Not to mention the GUI they use for security. Wouldn’t it drive you nuts if every time you opened a password-protected file you got a two-second animation followed by a flashing red “ACCESS GRANTED” message and matching audio?
That drives me nuts, and they do it in just about every episode of CSI. They start with footage from a poorly-lit parking garage, taken by an old, cheap black & white security camera with a lens that probably hasn’t been cleaned in 10 years. Push the “enhance” button, and you have a high-resolution photo of the bad guy from a reflection in a curved hubcap that was probably six pixels across in the original footage. Argh!
I also hate when they do artificial aging of a six-year-old girl from an old photo, and come up with a perfect match to the forty-year old suspect, right down to the hair length and style. Give me a break. This is even more egregious when the forensic specialist starts from a skull and creates a picture of what the person looked like when they died, guessing at the eye color, hair style, nose shape (skulls have no noses), and other details. The picture is immediately recognized by a bartender that saw the person a few times 10 years ago. Double argh!
Wasn’t it Robin Hood: Men in Tights that included that wonderful line, “Unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with a British accent?”
How can you tell when Clint Eastwood grimaces?
Mine does. I can carry him rightside up, upside down, I can even pick him up by the “hips” (do cats have hips?) and let his front end dangle and he’ll purr. As soon as I pick him up he goes completely boneless.
The Number 1, classic, total suspender-of-belief of all time.
In Rebel Without a Cause Jim Stark (James Dean) - the jeans-wearing, leather jacketed, angst-ridden, alienated teenage antihero of all time, angrily storms into the house one evening, yanks open the refrigerator and…
Pours himself a glass of milk.
Now I’ll grant that the movie was made in 1955, and adult screenwriters’ idea of how angry teens reacted was at odds with reality, but come on.
This was James Dean
He was a Rebel
…Without a Cause!
The least he could have done was drink straight from the bottle.
I’ve been working in restaurants for many years, too, including too many cramped, one-man kitchens. I’m sick and tired of characters eating in a small, cozy restaurant when the bad guys burst in and they escape by running out through the kitchen. An institutional-sized kitchen with lots of open space and all sorts of new & shiny equipment, and a dozen cooks. Seriously, the dining room will appear to be sized like a small diner, and the kitchen is bigger than the one we have at the convention center where I work now.
I’m an aerospace engineer, so I notice lots of aviation-related errors. At this point I usually give them a pass, since they’re so common. It takes something really blatant, like magic tunnels throughout the aircraft, to pull me out of a film.
No, the one thing that consistently takes me out of a movie are eating scenes. You see, I noticed that one of the easiest to find continuity errors is changing levels of drinks in glasses. So now every time there’s a dinner scene I’m staring at the glasses, looking for the levels to jump around between cuts. It’s a stupid habit I’ve developed, but I can’t help myself.
There’s no way this is possible. The only way it could possibly be is that he’d just given up. If you watch the film his smoking scenes are laughable. There’s LOTS of smoking in that movie for some reason though… Nearly every Ghostbuster smokes except for Egon. You say he was a somker. I’m sure that it can be proven by some biography on the internet. But just have a look at that movie. Show me one scene where he actually takes a drag. It never happens. Bill Murray, on the other hand, inhales and takes a drag. I know smoking is bad, etc… but he pulls it off. Dan Akryoyd did an awful job even if he was a smoker…He smokes cigarettes like cigars. And that’s being generous. Seriously, check out the film! There’s no way he was actually smoking when he filmed it, regardless of whether he was a normal smoker or not.
I remember some absolutely HORRIBLE Bruce Willis movie where he led a platoon of Army Rangers sent to get some US doctor out of some African wilderness that was about to be attacked by warlords.
Her: “I’m not going to leave before my people leave!”
Rangers: “OK, we’ll wait.” :dubious:
Later they finally get her out, JUST before the warlords get there and kill the platoon. They get on the helocopter and on their way out they see a village that’s been destroyed.
…so they decide to go back and help her villagers escape. :smack:
They’re the US ARMY RANGERS!!! They ask you to go with them, YOU GO WITH THEM. You refuse, they tie your ass up and throw you in their copter and GTFO. None of this “oh help the village survive” Bono shit.
/second worst movie I’ve ever seen.
//Mystery Men was the worst.
Whenever Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst stare blankly into each other’s eyes in what is meant to convey longing, it completely ruins my suspension of disbelief in that movie.
More generally, the miraculous image resolution enhancement is the absolute worst, as far as I’m concerned.
Did you ever consider that he is playing his character that way? I have know many smokers and some of them actually do act that way with their cigarettes. They light up, take a small puff and then leave the cigarette hang out of their mouth. My dad does that sort of thing, because he grew up during the 50s and it was “cool”.
I love it when Costner shouts “this is English courage!” near the beginning of the movie.
I have to say, though, the accent didn’t make it any less enjoyable for me. I love pretty much anything Costner is in, and Rickman’s Sherrif of Nottingham was a great villain, plus the set design was excellent.
Plus, if the movie is set in the 1200s, people wouldn’t have modern English accents anyway, in fact they’d be pretty incomprehenisible to modern ears until you’d gotten used to them.
So this is really a subset of the wacky way that foreign languages are handled in movies. So if the characters are supposed to be speaking Arabic, some speak English with exagerrated Arabic accents (the extras and villains), some speak English with English accents (the sidekicks and mentors and such), and some speak English with American accents (the hero). So often you’ll have weird things like where the characters are supposed to be speaking Arabic and the supposedly native Arabic speakers are speaking broken English while the American hero who supposedly just learned Arabic is speaking in perfect English.
Now listen very carefully, I will say this only once. The only correct way to address this issue is the “Allo Allo” solution: If a character is speaking with x foreign accent, that means they are actually speaking x foreign language.
Trust me, the man smoked like a chimney. Kingston probably owes 20% of its butts-in-the-gutters problem to Dan Aykroyd.
His smoking scenes aren’t at all laughable. I lived with parents who smoked my whole life and he knows how to hold a smoke. Of course, playing to a director who’s asking you to do it again for the ninth time can make you stop caring, so one never knows. But believe me; Dan Aykroyd was a smoker, and it’s not an opinion call, it’s a fact.
For me, the weirdest take-you-out-of-the-movie scene was in “Die Hard.” The evil guys are shooting at Bruce Willis when Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) remembers Willis doesn’t have shoes on and so yells at a henchman to shoot out the windows… in German. The henchman doesn’t quite understand him, so he yells, slowly, in English, “Shoot the glass!”
Why would a German, trying to make himself understood to another German, clarify himself in English?
What was that Bond movie where one of the minor bad guys is coming after him in a helicopter, and uses the rotor blades as an offensive weapon by tilting the craft forwards until the rotor is nearly vertical, and then starts creeping forwards (all this a few feet off the ground, starting from a hover)?
Nuh-uh! :eek: Angle of thrust is perpendicular to the plane of the rotor disc! If it’s nearly vertical, you’ve got lots of forward thrust and negligible lift.
To be honest, there are dozens of North Carolina accents. About the only ones which you’ll ever here in the movies are mountain accents, which are very close to eastern Tennessean accents.
Believe it or not, not all of us sound like we’re from Nashville.
The accent you describe is what I’d call “country”, which you might hear in the western mountains. The “Y’ain’t…” sounds like it might be from the Piedmont, possibly down east. For pure auditory bliss, listen to a young lady with a Johnson County accent. I couldn’t even type how it sounds. No one who is not from Johnston County can sound like that.
In Memoirs of a Geisha, the Hollywood producers and directors seemed to think that a western audience could not tell the difference at all between Chinese people and Japanese people when doing their casting call. The actress chosen to play the main character is, IIRC, Chinese. Almost all of the other actors are Japanese. When listening to the characters talk and interact, the main character’s appearance and accent stand out because they are different enough to not blend in with the variety of Japanese people with Japanese accents. It pulled me out of the movie moreso than other films that have the actors speak English with each other, even though the presumption is that they are speaking X language via some sort of Babelfish reality.
Yeah, that’s from the first MI I think…Oh yeah, this also happened in the Channel Tunnel, to make things seem even more real.
We also have the thing in True Lies where Arnie rotates a harrier around the Yaw axis while hovering to do a stunning sweep-up. This is also not possible.
Damn Rick Jay I’m sure you’re right about this one, but why the hell does he smoke so weird then? I’ll try to get some screengrabs to show you what I’m talking about…
