The first time I recall seeing that effect was in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie otherwise pretty dilligent about technical accuracy (billowing lunar dust notwithstanding). The scene, IIRC, was one in which Bowman (Keir Dullea) was piloting one of the pods.
You’d be surprised. Six months ago, my former boss went out and bought 50 15" flatscreen monitors. Gave one to everyone in the office - executives, assistants, telemarketers, everyone. I still don’t know why he did that - probably got a good deal for them. Businesses work in mysterious ways.
Craps games-
Dealers take the line on a 2/3/12 craps after the point has been established.
(more tv than movies, but still) Character is shooting, yells out the number rolled. Stickman does not call the dice. Dealer pays the character’s bets without checking with the boxman or stickman to find out what the call actually was.
Character has stacks of black ($100 chips) on the line, on the come out roll. Winner 7 or 11 rolls. Dealer pays the bet by sizing into it without breaking it down to make sure it is not over the table limit.
Can’t think of much to add, except the way email works in movies. How many people have full screen animations play whenever a message is recieved? Or get video emails? Plus the massages usually just come from a screen name, without a server. For an example of all of these, see Mission: Impossible.
Then there’s the fact that anything can be hacked with just a keyboard. No software required. Or knowledge of the system involved. Actually, in some movies, anything can be done with about 50 keystrokes (including programming a virus for a completely unfamiliar operating system, including “downloading virus” popup window and skull and crossbones cursor icon).
There’s always the scenes where a ten-year-old can crack the most secure computer systems.
Computers have to be right behind explosions as the concepts least understood by movie producers. Another pet peeve is when the hero’s plans constantly require miracles to succeed. I have no problem with the incredibly improbable event saving the hero, but most people don’t survive too long if they depend on it more than once.
Any “quaint foreigner” scene is usually horrid. You know, the middle eastern market with the live chickens, the fruit stand that you know will be knocked over, and the menacing guy who turns out to be a good old chap?
And then there’s the schmuck bait: You know, the nice person who is in love with the protagonist, but whom the protagonist doesn’t love? The one that’s usually dead by the end of the movie?
I hate with a passion most screen portrayals of the handicapped. Gods, will these people get a clue? I have never seen my mother, a woman who has taught mentally retarded kids for almost 30 years, more upset at a movie than she was in viewing “the other sister.” Here’s a hint, screenwriters: Just because someone is MR doesn’t mean they don’t know about sex, dating, love, society, hatred, racism… it also doesn’t mean that they can’t feel emotions, have a job, or speak correctly.
Hah, that was the lamest part of MI:2. Yeah, yeah, its a cool effect, it surprised everyone in the first movie. LET IT GO! They used this 4 or 5 times in #2, and it got so damn predictable.
William Shatner.
Or in Blade Runner, suddenly there’s this device which can look at flat photographs and decipher what’s behind objects in the photo. Argh.
In several Columbo “movies” he actually asks the video technician to “blow up” the image.
So the guy does!
You can read the name of the villian on the invitation on the desk across the room, for instance.
And no one has mentioned the explosions and other sound effects in space yet? I’m surprised…
Movie makers, get it in your head: there is no sound in space!! Really!
It’s the little things that bug me.
Nobody ever wakes up with their hair going every which-a-way and they never snore or have rank morning breath. And some of the ladies wake up wearing make-up, and it’s not smeared all over the pillow.
I hate the cop cliche of the all-knowing snitch. The snitch always knows what the ‘word on the street’ is. Like there’s a daily newspaper for the criminal underworld.
I hate how they always want to talk to their wounded friend before they load him onto the ambulance. “I know he needs emergency medical life-saving treatment, but we need a moment to bond here!”
Three words – Egregious Historical Inaccuracies.
One example out of many: In Braveheart, William Wallace boinks a princess who didn’t even come to England until 3 or 4 years AFTER he was drawn and quartered in real life. If the moviemakers really felt they needed another love interest, they could have used Edward I’s second wife Marguarite – who WAS in England during that timeframe. Of course, then they couldn’t have implied that Edward III was REALLY the son of William Wallace. Faugh.
And to those of you who would say, “It’s only a movie. It’s supposed to be entertainment” I will say (and my family has heard it often enough to shout it along with me) HISTORICAL INACCURACY IS NOT ENTERTAINING!
Thought of another one…
Precocious kids. AARRRGGGGHHH!
Seems to be a real favorite of the Spielberg factory. Fer instance, in Jurassic Park (a popular target for this thread), the 10 year old girl who is a)profficient in UNIX and b) can hack and reprogram complex code. I’ve worked with programmers and done some myself. The guy who wrote the JP software would probably need days just to refamiliarize himself with the code before he could modify it.
And not that I have anything against kids (just had one myself recently), but I hate it when movie tots seem to be surrounded by a shield of invulnerability. The world is crashing down around them, bad guys are becoming ex-bad guys by the score, yet little Timmy can find a structurally sound nook to hide in that allows him to view the entire action but no one can see him.
I could go on and on:
- cell phones that never go out of range
- movie houses are never dusty, even the poor people’s places
Why why why when running away from bad guys or bad things do the runners HAVE to look back over their shoulders?? If you’re being chased and your life depends upon getting away, would you REALLY risk tripping or breaking stride to see how close the villian/villian’s car/villian’s dog is behind you?? I think I’d be looking ahead for SOMETHING to help my situation.
But that’s just me, I suppose…
I hate to disappoint, but that one’s actually real. It’s Silicon Graphic’s FSN. If you have an Irix box lying about, you can download it from:
Of course, you’ll note that it’s under the ‘fun’ section, so you’re correct that it would be extremely unlikely to be in use as their main filemanager.
I’d really like to see someone in a film using that “Doom for system administration” in a really serious lab. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out Doom )
Check out http://www.jabootu.com/glossary.htm for a pretty funny list of bad movie rules. It includes the Hero’s Battle Death Exemption which states that the monster must take at least 10 times as long to kill the hero as it did to kill anyone else, and the Atomic Grenade which allows an explosive small enough to fit in a purse to be powerful enough to completely demolish a 50 story building.
How 'bout horror movies where a female character actually has the ovarios to stand and fight the monster, and the monster does something impossibly stupid that makes it easy for her to kill it?
I’m thinking about that scene in C.H.U.D. where female character and, um, C.H.U.D. face off, female character grabs for Samurai Sword, C.H.U.D. stand there and stretches its neck about eighteen inches, presenting her with an unmissable target…
slice
I get annoyed when the moviemakers try to throw in every trite landmark in a city/state/country you know well. And usually its done in an impossible timeframe. For instance, if the movie involves a car chase in D.C., one second they’re in front of the White House, then half-a-second later they’re careening through Georgetown.
And invariably every American who dreams of travel in a movie wants to go to Paris. Why can’t they say Buenos Aires or Cairo or anything else for a change?
What’s strange about this is when you hear a real kookaburra, and you think “Argh, I’m in the Jungle? There are leopards out there!!” … “Oh wait, I’m in Melbourne suburbia…”
Wait a minute! Those aren’t armadillos, they’re giant Transylvanian cockroaches!!! Yuck! Dracula is a terrible housekeeper, isn’t he? 
~~Baloo