It's the little things ...

... that drive me nuts!  I'm watching a Hallmark movie, "Dear Prudence," that just aired last weekend.  The heroine walks into the Wyoming mountains to a murder scene.  Lovely shots of granite hills and bright yellow aspen trees.  So it's late September/October, fall foliage.  Very next scene, the next day at the funeral.  Lovely shots of bright green grass and blossoming lilac.  So it's late May/early June, spring foliage.

Grrrr!  Are movie makers so in a hurry that no one pauses to catch the contradictions?  Cindi, your sweetie pie works in the industry.  Can he please send them a memo?

Karen

I saw that movie when it came out last month and was wondering if I had missed a segment when I left the room for awhile. 

Like any industry, some people care about quality  and some don't.   Some directors and producers care very much about continuity; in fact, Clint Eastwood talked about that a bit on the Daily Show last night (while talking about the upcoming release of The Changeling, a film that my sweetie pie worked on, as a matter of fact)!  Of course, I don't know the cirucmstances for the movie you were watching, but even if they cared, it's possible that they just didn't have the ability to film those scenes in order and in a location that gave them continuity, and they did their best with what they were given.  Depends on a LOT of factors. 

But I'll tell you what bugs me much more than that -- horrible, obvious typos in books I'm reading.  There I am, lost in someone else's world and then I'm abruptly brought back into myself as I read something like "The two boy's playing in teh yard..." or something just unforgivable like that.  Arrrgh.

Cindi

My sister was an editor for years -- PC World, MAC Magazine, stuff like that -- and she traveled a lot and when she was reading a magazine on the plane or in an office she would pull out her red pen and make the corrections.  I guess you could say it bugged her too.

Oh, Karen, I'm with you on that.  I understand, foliage you can't control -- maybe they ought to consider it, though, when they're deciding which scenes to film -- but you can control whether the girl's hair is wet in one cut of the scene and dry in the same scene.  There are so many examples that I can't think of, but I see it all the time, and it really bugs me, too. 

You're right, Janice -- so many examples.  I especially love the rough and tumble fight scenes in action movies when our hero is bruised, dirty and bloody.  Then a close-up of him walking away from the fight with a magically cleaned and healed face.  I saw Clint Eastwood on the Daily Show segment that Cindi described.  When he said that moviemakers are so careful now with those anomalies, I wanted to laugh.  He's not watching some of the stuff I'm seeing.

Karen

In the season episode of "Two and a Half Men," Alan is shown eating a sandwich.  When they'd cut from his scene and back to him, the sandwich was either half eaten or not a bite was taken out of it.  This went back and forth 5 or 6 times! 

There's a website that lists movies and the scenes that have "errors" in them.  I can't remember what the official movie lingo is for that.  Maybe Cindi knows.

Lillian

Hi,

There are several web sites devoted to these goofs.  Some of them are funny.

The easiest ones I spot are on the cooking shows.  Goes in facing left, comes out facing right.  Pan goes in the oven green enamel, comes out stainless steel.

Cindi,

speaking of books with typos, I once read a true-crime drama.  
It was actually an interesting story and one I wasn't familiar with.
Near the very end of the book, there was some kind of production error because several pages were obviously missing and a few pages were repeated.

I took the book to a couple different bookstores to exchange it.  Every single book had that same problem.  I even wrote to the publisher.  Never heard a word.

I never did find out the ending.

Tricia:

I've had that happen too, although at least I didn't miss the ending. It was one of the Carolyn Haines "Bones" stories -- I think it was "Hallowed Bones." (Don't remember for sure, and I've already passed the series on to someone else.)  But at some point, when you turn a page, rather than continue the sentence -- you have a dozen pages that repeat from a previous chapter! When you get past that point, although some of it's missing, you can pick up on the story and figure out what you missed.  Still, very annoying.

Cindi

Lil:

Don't know if there's some other official term for that or not -- I've always just heard them called "continuity errors." I asked Greg and he said there was probably a "hip" term for them, but he's not aware of anything specific.  In period pieces, you might hear of editors checking for "anachronisms" - something that's from an incorrect time (e.g. wearing Reeboks in a gladiator movie.)  I vaguely remember an episode of Cheers in which Norm and Cliff had some kind of drinking game based on taking a shot each time an anachronism was encountered in their favorite bad movies... but it's been so long, don't recall it exactly!

Cindi

It happens in songs, too.  There's a folk singer I like who wrote a song that included the lyric, "Where the Walker River flows into the Carson Valley plain."  Well, I live here.  The Walker never touches the Carson Valley.  I guess poetic license means never having to consult a map.  Call me obsessive, but as lovely as her voice is and as pretty as the melody is, I can't stand to listen to the song because of mangled geography.

Karen

I live in Downstate Illinois.

After Harrison Ford's movie "The Fugitive" came out, I immediately pulled out my road map to figure out where the heck he was after the train derailment, based on Tommy Lee Jones's lines (he mentioned "Route 13" and the town of Chester, two landmarks that don't intersect).

I still haven't found the huge mountain in the background or the big-ol' dam he "did a Peter Pan" off of.

Kathryn:

They filmed the original Die Hard at a building in Century City that was a block away from the office I worked in when I first moved to L.A.  When I saw the scene of the cop standing at the gas station and looking at the building, my first thought was, where the heck is that gas station? I could really use a gas station right there!!!

Ahh, movie magic/poetic license... whatever. 

Cindi

LOL on that poetic license...

because there was a crappy made-for-SciFi-Channel movie called "Black Hole" a couple of years ago in which a black hole was created, and then said hole traveled around St. Louis wreaking havoc until it was stopped and the electricity monster (which came out of the hole) was defeated by our hero -- the Drunken Washed-Up Scientist Who Saw It Coming But Was Never Taken Seriously, and his love interest -- the Blonde Scientist With Glasses Who Removes Them And Lets Her Hair Down As She Falls In Love With Aforementioned DWUSWSICBWNTS.

Anyway, the black hole was created in the Science Center's planetarium. And here I thought it was just a museum!  They walked into the building, and there was the reactor/collider/science thingy exactly where I watched the Laser Beatles show!

And they managed to evacuate the entire St. Louis Metro area in about 15 minutes flat, which annoyed me because the movie aired at a time when the Poplar Street Bridge (Interstates 64, 70, and 55 squish down to 4 lanes to get across the Mississippi into the city) was being worked on, and it took me 2 1/2 hours to get home when it should have taken 20 minutes.

But it was a lot of fun picking it apart!