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After the one guy shoots the cop, a blue Ford passes them. So the bad guy goes after them to find that the Ford flipped over. He stops then puts the Oldsmobile in reverse. Just before the car stops you can see that the taillights are from a 1989 or 1990 model. The film is set in 1986 or 1987. See more...

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Fargo (1996) - 17 corrections

Directed by Joel Coen, starring Frances McDormand, Peter Stormare, Steve Buscemi, William H. Macy (add more)

Genres: Crime, Drama, Thriller

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

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In a scene a neighbour and a cop speaks, they are dressed like its -25º c but there is no ice or snow on the street and no cold air coming from their mouth when they speak. Obviously it's above 0º c. [First, they can dress how they want. Second, no ice or snow or visible breath is absolutely no indicator of the ambient temperature.]
Edit Corrected by Phixius Time
In the night scene, there is blood spatter on Carls face BEFORE the cop is shot. [In the version I have "Special Edition", the blood only appears after the cop is shot. Timecode 00:27:49 to 00:27:55. To me it's more of a problem that that the blood appears on his face when a frame or so before there is none, and the blood is shooting out forwards.]
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When Jerry, "Mr. Anderson", is arrested in the end, the two police officers cuff him on the bed, but with a closer look you can see Jerry intentionally puts his hand behind his back, although completely resisting the arrest (kicking, screaming, shaking, escape attempts etc.). [In fact Jerry pushes his arms back to stop them being squashed underneath him as he is thrown face down onto the bed. This is an instinctive reaction and probably something William H. Macy did while shooting the scene.]
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The tan Cutlass Sierra given to the men who were to kidnap Jerry's wife, is an older model Sierra. However, after Carl is shot in the face and after he has assassinated the father, the Cutlass Sierra he speeds off in is a newer model (early 90's probably). [Carl drives the same year and model (Cutlass Ciera) throughout the movie.]
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Towards the beginning of the movie there is a shot of a bunch of new Oldsmobiles. Towards the front there is a blue Cutlass Ciera which has door mounted seatbelts and a driver's side airbag. Door mounted seatbelts weren't introduced until the 1990 model and a driver's airbag wasn't introduced until 1993. The film takes place in the 1980s. [The seatbelts aren't mounted on the door. They are mounted on the post between the front and rear doors. Same as on my Pontiac Grand Prix.]
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After the car that was trying to get away crashes, a man gets out and then gets shot in the back and falls forward onto his stomach. In the scene when the police are looking at the car, if you look in the background the man is now laying face up. [The man may not have died immediately, and rolled over sometime between the time he was shot, and when the police begin investigating. Many people do not immediately die from gunshot wounds.]
Edit
In the scene where Carl and Wade have the shootout, when Carl shoots Wade after he's fallen down, you can see there are no impact wounds from the bullets. [You can see the first impact throughout the scene, both before and after Wade falls down.]
Edit Time
The fence where Carl hides the money is at first a fence consisting of some barbed wire and net, then it is simply three files of barbed wire. [Actually the fence consists of two - three strands of barbed wire on top, with the squared wire on the bottom. When the camera pans back, and shows down both sides of the fence, we see the squares in one direction, but not in the other because the snow has blown over and covered the bottom squares. We know the snow is at least as deep as Carl's hips, when he returns to the car.]
Edit Time
When Jerry thinks the investment he has proposed to Wade will work out, he tells Shep he may not need the help of the two kidnappers he put him in touch with. Shep then tells Jerry that he only put him in touch with, and vouched for, one of the kidnappers: Gaear. He makes it very clear that he has never heard of and does not vouch for Carl Showalter. However, at the beginning of the movie, Carl specifically mentioned Shep, saying "Shep didn't tell us much..." etc.) And when Shep is told by Marge that involvement in the kidnapping/murders could put him back in Stillwater, he knows exactly where to find Carl to give him a thorough beating. When he shows up, Carl even recognizes him ("Shep, what the Hell are you doing, I'm banging that girl.") Shep obviously knew Carl, and had no reason to hide it from Jerry, as Gaear was the more dangerous of the two. [Shep says he knows Carl, and vouched for Carl, not the other way around.]
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As Marge and Lou leave the scene of the murders, Marge tells a joke about a guy who couldn't afford personalized plates, so he changed his name to "J3L2404". In Minnesota, non-personalized license plates have always had only 6 numbers/digits, so it's highly unlikely that someone who was born and raised here would tell a joke like that to someone else from the area. [That may be true, but since Marge is only telling a joke it's a bit of a stretch to include it as any type of error/mistake.]
Edit Time
The two kidnappers are pulled over by the cop they eventually murder because they are not displaying temporary tags on their car. However, when Marge Gunderson shows up to investigate the crime scene the next morning, she figures out from the cop's citation book that the car had dealer plates (DLR.) If the car had dealer plates, they wouldn't need to display temporary tags, as tags are to be used when a license plate is not yet available for a car. There was no need to pull the kidnappers over, which makes the turning point of the story completely pointless. [Temporary tags have a non-unique number and the designation of the dealer on them, the cop put down DLR and was then going to put the dealer's number when they produced the temporary tag which they said they had forgotten to place in the window. On a temporary tag, the "tag number" is either the date the temporary tag expires or one of a limited number assigned to that dealer so it is not unusual to see duplicate temporary tags on different cars on the same day - you would need the dealer's number which is rather small at the bottom of the paper to actually identify the car.]
Edit Corrected by Myridon
Marge's husband is despondent because his entry in the stamp contest is awarded only use on a small denomination stamp. Actually, what are often called "duck stamp contests" or waterfowl stamp contests have nothing to do with postage stamps. This system, in use by the Federal Government's US Fish & Wildlife Service for over 50 years, is a way of funding habitat projects and is not used for postage stamps at all. The winners of wildlife stamp contests have their art recreated on stamps that must be purchased by hunters. Such stamps are used only on hunters' licenses, not on general postage. [Waterfowl designs can be used on general postage stamps as well (e.g. the 2003 Snowy Egret 37-cent stamps).]
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When Marge goes to The Cities to investigate the homicides, she stays at The Radisson. She walks into their diner for a meal and reunites with Mike Yanagita. But she never told him she would be there, he never asked, and they never made plans to meet there or anywhere else, for that matter when they spoke on the phone. [When they meet at the restaurant the film implies that they made arrangements to meet beforehand. The viewer can easily assume one phoned the other a second or third time to make arrangements.]
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I live in Fargo. There is so much wrong with this movie. First nobody here talks with that accent. We speak perfectly normally. I don't know one person that says "ya sure ya betcha" or anything remotely close to that. Second, the biggest of all, a huge majority of the movie was not even filmed in Fargo. It was mostly filmed on a rural stretch of interstate between Fargo and Minneapolis, and in a small little city off the interstate that barely looks like anyone lives there. Fargo is a large city, nearly 100,000 people. The movie is not true, but some like to think it is. And please quit thinking Fargo is in Minnesota. It is in North Dakota, a state on it's own, not Minnesota. [The film is called "Fargo". Apart from the first scene, it takes place elsewhere, which is made quite clear. Why did the Coens call it "Fargo", then? Probably because it sounds better than "Brainerd"...]
Edit Corrected by Ioreth
Minnesotans do not call Mpls/St. Paul the "Twin Cities", they just refer to them as "The Cities". [I live in the Twin Cities, and that's how I hear them referred to most of the time. "The Cities" might be more common in "Greater Minnesota" (outside Minneapolis and St. Paul), but "Twin Cities" is not unreasonable.]
Edit Corrected by Bob Blumenfeld
In the scene where the two kidnappers are driving into Minneapolis the one driving comments that the tall glass building is the second tallest building in the mid-west behind the Sears Tower. When actually the next two tallest buildings are also in Chicago - the Amoco Oil building and the John Hancock building. [Though the statment is true, it is not necessary that we assume that Carl actually knew that. He had trouble remembering the word Tower in "Sears Tower", and barely muttered out "Hancock Building", so it's more of a character mistake than an actual movie error.]
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Minnesotans don't actually talk like that. In the movie they use accents on some words that they don't even say very often (e.g. Ya shore, you betcha.)  Nobody says that very often.  It's a Norwegian term, but it's rarely used.  The only accent they have is the Mid-western one that everyone around there has, unless you're Hispanic or have just moved from another country. [Apparently, while it IS exaggerated in the film, it's more accurate than not].
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