[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
Me, I like the majestic cliffs and mountains near the seaside Virginia settlements in Disney’s Pocahantas. Ever been there? Flaaaaaaaaaaaat! Hocus Pocus.
[/QUOTE]
Kind of like the cheerleading nationals in Bring it On that take place in Daytona Beach. Nice mountains in the background.
One that made me laugh (not a mistake per se but just silly) was from the movie Timeline. There’s a big battle scene that takes place during the night. One side launches a volley of flaming arrows to their enemies to do damage and hopefully set them aflame. Then a commander yells “Fire the night arrows!” and they launch a volley of regular unlit arrows that the enemy doesn’t see coming because it’s dark outside.
It just struck me as funny that they had two types of arrows, the default normal arrow (flaming) and the specialized “night” arrow.
[QUOTE=e-logic]
Almost every episode of CSI involves a blurry CCTV image of a suspect which is magically “enhanced” to show a full-res close-up of the person.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, Law & Order too. “Zoom in on that? Now focus? Take out the background noise?” Ah, a perfect license plate number, or tattoo, or clear face! RIIIGHT.
Also in Jagged Edge, the famous “Glenn Close’s suit changes in the middle of a court scene”. Like from gray tweed to green or something, very obvious.
Ironically, when they re-mastered MASH, (Believe they went back to the original negs, and generally, they did a splendid job of it) it became obvious at times that the 4077 was really on a Southern California backlot when the power lines pop into view.
The lines were lost in the fuzz previously, but now, they stand out.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
For som,e reason, people like to depict balloons in medieval or Renaissance festivals. I could accept inflated bladders on sticks or the like, but people insist on putting in brightly-colored floating balloons. Walt Disney’s Robin Hood did this, and I’ll let Disney slide a bit, but others have done it, too (Shrek has the inflated frog and snake balloons floating up as if helium-filled), and not just in cartoons (I’ve seen 'em, but can’t recall the titles). The idea of stretchy, inflatable balloons is absurd in Med/Ren. Europe. The idea of brightly colored items like this a further burden on credibility, and having them float as if filled with helium or hydrogen is simply ridiculous.
[/QUOTE]
Balloons in Shrek? Shrek is filled with deliberate anachronisms. The fact that an ogre can blow up a frog, and a princess can blow up a snake and both of them float like helium balloons is what we call a joke, son.
In a movie with a donkey that wears sunglasses while singing karaoke and a magic mirror that has a remote control I don’t think helium balloons ruin the suspension of disbelief.
The entire plot device to get Daniel Jackson into the project is to have him decode the symbols on the Stargate. On earth they can only manage to get to the 6th symbol because they don’t know the 7th - the point of origin symbol (Earth)
It seems to me they could try each one (It only looked like there were about 50), and if they open the gate, send a little rover camera through and see what it sees.
They didn’t really need Daniel at all.
Same with the return to earth. Later in the movie they had all but the last symbol. Why not scratch the last symbol on a rock and tie a note that says “if this landed on earth, please open the gate and chuck this rock back through”.
[/QUOTE]
Not really, they didn’t know that the seven symbols meant at all. They were simply running random combinations. The symbols are based on constellations at the point of origin. Which means that different stargates on different planets would have completely different constellations. The DHDs make that all “idiot-proof” but Daniel was needed.
Oh, ah knows it. But it just annoys me that everyone wants to put those damned balloons in a medieval setting. It’s a joke in Robin Hood, too, but it wasn’t in the third movie (whose name I can’t recall).
[QUOTE=MsWhatsit]
I’m putting this in a spoiler tag because it’s a recent movie and involves the ending.
The Departed:
When Matt Damon’s girlfriend comes home and announces that she is pregnant, she is still extremely skinny and isn’t showing at all. She also announces that the ultrasound revealed that the baby is a boy. This is really nitpicky, but you typically can’t see the sex of a baby via ultrasound until around the 16-week mark, by which point a very thin woman like that actress would definitely be showing at least a little bit. It’s a small point, but being 4 months pregnant myself at the time I saw it, it pulled me out of the movie a little bit.
[/QUOTE]
That’s not nitpicky at all. It’s majorly negligent on the part of the director. Too many people have experience in that matter, and depending on the movie, screwing it up could ruin an ending especially. Maybe studios should do screenings further away from Tinsel Town.
[QUOTE=glee]
Chess boards should have a white square in the right-hand corner. Often messed up by TV and film.
To be fair both ‘From Russia with Love’ and the Harry Potter game were correct.
As for the original ‘Thomas Crown affair’, I was too entranced by Faye Dunaway to look at the board… :eek:
[/QUOTE]
And of course in FRwL, Kronsteen’s position blah blah Spassky-Bronstein blah blah, but you knew that already.
Let’s talk “Demonlover” a film by French director Oliver Assayas (he did Irma Vep). “Demonlover” is about a corporate spy who spies on a French firm called Volfsgrup. Volfsgrup is obviously a big deal – corporate jets flying execs to London and Tokyo to clench big deals, their own skyscraper, guys in suits staring at banks of computer screens and shouting ‘Buy! Buy! Buy!’ and ‘Sell! Sell! Sell!’ into telephones, big land deals in Abu Dhabi … they’re rolling in it.
But the really hot division, the one that is going to make bank for Volfsgrup is the purchase of software to produce animated hentai in 3D!
This is so ludicrously stupid and improbable that it completely destroyed any cred the film had with me. I mean, come on, the BONUSES given to the top guys at Wall Street brokerage firms this year way outgrossed the annual take on the biggest porn site on the WEb, which would be Danni’s Hot Box, I believe. The BONUSES. For just the top guys. People who make major stock market trades are playing with so much money that absolutely dwarfs the kind of money that the biggest porn sites make.
But we’re led to believe that hentai is such a huge biz that it would easily outgross the take on a biz that has its own stock trading room? Jeebus. An individual or a small firm might do very well with great 3D hentai software, but to a huge conglomerate like Volfsgrup it would be a ridiculously tiny deal. (Plus, it already exists. It’s called “Poser” I believe.)
It would have been very easy to explain away the 3D hentai deal as a :::ahem::: personal interest of Volfsgrup’s owner, managers or what have you. But the people who made Demonlover were so FRIGGIN ignorant about business, and couldn’t be bothered to spend so much as FIVE fricking minutes Googling at a computer terminal to find out how awesomely stupid they were being …
[QUOTE=Hypno-Toad]
There’s something similar in Rumble In the Bronx. Since it was playing in China, very few of the audience had trouble with the fact that there were majestic West-coast mountains in the background of “The Bronx.” New Yorkers were amused and/or vexed by it.
[/QUOTE]
Not to mention the multi-ethnic gangs who dress like rejected extras from Michael Jackson’s Beat It video.
Bing, Rosemary, Danny, and Vera-Ellen are on a train heading to Vermont from (IIRC) NYC. Dreaming of the winter wonderland that awaits, they start singing the song Snow. Upon finishing the song, the scene fades to black, reopening on an exterior shot of the train…
… clearly passing a number of very obvious palm trees.
No wonder there was no snow at the ski-lodge when they arrived!
[QUOTE=glee]
Chess boards should have a white square in the right-hand corner. Often messed up by TV and film.
To be fair both ‘From Russia with Love’ and the Harry Potter game were correct.
As for the original ‘Thomas Crown affair’, I was too entranced by Faye Dunaway to look at the board… :eek:
[/QUOTE]
As a chess player that mistake really gets on my tit
[QUOTE=Hypno-Toad]
My friends and I were all over that. We were pretty familiar with the Atlantic coastal plain.
But when it comes to “mobile” mountains, nothing can match the Grand Tetons. Thanks to the movies, they’ve been everywhere.
[/QUOTE]
How about Monument Valley? thaks to John Ford (among others) it’s been:
Southeast Arizona (Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache)
West Texas (The Searchers, Rio Grande, Tall Tale)
Wyoming (She Wore a Yellow Ribbon)
Oklahoma and Kansas (Cheyenne Autumn)
Central California (Back to the Future III)
New Mexico (Billy the Kid)
In Zombie Holocaust (aka Doctor Butcher, M.D.), a character commits suicide by jumping out of a high rise window. Cut to a shot of his body, obviously a dummy, falling towards the groud. The dummy hits the ground and its arm flies off. Cut to a shot of the actor laying bloodied on the sidewalk, his arm still in place. Guess the filmmakers were too lazy to carry the dummy upstairs and throw it out the window for another take!
[QUOTE=glee]
Chess boards should have a white square in the right-hand corner. Often messed up by TV and film.
To be fair both ‘From Russia with Love’ and the Harry Potter game were correct.
As for the original ‘Thomas Crown affair’, I was too entranced by Faye Dunaway to look at the board… :eek:
[/QUOTE]
Chance says that about 50% of the movies should have them right (a bit more if you consider the lucky ones where the set guys knew chess). That none have it right would make you think that they are doing it on purpose just to tick you off.
There are actually some pretty cool things you can do to analyze CCTV footage. If you only have one still picture, you are pretty much stuck with what is in it. But if you have a series of pictures, such as video, with some really fancy software, you can figure out how often, and for how long certain pixels are captured at different color tones. Finding out when they are past a threshhold. The image part being analyzed needs to be a certain number of pixels to get any accuracy, but a tiny blurry license plate moving past a security cam can sometimes be cleaned up an amazing amount.
There was an episode of MacGyver (I think) with the classic ransom-phone-call type scene. (The bad guy calls the good guys, who have to keep him talking long enough to trace the call.) The call comes in, the team springs into action. First they have one system that traces the incoming call to get the number of the phone it’s calling from. Then they take that number and put it into another computer that will tell them where that phone is located. But the guy hangs up before the second computer is finished. Everybody’s disappointed.
But guys, you know the number he was calling from. It’s not like a phone number gets reassigned somewhere else in the city just because he hung up. The scene is tense and well-directed enough that it actually took me a few seconds to realize the flaw in the logic.
A little less glaring is Die Hard 2, where the controllers send a SWAT team and tech guy to a deserted part of the airport to access the only transmitter they can use to talk to the planes overhead. In fact, every plane on the ground at that airport would have a transmitter on it.
[QUOTE=Liberal]
As a child, I noticed an Indian in a western with a vaccination mark on his arm.
[/QUOTE]
For some reason, the only time this bothered me was in Brad Pitt’s portrayal of Odysseus in The Trojan War .
This particular problem will gradually be phased out of existence, since apparently about a decade ago they stopped using the kind of vaccination that produces that scar.
