Not really Hollywood’s fault, but having lived in the LA area, I find it distracting when I recognize a location and it’s being played as Boston, or San Francisco, or wherever.
Hey look, it’s the intersection at Fig and Wilshire! That’s not Harvard, it’s UCLA! etc.
The earlier mention (by friedo) of the phony coffee cup issue helped me remember that as I watched (for the eleventieth time) the otherwise magnificent Unforgiven last night I couldn’t help but notice how poorly Eastwood and crew managed the drinking of hard liquor by almost everybody, but especially the Schofield Kid. It’s rare that movies do it right anyway. Whatever substance is actually in those bottles (probably tea or some other brownish water) the actors swig it down with hardly a grimace. In my experience, hard liquor stings, especially if gulped down straight. But The Kid is swilling liquor as if it were nothing more potent than Snapple. And that happens several times in the movie (and lots of other movies). The only semi-realistic liquor drinking I can recall is Eastwood’s toward the end, after he has killed the town. He sips and grimaces with the sips.
And – in keeping with the main theme of this thread – my attention was drawn away from the action (perhaps more because I already knew what was going to happen) by trying to read the label on The Kid’s bottle. One time it looked like it might be Southern Comfort and another time it looked like “Jonathan’s something-or-other” and yet again it appeared to be something else. The issue here is that I’m not sure how much of this was my being able to split my attention due to the rerun nature of my viewing, and how much was just plain shoddy movie-making. Eastwood is one of my heroes, and I haven’t missed many of his flics, but there are those little things (my comments upthread about the mysteriously moving glass with its mysteriously changing contents level refer to one of the Dirty Harry films) he (or his crew) seems to mangle consistently.
What kind of bubble bath are you using? I’ve never rinsed off after a bubble bath in my life, and I’ve never been sticky.
Strictly speaking, this isn’t “breaking the fourth wall” (which is where a character directly addresses or acknowledges the presence of the audience as in It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, Malcolm in the Middle, and The Saint), but rather a form of metatextuality, i.e. criticizing or highlighting a common cliche. The film Ronin in that The Case,which is the “McGuffin” plot device that drives the story, is also a plot witnin the story of the film; it’s a lure to draw Seamus out of hiding. The fact that neither the characters or the audience discover what’s in the case (Vincent: “What was in the case?” Sam: “I don’t remember.” Vincent: “Lesson Number Two.”) underlines the fact that the actual contents of the case were irrelevent. Mamet could have identified the item in the case–say, a suitcase nuke or a vial of weaponized bioagent–but what would that have added to the story? There are other suggestions of this in the film as well: for instance, the fact that the main protagonist is poignantly aware of his own mortaility (Spence: “You worried about saving your own skin?” Sam: “Yeah, I am. It covers my body.”) Very clever.
You have to consider that most of the people in the film are “hard drinkin’” guys for whom drinking whiskey is probably more usual than water. Once you’ve become accustomed to drinking liquor straight it doesn’t really sting. Clint Eastwood’s Bill Munny, on the other hand, is a reformed character who hasn’t tasted a drop of liquor in years, and when he does, it’s a turning point for the character, when he reverts to the brutal, drunken sociopath he was before his wife “reformed” him. (This is also a metatextual reference back to previous Eastwood films where a sanitized version of the character–“The Man With No Name”, Josey Wales, “The Stranger”, et cetera was a hero for being brutal and violent.)
There are a few things that really break the movie for me. Once is general computer use, and in particular, the hacking of encryption, which is generally shown to be just a matter of time (usually minutes). Never mind that the characters only have a single e-mail or small file to work from with no knowledge of the contents, making a context-based encryption hack virtually impossible. Another is firearms use; in virtually every movie one sees allegedly professionals running around with finger on the trigger, pointing the gun at their feet or other parts of anatomy, jerking the trigger when they fire the gun (which would completely ruin accuracy), et cetera. One notable exception to this is the film Heat, because director Michael Mann had the main cast attend tactical weapons training with advisor and former SAS officer Andy McNab for several weeks. The selection of sidearms (a flashy, customized, ivory handled Colt Commander for the flashy Lt. Hanna, and a stock Sig P220 for the spartan, minimalist McCauley) was also appropriate. Note that nobody is wearing a shoulder holster, which are for poseurs.
There are several actors who are such personalities in their own right that they generally drag me right out of the film, including Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, and Alec Baldwin. All of these guys can act when it’s required of them, but generally they just play themselves, and it completely removes me from the film, as in the performances of the latter two in The Departed. Alec Baldwin was funny (Nicholson just annoying) but I immediately thought of Blake from Glengarry Glen Ross (and how that brilliant scene was written specifically for Alec Baldwin) rather than staying in the film.
Stranger
Actually, portraying Mary as youthful is not that unusual. Michelangelo’s Pieta is a good example. Mary is obviously not a normal woman, so she wouldn’t be expected to age like a normal woman.
Flat lenses in eyeglasses.
Weightless backpacks that are supposedly full of gear.
CMC fnord!
Anytime there is an animal in a scene, it is making noise. Horses constantly nicker and whinny… even when they aren’t moving thier mouths. Dogs whimper and bark and growl. Cats meow and screech.
Now, I have owned horses in the past, and at this time I live with 4 dogs and 2 cats. Never have mine been so… vocal. In fact, if my dogs made that much noise, I woud thrash them about the head and shoulders.
On a simlar subject, I remember a movie where it showed a woman riding a horse, TROTTING (A 2 beat bait) in a circle in the grass. The sound effects were of a horse CANTERING (A 3 beat gait) on pavement. Ruined the entire movie for me.
Or after a man and a women have sex both are naked, but the sheet only comes up to the guy’s waist yet cover’s her breasts. The she get’s up and takes the blanket with her, but leaves the sheet covering the guy. This of couse means that the woman was on top of the sheet while the guy was under it. Or is that just something straight couples do :rolleyes: ?
Accents:
As mentioned before the southern American accent is usually terrible in film. It is usually way overdone and sounds ridiculous. I doubt if Hollywood voice coaches have ever even been to the South.
Also, period pieces in which different actors use different accents. If it is an 18th century French piece some actors will use French accented English, others British accented English, and still others will use American accents – in the same film! I realize that the characters wouldn’t be speaking English at all, but the onus is on the director to pick an accent and push uniformity for the sake of keeping the story authentic.
Also: squealing tires on gravel, grass, and dirt. Such a stupid sound effect.
It’s puzzling that someone with your username has trouble casting himself back to the time a film was made.
Not a movie, but a show - Early Edition. There’s a cat and sometimes they’d have a close up of the cat…not meowing, but you’d hear it. ARG. At least they could have shot the cat differently so that it wasn’t so noticeable.
I hate the 555 teleohone numbers too, but I suspect I’d hate it even more if a movie or TV show used a random number that happened to be mine! How many poor people had to change their phone numbers when Tommy Tutone recorded “867-5309 (Jenny)”?
Years ago, I remember that “Kojak” sometimes used the number 246-4200 instead of 555-whatever. I don’t know what number that was in other cities, but in NEw York (where I lived), it was Dial-A-Prayer! So, any wise guy who thought he’d call the number he’d just heard to see if Telly Savalas would answer got a recorded hymn or prayer.
A major one for me is any scene where the actors are supposedly eating a meal. It is always obvious that they are just pushing bits of food around or toying with it. They very seldom actually eat anything. I understand all the reasons for this, but it just tends to always leap out from the screen at me and draw attention to the fact that ‘Hey, it’s just a movie! They’re just actors!’. This is such a problem (at least for me) that I wonder why writers even bother with ‘eating’ scenes. Would it make such a big difference to have the dialogue take place say, just after a meal or over coffee or something like that?
My pet peeve is when characters get drunk, have a night of hot monkey sex and then wake up clothed…wtf? Who puts on clothes immediately after sex, especially when they wake up, and its implied they have no memory of the night before - except they boinked like crazy.
One bad example of the ‘555’ numbers was Love Story. I can’t even remember which one was making the call or who said what, but when one was about to make a long distance call, the other says “be sure to dial ‘1’ first.” They actually force your attention to the phone dial, which was positioned to be completely visible.
And what does s/he dial? 5-555-5555. And they show almost the whole damn thing.
My biggest pet peeve is Southern accents. Apparently no one in Hollywood has gotten the message yet that there are many different Southern accents, all incredibly region-specific. If the movie was filmed in Wilmington, then they have no excuse and should be immolated immediately.
The best worst Southern accent I ever heard was in a 1990’s mystery show on A&E where the (British) detective went to NC to solve a crime. The previews for the show had a scene where the detective was in a down-home convenience store and the clerk behind the counter announced, “Yew ain’t frum arayoun hyar, are yew?” That would be what we call a “Deep South” accent, like Mississippi or Alabama. NC accents aren’t quite so pronounced. In NC that line would sound more like “Y’ain’t frum aroun’ here, are ya?”
And can anyone tell me why guns in movies never have recoil? I’ve never shot a gun, but I know that they won’t magically stay still after you fire them.
You can add me to the list of the godsdamn makeup everywhere. It drives me batty. We’ve been re-watching Star Wars and I notice Leia’s got bright lipstick on in every scene! I hate that! Do you really think while she’s on Endor she’s got time to re-make herself up?
All kinds of movies have that. There is a way to put on makeup unobtrusively!
Also the gratutious romance in general. Ugh.
from the top 100 things I would do If i ever become an evil overlord.
#215. If I ever MUST put a digital timer on my doomsday device, I will buy one free from quantum mechanical anomalies. So many brands on the market keep perfectly good time while you’re looking at them, but whenever you turn away for a couple minutes then turn back, you find that the countdown has progressed by only a few seconds
Yet another inappropriate makeup hater here. “We’re about to land on Mars! Better put on my mascara!”
My other one is the gratuitous strip-club scene (with the principal characters of course talking to one another and ignoring the gyrating girls). Far, far too many movies use this to make otherwise boring exposition visually compelling (I guess). As soon as one happens, I think to myself, “Guess the dialogue’s going to be bad.” The one that cracked me up the most was <checking imdb> Varsity Blues, where the football team – most of them presumably under 18, certainly under 21 – go to a strip joint and of course have Meaningful Conversations with one another.
In The Chronicles of Riddick the girl who was in the prison on Crematoria had shaved armpits. I know this because her one-day old stubble slapped me in the face in every scene where she had her arms raised. Sorry, but in the real world, she’da had afro puffs under there. Her head hair also would have been a tangled mess, especially since it was curly. But no. Instead she looked like someone who just strolled off the set of Digrassi Junior High. She looked nothing like a tormented prisoner.
Everytime I watch a movie that has a cat which demurely lets you carry it without so much as a wriggle, I have to wonder why none of the cats I’ve come across in my life behave like that.