In Galaxy Quest, Tony Shalob’s character gets it on with a multi-tentacled alien.
“Oh… that’s not right…”
Anybody ever look at the fish tank in A Fish Called Wanda?
First of all, many of the types of fish they show would be chowing on the others, second, there were way too many fish for that size tank and third, a tank that size, with that many fish with no lid would have fish gasping for air on the floor in seconds.
Oh, and a friend of mine pointed out that the cows in City Slickers were milking cows, not herding cows.
These didn’t really bother me, most people would never catch them, but it’s fun to know these little details.
Any time they show “scientists” working in a “lab”, it’s wrong. Dead wrong. Horribly, totally, completely wrong. No one will go to the movies with me any more, because it pisses me off so.
Maybe in the real world it is. 
Which is why I seldom go to see movies anymore.
And as far as the research - I subscribe to a journal written for folks with type 1 diabetes. An article was written explaining why this disease is always depicted incorrectly in the movies, even when the correct depiction would not alter the move (think Con Air, for one). If this article was correct, the researchers are routinely ignored by the producers, writers and directors - they have it in their head how it “should” be and that’s the way it’s going to be.
Seconding Rotorhead’s nomination for pretty much anything to do with flying. If it deals with a jet and it’s in a movie, it’s wrong. Especially annoying when doing it right would be so easy (ie the “Runway 44” flub in Catch Me If You Can ). The runway used most days for landing at LGA is actually runway 22, but I can just see some movie guy saying “Well if runway 22 is good, runway 44 will be TWICE as good!” Sheesh.
I also nominate Jeff Goldbum’s amazing lighting-quick sobering-up in Independence Day . Not that anything in that movie was really believable, but drinking 3/4 of a bottle of whiskey and instantly sobering up when you just really, really need to annoys me.
You’d think Los Angeles would be the most accurately-depicted city in movies, but alas this is not so. Generally any movie set in LA will have problems.
For example, in The Italian Job, one of the many Mini-Cooper-commercial moments is a sequence where the protagonists are practice driving in the LA River. Now this in itself isn’t impossible, since the LA Trickle is like the Ankh in that you can walk across it but you probably wouldn’t want your feet afterwards. But not only is it unlikely they could get access to that area more than once without getting caught, but in the background there was a) no homeless people, b) no trash, and c) no graffiti (some of the most beautiful artwork in LA is along the river near Union Station).
Not to mention the bit in Rush Hour 2 where our heros pull up and park … in downtown LA … in front of a hotel being played by the Library Tower (the tallest building in LA). Right in front of the front doors, no less. Riiiiiight.
… just realized I should specify that I was referring to this year’s Italian Job, not the original with Michael Caine. Bad me!
Favorite cliches:
- Lots of coloured bubbly liquid in flasks, with dry ice
- The rotovap
- Clean lab coats outside of a micro lab
- The use of expensive robotic machinery to do stupidly easy tasks (case in point, Osborn’s lab in Spiderman)
I’ll ruin your pleasure in a LOT of TV shows and movies. Every time you see a scene where the heroine (or hero, I just prefer thinking of heroines in this situation, but it definitely happens to heroes too, just not as often) has been captured by the bad guys and is left somewhere with her thands tied in front of her and gagged.
Do an experiment. Put your wrists together as if tied and put them up to your face. Notice how easily they get there. Notice how your fingers are free to do thing … like remove gags. Now see if you can get your hands behind your head with your wrists touching as if tied. You sure can! So even if it’s a cloth tied in the back of the head, you can get that gag off. Or at least pull it out of your mouth.
Now your teeth are free to work at the bonds on your wrists.
Hands tied in front but not otherwise secured are, well, pretty darned handy! Hands tied in back are considerably less so. Every time you see such a scene – and there are LOTS of them – well, it just aint right!
This message brought to you by the Loosie Awards.
I realize this, but there was no indication there was any gunpowder in the windmill(not that I remember).
Pretty much anything involving computers at all.
I’m no computer expert, I’m just an ordinary person who uses the computer for work, games, and the Internet. But even I can tell that people in movies and on television almost never use computers in a realistic way. They either do things that are impossible, or have difficulty doing things that are simple.
In Rising Sun, Tia Carrere plays some kind of graphics expert who shows Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes how you can alter video images digitally. She takes a video image of the two men and switches their heads. Predictably, they make this look easier than it really would be. But the real problem is, when Tia Carrere clicks and drags the first head, you don’t see a blank spot where that part of the image was – you see the back wall. Pretty amazing how the computer knew what was behind his head!
I can’t remember what this was from, but some supposedly great hackers were downloading a big secret government text file. They had almost completed the download when security caught onto them and cancelled the transfer. The hackers gave up in frustration, apparently not realizing that they already had 99% of the document! They didn’t even try to read the incomplete file!
More plane stuff.
In Always, near the opening, Dreyfus stays out too long on a a run and runs out of fuel. Of course, he does a dead-stick landing from about 200 feet from about seven miles out. This, of course, is stupid as any real plane would have been splattered through the trees about six and three-quarter miles back, but I put up with it because it’s Hollywood.
However, they continually show scenes from the cockpit, looking out over the wing at the propellors–and the props are not feathered! They had to have had a tech advisor on that film; couldn’t he at least have asked them to feather the props?
How about music?
Especially in older TV and movies, they’ll show someone supposedly playing a guitar or piano and they just - aren’t!
Heck, if I can do it, so should they!
Go figure. Certain things REALLY bug me when they crop up in movies; some don’t.
The fact that the law of conservation of energy prevents “The Matrix” from ever being possible, due to the energy requirements for life support for billions of people violently outweighing anything you’d ever recoup in their body heat? Doesn’t bother me at all.
The fact that the blood-barfing zombies of “28 Days” would have been dropping dead in a week or less, due to the massive fluid loss the disease seems to engender? Didn’t faze me.
…but the Terminatrix in “Terminator 3” being able to reprogram police cars to drive around by themselves bugged the HELL out of me for some reason. What the hell? I never realized that police cars were equipped with electronic accelerators and brake pedals…
I like movies that show a conductor in front of an orchestra just randomly waving his arms in a way that has nothing to do with what the orchestra is playing.
Whenever a character uses binoculars, we see his view as two circular zones joined in the center, for a sort of “figure 8” effect. This does not happen… your brain blends the two images together, and you see a single circular zone.
Also, even while holding the binoculars one-handed while hanging from a ladder on a moving boat, the character somehow manages to hold the binoculars perfectly dead still on whatever he wants to see.
Some are. If the car had cruise control, it could control the accelerator. If it had tration control or perhaps stability control it could control the brakes.
But steering? Come on. What car has computer controlled steering?
One thing that really bothered me is in Terminator 2. Dyson just walks into the clean room without putting the suit on, and there’s a guard in there also without a suit on. Some clean room, huh?
I think this was from the Lone Gunmen, the short lived spinoff from the X-files. It was from the pilot episode (only shown once because of the 9.11 related content). But this scene sounds familiar.
I don’t claim to be an expert on firearms, but even I knew there was something wrong in the movie Hard Target (starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, directed by John Woo) when bullets caused sparks when they richoceted off trees :rolleyes:
Barry