Before the internet, I had no idea that coffee cups that were obviously empty bugged so many other people too. It’s like a warm hug of nitpickiness.
OT, but the Korean War Memorial in DC has that. One of the statues is a soldier with an M-1 carbine, and he’s carrying it one handed with his finger on the trigger. When I saw that, my first thought was that his sergeant would have slapped him upside the head the instant he saw it. Kinda spoiled the mood the memorial was supposed to give. It was a number of years ago that I saw that, so they may have fixed it since then. [/end OT]
Except, my glasses, which have actual glass lenses are flat on the front. They have to be because they are a rather strong correction. I think the more obvious thing with fake glasses is that you can see they are not distorting the wearer’s face at all. They have used real glasses from time to time, but mostly when they want to emphasize really bad eyesight – Papillion comes to mind and that classic Twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith.
What takes me out of a movie is that really excessive CG that is supposed to make the scenes immersive but ends up being annoying and tedious. Return of the King has some of that, but the worst IME was probably the Minority Report movie.
I first saw Hell Is for Heroes when I was six, and it made a huge impression on me. Seeing it again a couple of years ago, I couldn’t help noticing that Steve McQueen was constantly fiddling with something on his M3 submachine gun (the ejector port, I think) for no apparent reason.
This may have been Steve’s way of giving his character a nervous tic (they* were* in a combat zone, after all), but after a while it bugged the hell out of me! :smack:
Or Stuarts. Or Pattons. Or Walker Bulldogs. Or… :smack:
The worst examples of this I’ve ever seen were in the adaptations of Fatherland and Archangel (by HBO and BBC, respectively). In the books, the relationships between the male and female leads were purely platonic.
He was a notorious scene-stealer. He bugged the crap out of Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven by fiddling with his hat during Brynner’s lines.
When somebody runs in and yells, “Quick, turn on the TV!” and the people already there don’t ask what channel to turn to. And the news item is apparently starting over again from the very beginning so that those watching the report get to hear all of it.
A friend of mine swore he watched an Elvis movie in which a motor boat made the peel-out sound.
As long as we’re nitpicking gun stuff - how’s about the stone-cold killer / ultra-competent badass who blinks and/or flinches each time they fire? It’s very indicative of a person who’s inexperienced with guns, but there’s no way to train a person not to do it except for giving them lots and lots of range time.
Amen to that!
There’s a remarkable lack of "understand why they did it " in this thread, considering the subject line.
Oh, look; a guy with a gun just got the drop on someone from a short distance away. For plot purposes, I know the gunman now has to walk right into hand-to-hand range; I’m sitting here expecting it, because it has to happen: it’d make no sense in reality, but it makes so much in-story sense that I’m taken out of the movie in advance.
In the “experts messing up” category, it’s military uniforms for me. The ACU has a zipper on the front and a velcro tab on the collar. Both features were added to accommodate body armor*, which were uncomfortable with the old, plastic buttons. When you wear it, you zip it up to sternum level and fold the collar down. When you put on your armor, you zip it all the way up and flip the collar tab closed if you want to.
In movies, though, they’re consistently screwing this up. They have that collar closed and the zipper all the way up. They have no name plates, no flag, no unit insignia, and the rank is sometimes in the wrong place. Their boots aren’t bloused and their laces hang out.
I know to civilians it doesn’t seem like a big difference, but that’s not the point. The point is that this is a basic function of getting dressed. The soldier does it every day. Their character ought to know how to dress themselves properly. To us servicemen, it looks the same as having your pants on backwards.
Come to think of it, I actually don’t know why costume departments can’t get it right.
*They tilted the breast pockets for the same reason, so a soldier can access the pockets through their chest protector’s arm holes. They’re velcro so they can be operated one-handed.
Or the headrests. They’re often oddly missing as well.
I have no clue what this is supposed to mean (aside from being unnecessarily hostile).
There was one movie where Gene Hackman (I think) was pursuing some baddie on a train. He finally gets the drop on the guy in the space between between cars, and instead of handcuffing or otherwise securing him, he goes “Ha! It’s a toy gun!” Whereupon the bad guy proceeds to beat the crap out of Gene.
Of all the dumb things I’ve ever seen in a movie, this ranks among the dumbest!
Like Dirty Harry. 
Justified is a great show, but it’s terrible in this respect. The Appalachian foothills of Kentucky are damn near the most important character on the show, certainly in the top five–but all their establishing shots have sagebrush and shit in them. Would it have killed them to send a crew to Appalachia for a couple of weeks, knock back a dozen hours or so of scenery footage to use for the rest of the series?
If the setting weren’t so important to the show, I wouldn’t mind so much–but as it is, it’s really hard to believe they’re tracking down hillbillies when they’re practically in the desert.
The one that really bugged me was near the end of Skyfall. The badguy and his henchmen track Bond and M and some other guy to the Skyfall mansion and start shooting up the place. M and the other guy take an escape tunnel that dumps them out into the countryside. It’s night, it’s dark, and they have a good lead on the bad guys. So they pretty much have a clean getaway right? No. M and the other guy are using a flashlight while running across the moor.:smack:
Bad guy looks across the countryside in the dark of night 360 degrees around the house, sees the flashlight in the distance, “There they are!”
Idiots.