Can anyone list some movie errors? In Casablanca, for instance,

The German uniforms were just strange. I couldn't tell if they were supposed to be Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe or SD. Has anyone else noticed similar movie mistakes?
Like the bandido in Hombre who was sent up a hill and never did come back again when the shooting started.

and then in the next scene it's in perfect shape.

There are shitloads of errors in movies like that - mostly just editing mistakes, or issues that couldn't be fixed in editing at all. Stuff like cigarettes changing size from one camera cut to the next; shadows moving back and forth (see that in Westerns and other movies filmed outside) and so forth.

Great scene in Young Frankenstein, while out in the woods searching for the monster, the constable with the wooden arm moves it, but it's the right arm, not the left one like in every other scene. I'm sure that was an intentional inclusion by Mel Brooks; a little Easter Egg for the people who pay attention.

I love finding mistakes.

that! The editing errors are one thing and then there are things like the streetcars in the old movie, "The Cardinal" which are 1950's types and not 1920's. Just plain scenery or backdrop mistakes. Oh, and of course, the one that most people do catch, the cowboy six shooter which can shoot all afternoon without being reloaded.

there's a scene of either Tarzan or Jane swinging from a vine from one side of the screen to the other, and doing the Tarzan yell - but there's no Doppler effect at all.

I (along with a bunch of others) caught that while watching the movie with my frat brothers in engineering school. We all decided that it wasn't a mistake in the movie, but that Jane (or Tarzan) was so brilliant, that he/she adjusted his/her yell to compensate for the Doppler.

M*A*S*H? Or cars can somehow squeal their tires on dirt roads?

would bea "gag", not a "mistake"
:shrug:

stormtroopers marching into the room where 3P0 and R2 were hiding... the last stormertooper smacks facefirst into the door. :)

I would have laughed loudly had I noticed it!

Although I haven't seen the newest DVD versions.

and I never noticed that.

They even added a sound effect for it!

...that instead of editing it out, they decided to add the sound effect of the guy smacking his head on the beam.

I have tried so hard to warn folk about the mind-bending additives in the popcorn ...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034583/goofs



I miss a lot of the errors, and most of the time it's not that important.

The only thing that distracts me is "boom microphone visible"

I can see I could browse this for hours if I don't watch out!

you can hear it raining, they go to a close up and it stops. couple other continuity gaffes, but i am too tired right now to remember.

without seeing it. it is something. and man was nicholson cute back then hubba hubba.

I just remembered that it's on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT9UUPVOZCs

also, go to http://www.moviemistakes.com for more.

I know German cars are good but I never thought they were miraculous. Thanks for the linkee.

When Bill Murray has the groundhog in the truckat the quarry...

When he crases through the gate, the front grill of the truck is broken and askew.

Later, when he is sitting in the truck before he drives over the cliff, the grille is intact.

Mostly with the cars.

• Steve's '58 Chevy has the same license plate (JPM 351) as the Studebaker in which the cheerleaders from Turlock (and Carol) are cruising.

• It's unlikely that Steve's '58 would've had a 327 engine, as Toad bragged to Debbie, since the film is set at the end of the summer of 1962 and the 327 was introduced for that model year. (The car likely came with a 348, which had more torque than the 327, so unless Steve blew the 348 he probably wouldn't have swapped it for a 327. Even if he did blow it, 348s were still readily available in '62.)

• A few cars later than 1962 can be seen, like the '73 Olds in the background when Curt runs through the intersection after spotting the white T-Bird and the '67 Impala Toad passes when he's cruising in Steve's Chevy.

• When Falfa rolls his '55 Chevy in the race with Milner, you can see that it has single exhaust, which would be utterly ridiculous for a street machine. Also, it has stock wheels painted silver, but while Falfa was crusing in it it had chrome reverse wheels. (They used three '55s in the film, including one as the "crash car" and another as the "crashed car." The "cruise car" was the one driven by James Taylor and Dennis Wilson in "Two-Lane Blacktop.")

• Before the race, Milner stops by a gas station to uncap the Deuce's headers. But when he leaves, you can see the exhaust coming from the tailpipes.

• When Toad's hanging outside the liquor store for a "shoulder tap," he asks a guy the time and the guy says it's a quarter to 12. A bit later, Curt's sitting on a car in front of a teevee store, watching "Ozzie and Harriet" through the window — at almost midnight?

• When Milner gets pulled over by Officer Holstein, he's next to a movie theater, which has a poster for "Cabaret," which came out in 1972.

the Cabaret poster without thinking about it.

In the climactic ninth inning, with Willie Mays Hayes on second base with two out, the score tied and Jake Taylor at bat, Taylor signals to the bench that he wants to bunt, and manager Lou Brown says, "That's a helluvan idea." No manager in his right mind would think a bunt is a good way to score a runner from second, especially with two out and an aging catcher with bad knees at bat, because Taylor would have to beat the throw to first for the run to count if Hayes did manage to score (which he did).

BUT — it's all wrong anyway, since the no. 9 batter led off the inning and made the first out. Hayes was the leadoff batter, and no one else came to bat between him and Taylor, so there was really only one out.

And what the fuck is an aging catcher with bad knees doing hitting second, anyway?

Oh, and when Pedro Cerrano homered in the seventh to tie it, he carried the bat around the bases. That's against the rules.

odd. I hadn't seen anyone do that before. I imagine it looked odd to a lot of other folks too.

At the biker bar, when Arnie gets the cigar burn on his upper chest...he grabs the dude, and throws him into the kitchen/cooking area...but, when they show Arnie throw the biker...no burn mark, no cigar burn...then its there again, when he fights a few other bikers.

clearly visible in a shot.

...balance his car onto the right two wheels to fit down a narrow alley during the big car chase scene. When the car comes out of the alley, however, it's on its left two wheels. The producers realized the mistake during post production, and had to film an insert clip in which the car drops onto four wheels and then back up onto the opposite two, even though the alley had been established as too narrow to do this (otherwise Bond would simply have driven down the alley on all four wheels).

the cutting room floor.

mirror image... or was the shot too close to get away with that?

...with writing on them. All the lettering would have been backward if they'd just reversed the film.

Han Solo uses "parsec" as a measure of time rather than distance.

I could list a dozen astringent bits that are off in different films, but I'm just not paying so much attention to such things anymore.

When he said that he made the run in less than 12 parsecs he never meantioned that that was a referance to the time it took to make the run.

The explanation I remember is that the Kessel Run was a zig-zig, windy route and Han had found the shortest distance from point A to B, that distance was 12 parsecs.

However that explanation could have been the result of someone telling George Lucas about a mistake and he made up a story to fit his dialog.

The prefix "giga" is pronounced two different ways, depending on what you're dealing with.

Gigawatts, gigagrams, giganewtons, whatever, all are pronounced "jig."

But in computers and electronics, gigabytes and gigahertz are pronounced "gig."

When Jason Bourne escapes from the embassy, he goes out the upstairs door onto a rickety metal balcony. When the door first swings open, the balcony is covered in snow.

When Bourne is out on the balcony, trying to climb up, there is no snow on the balcony any more.

When the Marines open the door and look out, I think in one brief shot there is snow again.

* Revealing mistakes: When Robert is scooting backwards after being stabbed in the leg, a blood trail from previous takes is visible behind him. Within this, there is also a continuity error, as the trail disappears in some shots.

* Continuity: When Robert is suspended from the light pole it is with a black cord/cable. Later when he is in his lab, arms wrapped around Sam, the cord/cable is white.

* Revealing mistakes: In the opening, when the UN building is shown, the flags in front are hanging motionless. But in the same shot, the trees in the foreground are swaying in the wind.

* Miscellaneous: The fictional Batman/Superman movie was slated to open in 2010 (seen during one of the opening scenes in Times Square) - however - if everyone was either infected or died three years earlier, who would've put it up? Advertisers generally don't advertise movies three years in advance - especially when Manhattan was in such a state of chaos.

That is when he was having his flashbacks to evacuating Manhattan with this wife and kid, in 2009.

Did you see that gas was $6.69 a gallon, too: :wow:

Brad Pitt and Matt Damon are talking in the scene just before Julia Roberts comes down the stairs. Brad is eating shrimp from a glass bowl. Then he's eating them from a plate. Then back to the bowl.

Titanic-when the ship is nearly vertical, a passenger slides down the deck into a large round solid looking structure, it flexes.

Glory-a civil war soldier is wearing a wristwatch.

Bullit-hubcaps fly off the Mustang, only to re-attach and fly off again in subsequent scenes.

Raiders of the Lost Ark- When Indy escapes from being sealed into the snake pit, he pushes out with relative ease, a stone block that looked big enough to weigh 5 or 6 hundred pounds. Then it bounces.

The charge in the final scene goes the wrong way.

They did this because if they'd filmed it going in the proper direction, there would have been a resort hotel in the background.

They keep passing the same green Volkswagen Bug throughout the chase within the city.

At one point in the chase his car runs smack into the camera. I always wondered if the cameraman was injured or not- it was a high speed collision.

...Back in the early '70s, my friends and I (we were maybe six or sven) used to stand on a hill by a big road and count all the Bugs. Believe it or not, back in those days there were more Bugs on the road than any other car model BY A HUGE MARGIN! Something like 25% of all cars we counted were Bugs. I mean, it was incredible! Those suckers dominated the road-- or at least THAT road. (And NO, it wasn't a road outside a Volkswagen distributor, etc. Just an ordinary road in Pittsburgh PA.)

Well, the first one that pops to mind given the context of Casablanca and historical errors is _Gettysburg_. Some historian friends and I made a drinking game out of spotting the errors. Unfortunately this means we're blasted before the actual battle starts ... and this is a 4 hour movie.

A few random ones, starting with the voice-over during the introduction ...

No one even really knows what Lee's full plan was and certainly doesn't know about any supposed letter prepared for Lincoln demanding surrender.

Fat guys did not exist in the Confederate (or Union for the most part) army, e.g. the picket who encounters "Harrison" when he's trying to find Lee's army. That guy ... shudder ... no, just no.

James Longstreet's beard did not look like a chipmunk died on his chin.

Sir Arthur Freemantle was not some fop idiot who wore a red uniform begging someone to shoot at him.

I could go on ...

My wife commented on that. I'm surprised there weren't any soldiers with wrist watches in that epic.

He was about average height for the day ... him being tall is a legend of sorts.

As for wrist watches, there were. They used reenactors for the "extras" (fat guy) and some of them wore their watches. IIRC, the first one you can notice is near the same scene with the fat picket. There was also a truck running in the background during Pickett's Charge <sic>. They go to all this trouble to bury all the power lines to make the scene "real," the only scenes actually filmed at Gettysburg, and some idiot let a truck through during the filming. The mind boggles.

at the reenactment events I've seen. I could never play a Civil War soldier. I am fairly tall but also heavy and older. I COULD play some general like Ben Butler or a cabinet member like Salmon Portland Chase and that would work out! But having someone my age and displacement on a battlefield would be an anomaly. Also the women one sees in Civil War movies and reeneactments are obviously not wearing corsets which were practically mandatory at the time for the severe pinched waist effect.

The actor who played him in the movie looked like Trimble so much it was scary ... and without makeup, padding, etc. I've seen him in other things, and he still looks like Trimble.

Seriously, though, very few people today look anything close to what a Civil War era soldier looked like, or even random people. The average height was much smaller as was the average weight. I knew, for example, that Jefferson Davis was a small man, but I was somewhat shocked when I saw his suit in a museum. Looks like a kid's set of clothes. Tiny.

more than a foot taller. I can't fit into any of the old WWI or WWII uniforms I've collected and not because of a few extra pounds. It's because we are just bigger people. I have had WW1 German pickelhaube helmets I thought were for children but they are, in fact, regular issue!

Tom Hanks read off a bunch of numbers to Mission Control. Three controllers then added them.

With slide rules. :eyes:


For the non-geeks... slide rules are used to multiply and divide, not add and subtract. That's why god gave you pencils and scratch paper!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule





In Saving Private Ryan, there's a scene where you see the GIs loading a .30-caliber machine gun with a cloth belt full of ammo, then later on when they are shooting the MG you can see the links from a disintigrating metal-link belt flying through the air.

In other words, they put this in the gun...




Which magically become this:

I just wrote that off as Lovell understating the difficult nature of the calculation. There's not a lot of just plain addition in celestial navigation. Or maybe he was adding logarithms (which is what slide rules essentially do) from a log table. I just thought it was cool to see my K&E old slide rule (or at least a model close to it) up on the big screen.


Other Apollo 13 errors:

Lovell's Corvette had 1972 turn lights!

The NASA "worm" logo designed in 1976 makes an appearance on a door.

The astronauts point out he Sea of Tranquility as well as their intended landing zone while on the far side of the Moon. They are both on the near side as were all the manned missions for communication purposes.

A technician at Cape Canaveral is seen wearing a Rockwell International logo. North American Aviation did not become Rockwell International until after the Apollo program.

when it's fired, it sounds like a machinegun.

Those weapons fire so fast the sounds of the firing rounds overlap; in real life, Miniguns sound like the world's loudest fart.

The Dennis Quaid character draws a line across a map of the United States to show all the leaders what portions of the country are going to be frozen over and which ones weren't. On the first shot, the line cuts just south of Washington, DC (meaning the politicians are in imminent danger). But the second shot has the line awkwardly drawn above Washington. I noticed because the first line went right through where I used to live.

Dustin Hoffman is driving the wrong way on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. He's driving away from Berkeley, not toward it.

I lived in Berkeley when that movie came out. The entire audience cracked up at that scene.

When the Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare characters are driving into Minneapolis, they are supposed to be coming from norther Minnesota, but that section of I-35W they filmed is south of downtown Minneapolis.

That always bugged me. Then again, Benjamin Braddock was MORE than a little confused. Gosh, I love that movie, though.

and had to come up from the south when they got to Bloomington?

Nah, it's because that ugly Multifoods tower(is that still the name? It's been 20 years for me) would be in the shot if they got it right direction-wise.

Except "Kashmir", the song played directly after that line, is on Side 1 of Physical Graffitti. Well, not NOW, that is, since there are no sides anymore. Back THEN . . .

Side 1 of Zep 4 is fairly good "mood-setting" music. The clueless kid, however, plays the wrong, much heavier Physical Graffiti.

Bruce Willis is rushing through Dulles airport in Washington DC and comes to a payphone bank where the phones are labeled "Pacific Bell"

I am going to have to look sharper at flicks.

but, that was pretty obvious, as it was probably intended as one of those "sponsor placement" sort of things.

The name of the musuem is spelled differently over the two entrances.

Some are deliberate, some are not.

If you really start looking for them, as we did when we first got out of film school, it can ruin the moviegoing experience.

Deliberate: the film-makers putting together locations that don't exist in real life, because they know that the average movie viewer won't know the difference. This is done for convenience, or for dramatic effect.

Non-deliberate: Continuity problems with actors in different positions/clothes/gestures when cutting between shots, reflections of the camera crew in windows, sound boom dipping into the top of the frame, electric cables or film lights in the shot, and other mistakes of this type..

Whenever there is an explosion during the space battle you always hear a loud boom. However, sound doesn't travel in a vacuum, which space is. But having a big silent fireball loses a lot of dramatic effect, so the filmmakers will always change the laws of physics just for that reason.

another sci-fi-favorite.

theres a great chase scene in throgh the Chinatown disctrict of Racine, Wisconsin. But Racine has no Chinatown. At most it has a couple of Chinese restaurants.

mostly due to the relative expense of filming in different places. Prague and Budapest have been popular to represent other old cities that no longer exist.

"Last of the Mohicans" was filmed in North Carolina, not in upper New York, even in terms of outdoor venues.

So many productions are filmed in Canada, because of cheaper costs. Vancouver is very popular. So many of these American films now with very tall peaks in the background ...

I grew up there and could see that view everyday.


Since I was in LA, I was the only one in the theater laughing.

Shoeless Joe Jackson bats right handed, but in real life he was a lefty.

...years before playoff/pennant games were ever played at night. But they needed that poetic license, I guess, so that Redford's climactic homer could hit the stadium lights and cause that glorious shower of sparks. Totally fanciful.

later and I knew that too!

like when the scene starts and the wineglass is almost empty but a few seconds later it's half full

just another of my useless talents :P

Of course, the whole movie is one large error, but that's beside the point. Anyway, as the Greek fleet approaches Troy, there is a scene in the market. The citizens are dashing to and fro in a panic because of the immanent arrival of the Greek ships on the beach. One of the vendors has, I kid you not, 2 llamas that he is hustling out of the market square. My husband and I call them Ralph the Wonder Llama (tip of the hat to Monty Python and the Holy Grail) and his cousin Fred.

people when that scene comes around.

I saw the film three times in the theater, and I specifically looked for the van in my second and third viewings, but I couldn't find it.

Did it make it to the DVD release, or was it edited out?

Total butchery of the Pythagorean Theorem.

Was it an error, or was it a sly spoof of "book smart" people?

...and listened to my fellow students bellow, "That's wrong!"

...Cage's character has a son who is about a year old in 1991 when the Cold War ends, but by the end of the movie, which brings us up to the Bush presidency, the son is a mere toddler rather than the 9 or 10 year old that he should be.

when Agent Smith gets hit by the train...right before then, Neo does this nifty flip to get outta of the way, when he does this you can clearly see him holding onto wires, helping him do the flip....

As the camera angles change, dinnerware and dishes change positions.

When the trucks are on the tour and they pass the T-rex paddok, the trucks are on a road, there is a small concrete wall supporting the elecric fence and then there is the T-rex enclosure on the other side. They bring out the goat but the T-rex does not show up, so the tour continues.

When they get back to this area and all hell breaks loose, the T-rex walks over the concrete barrier to eat the trucks. During the attack the T-rex pushes the truck over a 100 cliff where 5 minutes earlier there was a field with the goat tied up.

I have read this was done on purpose to get the truck into the tree for the next scene, in the book the T-rex picks up the truck in it's jaws and throws it into the tree but that was not a feasable shot to accomplish.

There's that scene where Harrison Ford leaps from the dam. Now assuming that Richard Kimble was tried in Chicago and that the train was heading south through central Illinois, frequent visitors will note the conspicuous absence of any geological formations in Central Illinois larger than a molehill -- much less a high-water dam.

The scene was shot in North Carolina.

Proves that Kubrick was simply and OK director.

During a scene that ostensibly took place in Vietnam the soldiers are walking through a newly cleared area having a chat. During the conversation their breath fogs as if its about 50 degrees F (because the shooting was done in England). I'm pretty sure it doesn't get that cold in Vietnam.

They filmed the Darlington Agency, which is in the middle of Oklahoma, in Monument Valley.