“Nobody’s that good an actor!”
You’ve just now emphasized that somebody is: the guy who’s right there is. You’re explicitly (a) reminding me that sometimes people are putting on an act, and you’re (b) drawing my attention to the fact that — however sincere he seemed when he read those lines — that’s exactly how good an actor he is.
And there are better actors!
There was a scene in “Friends” where Joey had to smoke for a part and Chandler explained it like this:
Another technique thing that breaks the scene for me is when a character is supposed to be at an elite level of playing a sport, but it looks like the actor was just shown how to play right before the scene was shot. Playing at an elite level looks a certain way. It’s not so important if playing the sport is just a random aspect of the character, but it’s annoying when it’s central to the plot. Like, if a character is randomly playing soccer in the park, it’s no big deal if they don’t look perfect. But if the show is about soccer, the actors should look like they have some experience actually playing soccer.
Another who hates this. You can tell by the way it’s being carried, and by the sound the cup makes when it’s set on a table.
The big one for me is bad gun handling. Endless ammo is bad enough, but when actors repeatedly jack the slide on a semi-auto pistol, it makes me grind my teeth. One series that is actually very good about weapons handling and military tactics is “Seal Team” on NFLX. They must have a former military person as an advisor, and they actually listen to him/her.
Another is when a grenade is thrown and the whole building/car/whatever blows up. Grenades are anti-personnel weapons.
A really trivial one is when the liquid in a glass keeps changing without anyone taking a drink, especially when it goes down and then back up again.
Good point…although nobody actually uses gold to purchase things these days.
(Whereas, back in the day when $5 gold pieces were being minted for use as currency, they presumably were actually used for purchases.)
From Dune Part 1: After the “Ornithopter” they are being transported in crashes, Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) asks his mother “you good?” like a modern American kid would.
And no one bothers to depict PERIOD TEETH.
How long would it take to paint someone’s teeth so they’re not Specifically 2020’s Artificially-Whitened Chompers?
And those teeth are practically glowing when surrounded by the makeup (that they DID spend time on) to make an ancient peasant look down-and-out.
Characters having a conversation while driving and not paying attention to the road.
There’s either going to be a collision or there won’t be and either way I’m not thinking about the story any more, I’m just thinking “look at the damned road!”
For my husband it’s police investigators who don’t use gloves at crime scenes.
I know one case of the opposite: A scene supposedly in Canada that wasn’t:
In the move Away We Go Maya Rudolph plays a pregnant woman looking for a place to settle down. In one part she visits a friend in Montreal. I remember thinking, “This doesn’t look like Montreal at all.” I found out later it was filmed in Vermont. Now Vermont and Montreal may be close geographically, but they look absolutely nothing alike.
Even when they use anachronistic music as an intentional, artistic choice, it sets my teeth on edge. Maybe more so. The only examples I can think of off the top of my head are the movies Moulin Rouge and A Knight’s Tale, but it seems like it’s done fairly often.
I remember being mildly jarred at hearing a Decemberists song in the Season 1 finale of Mad Men.
When people are playing games in the background or the characters play a game as part of the scene, but nobody sets it up to be a legal situation, (like chessboard with only 1 king or a pool table with only 1 red ball and no black* or professional poker players having to call for more money mid hand.)
*In a UK context all pub tables are 7 red, 7 yellow 1 black and are assumed to be playing 8-ball.
A couple things you see a lot in old TV shows or movies, but not so much any more:
When someone is supposedly playing the guitar onscreen, they make no effort at all to make it look like they’re making actual chord shapes; they just slide their left hand up and down the neck randomly.
In old Westerns or cop shows, the actors in a shootout jerk the pistol forward when they shoot, as if they’re trying to push the bullets out or something. They look like little kids playing cops ‘n robbers.
Maybe this isn’t exactly trivial and isn’t exactly about a “show”, but I get very annoyed about supposedly real-life situations that ignore the existence of the camera operator. For example, there may be a scene with the show’s host meeting someone for the first time. They come to the person’s door, the person opens the door, the host says, “Hi, I’m Joe Blow with This is Real Life, can we talk to you for a minute?” but the scene is being filmed with the camera INSIDE the house. Obviously this isn’t the first encounter the occupant has had with the show’s people. Or a real-life person is shown supposedly alone in a house or in the woods or whatever, but a camera is filming them.
Depending on the job, of course. Cowboys were often paid “dollar a day + found” (plus a bonus when the cattle were sold) and shop clerks got the same.
I can forgive that happening once, as some crooks have been known to do that to sound bad, thus expelling a perfectly good round on the floor.
What annoys me is when the cops, etc take one look at the gun wound and say “9mm”. Well, a .38 has effectively the same diameter, and a 10mm is only- yes you guessed it- 1mm bigger, which is hard to tell from a wound. A .22 wound does look different from a 9mm, but looks the same as a .25. So, they can just say " a small caliber wound" or “Looks like about a 9mm”.
Yes, the $20 was more used for bank transactions.
I saw an interview with an old lady who poked fun at Matt Damon’s teeth. “Nobody had teeth like that back then!”
I don’t generally mind if a show isn’t filmed where it’s supposed to be taking place, if it’s just generic city street scenes or the like. But yeah, anything that’s obviously wrong for where the show is set it completely distracting to me. For example…
I started watching Animal Control on Netflix a few months ago. The show’s set in Seattle, but in one scene in an early episode there was an obviously Canadian railroad crossing sign clearly visible in the background. In generally Vancouver could probably pass for Seattle in a TV show as long as they’re careful to not show anything obviously Canadian, but seeing that obviously foreign road sign made it all too obvious it wasn’t.
One of this most ridiculously bad examples of this was in Mindhunter. A couple of episodes took place in Sacramento, and I happen to live in the suburbs of Sacramento. Most scenes I could kind of tell were probably actually filmed in Atlanta, but it didn’t bother me that much because they were just “generic city” scenes. But then in one scene the two main characters were eating in a diner, along a two lane road, with Sacramento’s Tower Bridge in the background. There’s no place in Sacramento that looks even remotely like that from which you can see that bridge. They clearly just used CGI to add it to the background of that scene. It’s like the director insisted on showing a local landmark to make it look like they were really there, but they botched it so badly that the inclusion of the landmark was the thing that made it look so wrong to a local to the point of being distracting.
Oh yeah, In Outlander she just happened to run into the one Scotsman who not only had good teeth (and bathed), but spoke a dialect she could understand- and he could understand hers. Not to mention a very progressive Scot, who was okay with women doing un-women like things.
Go back 1000 or even 500 years in the British isles and it is unlikely you would understand the local dialect, and they would not understand yours either.
Yep, that is a Bad Thing.
In a similar vein, there’s a ‘talking head’ stylistic device in several recent sitcoms where the characters take turns in one-on-one, sit-down short interview segments where they talk directly to the camera. This may have originated, or was at least popularized, on The Office, and it’s also used a lot on Abbott Elementary. It makes sense on those shows, since they make it abundantly clear that there is a film crew documenting them in the show’s fictional universe.
But…what about Modern Family? They did the sit-down, talk directly to the camera thing all the time too. But unless I really missed something, they were never being documented by a camera crew.
Who were they talking to?!? 
Scenes where the driver is conversing with the passenger and maintaining eye contact for extended periods of time. The only movie I recall where they crashed was Mississippi Masala.
Good one.