It really is not a flaw, I’m sure it was intentional. Frau Blucher, from Young Frankenstein. I think in German, Blucher means glue factory, and it scared the crap out of the horses.
I love John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness – the dream sequences scare the stuffing out of me, and I guess after I’d seen it by the 10th time, I finally had the plot worked out.
That said, the history stuff in it is such a funny giggle! If they Brotherhood of Man’s book was written at the time of Christ, as the film posits, it wouldn’t be in book form, but a scroll…on papyrus, not parchment…probably not in Latin (ok, would maybe give them that, if it were written in Rome, though)…definately not in the bookhand it’s in (looks like an attempt at much later mediaeval letters).
I know there’s a scene (spoiler ahead!) where someone exclaims in shocked horror, that some of the words in this book have been erased and written over…I cracked up a then-fellow grad by saying, Oh, my God, it’s a palimpsest!
Mmmm, the fun of watching a movie with a palaeographer…
[Black Adder]
The long winter evenings must just fly by…
[/BA]
Still…jolly fun film – only thing it’s missing for me is Kurt Russell (who would have taken a flamethrower to the Son of Satan in the first 15 minutes, so perhaps casting him would have changed the whole timbre of the film…)
There are very few films taking place in the Middle Ages and antiquity – that aren’t intentionally silly comedy like Monty Python or Mel Brooks – I can watch without getting a headache (stirrups in Caligula :smack: )
Speaking of Caligula…
You know the scene where “Little Boots” Caligula is strutting around like a great soldier? That’s what I think of when I see Duhbya. 
Jeez, almost ANYTHING in a movie that involves airplanes is laughable.
The Airport movies were a joke, but more ambitious movies like Broken Arrow that combine hokey military stuff with unrealistic flying scenes are just about unbearable.
Airplane movie rules:
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When an airplane dives (no matter what type of airplane, including modern jet airliners) you must hear the sound of a WWII Stuka dive bomber. Otherwise, you know, the audience wouldn’t know the airplane is DIVING!
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When flying an airplane in a critical situation (ie landing, near a mountain, etc) you must produce a supreme physical effort. Even though the airplane has hydraulically powered controls that limit the force you can apply, you must ACT like it is really, really, hard to do what you are doing.
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Airplane takeoff distances, landing distances or taxiing routes can be as long as necessary to get the shot. Need 90 seconds to coordinate all those stuntmen falling off the wing? Fine - the takeoff will take 90 seconds. All you Dopers - the next time you fly, hack your watch when the engines spool up and see how long it takes until you are airborne. Even on international flights that takeoff at high gross weights I bet you’ll be airborne in under 25 seconds. Yeah, for those of you who don’t like to fly it might seem like forever, but it really isn’t.
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Any hole in an airplane, at any altitude, will cause an explosive decompression. The severity of the decompression is inversely proportional to the proximity of the BAD GUY to the hole. The closer he is, the worse the decompression. If the hero is near the hole, just add some big fans to the set and call it good.
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(The last one, since I’m getting pretty obscure). All radios transmit on all frequencies and everyone can always hear who they need to but no one else. Yes, if you are the CEO of an airline and walk into the O’Hare tower you can talk to your airplane that is orbiting over LAX. But you can also listen to what is said in the cockpit, and you can talk directly to the LA Center controllers…you get the idea.
In “Runaway Bride” and “In & Out” they both had a wedding scheduled in a Protestant church on a Sunday morning. This way they could run to the basement of the church and have to run through the Sunday School classes.
I have been an organist for nearly 30 years and I can tell you that I have played for exactly two weddings on Sundays, and they were both around 2:00 p.m. Weddings are NEVER scheduled for Sunday mornings.
I also hate it when actors are trying to be music directors and do the beat patterns wrong. For instance, Jimmy Stewart is in a movie about, oh, I don’t know, maybe Benny Goodman, and he does the 3-beat pattern backwards. I guess it made sense that Robert Preston did the 2-beat pattern backwards in Music Man, because he wasn’t supposed to be trained.
It’s also terrible when they try to let actors pretend to play the piano. Give me a break!
When my daughter and her frends made a movie last summer I thought it was really funny how they would be running on this street, then over a bridge somewhere else, etc. It’s hilarious! But the funniest part is where they have a fight in the lake…my daughter has no shoes on for the fight, but in the scenes before and after she had shoes on. She didn’t want to get them wet!
I’m a geologist. So The Core is by far the funniest movie I have ever seen. Really, the whole thing cracks me up so much I bought a copy of it.
Also: Dante’s Peak. Hilarious. My favorite scene is when the grandmother jumps in the acid lake to save her family.
Priceless!
In Sleepless in Seattle the man and boy took their little row boat from Lake Union, through the Hiram Chittendam (Ballard) locks, around Elliott Bay to Alki in West Seattle. That’s about 40 miles and they did in a couple hours. I don’t think they allow non-motorized boats in the locks… Not sure.
For me it’s anything veterinary related.
The one that comes to mind is Terminator 3. In the veterinary office treatment room there was a locked glass-fronted cabinet that contained flea control products, antibiotics and controlled drugs, i.e. phenobarbital. This cabinet was easily broken into by John Connor who then proceeded to take handfuls of phenobarb for pain from his motorcycle accident.
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Controlled drugs must be kept in a locked cabinet but not one that is that easy to break into. They are usually kept in an all metal double-locked narcotics cabinet or a safe that is not kept in plain site. These are DEA regulations and both DEA and DPR do periodic inspections of veterinary hospitals to check on storage and recording of controlled drugs.
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This was obviously the treatment room, the majority of vets do not allow clients into that room so why have a locked display with flea control medications in there? Perhaps there was a lot of employee theft of those products?
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Phenobarb is primarily an anti-epileptic and a very mild sedative. It is a barbiturate but it has little if any analgesic effects. Granted John Connor is not a doctor but supposedly he’s learned all sorts of survival methods and this was supposedly just what he was looking for.
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I believe that the girl vet also locks John Connor in a dog cage at some point and he can’t get out. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this and I can’t remember the details but I do seem to recall that he should have very easily been able to get out of there, either by sticking his fingers through the bars and opening the lock or by removing the bar in the corner that holds the cage together. Perhaps he was just drowsy from too much phenobarb or he hasn’t been locked in as many dog cages as I have (a hazard of being a very small person in the veterinary field).
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I believe the vet mentioned previous break-ins at this clinic when she caught Connor. Yet they still didn’t have an alarm system and still kept their controlled drugs on display for all to see? And she goes into this previously broken-into clinic that has no alarm system by herself in the middle of the night in a secluded industrial area?
The only thing that almost made up for it was the annoying, whiney, demanding, neurotic, pain in the ass client getting terminated. Still I couldn’t help but think how that was going to be very bad for business and insurance premiums.
When my dad used to watch any movie with an airplane in it, he’d get a huge kick out of pointing out how they were using the landing gear of one plane and the instrument panel of another and the cabin of a third.
My “specialized knowledge” involves one movie: “Tank” starring James Garner and Shirley Jones. It was filmed in my housing area at Ft. Benning, in a house exactly like mine. We could all cope with the fact that they cut out a wall between the kitchen and dining room to open up the pokey little rooms. But the detail that makes me crazy occurs when the two leads have a fight and she storms off down the hall to bed, slamming the door behind her. He gets up to follow and finds the door locked. That door doesn’t have a lock. It’s the door to the hallway that leads to the bedrooms and bathroom. It was a wonderful door, because you could close off the private areas of the house when entertaining, or to reduce noise when the kids had gone to bed, but it didn’t lock. It would have been a safety hazard. Don’t know why it bugs me so much when the rest of the mistakes in the movie are more glaring, but there it is.
I’m not a CPR expert, but I did get some training in resuscitation many years ago, and IRL you have to be very careful about the angle when you’re compressing on a person’s sternum – perpendicular to the patient, or some ribs are gonna break. The CPR giver has to lean over the patient, lock elbows, and keep those arms straight up-and-down with each compression.
Yet they often get this wrong in TV and the movies, with the caregiver lazily resting on his or her haunches and letting the arms do the leaning, and pressing into the chest at a ridiculously acute angle… :rolleyes:
Also, you don’t pound the chest unless the person’s heart isn’t beating. (Seems obvious, doesn’t it?) But you can’t determine there’s no pulse without taking one, and, surprise, they often skip or rush that part. Also, it’s wrong to assume there’s no pulse simply because a person isn’t breathing – if there’s an airway obstruction, you have to clear that first.
Darn, you beat me to it…
Also, I get peeved about a lot of occult stuff, weaving looms, playing of musical instruments… I don’t know if I have a lot of obscure knowledge, or just too many hobbies, or what.
Three errors involving the Montreal metro:
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In Jésus de Montréal, Daniel’s friends help him into Place-Saint-Henri metro. They’ve supposedly just come from the hospital, but there’s no hospital anywhere near there. (That’s my neighbourhood.) And at the end of the film, two girls are kneeling and singing in the same station at a place where busking is not permitted.
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In Maelström, the main character is sitting in Acadie metro, and asks someone else the time. He says it’s midnight. When the movie was filmed, that line closed before midnight.
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In The Jackal, …okay, it’s a standard cinematic thing, but the “Washington metro” is really the Montreal metro (complete with blue rubber-tired cars instead of silver and brown steel-wheeled ones). More picky, though, is the fact that the bad guy (with the good guy in hot pursuit) dash from Capitol Heights station to Metro Center. Those are quite some distance and several stations apart.
Oh, and in the first few episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise, the “linguistics” spouted by Hoshi Sato absolutely drove me bananas. I offered my retroactive condolences to all physicists and space scientists at that time.
Finally, I remembered a geeky one. Sliding Doors - the train that Gwyneth Paltro misses isn’t the District line, but the Waterloo & City. She needent have got a taxi, because it’s only fifteen minutes walk to the other end.
Worse still, I know they’ll have offered them that station at a reduced rate because the line is normally closed at weekends.
Oh, and Prodigy’s Firestarter video is also in a defunct underground tunnel, but I’ll leave that for now.
Shakespeare in Love was clearly not meant to get on the nerves of anyone with a historical bent, and I tried very hard not to let the inaccuracies bug me, but they did. A lot. The so-called nobleman that Gwyneth Paltrow was forced to marry reportedly had a tobacco plantation in or around West Virignia. Granted, plenty of Brits made good money from just such ventures in their time. Therein lies the rub: in their time, under the rule of, say, King George the Umpteenth. Not anyone who attended Queen Elizabeth I’s court. People who took off to the New World in the latter days of her reign were explorers or idiots (depending on your opinion of Francis Drake), not investors. First you claim the land, then you farm it.
Is he too lanky or something? Are there height limitations for being a pilot?
Don’t get me wrong, I like NYPD Blue. But in an episode I saw recently the Detective Kirkendall was put onto the situation of a woman shoplifter by one of the uniformed cops. The cap kept complaining that it was the woman’s husband who forced into such actions and that he ought to have his ass kicked. It was obvious the cop had a personal, although not an amatory, interest in the woman. So Kirkendall had the same cop go out and pick up the guy with the warning not to beat him up. I’m not a cop and have never been one but I’ll bet dollars to donuts that police departments have a strict policy against cops handling cases in when they are personally involved.
All WWII movies that I have seen are junk. Patton was good junk but had some crap in it too. For example the scene where Patton is in the middle of the street in Africa and the German plane strafes. The machine gun bullet splashes come up the street in a nice, neat lines while he fires his .45 Colt at the plane. I laughed right out loud. Machine gun bullets don’t act that way. If any bullets from the guns of a plane a couple hundred yards distant had come that close to Patton he would have been full of holes because of the normal gun dispersion. And I guess the ricochets from the bullets hitting the ground went somewhere else.
Saving Private Ryan was so full of anomalies that it was spoiled for me. For starters is was based on a false premise. There was no rule about sole surviving sons having to be immediately pulled out of combat in WWII. The scene where the room is full of women typing out death notices by the bale and the officer in charge picks up on the fact that Private Ryan is a sole surviver is comical to me. Next, I laughed when I saw an 8 man squad walking in full view down a road in what was supposedly enemy territory with one guy arguing about the assigned mission. I also am dubious about the wisdom of an 8 man squad engaging in fire fights while trying to make its way through miles of enemy held country. They also didn’t look like they were carrying a lot of ammo. And in the end is turned out to be just another western when the wagon train (US soldiers) was surrounded by the hostiles (Germans with a tank) and the cavalry (P-51s) comes riding to rescue in the nick of time. And last but not least, the movie dragged in Omaha Beach apparently so they could show some good action. Ryan was supposedly in the 101[sup]st[/sup] Airborne division and it landed behind Utah Beach as did the 82[sup]ne[/sup] Airborne.
I’d love to hear how many plot holes you could count for Die Hard II: Die Harder.
The thing that REALLY gets me is that the bad guys take over a D.C. area airport - and no one can communicate with the planes routed there because of the distances involved, you can’t use the radio.
Or that the planes have the fuel to orbit the airport for hours, but not enough fuel to divert to other strips? :eek: This is D.C., people. Assuming that they took control of Dulles, there’s Reagan (whatever it was called at the time the movie ws filmed), BWI, Wilmington, Richmond - completely ignoring the veritable flowering of military strips in the area - all within 15-30 minutes flight time for a commercial plane.
Any Steven Segall movie is of course hilarious just from the horrendous “acting” alone. But one that is particularly funny to those who work, or have worked in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska is “On Deadly Ground”.
The errors are beyond ridiculous and too many to mention, but here are a few:
The helicopter ride from the pump station at Valdez, to Pump 1 at Prudhoe Bay took about the length of time for one of the characters to smoke a single cigarette, nevermind that the landing strip isn’t actually AT pump one.
During one of his escape scenes from the bad guys “eskimoes” (c’mon people, there are a TON of different natives here), helped him escape on horseback. Ummmm, they’re NOT 1800s American indians in a Western, natives in villages don’t do the “horse thing”.
As they’re galloping frantically away from the bad guys, they’re jumping these tremendous cliffs and running enormous redwood forests. On the North Slope of Alaska? You know, where the TUNDRA is? (hint, it’s very flat, and there are NO trees).
In another scene, some natives were rescuing him by dogsled, and the dogs were barking as twere mushed frantically down the trail toward the village so he could be saved. Two things were wrong there. Imagine you’re running as fast as you can, would YOU be yelling?
Two, it was bad enough that the dogs were barking while full on running (the expert on sled dogs they’d gotten tried to TELL them sled dogs don’t bark on the trail), but the barking dog sound track was that of some huge dogs, perhaps St. Bernards? But sled dogs are very slender smallish dogs, and when they do bark it’s very high pitched and excited. Not at all the deep booming barks of the soundtrack.
The dumbest thing about the movie, and you don’t have to have worked on the slope to figure this out, was the premise of the movie.
The “bad guys” were supposedly purposely putting defective parts in their equipment, which as only Steven Segall could know, was GOING to cause a soill. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of business practices can see that this is idiotic.
But secondly there are so many incentives for the oil companies on the slope to keep things COMPLETELY safe and accident free, that this would cost them money. Not to mention all the silly sabotaging they did to other pump stations and such just to “get Steven”.
Well, it made for a great comedy just before we had to go catch our ride back to Anchorage anyway.
True, but in their defense, Truman didn’t know that.
Knowing a fair bit about firearms makes me roll my eyes in many action movies. The worst offending is people who will continually rack the slide on a pistol or pump the slide of a shotgun, just because it sounds cool. Yeah, it does sound cool, but you only need to do it ONCE, when you need to chamber a round from a newly inserted magazine.
Doing it after that merely ejects catridges/shells unused. If one doesn’t pop out on the 2nd rack/pump, it signals to me that the gun is empty.
That and magazine sizes rarely seem to sync up with shot counts. This is very apparent when the hero will fire a gun for much longer then there would be ammo for. A 30 round M-16 magazine is exhausted in roughly 3 seconds on full auto. A 100 round tommy gun drum will last about 10 seconds on full auto fire. You want to go longer then that, use a belt.