Things that totally ruin the suspension of disbelief in a movie

[Zeldar]

@Morbo

It was a lamp. You can see it at ~the 22 second mark here.

Thanks!

[Malacandra]

@Sublight

Like Lok said, I think that’s Tomorrow Never Dies. What pulled me out of the movie about that scene wasn’t the whole lift/thrust problem, but the fact that the pilot was using the rotors to shred everything in the alleyway, including storefronts and vehicles. I didn’t know they made unobtanium light enough for use in helicopter rotors!

Well, that too, but mostly the fact the chopper would plummet to the ground like a stone…

What they did have in MI was a helicopter being towed into the Channel Tunnel by a train, and lasting for quite a long while without bumping into anything. Uh-huh. :dubious:

[Kamino_Neko]

@RickJay

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!”

Reminds me of one thing that killed Godzilla: King of the Monsters for me…

In any scene where Raymond Burr’s character was present (other than the ones they shot with him), they left the Japanese dialogue intact, and just had Burr do a running translation/paraphrase of it.

When he’s not…the Japanese characters’ dialogue is redubbed in English,

Why they did this is obvious, of course, but it struck me as pretty funny that it gave the effect of the Japanese characters only spoke Japanese in the presence of the white dude.

[zyzzyva]

What code doesn’t do in real life

I think “code is not green text on a black background” is the most frequent (if not worst) offender.

[Throatwarbler_Mangrove]

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."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.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.

That’s the one where he had his rifle sight on backwards.

[Trivial_Trivia]

@Farmwoman

Parking. Specifically, parking in front of the door of the Manhattan address the character happens to be visiting.

Perhaps if I hadn’t actually lived in that city and spent upwards to 6 hours a week looking for parking in my zip code it wouldn’t bother me so much. Would it be so hard to show the guy walking down the block instead of pulling into a spot we never, ever see in real life? The magic is immediately blown for me.

I was at a Tenley Circle-area theatre in DC the night A Few Good Men premiered. Early in the film Tom Cruise parked his late 70s/early-80s tank directly in front of his apartment building. The entire theatre erupted into applause upon viewing that magic trick.

I’m drunk right now so the actual title of the book/movie escapes me, but there’s a famous Russian film where the hero and his love escape the revolution by withdrawing to a dacha. Much is made of snow on the stairs, icicles on the chandeliers, and frost on the windows…yet the hero pulls a bottle of liquid fountain pen ink from a desk drawer and starts writing.

[Intelligently_Designed]

If I recall correctly, it was in Doctor Zhivago.

[MaxTheVool]

@RickJay

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?

Is there any reason to think every member of his gang is German? Theo (the hacker) clearly isn’t, and the asian guy (Al Leong) (aka Genghis Khan from Bill and Ted) doesn’t look it.

[nashiitashii]

@xnylder

The accent clash was my second-least favorite thing in that movie. The sets were the worst. Producers, please listen: I know Japan is an expensive country to live in, so I presume it’s expensive to shoot films there too. But if you’re going to the expense of building a huuuuge indoor set reproducing parts of Kyoto (and you did, as you bragged in the pre-film publicity), why not just go over there and film existing locations that actually look right? If Kyoto won’t let you, try Hida Takayama or another town that still has plenty of old streets that could pass for Gion. Because everything, from the woodwork to the width of the alleys, felt fake to me. Or better yet, you could have saved yourself a lot of money and borrowed some existing sets from a samurai drama. There must be tons of those around and they would have only need minor updates for the fim. And don’t get me started on the “reinterpreted” costumes, or “interpretive” dance, or the damn fabric cherry blossoms…

I wasn’t expecting the movie to be all that good, considering that the book wasn’t that great when it came to accuracies in Japanese culture. But yeah, there are a LOT of things that are wrong with that film.

[Ludovic]

While we’re on accents, what did everyone think of Harrison Ford’s Slavic accent in “The Widowmaker”? Ostensibly a Russian, the accent in previews to me seemed much more Yugoslavian. I don’t know from Russian vs Yugoslavian, though, so did anyone else have a problem with his accent in the movie? (Didn’t see the movie, so I wouldn’t know.)

[Gary_Robson]

Sometimes things can blow you out of the movie when you’ve read the book. For example, in the book Shogun, much was made of the pilot’s blond hair. The Japanese hadn’t encountered anyone with blond hair before. It was brought up many times.

So what did they do in the miniseries? Hire an actor with light brown hair and dye it darker!

@Lemur866

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.

Yes, but it was a joke. Robin Hood: Men in Tights is a comedy.

[flex727]

One thing that has always bugged me in movies, and especially on TV, is women who sleep in a bra. I’ve never known any woman who would sleep in her bra. I understand why they do this on TV, but it is still distracting.

[betenoir]

@flex727

One thing that has always bugged me in movies, and especially on TV, is women who sleep in a bra. I’ve never known any woman who would sleep in her bra. I understand why they do this on TV, but it is still distracting.

I thought they said Marylin Monroe was found dead in nothing but a bra. Of course this could have been brought up (well of course it was) for purient interest, why make nake that up? Why not just say she was naked?

Just saying…

[Robot_Arm]

One from Rollerball (the original, I haven’t seen the remake). During the games, alot of the shots require the camera to be somewhere on the track. It’s common to have a camera rolling along the track, looking back at the actors, for example. I don’t have a problem with that; our window into the movie’s world is supposed to be omniscient, showing us whatever it needs to to tell the story.

But, there are times in the movie when characters are watching the rollerball matches on television, and they’re seeing the same sort of shots. Within the world of the movie, there couldn’t be cameras in the places required to get those pictures.
I don’t know if that really “ruined my suspension of disbelief”; I had seen the movie a few times before I even noticed it. And cameras have gotten so small, maybe it’s plausible to say that they’re mounted on the motorcycles or something. I’ll be on the lookout for that next time I watch it.

[Zeldar]

@betenoir

I thought they said Marylin Monroe was found dead in nothing but a bra. Of course this could have been brought up (well of course it was) for purient interest, why make nake that up? Why not just say she was naked?

Just saying…

Elton John’s Candle in the Wind says as much, or it did before he rewrote it for Di. I don’t know the later version, just the one on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

[Speaker_for_the_Dead]

@nashiitashii

I wasn’t expecting the movie to be all that good, considering that the book wasn’t that great when it came to accuracies in Japanese culture. But yeah, there are a LOT of things that are wrong with that film.

Like, for example, the fact that all of the Japanese people (who have, ostensibly, been speaking Japanese throughout the film) can communicate with the Americans in exactly the same way they communicate with one another. It was so strange; I don’t think I’ve been taken out of a movie so much before.

[Catamount]

@flex727

One thing that has always bugged me in movies, and especially on TV, is women who sleep in a bra. I’ve never known any woman who would sleep in her bra. I understand why they do this on TV, but it is still distracting.

I used to when I was younger and hadn’t discovered underwires. Those are too uncomfortable to sleep in, but the elastic ones are fine.

[Moirai]

@InvisibleWombat

For example, in the book Shogun, much was made of the pilot’s blond hair. The Japanese hadn’t encountered anyone with blond hair before. It was brought up many times.

I think it was red, actually.

[Kent_Clark]

@flex727

One thing that has always bugged me in movies, and especially on TV, is women who sleep in a bra. I’ve never known any woman who would sleep in her bra. I understand why they do this on TV, but it is still distracting.

I’ve known a number of amply endowed women who wore bras when they slept.

[Moirai]

I did, starting when I was pregnant and the girls got huge. Then, while nursing and after, I kept sleeping in a jog bra in the vain hope that it would help keep them up where they belonged… perhaps it helped a bit.