It wasn’t a film but it happened recently and just annoyed the hell out of me. I was watching a Discovery channel show about Capt Bligh. The narrator kept mispronouncing the word “Admiralty” as ‘admirality’. The word was pronounced correctly by the actors in the little skits, but the narrator must have mispronounced it incorrectly 10 or 11 times by the end of the show. I had to restrain myself from throwing a brick at the TV.
Didn’t mean to sound cranky, but to make such a comment and then *not * explain, well . . . .
Thanks for explaining the phenomenon I was trying to in the OP! I should perhaps have mentioned earlier that I was in at least a couple of plays where unusual words and phrases came up and the pronunciations for them varied by actor. The director never took a position on that and just allowed the variations to stand. I can imagine some audience members having the same response to that as I did to the Gittes/Gittees/Gitz thing: sloppy research in the name of “who could care?”
Since the Chinatown instance was perhaps chosen to indicate the contempt that Cross feels and shows for Gittes and was possibly as intentional as having specific intructions for pronunciation in the screenplay, maybe my reaction was faulty. But it was my reaction after all. I just wish I could have identified other similar instances where the intention wasn’t as open to debate and interpretation.
There are several others like it that remain fuzzy enough as to which specific films and actors, but surely some of you have noticed how some character’s name or the name of the town or country or some other proper noun gets pronounced multiple ways be people who ought to know better if they were “really” in that situation. I feel that this concession to realism ought to be in place or else things just sound phony. Phony is okay if it’s intended, but not if it’s just an oversight. Like continuity errors and such.
I just watched The Core last night. The whole movie is gleefully absurd, but I noticed one jarring thing: one of the lead scientist characters repeatedly said “nu-kyu-lar bomb,” even though everyone else said “nu-clee-ar bomb.” I guess it could be argued that it was an “intentional mistake,” since there are people in real life who use the first pronunciation, but it was still irritating.
Along the same vein, is there any reason why whenever they have to have video game sound effects it’s always the Atari 2600 version of Pac Man?
I can totally deal with this. Bad teeth make me cringe.
I can’t think of anyone in an important position pronouncing it “nu-kyu-lar”? I mean, what kind of idiot would screw that up? They’d never get put in charge of anything remotely important.
What? 
It’s a pefectly valid alternative pronuciation, like it or not.
What always drove me nuts about *Law and Order * back when I actually watched it was the remarkable competence of the defense attornies for even the most degenerate poverty-stricken scumbags on trial. I had no idea that the public defenders’ office was filled with the best and the brightest.
Those special shaped movie sheets that always show the bare male chest while keeping the girls’ modestly covered.
I know you are trying to steer this toward recent movies, but no Die Hard Aviation Blasphemy can be mentioned without at least acknowledging the heinousness that was Die Hard 2. Only one radio for every airplane trying to land in DC? And, yes, with one computer hack some terrorist can skew down the ILS and every crew will then fly their airplane into the ground, because, you know, we don’t pay attention to our altitude. Or the whole trail of fuel that will not only ignite with a lighter (or match, I forget) - and for the record, a match dropped into Jet-A will extinguish - but the trail of fuel will race up and make the airplane itself explode!
That movie should be shown as a lesson on what CANNOT happen in aviation. Wait - didn’t Bruce Willis eject from a cargo airplane near the ned? I must have blocked that from my memory to prevent nightmares.
Oh, as to the teeth thing - I see people walking around all the time with teeth that make me cringe. Nasty plaque, black shit between their bottom teeth, etc. It’s not a lot of people, but it is enough to make me happy I have a dentist at least once a week.
Yuck.
But it also makes me expect that movies showing people from long ago will have much worse teeth. If your movie is set in 1100 AD, you better have your contracts stipulate that everyone gets the funky tooth makeup treatment before going on camera. I don’t need to see a butter-churn girl from some hovel in Scotland blind me with a perfectly white set of choppers.
Sorry Anaamika! 
Almost any movie involving a death scene, a hospitailzed character or a woman giving birth. So many people die in their loved one’s arms looking so great. No ashy cast, no blue lips. Anyone strangled or drowned takes 1 minute to die. Whoever is in the hospital ICU is hooked up to one IV or is on O2 without a monitor. Revenge of the Sith–Padme dies giving birth why? And looking just so rosy and great while she did it. She lives long enough to name her babies and then just dies. And what is that contraption hovering over her body targeting anyway? Knocked Up–that was the cleanest perineum I ever saw! Get those knees back and push like you mean it! I can’t watch ER on TV. I. Just. Can’t.
Cyn, OB/GYN RN who only wears a cap for fun-time and rarely wears white but is still an angel of mercy!
When folks light a cigarette, take two drags and stub the cigarette out.
Seven Years In Tibet, Pitt keeps calling them the Him-ill-I-ahs. I liked the movie, but ground my teeth every time he said it.
There was no time to explain!
-Joe
To give the pilots the benefit of the doubt, it was supposed to be totally foggy (I wonder how the terrists arranged that?) so by the time they could actually see the ground, they were inches from it.
And, yes, he did eject from a cargo plane. Sitting still. At ground level. Hell of a parachute on that thing, I tell you.
-Joe
I love the movie MY COUSIN VINNIE but the ending, much as I like it, is just so deus-ex-machina AND illogical that it’s hard to overlook.
For one thing, Vinnie himself very obviously knows everything Mona Lisa does about the tiremarks and how it concerns the makes of the cars. When he can’t get Mona Lisa to comply, can’t he just recall the state’s expert witness and ask him questions that will get this?
Also, what are the chances that two vintage 1960s mint green GM classics would both go to the “Sack’o’Suds” driven by two sets of drivers/passengers who look alike within a few minutes of each other? And either the real killers raced off in the other direction, in which case one of the witnesses should have seen them, OR they had to have passed the Macchio car, in which case Macchio should have seen them. And here’s a hint: the tire marks tell which way they were going.
NOBODY noticed the tire marks before? They’re pretty clearly not like other tire tracks of cars going over a concrete median.
OTOH, I love Joe Pesci, Marisa Tomei, and most especially Fred Gwynne so much that I’ll overlook these things and even the “isn’t it great that they happened to not only catch the other guys but they still had the murder weapon?” part. But as lnog as I’ve heard Fred/Pesci’s “You on drugs?” “I doan like yo’ attitood” exchanges I can live with it (cause all these years later I still laugh).
When a person lights a cigarette and it sounds like a freaking forest fire. Or when the length of the ashes/cherry on the cigarette keeps changing during a scene due to a continuity problem.
I can’t think of a specific example right now (due to being not have enough coffee yet), but the PAUSE before an attack is a little bit buggy to me. You know, when something very bad is about to be done to someone, but the creature/person/godlike entity has to pause for just one moment …
How many times in real life does a bear jump out at you, PAUSE, and then swipe at your head? Or a snake rears up it’s head, PAUSES, and then strikes you? Or the bad man points a gun at you, unpoints it, points it again, waves it around while detailing his master plan, points it at you again, PAUSES, is about to pull the trigger, a shot is heard, and then blood starts spewing out his mouth because the shot came from someone out of the camera’s view?
It’s not so much that these things don’t happen in real life, because it is a movie after all, it’s more about how cliche the stupid PAUSE is.