This.
Bad guy: I don’t really want to kill you, but I must.
Good guy: Bet you won’t!
BG: Now I’m really going to kill you! <Cocks the gun>
GG: Nanny, nanny, boo-boo!
BG: I mean it! <Racks the slide>
GG: I know you are, but what am I?
BG: Now you’ve done it! <Slides magazine into the gun>
Maybe not as unrealistic as it sounds; Rome is pretty built up and has really small, twisty and turny roads, as well as a lot of traffic.
A Vespa is pretty ideal for weaving through all that, and a 5 series isn’t.
Good blocking and cinematography.
It’s really weird, sometimes for no reason I’ll just catapult out of the narrative and say “wow, that’s a really good shot!” or “wow, the choreography of this conversation is great!”
This especially happens with shots that have something happening on multiple “planes” in the shot. Like the famous shot from Citizen Kane with the kid playing outside the window.
Any time a cat makes a cameo, we are treated to “meows”.
That alone doesn’t take me out of the movie. It’s when the cat’s mouth is not even open and we get the sound. I’m looking at you, producers of Black Mass.
Huge happy guffaw of laughter! You’ve caught the very essence of the problem!
The worst for me is when fire sprinklers go off in a movie or tv show. I know they do it for comedic effect, the “oh boy, we just goofed up!” scene. But it’s so far removed from how fire sprinklers work that it completely takes me out of the moment.
Fire sprinklers are not activated by smoke. They’re activated by heat. And even if there’s enough heat to activate the sprinkler in that room or area, it does not activate the sprinklers in the entire building. That would be stupid! That’s why they’re built the way they are. You don’t want to ruin the whole building with flooding because there’s a fire in one room that probably is put out by the one sprinkler activation.
So when I see someone burning a piece of paper in a trash can and then the fire sprinklers activate in the while building, I’m done. You just yanked me right out of whatever story you’re telling.
(Oh, and people carrying suitcases that are obviously empty and light as a feather. That annoys too.)
You would have to see the movie (not recommended) but that didn’t come into play - she was just right behind them one scene later. Of course, even if the movie took that into consideration, there’s really no way in hell she would even know which small twisty streets the BMW took. The minute her covered moped fell over and she climbed out to get on the other one they’d be long gone. It’s not like she had some sort of tracking device on it or anything.
Or:
And they don’t even go off a room at a time. Evey single sprinkler head is activated on it’s own. The only person who will get soaked by holding up a lighter to a sprinkler head is the guy standing under it.
Sheesh, this thread degenerated quickly. Sorry, OP.
I can’t think of an example right now that actually takes me out of the movie or TV show or whatever, but the whole “timer down to 1” thing does bug me sometimes, EVEN THOUGH I UNDERSTAND IT’S DONE BECAUSE if it were much more, the audience wouldn’t feel as much suspense, and think, oh, there was no danger, there was plenty of time.
I will willingly and eagerly suspend my disbelief for almost anything, until somebody throws up. At that point I invariably notice that I think this is a horrible thing to do to the actors–to make them throw up on camera. Even though it’s fake, fake throwing up is IMO almost as bad as real throwing up, and can lead to it. And on and on, which I’m not going to do here, but I AM going to do in the movie, which ruins it for me.
Now horror movies are kind of different, in that there are ALL KINDS of things in horror movies that seem horrible to do to actors. Possibly this is why I don’t watch a lot of horror movies. But if I am watching a horror movie and someone projectile vomits green stuff, oh well.
Things other people have mentioned, plus things like, say, Skylab is falling, only the movie is set in 1981, will not take me out of the movie. Seeing a glimpse of a boom mike will not, etc. Wrong license plate for the state/era, no problem. Throwing up? Oh, it’s a movie, that poor actor (yeah who got paid $3 million but still).
I hate the gasoline bomb fire ball explosions. I mean, sure, I like fireballs, but they don’t do much other than set things on fire.
I’ve got a lot more to rant about, but I gotta go get a burrito or something first.
Fake sneezing. It’s next to impossible to convincingly fake a sneeze. Why try? It’s easy enough to sniff a little pepper and sneeze for real.
Or pluck a nose hair.
I understand why movie animals and bad guys do this, but it’s incredibly annoying. So the bad guy–the bad lion, or bad mafia dude, or bad robot, or bad super-villain, or bad alien monstrosity–sneaks up behind the good guy. One pounce, one shot, one punch to the back of the head, one tentacle up the ass, and the good guy is dead. But does the bad guy silently dispatch the good guy? No, the lion roars, the robot whirrs, the monstrosity hisses, the black hat sneers, “Hey Cody!”.
Then the good guy turns around, sees the bad guy about to attack, and has time to either pull out his gun and shoot the bad guy dead, or take a moment to savor the situation and then take off running, with the bad guy in pursuit.
In real life when a lion sneaks up on you from behind they silently pounce on you, and you don’t realize you’re being attacked by a lion until you feel the fangs puncture the back of your skull. In real life it’s a lot faster to shoot someone when you’ve already got a gun pointed at them at point blank range than it is to whip around and pull out your gun and shoot them.
In real life, if a lion really does walk up to you and roar, he’s not hunting you, he’s threatening you. And the last thing you should do is run, because lions can run faster than humans, and if you run you trigger his chase instincts.
It’s a very dramatic scene, because the audience sees the danger, but the good guy doesn’t, and so we have dramatic tension, which builds with the threat as the good guy realizes the danger, and then the release as the chase starts. But just once I’d like to see a lion jump on a guy out of nowhere and bite his spinal cord out.
Almost anything to do with getting shot or stabbed or punched and resulting mobility, unconsciousness, or death is pretty badly unrealistic.
I wonder if anyone has ever tabulated the number of times Jack Bauer has been stabbed in the gut or shot in the shoulder in the course of 24 hours, and yet manages to subdue the terrorists at the end of the day.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! That’s great. I’d love to see that!
In my case, more or less any fight or gunplay scene, ever. They are acted out in accordance with certain standard clichés that bear no resemblance whatsoever to reality, for the most part. Certain exceptions aside, they produce in me no sense of tension or excitement at all. I’m just waiting for the farce to finish with the conclusion required by the plot.
I heard an interview with the military advisor (R. Lee Ermey I think) for Full Metal Jacket explain how monumentally difficult it was to get the actors to behave as soldiers actually behave when under fire. He described how the actors wanted to just stand or crouch in full view, but said (IIRC) a “real soldier will do anything to get cover when under fire, up to and including digging with his tongue if necessary” and that they had tenths of seconds to live, otherwise.
Compare that to about 90% of all gunfight scenes.
In theory, you could create glasses that have their refraction reversed by contacts, but I don’t know if that’s ever been done.