In Napoleon Dynamite there is a llama for no reason.
In a Shakespearean movie, when an animal was mentioned it would come up again with a reason. He knew how to write screenplays, that dude.
Brat. :smack:
Let’s try that again…Not two minutes later, Farrell’s character is still running down the street and her shirt has no damage.
So was the cameraman. 
Monk routinely makes blunders that would only be noticeable to residents. It’s clearly shot entirely within LA except for some reused exterior shots. Wrong color streetsigns, palm trees everywhere, parkways with grass medians, ocean scenes with backgrounds that are laughably not the Bay…
Monk himself, a supposed native of San Francisco, makes a few verbal mistakes as well. A couple that I distincly remember:
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They investigate a murder north of SF on 101 due to a huge pile-up. Monk calls it in by saying “we’re on the 101.” Nobody in the Bay Area refers to highways by “the” - that’s a SoCal thing.
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There’s an episode at Monk’s alma mater, which he referrs to the entire time as “Berkeley.” Bzzt. Nobody, especially someone who grew up in SF and / or went to college there, would call it anything other than Cal.
I thought it was supposed to be Napoleon’s pet. But then again, Napoleon Dynamite is a very Seinfeldish film, there are a lot of unusual things in it. It doesn’t really follow the old Chekov line about the guns.
In War of the Worlds, there is a giant flash of ‘lightning’ which zaps every electronic device, including the cars, which are stopped in their tracks. Tom Cruise comes across his mechanic buddy who can’t seem to figure out why all the cars have died. Tom, without missing a step yells something like ‘check the solenoid!’, which proves to be the problem. There are several problems with this.
- If there was some kind of huge electromangetic pulse capable of ruining elctronic devices, the starter solenoid is the absolute last thing on a car that would get fried. It’s connected directly to the battery by the huge battery cables. It’s not a delicate electronic device. The computer would have been much more likely damaged.
- If the guy is a mechanic, and the car won’t crank, the solenoid is the first place to look. Tom shouldn’t have had to tell him what to look for.
- The solenoid only operates when starting the car, not when the car is running. The streets were littered with dead cars. Bad solenoids would not cause this.
I think this bugs me because the writers clearly did this so Tom Cruise’s character could have access to the only working car around. It would have made so much more sense to say the computers were fried, and Tom could have pulled his Mustang out of the garage and driven that. That certainly would have been more exciting than seeing him tear around in that dorky minivan.
There is a house just outside of my hometown in Northwestern IL where the people have a llama. It’s kind of an outdoor pet sort of thing. The people just up the road have buffalo, too.
Mine is from Prison Break last night. They talked all about the measures they took to make Clarence Steadman unverifiable as himself, even going as far as to mention that they erased his previous DNA profiles. But wouldn’t they be able to just test his DNA against his sister’s?
There used to be a lame-ass cop show called Houston Knights. Everyone in Houston watched the first couple of episodes and laughed their asses off about the fact that the folks who shot it had no clue about where they were in the city. They would have dialog that indicated that they were going to be at location XYZ in three minutes, and looking out the window of the car, you could pretty much place them at a location that was at least 30 minutes away.
Really more like 60 minutes with our traffic.
I’ve lived my entire life in the Bay Area, and I say both of these pretty regularly.
I live here, and I do.
Disclaimer: I didn’t grow up here, but I have spent a lot more time here than I ever have in SoCal.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the traffic reporters on KCBS referring to freeways as “the”, too.
There are actually quite a few palm trees around in the Bay Area. There are, of course, the ones on the Embarcadero. And I see a fair number of them around elsewhere, too- there are some right across the street from my apartment building.
And it’s a 2x2x2 Rubik’s Cube, which was invented after the standard 3x3x3
well, in CSI Miami, those guys go accross the city in minutes. Miami is a flipping parking lot throughout the entire day.
Along the same lines, the various Lethal Weapon movies play fast and loose with LA geography. Riggs will be running down a street in the Valley, turn a corner, and suddenly he’s in downtown LA. Not obvious to anybody outside SoCal, but hell, there’s millions of us!
There are tons where I live. Grassy medians also.
As for “the” 101 - I’ve heard it a few times on KCBS, but not often. If I hear it too frequently I might visit them with a baseball bat to encourage them to stop. 
As for bad use of LA scenery for some other place, the first Nero Wolfe series - the one with Bill Conrad, not the later, much better one - had Archie out on the streets of New York, walking in front of a marina that is obviously an LA one. I won’t even mention the absurdity of Archie being able to find a place to park.
I vaguely remember it now. It was a while ago. I have a copy of Koch’s book The Panic Broadcast of course.
FMC? I had a friend who worked there. I got some late 19th, early 20th century Mr. Dooley books there, plus countless others. The difference between West Coast used book stores and East Coast ones (like the Strand and the Brattle Book store in Boston) is that West Coast stores seldom have cheap, old, books.
</hijack>
The moment I saw “Really Obvious” in the thread title, I knew that people would interpret it as “Unbelievably minor”.
Anyhow, I’m a bay area native with parents who now live in LA, and “the 101” is definitely the LA way to say it. Here we say “I’m on 101”.
Wow. You’re honestly the only person I’ve ever known to do so. How do you distinguish between the city and the school in conversation?
I’m more surprised that Miller does so, having lived here his whole life. Maybe the traffic reporters are from LA, and perhaps you learned it while you lived there. Seriously, I don’t ever hear people refer to highways with the “the”.
Yes, I’m aware that there are palm trees here. In no way shape or form to the extent they exist in the background on the show when they’re at a crime scene in the City itself. C’mon - you really think it looks like SF and that they film on location?
At any rate, this thread was for “really obvious” mistakes, no need to make my minor hijack worse.
It was starting to bug me, so I looked it up… the CDC says that routine immunization of children against smallpox ended in 1971. I’m trying to find a cite on how old a child had to be to receive the vaccine, because if memory serves, it used to be given to teenagers during my mom’s era, but then was refined and began to be given to older children, but never to very young kids.
Pardon me for belabouring this point, but… in RoTK, what the hell happens to the damn horses in the last battle?
In Dragonheart the female lead is a beautiful peasant girl with stunning hair.
I want to know where she got the shampoo, not to mention the hair crimper.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie, but I remember thinking that as David explained it, you only needed three symbols to find the location in space