? Why would they bother with that? Completely threw me.
“This is my girlfriend, Beru. Well, actually she’s more than my girlfriend. We live together, and I gave her a promise ring, so I guess you could say we’re ‘engaged to be engaged.’ We’re taking it slow, you know? I mean, there aren’t too many humans out here, but this is a big decision, and we don’t want to rush it. We met through a mutual Rodian acquaintance at a Pod Racing after-party, but we lost touch until we ran into each other in Tasche Station. Funny story…”
I considered starting a thread on this, what destroys my suspension of disbelief is obvious homages or pop-culture references. I realise I’m going out on a limb here but personally I hate it, just tell your own story Mr/s Director! Stop copying/referencing others!
Anachronisms sometimes jar me in a flick. In The Patriot, Mel Gibsons character is a southern plantation owner who just happens to hate slavery. He only employs free black men. Ah come on! He would totally have been a slave owner. I realize that it undercuts the “All men are created equal” thing, but that’s the reality of the revolution. Mel should have manned up and pointed it out. Or at least left out the pointed reference to being abolitionist in mien.
In the begining of U-571, one guy asks, “what’s the op?” That sounds like what a 1990s sailor would ask, not a 1940s one.
Neil finds out how Waingro sold them to Van Zant (who had them blown to MCU by Hugh Benny, who was a CI for some nameless LAPD detective) when he goes to Trejo’s house on stilts and finds Trejo’s wife dead (beaten and raped, as indicated on the deleted scene) and Trejo left for dead, who then explains that Waingro and Van Zant’s people had him set up. Waingro was basically off the radar; he was your basic low level scumbag, and his connection with this criminal underworld of fences and crews was transient at best. The only way McCauley’s crew knew that the MCU was onto them was because of the screwup at the platinum heist; McCauley heard the noise, saw the vans, and made everyone walk; if not for that, they would have gone down at that point.
The thing that bugs me in Heat is the entirely extraneous scene and followup that establishes Waingro as a serial killer. It has no point in terms of plot development except to establish that Waingro is a real colostomy bag, and that Hanna is a good guy even if he is obsessed with his job to a degree bordering sociopathy. It seems like about eight minutes of screen time that could totally be cut in favor of developing some of Hanna’s crew of detectives or giving more screen time to McCauley, Hanna, and Shiherlis and their respective relationships with women. Frankly, despite the running time, I think the whole thing would play out better as a miniseries of 5-6 hours; Mann weaves a rich thematic tapestry, and then leaves a bunch of threads hanging.
One mistake that bugs me is in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; they replay the gag where a swordsman threatens him and he draws a gun, only he has no gun this time. Good yucks all around, except (for reasons never really explained) Temple of Doom occurs two years prior to Raiders of the Lost Ark. One would think that Professor Jones wouldn’t have such a dismissive opinion about the Ark’s alleged powers (“Lighting. Fire. Power of God or something.”) given what he witnessed with the Sankara stones and the Thuggee cult. Also, whiskey tango did Jones do with Short Round? Stick him in an orphanage somewhere? Sell him to a sex cult? Give him two bits and tell him to shove off?
The Paris flashback scenes in Casablanca. Seeing Rick so stupidly happy is way too jarring. The “We’ll always have Paris” line tells us all we need to know about their brief, doomed love affair.
This is mostly because I personally am such a dork. In Batman Begins, young Gus Lewis is perfectly fine as the child Bruce Wayne, but he didn’t look right. Which is to say, he didn’t look *exactly *like former child actor Christian Bale (although darn close in those two pics). I kept thinking, jeez, why didn’t they get that kid from Empire of the - oh, right.
Hope you don’t mind that this is not a movie, but the on the last episode of House, the baby used for new mother Cuddy was so obviously fake it was ridiculous. At my place, we were so taken out of the moment that we almost didn’t recover enough to get to the end / resolution.
This is why directors have to be very prudent with their use of cameos. Anytime a big name actor makes a sudden, unexpected appearance in a film, the audience’s first reaction is “Hey look, it’s [insert famous actor’s name here]” which translates to suspension of disbelief, momentarily shattered. (Consider *Sean Connery’s *cameo at the end of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves as an example.)
Anyway, this is why I simply could not watch Bobby. It was like, jeez how many favors of famous actors did Emilio Estevez call in just to designate them with insignificant roles in a film that fails on any number of levels. Any attempt to follow a meandering story line completely falls apart when you’re more curious to see which big name actor is going to come from behind the door next.
Unless it’s done very well (and actually, you know, contributes to the plot), most nude scenes take me out of the picture, because they’re all just fanservice. I don’t see many movies, so coming up with examples is hard, but… Forgetting Sara Marshall, for instance, or the newer remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. Both had just a few seconds of nudity for no real reason other than “Look! He/she’s naked!”
When the sound/foley guys use the same damn sound effects we’ve all heard for forty years. The most famous is the “Wilhelm Scream” but there are others. The generic “childrens’ laughter” track is heard all over the place, especially toy commercials. The “police background radio chatter” (made most famous by Sim City) is VERY annoying one you notice it, especially in Law and Order (it’s literally in every scene that takes place within any vicinity of a cop car.)
There are others, but those are the big three. Honestly, someone should just take a coupld months and make a whole new batch of sound effects.
Whenever I see a 555 phone number, it jars me back to reality. I wish they would be more subtle in anonymizing phone numbers, for example, only letting us see a few digits being dialed, or strategically placing props to hide some of the digits.
The one that’s caught me recently was a young woman with an obvious boob job, in a period piece before boob jobs existed. Not helped at all that she was supposed to be sometime in the 1930s and the director seemed to be trained at the ample cleavage of her low cut blouse.