"Wrong" things that you notice in movies

[MissMillie]

Seabiscuit is a movie I can watch over and over and over again.

What I noticed: Seabiscuit is supposed to be a small horse (15 hands) and War Admiral is supposed to be a big horse (18 hands). Yet, in their showdown (in the movie) the side-by-side shot of the two horses has them at about the same size.

Do you folks ever notice stuff like this in movies?

[GPV]

1. Bad movie physics and impossible timing

[hunter]

34. "Gravity," the movie starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_%282013_film%29

Damn, that was almost painful, lost in the uncanny valley between hard science fiction and fantasy.

[Beakybird]

2. Maybe they just said, "Seabiscuit is a little hoarse." 😆

[cyclonefence]

5. Go stand in the corner

[cyclonefence]

3. The remarkable way short leading men grow taller when they stand near women

Maybe Seabiscuit stood on a box like Tom Cruise does.

[leftieNanner]

8. Or back in the day

when they would not have the man stand on a box, but the woman stand in a hole.

Such fragile egos.

[underpants]

4. Die Hard has several scenes that CLEARLY aren't Bruce Willis

Stunt man

[50 Shades Of Blue]

6. Endlessly!

Anachronistic clothing, hair, and make-up in non-contemporary settings always stand out like sore thumbs to me.

[a kennedy]

7. OMGOSH YES.......I should be a movie corrector to make sure it's right before ya shoot the scene.....

Not sure how to explain……but in one scene say the guy is wearing a hat, and in the next scene he’s not, I SEE IT and will tell my husband see, he’s not wearing a hat there. My husband hates it, but it happens a lot, AND I NOTICE. I should get a job pointing it all out.

[mopinko]

45. continuity is a job in the movies.

i notice them too.

[genxlib]

9. I really notice the seemingly instant globetrotting

Especially in the action films where people will be in far flung corners of the world and suddenly turn around and be somewhere else.

What would be a 48 hour trip is treated like an hour.

Bugs me

[MissMillie]

22. Yup... on TV too.

Did you ever notice that it takes Jack Bauer ("24&quot 5 minutes to get to the "other" side of Los Angeles during rush hour?

[Wounded Bear]

39. NCIS:LA does that almost every episode...

Then every so often they'll have an episode that includes the traffic in the plot. Then nobody can get anywhere, except that they do make it at the last minute.

[leftieNanner]

10. The Graduate

He's supposed to be driving from San Francisco to Berkeley on the Bay Bridge, except that he's on the upper deck of the bridge - which goes from east to west INTO San Francisco.

On edit: One of the Star Trek movies where they are supposed to be in Monterey and they are walking along the Marina Green in San Francisco.

Can you tell that I'm a San Francisco native?

[Submariner]

11. In the great western movie "Shane" with Alan Ladd

Ladd is reportedly standing on boxes in most all close in screen shots, which seems obvious throughout.

[Paladin]

28. Alan Ladd's height was 5' 6". (nt)

[SamKnause]

12. I find mistakes all the time.

The 3 mistakes I find repeatedly:


Clothes and hair styles don't match the entire length of the scene.


After getting wet from swimming, showering, water sprinklers, accidents involving water etc. their hair and clothes are dry.


After touching or holding onto someone who has just been killed or in the process of dying and bleeding heavily

the actors get fresh blood on their hands but if they touch something it never leaves wet blood on the object.

[Irish_Dem]

13. One of my professors told us to stop fighting with movies and books.

Because like you are describing, bright people notice all the inaccuracies, mistakes, stupidity in pop culture.

He said, go watch Michael Jackson, enjoy it for what it is, and don't argue with it!

Ha, easier said than done. Like you, I notice all the mistakes and idiocy when reading or watching a movie or TV.

[cemaphonic]

18. It's a lot more bothersome when the movie in question has a veneer of realism though.

Unrealistic space physics in Star Wars is much easier to ignore than the unrealistic physics in Gravity, for example.

Or any movie that claims to be based on a true story.

[Irish_Dem]

20. I just watched Intersteller and fought with it the entire time.

And I don't even know much about physics.

But I have to keep remembering my professor's comments.
His point is that movies and books are art. Not reality.

They are a product of an artist's imagination and not subject to rules of every day life.
Just enter the artist's reality and enjoy it.....

Easier said than done.

[hunter]

36. Oh, I just posted about *Gravity* above before I read your post.

Gravity made me squirm in my seat.

I consider any movie with FTL travel and other sorts of technobabble magic pure fantasy which increases my ability to suspend my disbelief. Star Wars and Star Trek don't bother me.

There's a bunch of political "true story" movies I find equally uncomfortable.

[Nittersing]

14. When an entire room of overhead sprinklers go off!!

They just don't work that way.

And crawling around inside (bright and shiny) ductwork.

[Ocelot II]

15. In historical movies they almost always get the music wrong.

Last edited Mon Oct 11, 2021, 06:20 PM - Edit history (1)

Drives me nuts. You shouldn't hear Baroque music in a film about Henry VIII, for example, but I guess movie producers figure that any music that's older than Beethoven is just fine for a movie set in the Middle Ages.

Also, why do people in a hurry to do something really important always find a parking spot right in front of wherever they're going?

And why doesn't anybody ever have to go to the bathroom?

[3catwoman3]

17. "And why doesn't anybody ever have to go to the bathroom?"

Don’t know, but no one ever does, even if trapped in an elevator for 8 hours, or down a well for 6 weeks.

[Jilly_in_VA]

16. I'm bad with movies

but even worse with books. I almost stopped reading The Pillars of the Earth in the first chapter when the poor builder dude started undoing his wife's buttons. Poor people did not have buttons on their clothes in the twelfth century. I'm not sure even rich people did.

There used to be a website years ago that was called something like "Details" or "Little Details" where aspiring writers could ask questions about stuff like that. I don't know if it, or something like it, still exists, or if it's converted to a subreddit, or what. It was great though. Ken Follett could have used it.....

[rsdsharp]

26. I'll get flamed I'm sure, but I notice gun mistakes.

For the first half of the Women’s Murder Club series, James Patterson constantly had characters click off the safeties on their Glocks, which have no external safeties. Or using “revolver” as a pseudonym for handgun, even when referring to semi-automatics.

Movies constantly have semi-automatic handguns continue to fire after they are empty, and the slide locked back. Or showing they ARE empty with repeated clicks, when the hammer can’t fall with the slide back — if that particular gun even HAS a hammer.

[hunter]

37. Those bother me too, and I despise gun culture.

Most people who keep guns for "self defense" are idiots.

[rsdsharp]

43. Well, CSI had the bullet made out of frozen hamburger,

techs would could tell with the naked eye that a bullet came from a .357 magnum (as opposed to a .38), and deemed a Ruger GP 100 a “rare gun,” so it’s not alone.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

19. The one thing that bugs me the most is

putting wedding bands on men before they actually started wearing them. It didn't become common until the mid-1960s. Essentially no men, at least no men in this country, wore them before then. If you really must indicate that a man is married, have him mention his wife the first time he opens his mouth.

I also am highly annoyed when someone outruns and explosion. Then there are the car wrecks where those inside aren't wearing seat belts and they walk away with nary a scratch.

I also notice stuff wrong in books, and I stop reading or watching when it gets too bad.

I stopped watching "The Crown" after the second or third episode because of the way Phillip was being portrayed as a kind, supportive, and loving father to Charles. Nope. Never was. He was nearly the worst possible father for Charles. There were other things about Margaret that I know weren't accurate. I've had the misfortune to have read any number of biographies about the royal family, and so I'm hampered by the facts.

[sinkingfeeling]

23. My father wore his wedding ring from 1939 and was buried with it in 1989.

[rsdsharp]

25. Mine, too. Married in 1945. Wore it to his grave in 1969.

[hunter]

38. My wedding ring got caught in a power tool once.

It hurt like hell and it cost a lot of money to repair the ring. Not to mention my finger, but insurance paid for that.

Idiot me, I'd worked in machine shops before I was married where I'd been warned about jewelry.

Nevertheless I haven't removed my wedding ring in decades. It's possible I couldn't get it past my arthritic knuckles.

My grandma left her wedding ring to my sister. The undertaker had to cut it off.

I've also been in car crashes, explosions, and witnessed shootings. It's nothing like the movies.

Usually it's a moment of confusion followed by terror and, if you are unlucky, long periods of pain and PTSD.

[Diamond_Dog]

21. I always notice

That hairstyles in the time period of the movie are wrong if the movie was made more recently.

[sorcrow]

24. Airbags!

Airbags never go off unless unless it's a plot device of some sort.

Regards,
Sorghum Crow

[Aristus]

27. As a former tank crewman, I always notice when a tank film gets something wrong about

the tank and its crewmen.

Lots of examples, but the one that sticks out in my mind the most is in the Kevin Reynold's film "The Beast Of War." The movie depicts Soviet tankers during their own Afghan War. The tank in question is a Russian T-55, which boasts a four-man crew. In the film, they supposedly are able to cram five men into the tank, one of whom isn't even a crewman, but the crew's Afghan interpreter.

I've had a chance to inspect a T-55, inside and out. Inside, there's barely enough room to move around even for one person, with the tank in museum-mode, without a full combat load of ammunition and gear. Combat-ready, it would have been a very tight pinch.

Having said all that, it's nearly unanimous among the tanker brotherhood that "The Beast Of War" is one of the best, if not the best, tank movies ever.

[Ocelot II]

29. Airplanes. I assume they get consultants for movies involving aviation, but

they must be ignoring them much of the time. I recall seeing one movie - don't remember the name - where the interior cockpit shots were of a B-737 and the exterior shots were of an MD-80. These are not remotely similar, but maybe it was easier just to use stock footage of one or the other and they figured most people wouldn't notice.

[Phentex]

30. When ALL of the sprinklers go off for a small fire on one area...

like a trashcan or something. This drives my husband crazy. Only the sprinkler(s) over the fire would go off not all of them on the same floor.

[msongs]

31. take off jet has 3 engines, landing jet has 4...and different airlines nt

[First Speaker]

32. "Where Eagles Dare" is one of my favorite films...

...I mean, WWII kitsch at its height. And so much of it is just flat-out gonzo--how Richard Burton has a hairstyle that would have had him arrested on sight in Nazi Germany. How the three British traitors all look exactly alike. How the Gestapo Major looks *so* much like a stereotypical "Aryan" that it provokes snickers. The bizarre logic--why, at the climax, do the two surviving traitors *want* to go down in the cable-car? Staying in the castle would by far be the safest thing for them to do. And at the very end, one can see very plainly that a jeepful of "Germans" are clearly dummies. It's a wild and wacky film that seems more like a dream every time I watch it...

[First Speaker]

33. Another classic--the sun setting in the East at the end of The Green Berets...

[Leith]

35. In ConAir

When the airplane was zooming low over Las Vegas, it hits the Hard Rock Cafe sign - then keeps going. In real life, it would have plowed into the Hofbrauhaus restaurant. The plane would have had to make a couple figure 8s over the city in order to buzz the landmarks in that order.

At the end, when Nicholas Cage and John Cusack are chatting in the rain, their backgrounds put one of them on Fremont Street downtown and the other on the Las Vegas Blvd strip several miles away.


All movies and TV shows:
Nobody says "goodbye" before they hang up the phone!
Drivers are always shown looking at their passenger having a conversation. Watch the road, dammit!

[tanyev]

41. Drives me crazy when they have big dramatic discussions

while supposedly driving somewhere and the person who is supposedly driving spends more time looking at the person in the passenger seat than watching the road. I think the movie Say Anything had a really egregious example of this—so bad I couldn’t focus on the story, but kept yelling at the screen, “Watch the road! Pull over and stop!”.

[Doc_Technical]

42. The HUGE interiors of WWII era

Aircraft and submarines.
"Das Boot" being a rare exception.

[berniesandersmittens]

44. In "Anaconda" a waterfall was flowing up

Thought I was nuts but I went back and yep. Right behind Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez

[nolabear]

46. Sleepless in Seattle has a famous one.

At least here in the Seattle area it is. Tom Hanks lives on a houseboat clearly in a specific area and at some point he takes a boat to another area that doesn’t actually connect by water.

[radicalleft]

47. Movies where military members hair is way too long.

Or have them wearing head covers indoors or the crappy salutes (cringeworthy for a vet)

[electric_blue68]

48. I hardly ever notice stuff. But my mom...

was our TV shows continuity person! 😂

[betsuni]

49. I'm watching a scary movie tonight and at the end, scariest part, a convenient

storm with thunder and lightning. I expect that with really old movies, but this is recent. I'm so sure. Not wrong, just annoying.

Also annoying is how phones are main characters along with the humans.