It always bothers me when someone’s on the phone and the other person hangs up … and they get a DIAL TONE, not dead air, like in real life.
Also, the exchange is always 555, which is never used for a residence or business.
Oh, and one more thing. Characters who enter or exit hardly ever close the door after them.
Well, the implication in that scene is that Deckard (Harrison Ford) is analyzing a hologram. I liked it that they didn’t explain this, they let the audience figure it out.
re: Disney’s Pocahontas: They DID release a (straight to video) sequel of sorts wherein she did go to England with John Rolfe (who was the guy she married in REAL LIFE). But it was still historically INACCURATE to the max.
Another pet peeve: j’ever notice that in movies and on tv, when they end a phone conversation, nobody ever says “Goodbye”?
And count how many times you hear the phrase “Let’s get out of here”. I’ve read somewhere it’s used in about 85-90% of all movies.
FYI, there’s a reason for that. Apparently there’s a huge number of people out there that have nothing better to do with their time than call phone numbers mentioned in songs and movies. Annoying as all heck if it happens to be yours.
IIRC, there was a homeowner that had the phone number mentioned in the AC/DC song “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” - he ended up having to change it.
Tisiphone
There’s a class of old “classic” black and white movies that I love except for the overbearing background music.
Ancient Greeks or Medieval knights fighting with a definite slant towards Martial Arts!!! Karate Kid 500 BCE!
Raining dripping DOWNWARDS on the windshield of a moving car.
Tyres Screeching on a dirt track.
These are a few of my favourite things… when the dog bites, … oh yeah, and damned musicals that get the whole household singing and dancing, wrecking the joint!
I know the Millenium Falcon moves as if flying in Earth’s atmosphere rather than space, but Star Wars still remains my fave movie… I saw it on my 10th Birthday, the day it came out in the UK… All my school buddies were soooo jealous!!
As for “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” the assumption I was under was that the number (36-24-36) refers to the traditional “perfect woman’s” measurements of chest, waist, and hips. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. I did hear, though, that the various owners of the number 867-5309 were quite upset after the song by Tommy Tutone talked about it. So, the 555 is necessary. There was a Schwarzenegger film which used this (I think it was “The Last Action Hero”). The hero is stuck in an imaginary movie world, and one bit of evidence to try to convince him of this is that all the numbers in his world start with 555.
(Now THAT’s a tangent!)
Actually I am surprised that no one else has mentioned this. This one really gets to me, when people are being chased by a car down the street, they run straight down the street infront of the car. Here’s a hint, dodge. Maybe even do some rightangle turns. Cars are much faster than people, so where do people excel? Manovourability (sp?), so use it lamb duck.
As to the landmarks things. SPOILER ALERTGoing to MI2 (one of the few movies where I can say this) the girl gets dropped in the city right, then goes to commit suicide off a dramatic cliff. To get there she would have had to either catch several buses (I think 3 or 4) or catch a bus/ ferry/ bus. WHat’s wrong with trying somewhere else, or maybe even walking in front of a car? (ok, I know why - the ‘antivirus’, but there are better places that are closer. ANd also with that movie, wasn’t the ‘virus’ airborn? Yet the guy injected himself and got on a plane? WTF?
In Historical Fiction or Time Travel stories, when characters …
1 - Say lines right out of a high school history book (example The Patriot, when Mel Gibson says “Well, I’m against Taxation Without Representation, but …”)
2 - Meet every possible famous person from that period (most notably Napoleon, John Wilkes Booth, Einstein, Hitler, Mark Twain, George Washington, and Socrates.)
3 - Change history, ignoring paradox.
4 - Do things grossly out of synch with real history (most egregious of late is, again The Patriot, where the British are portrayed as as bloodthirsty as Vlad the Impaler.)
Then there’s the Pregnancy Death Exemption.
No pregnant woman may be killed in a movie, no matter how much imminent danger she’s in.
Exception- she’s in the first trimester and contemplating an abortion because she’s not sure she wants to stay married to/in the relationship with the baby’s father.
Star Wars doesn’t have lasers. It has blasters. But speaking of Star Wars, what’s the point of Chewies blaster/crossbow?
Modern movie peeves:
No matter what the financial situation of the characters, they’re all wearing clothing from the Gap or Aberchrombie & Fitch.
All the popular girls in high school are superficial and snotty to the soft-spoken but kind un-popular girls.
Teenagers are full of angst(sp?) and hormones. We’re NOT! Really there are a few of us who aren’t!
Black-and-White movie peeves:
There’s always a platinum blonde doll who’s tough but with a heart of gold.
If it’s a city scene, all the natives have a Bronx accent. It could be in Cairo, but the shoe-shine boy will not only speak English, but speak it with a Bronx accent.
The entire city breaking out into simultaneous song and dance thing kind of puzzled me for a while there, too.
This isn’t a movie, but it’s a cartoon, so I figure it kind of fits in. It always bothered me that Clark Kent is always “mild-mannered”. Think about it. He’s always refered to as “in the guise of mild-mannered newspaper reporter Clark Kent”. What? The man can’t be cranky every now and then?
And don’t forget The Hunchback of Notre Dame. This was’t based on a true story, naturally. I’ve never read the book, but someone who was griping about the movie said that EVERYBODY died: Quasimodo died, Esmerelda died, probably the goat died too (never read the book). Now they’re making a sequel due next year. I liked the movie, don’t get me wrong (it had it’s dark side towards the end which I thought had really good animation, plus, how could you not like Frodo? He’s so evil, in a neat way), but making a sequel out of a movie based on a book where all the characters died! That’s Disney for you.
From,
Anake
Outbreak? That movie was filled with Hollywood cliches.
What movie that really gets me is The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Malcolm’s girlfriend (Sara?), had a million chances to die. She was getting herself into loads of trouble. Let’s see…she almost got killed by stegosaurus’, she almost fell out of the huge trailer to the rocky ocean below, she almost got killed by Velociraptors at least twice, encountered T-Rex’s at least twice–and came out with all of those with hardly a scratch. Now poor Eddie, he risks his life once to HELP his friends (can’t say that much for Sara) and he DIES the first chance he gets! I would have wanted him to live and Sara to die. The careful ones always die.
From,
Anake
Hoo boy, there are a lot of 'em:
As mentioned before, every single video game will have sound like Pacman. no matter how modern. And the people playing the game will frantically click their fingers on the controller with no apparent rhyme or reason. Also, you never actually get to see what’s on the screen, and if you do, the graphics are fully raytraced, complete with motion/depth-of-field blur and ray reflections/refractions.
Whenever you are fighting someone, they will always stand still while you escape. I didn’t really notice it at first because I, like everybody is “supposed” to do, was concentrating on the main character. But if you actually pay attention to the position of the enemy, they will start fighting and then suddenly just stand there growling saying “I’m gonna get you.” The more I notice it the more it pisses me off.
Computers always have 72-point font (as mentioned before) but also infinite resolution. The worst part is, I saw a commercial for AOL that had the images in infinite resolution. False advertising?
If there is a dogfight (either with regular airplanes or spaceships) the enemies will always go down quickly and discretely with small explosions, but the main character and/or enemy’s plane/ship will go down in a catastrophic, drawn out explosion.
Anybody, regardless of their training, can detonate an atomic bomb in less than 5 minutes. From what I hear, In Real Life, It takes a trained scientist about half an hour just to arm an atomic bomb.
Also, a train carrying Uranium, when crashed, will result in a horrific explosion (they made a made-for-TV movie about this. But I don’t remember what it was called, because I didn’t watch it, because of the aforementioned impossibility.)
Whether it’s a movie or RPG, no leading male character can be in contact with a leading female character without falling in love and/or having sex. There’s no such thing as just being friends if you’re opposite genders.
Just today I was watching the movie “Aliens.” Pretty good movie, except for the part at the end, where Ripley sucks the alien out through the vaccuum. I’m no expert on vaccuums, but From What I’ve Heard, if you did that and tried to prevent being sucked out into space by grabbing onto a ladder rung with your elbow, your arm would get ripped off. (Unless they were in a low orbit around the planet, but I could clearly see stars, and no sign of the planet, so I’m not sure.)
If somebody is typing something on a computer screen, and you can see the words as they are being typed, the person typing will take exactly the same amount of time to type each letter (well, not on the soundtrack, of course, but on the screen.)
Regarding other peoples’ posts:
Ranma: The Star Wars lasers are not lasers, they are (as mentioned earlier) blasters. And I think the ones on the ship are called Turbolasers, which are presumeably different from regular lasers.
Aghris: You’re right, there are no explosion sounds in space. But I was reading a “Making of Star Trek” book (published a long time ago, I didn’t even know we had it, but it’s a very interesting book) where Gene Roddenberry(sp?) commented on that fact. He said that in the beginning, the opening sequence had an animation of the Enterprise flying by, and no sound, as it would be in real life. He kept adding stuff to the scene for a long time, trying to figure out how to make it seem as though the Enterprise was going really fast, to no avail. Then he tried adding a “whoosh” sound to it, and, whoa, suddenly, the Enterprise felt like it was going really fast. As the author of the book described it (or maybe Gene Roddenberry, I don’t remember) humans (and consequently TV viewers) are used to things as they are on Earth, and it just doesn’t feel right otherwise. The fact that there is no sound in space can be overlooked, as it is a relatively minor detail that doesn’t affect the outcome.
Anake: I read The Hunchback of Notre Dame in elementary school. Actually, I think it was some kind of compressed easy-to-read version that stuck to the original story. Anyway, yes, everybody died. Next thing you know, Disney will release a version of Romeo & Juliet in which they live happily ever after.
This concludes yet another unnecessarily long post that took me forever just to type.
But she was locked up in an insane asylum with nothing to do but exercise…
Not only that, but Sara was the one directly responsible for his death by bringing the baby T. Rex there in the first place. Jabootu calls it the phenomenon a “designated hero/villain” where a character does things that seem to be opposite to their character type, but no-one notices it.
Calls the phenomenon, not the it phenomenon. Oops!
Oh, dammit. the, not it the. You wouldn’t believe I could get this wrong twice…
Try me. I can be very credulous. 
~~Baloo
I hate movies where the main character refuse to get rid of their sidekicks that always screw things up. A good example of this is Rounders.