Badmovies.org Forum

Aflter looking at many of the movies on the sites www.nitpickers.com and www.movie-mistakes.com, I have begun to notice that the movies made in recent years tend to have MORE mistakes in them than the movies made years ago.  

Why is that?  Do recent producers and directors even care if they make a movie with as few mistakes as possible?  Do they think they can get away with it?  I mean, look at Titanic with over 100 mistakes from one guy wearing a digital watch to Leo mentioning ice fishing in a lake that wasn't filled with water until 1917.

I just got rented the "remake" of the Planet of the Apes.  It was filled with errors that I saw on the first viewing.  At the end the girl runs off into the hills but she reappears a few seconds later when the guy leaves the planet.  I felt cheated.  (Even the "Surprise Ending" was stupid even though it was not a mistake. or was it.)  

Why are they making movies with SO many obvious errors in them when just a few minutes of research or better editing would solve the problem?

It could also be that recent movies attract more attention on such sites because more people are seeing them now and can more easily get the videos

True.  I thought of it that way too.  The invention of the VCR and DVD have made it possible for people to view a movie hundreds of times, more times than a person would see it in the theater.  Most people see a movie in the theater once, but with VHS and DVD, they can see it so many times that they know it by heart.

But that still doesn't take away the fact that there are errors in some movies that with just a little more effort could be resolved.  Just looking up when the lake was made would have solved the problem in Titanic.  Having the dresser check each extra before they got on the set would have solved the problem of the digital watch.

Why don't they even try to fix things like that?  Is it just a matter of the cost?

If you think of All the details that apear on the screen, frame after frame for 90+ minutes it would be nothing short of miraculous to catch every little thing. Plus especially with period pieces it's difficult to control the environment. It took the creator of the 1900s house 6 months just to cover all the details for one house. In one of the Clint Eastwood Spegetti westerns you can see the trail of a jet liner in the sky in the background. If you don't catch it right away or if you don't have the time/money to reshoot you really have no choice but to live with the errors. Its the whole how does a 250 pound man stop a moving car or how does that person survive a mile under water in street clothes type BS that I have no tollerance for.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that less attention is paid to making a cohesive, sensical film these days.  They try to do too much, and the movies become difficult to completely take in. OR, I could be full of s**t...

It's all relative to the film for me. I'm willing to forgive more blunders in an old, cheap, thrown-together picture than in a modern, polished $300-million blockbuster.

If the best you can do for special effects is to dress dogs up in carpet remnants and call them shrews, I'll hold you to a lower standard. If you have the best technology available, and can afford all the bells and whistles for your epic, you'd better put some of that dough toward making the picture as accurate, coherent and satisfying as possible.

The problem is that the filmmakers with the money put too much into sizzle and not enough into steak these days, and too many people are happy to eat it.

Kind of the equivalant of Hollywood going "Bite me?" Lots of Errors can be passed off, if the story has you caught up in it, and your able and willing to focus on the tale. However....if your not impressed with the acting and plot and story, then you have time to lets your attention wander. and therein lies the rub.The magician has to be GOOD at his slight of hand...and when he's not, you have time to go "Da hell...how did he get a Colt 1911 .45 auto..they whern't produceed till AFTER the Titanic sank!"

I believe the reason there are more errors in newer films than older ones because modern movies, for the most part, are much much more ambitious and grander in scale than older movies.  Movies such as Terminator 2 or Braveheart etc. could not have been done back in the 40's and 50's due to breakthroughs in special effects and camera techniques and so forth.  Watch any older movie and you'll notice the camera is for the most part stationary.  Now cameras are much smaller and more mobile than in the past.  The reason I think that there are more errors is that movie-making is much more advanced than it used to be.  The more things happening, the more errors you're going to see.

Here's my question. What kind of whacko notices an EXTRA that has a digital watch?! I think these guys are watching the movies WAY to closely.

On those lonely nights with no place to go, it doesn't take much to amuse some people.

Of course, the situation is so bad sometimes that I wonder if Hollywood editors/directors don't do some of it on purpose.   Continuity errors are incredibly easy to spot after the first (or second) watching, and some are so obvious, one has to wonder if it was not intentional.

As for the anacronisms (the digital watch, Colt 1911, Lake for ice fishing), even Shakespeare had those.  Julius Ceaser has several as does McBeth, if I remember correctly.  The point made above about good acting/good story going a long way toward making these errors forgivable is right on the money (very few people talk about the 'errors' in Shakespeare...the writing is so much better).

Peace...

Yeah I did a rant a few posts back about that.
If the story is good all is forgiven. If it fails you will be found guilty for every infraction. I know a few are intentional. In Star Wars Chewy hits his head on a pair of brass dice in the Falcon's cockpit that we never see again. In Raiders of the Lost Ark there are hiroglyphs on the wall of R2D2 and C3PO. So yeah, every once in a while the film maker will goad their audience, but for the most part... they're either sloppy, or have too much to keep track of.