I actually like genuine movie Nitpicks. My favourite ( like many others) is from North by Northwest - the shooting scene in the Mount Rushmore cafe, a boy in the background puts his fingers in his ears, because he knows the gun is about to be shot.
What annoys me is the nitpicks like “Tomorrow never dies”- China does not use MIGs. This to me is not a nitpick. The world portrayed in the movie is different than the real world.So in “Tomorrow never dies” the Chinese fly Mig airplanes and the British secret service is the best. That is not a nitpick. Maybe a piece of trivia but not a mistake.
ANother one from Angel Heart (IMDB goofs)Factual errors: When Harry Angel makes his tape recording, he gives the date as 3 January 1955. Later he quotes from the television program, “The Mickey Mouse Club” (1955) which did not premiere until 3 October 1955.
My reply- this is fiction. In this world MM club started in 1954. That is not a goof. It is trivia.
Movies are not documentaries. That world is different to our world.
Does anyone else get annoyed by http://www.moviemistakes.com and http://www.nitpickers.com and IMDB. IMDB has trivia and goofs for movies. Most of the goofs I would say are just trivia.
I don’t mean to “get” anyone here personally, but a few I’ve read here in CS. . .
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The design of the watch-towers in “The Village”
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A Budweiser bottle from the wrong era in “Capote”
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Some violation of Roman law in “Gladiator”
If a person allows any of these things to pull them out of movies like those, well they’re just not watching a movie in the way it was intended.
And, shit, half the time, it seems like some other poster comes along and says, “well, actually the bottles did look like that then” or “actually, people did hold their swords like that in that era” (that was from a “kingdom of Heaven” thread) so the original “nit picker” has not only nit-picked himself out of movie world, but he’s done based on his own poor knowledge. Two wrongs in a case like that not only don’t make a “right”, they make a UBER-wrong.
You want a movie that you can’t nitpick? Go watch “Gods and Generals” and tell me just how interesting it is to get everything right.
I’ve been waging a battle here on the board over this for years. It’s not so much about nitpicking – it can even be fun to point out the issue with the MiGs. What is stupid is when people point out tiny things like that and then say, “It ruined the movie for me.” That’s taking anal retentiveness to a whole new level.
It’s really just a form of egotism: the writer is saying “Look how smart I am!” and by saying it ruined the movie, it gives them a chance to flaunt their knowledge as though knowing that little bit of trivia is like being able to calculate pi to 1000 digits in their head.
Trunk has also made a point I’ve made many a time: people act like they’d prefer something to be dull and “accurate” than dramatic. The concept of “dramatic license” – crucial to all fiction – is, at best, ignored or at worst, unknown to the person making the nit.
I can be amused by an anachronism, or a trivial factual mistake in a film, but it never affects my enjoyment. I’m willing to cut the director some slack if the result is a good film.
Hell, when The Onion parodies your attitude, then you’re definitely looking at it wrong.
I agree with the OP. If the historical accuracy isn’t spot-on, then why should anyone care? Spotting the digital watch in Gladiator, however, amuses me a little.
One that really leaves me scratching my head is this list of mistakes. In Airplane. Did these people really miss the point of the film that badly? 
Wow. There’s a wrong way to watch a movie?
I love to nitpick. It heightens the enjoyment for me. Book 'im, Danno.
Yeah, there is.
If you go to see Gladiator – a movie about action, lust, revenge, power, blood, violence, and beefcake – and your movie is “ruined” because of some misuse of a handheld weapon in a battle scene. . .a battle scene whose purpose is to establish a characterization of Maximus, yeah, you watched the movie wrong.
There’s a limit to it. It’s going to be a rough sell for anyone if Maximum pulls out a laser gun, but we’re talking about “nit” picking here.
Re: Chinese Migs:
While the PLAAF has not used Migs of soviet manufacture since the Korean war, most of the fighter fleet is composed of some locally produced derivative of either the Mig-19 (J-6, Q-5), or Mig-21 (J-7, J-8). It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie but I remember when I first saw it that the Chinese planes could have been J-8s, so calling them Migs probably wasn’t so far off the mark.
So what should the penalty be for such heinous movie miswatching?
Watching “Gods and Generals”.
Agree 100% with the OP and Trunk makes an excellent point about most nitpicks turning out to be incorrect themselves. Obviously IMDB, et. al. cannot confirm every nitpick submission for every film, but I would say half the goofs posted, if checked, would be “incorrectly regarded as goofs”.
Anachronisms might be mildly amusing, but the nitpicks I tend to focus on are the ones about clear violations of a film’s internal logic. Spy movies are full of these, when they feature absurdly complicated plans that rely on random chance.
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Nitpick:
We just did this thread like two days ago.
Small nitpick here-you say “we”. But I was not here.
Well… exactly.
Look, sometimes it can be fun for some of us to chalk up a list of the “errors” we see in movies, especially when the movie presents itself as based on fact. It doesn’t “ruin” the movie, although when everything really is a crock of shit coughDay After Tomorrowcough it’s kind of hard to not view of the director’s effort with a bit of a jaundiced eye.
Those that do the equivalent of rending their garments and gnashing their teeth over a Roman soldier wearing a wristwatch have issues, of which the nitpicking is only a symptom. On the other hand, the claim that people who nitpick do it only to show off their intellectual prowess strikes me as a pretty hostile and defensive posture, which IMHO is a symptom of different issues.
Personally, my eyes glaze over when people start critiquing movies as if they were great works of art, and talking about how one director is superior to another because of the level of lighting they used to convey a certain atmosphere, etc. etc. But I do myself a favor then, and steer away from those sorts of discussions because I find them boring. Seems like a simple enough solution for the OP and folks with the same perspective.
My GF and I sometimes watch really bad movies for the sole purpose of nitpicking out loud, MST3K-style. CBS Sunday Night Movies and Lifetime Original Movies are prime for this. While sharing a tub of ice cream, there are few things more fun to do on a Sunday night.
Somehow knowing that someone somewhere is crying “But you’re doing it wroooooong!” just enhances the experience.
For some reason, any movie that features prominently biology or medicine bring all the worst nitpickers out of the woodwork. I hardly open any threads about shows that contain those elements anymore because half of the responses will be about how they got the gestation time of the ring-tailed lemur wrong.
Maybe it’s just because I’m a physics person and Star Trek has beaten me down, I no longer have the energy to worry about such things. 
Just tap into the space-time continuum and you’l have all the isotonnes of joules you’ll need. 1 to the fourth power, at least.