Peter Stormare as Gunnery Sgt. Hjelmstad in Windtalkers. I expect a John Wayne type in that role, a tough, vulgar Amurrrican, not someone struggling to hide his accent. Every scene with him just doesn’t work very well.
ETA: Not to mention every scene with Nic Cage shooting the enemy where his weapon seems to have a 100 round clip. Reload already!
Any appearance by Chris Elliot pretending to be an actor. I loved him on the original Letterman show, but he is the very definition of a one-trick-pony! Any role he’s ever been in, all I see is The Regulator Guy or The Fugitive Guy or The Guy Under the Seats. That is, all I see is, Chris Elliot, the C-list celebrity/comic trying to be funny by acting ridiculously over the top.
Yeah…I love Blade:Trinity (who doesn’t love a movie with a fit, often shirtless Ryan Reynolds?) but the ipod scene, ugh.
The thing that most often pulls me out of movies is when the characters fail to take what seems to me the most obvious course of action. Take End Of Days for example. People are trying to kill the girl, so she doesn’t end up having Satan’s baby as a prophecy foretold. You know the best solution to that? a hysterectomy. Did I expect them to do that? No. But since it’s so blindingly obvious, I thought at least one of the characters should suggest it, and they could explain why it wouldn’t work - like Satan would just regrow the organ or something…
Any time a character in a movie is shown being hanged (hung?), I get distracted wondering what kind of precautions were taken to keep the actor from getting hanged for real, and then I’m out of the moment.
The first time that I saw Casablanca was on an abandoned TV set in the 1970s. I had to slap it around a little to get a picture. The late movie on Saturday nights was hosted by our local weatherman, nonother than Pat Sajak. He billed himself simply as “Your Announcer.” The version that I saw back then completely left out the Paris scenes and I didn’t know any better until I had a chance to see it again at a showing at Vanderbilt.
Strange now to think how we could just see movies on demand.
In the movie Matchstick Men, there’s a scene in a parking lot where you can see part of a car in the lot. The only car I know of with the particular characteristics you can see on the car is exceedingly rare. Like only five were ever built, and I don’t know if any were ever shipped to the States. So I’m constantly wondering what that car could be and why it’s in the shot.
Ha! The opposite for me. I didn’t bat an eye with Jason Segel’s scene, but kept thinking “why was Kristen Bell having sex with her bikini on? Who does that?”
It’s a bit like the gratuitous hotel scene in the movie “Open Water”: the actress is naked except for the typical strategically placed bedsheet between her legs. I wouldn’t mind it if she was full-on naked (at all!), I would understand it if she was wearing underwear or if the take consisted of extreme close-ups, but this “oh, the sheet just happened to fall there” approach was so fake and amateurish that totally threw me off.
Any cameo by a well-known actor/actress, which seems completely out of place. For instance, Rowan Atkinson’s (Mr. Bean, Blackadder) short role in a James Bond movie.
Hurm. I actually really like Ashton Kutcher & Demi Moore’s characters. But yeah, it’s a movie for those of us who are used to seeing people we know play characters, like in theater.
I’ve only seen the movie once, and that was a while ago. Is it possible that they were joking about the Hollywood cliche and not about an actual event? Johnson is a pretty generic name.
I remember watching the movie Fletch in the theater when it came out. George Wendt had a small role in it as a homeless man. When he appeared on scene about half the audience yelled “Norm!” This was not a cameo, Cheers was in the middle of its run and he was not a big star.
Another thing that takes me out of the movie is the soundtrack. I mostly mean when I catch an older movie on TV. The worst offenders are from the late seventies and early eighties. Songs from the period are fine. Its the scores that are jarring. I caught Abscence of Malice on the TV a while back. Newman’s performance holds up very well and for the most part the movie does too. But the score is horrible.
Two camera shots that take me out of the movie.
The first,a character is getting something out of a fridge and the shot shows it from the perspective of someone INSIDE the fridge,WTF!
The second,the hero/ine of a horror/ripper movie knocks on the door of a house wherein there might be all sorts of scary things but the camera shot shows the door being answered either from behind the potential vampire or axe murderer or whatever from their perspective.
It seems to take away a good part of the mystery and scary factor rather then just showing the hero knocking on the door and wondering what lies within.
Yes yes! Poorly implemented sound effects is high on my list. Of course, that’s one of those things which I believe the common viewer doesn’t catch. Only, once you do get aware of them, they are very apparent. The episode of House mentioned above was very ridiculous because of it – Cubby is holding a baby that is very obviously plastic while we hear [CHILD CRYING] that is equally obviously a recording.
I recognise the children’s laughter you mention. There are also a few very recognisable punch sounds, that “crunch” effect when somebody hits somebody else in the face that usually take me out of the experience.
The Wilhelm scream, on the other hand – that’s just an inside joke in the industry, isn’t it? I think it’s cute.
Was that a cameo? Atkinson was in Never Say Never Again, released in 1983. By that time he’d done Not the Nine O’Clock News and the first series of “Blackadder”. (Would you automatically associate Nigel Smal-Fawcett with the actor in this clip?) I don’t know how famous that made him in Britain, but I doubt many Americans had heard of him at that point.
My problem is with poor editing for TV. The movie Blackdog has been on a few times latley. I enjoy the movie (dosen’t say much for my taste in movies I know). There is one scene when shown on TV goes like this;
Junior: Does this change anything? New driver and all.
Red: You planning on having kids Junior?
Junior: I don’t know, meet the right woman someday. Why?
That is it. Never referenced in the movie again. Of course on the DVD the final line is from Red “Because you suffer from a sorry ass lack of balls.” The whole scene is just this joke, and they could have taken the entire converstation out without losing anything but that joke. Instead they leave you wondering what that was all about.
Another from the same movie. Prior to the scene above, Wes and Sonny show up to follow the truck. They get introduced to the new driver, and there is an exchange between Sonny and Red that ends with Sonny saying “He came down from the top? You make him sound like god-damn Mosses or something.” They cut that line out, but later in the film they keep the scene where he applogizes for the “Mosses comment” What Mosses comment? Again if you haven’t seen the DVD you have no clue what they are talking about.
-Otanx
Good point. I got wrongfooted because I saw that movie on TV (years later), rather than in the cinema.
I’ve seen Casablanca four or five times and I have never seen any Paris flashbacks! I didn’t know they existed. I’m going to have to rent a “complete” version to check it out.
You must have only seen heavily edited versions, then - the whole ‘waiting at the train station in the rain’ bit, while the rain washes out the note from Ilsa? That’s the END of the Paris flashback sequence.
Mine is from a Batman movie (Batman Returns, I believe), where every car in Gotham City is a Volkswagen with a center headlight, except for Bruce/Batman’s cars.
In the Battlestar Galactica “movie” Razor there’s the scene where Kendra Shaw is supervising the nuggets field-stripping/reassembling their rifles, there’s a closeup of the buttstock of the rifle, which has a VERY CLEARLY visible Beretta logo, the firearm in question is a Beretta CX-4 Storm carbine
normally, the BSG set dressers and props department do a good job of disguising the props, but this was so blatantly obvious that it momentarily pulled me out of the movie, who knew Beretta had such a frakkin’ good distribution system, they’re able to supply firearms for both Earth, and the Colonies, way on the other frakkin side of the galaxy 
Or in any movie with a hospital scene, you’ll hear over the P.A…
“Doctor Davis, telephone please? Doctor Davis, telephone please?”
Doc. Davis must be in high demand, he’s in every hospital, must be a frakkin’ good doctor…
I’ve mentioned this in another thread. In any water scene (e.g., Jaws), when the camera is splashed and drops of water are visible on the lens / movie screen, I am immediately pulled out of the movie. It’s like when the boom mike casts a shadow–it reminds you that someone is filming it and it fouls up the illusion. It momentarily makes it that much more difficult to suspend your disbelief and immerse yourself in the “world” the director is trying to create.
But maybe this is a “mistake” and off-topic (the boom mike is, for sure). But I always mentally process it as: the director sees the drops of water and doesn’t think it matters. Well it does, dammit!
Baby bumps, or obvously hiding baby bumps. If the character ain’t pregnant, don’t use a pregnant actor to play her.