johnrosa

14th Apr 2008

Atonement (2007)

Corrected entry: Briony is played by 3 actresses, from a 13 year old girl to an elderly Vanessa Redgrave. I suppose that, in order to identify each actress who played the role, a mole was placed on Briony's face. The 13 year old Briony has the mole on her right cheek. The young nurse Briony has the mole on her right cheek. The first scene we see the Vanessa Redgrave Briony, the mole is properly on her right cheek. Then, suddenly, in a close up, the mole appears on Vanessa's left cheek. In the next scene, it's back on her right cheek.

Correction: The shot with it on the "wrong" cheek is her reflection in the make-up room mirror.

johnrosa

25th Dec 2004

Amadeus (1984)

Corrected entry: Mozart is asked to play in Handel's style. He waves dismissively, saying "I don't like him." In fact, Mozart greatly admired Handel, whose work had been a key part of his formative studies. (01:06:45)

Correction: As this film is not a biography, but a retelling of some of his life mixed with total fiction (including making Salieri an enemy where he was not), the choice is artistic, not a mistake.

johnrosa

16th Jun 2004

Hidalgo (2004)

Corrected entry: During the last scene, when it showed the hundreds of horses running in the field, it appeared that there was a person holding on to a horse's tail and being dragged on the ground as the horse ran.

Correction: Lots of wide shots of all those horses here. A timecode or better description would be good, as I see no such person. Too vague.

johnrosa

6th Apr 2004

Hidalgo (2004)

Corrected entry: When Frank is handcuffed to the pole after he is yelled at for having Jazira in his tent and the people come and attack the place where they are, there is a shot of Jazira trying to help him out of the cuffs. When they show his hands, it is so obvious that they are not his real hands. They look much younger than Frank really is. There are other scenes where you see his hands and they are completely different. How difficult is it to use the same actors hands for a single shot?

Correction: The short shot used is from the side, in heavy shadow. Determining the age of the hand's owner is just about impossible at normal speed (and even in slo-mo, not definitive).

johnrosa

8th Dec 2002

Bullitt (1968)

Corrected entry: When the Dodge crashes into the camera, there is a red flash. If you slow down the scene (on DVD or video) the road is totally empty after the red flash. Where did the Dodge go?

Correction: If it requires slo-mo, it's not a valid mistake. The single-frame of empty street isn't recognizable at normal speed.

johnrosa

30th May 2006

Hidalgo (2004)

Corrected entry: When the evil sheik is about to shoot at Jazira and Frank, Frank shoots him first, in the hand. The shot would have made him drop the gun, not take the time to throw it off to the side.

Correction: No 'time' is taken at all. He is aiming a rifle using two hands. The shot hits his left hand, he winces in pain as he yanks his hands outward. The rifle drops down and slightly left. It is not 'thrown'.

johnrosa

7th Aug 2004

Hidalgo (2004)

Corrected entry: The first rider to fall out of the race has a horse that trips and skins its "knee". The rider then kills it and kisses it near the eye. The horse blinks several times. (00:45:15)

Correction: The fake 'dead' horse never blinks. Note the distorted lip and open mouth that never moves - that would take some unique training if the horse were real and alive.

johnrosa

Corrected entry: Twice, there is reference to the "township of Nacogdoches." Texas doesn't have townships.

Correction: That will be news to Irvinggton Twp, TX and Monroe Twp, Tx, for starters. And Nacogdoches itself certainly was a township during the time of Sam Houston (1830s). I would guess some of the locals might still call it just that, even if it may no longer be a township in a legal sense by this film's 1980 era.

johnrosa

29th Jul 2005

Blue Thunder (1983)

Corrected entry: When Roy Scheider's partner is run over and killed, we later see him being zipped up in the body bag. If you look closely, you can see him slowly lower his own head to the ground after being zipped. Hardly the actions of a dead man. (01:11:20)

Gavin Jackson

Correction: The man in a dark suit uses his right hand to lift Lymangood's head, then slips the back of his left hand under and slowly lowers it into the bag, and then pulls his hand out. No error.

johnrosa

27th Aug 2001

The Pledge (2001)

Corrected entry: Before he leaves for his Baja fishing trip, Jack Nicholson's character sits at an airport bar drinking a plastic cup of Scotch. As the camera pulls away in the next frame, he's shown sitting in front of a tall flute of beer. A few frames later, he's back in close up, nursing his short plastic cup of scotch.

Correction: These shots are split by shots showing TV news coverage, planes leaving the hanger, etc, and are intended to show that significant time is passing as he sits there. His going from scotch to beer and back to scotch is another hint that he's been there long enough to have had several drinks.

johnrosa

5th Sep 2005

Ronin (1998)

Corrected entry: After the ambush, Reno and De Niro set off in the Mercedes. As they do a reverse hand brake turn, you see a sunroof on the car. In the next overhead shot, there is no sunroof. A couple of shots later De Niro pops up again out of the sunroof with the bazooka.

Correction: This shot is filmed from a significant distance above and forward of the car. As such, the edges of the sunroof's body-color panel are difficult to make out, but they are there faintly. It is the same car. (Using your DVD player's zoom feature helps to make it more obvious if you can't make it out normally).

johnrosa

Corrected entry: At the first dinner with Lars and Bianca, the glass of milk Lars is drinking suddenly appears on the opposite side of his plate when he begins cutting Bianca's food.

Correction: About 8 seconds pass between the shots, time enough to move the glass. When the cutting shot begins, the milk in the glass is moving before he starts cutting, suggesting he did just move it.

johnrosa

9th Jan 2005

Airport 1975 (1974)

Corrected entry: Shortly after the plane has landed you notice two oddities: the fire services leave more or less immediately after landing and another plane is taxiing to leave the airport. A major emergency of this nature would probably see the airport closed for a while.

Correction: As this was an accidental collision and the jet had landed safely, the danger is, for the most part, over. The fire crews might be leaving quickly, but the taxiing jet may simply be relocating to another part of the airport, having arrived recently or simply to move away from the damaged jet. Also, a closed airport isn't motionless and deserted. Internal operations like moving planes and equipment would still continue unless an imminent threat were still posed, which is not here.

johnrosa

20th Apr 2008

Cloverfield (2008)

Corrected entry: The explosion in the city is impossible. The monster came from the sea, overturning the ship. Now the monster can destroy anything, but there is nothing in the city that can generate that kind of explosion launching debris over the river. Gas stations are the only thing in that part of the city and they cannot produce such a explosion. (It wasn't the military because nothing in the entire film apart from the ending killing the main characters was used. And yes we all know that there are a bunch of unknowns, but since this film really does show us the physical limts of the monster and the military, and the fact that nothing in the city - even power plants, of which there are none - could produce that explosion, makes this event a plot hole mistake.).

Correction: The cause of the first big explosion is never explained in the film, but then many oher things are not. Not knowing what DID cause it does not make it impossible. The Statue of Liberty's head landing on Manhattan is also not explained explicitly (but is obviously not caused by that first big blast). The capsized tanker is shown burning north of the Statue (meaning it also could not have caused the statue's head to land on Manhattan). And we don't see the tanker from the roof earlier because it's far away, hidden by buildings, and capsized at night.

johnrosa

19th Feb 2008

Cloverfield (2008)

Corrected entry: When we first see the military attack the monster, we see what appears to be an original M1 Abrams with the royal ordinace L68A1 105MM rifled gun. However, this tank has been out of service since 1987, replaced by the German Rhienmetall M256 L-44 120MM smoothbore cannon. Also in this scene, we see what appears to be an M109A6 paladin drive right past Hud, but this would never happen since an M109A6 is a self-propelled Howitzer and would fire from afar - it would never get that close to the target.

Correction: Just a few steps of this creature would place it far from where it was prior to those steps. As such, that Howitzer might have originally been at its proper range, and now is attempting to relocate. Also, Wikipedia notes 8000 M1s of various types are in current service, with 1000 of those being original M1 105mm models reported to likely be with the Army National Guard- the expected first responders in this film's situation.

johnrosa

5th Apr 2008

Dead Bang (1989)

Corrected entry: In the beginning of this movie Don Johnson is driving a dark full-sized Pontiac. At 36 minutes in, he confronts the widow after parking on the street behind a medium blue Chevy Celebrity. At 42 minutes in, he is leaving the police station and says that the medium blue Celebrity parked illegallly out front is his car. He is seen in subsequent scenes in the Celebrity, but never again in the Pontiac.

Correction: Johnson's personally-owned car is a 1970 Pontiac Executive. He's a Los Angeles cop in 1989 California. During the investigation, he goes to Cottonwood, Arizona in a recent Chevy Celebrity (possibly a rental, more likely a police motor-pool car). His reasons could be gas mileage, dependability or simply that he isn't going to use his own 19-year-old car to go 470 miles on police business. No mistake.

johnrosa

Corrected entry: As the jackbooted thugs march in a tunnel with Pink at the head, between the drug overdose and the fascist rally, they march left right left right. The visions cuts and the sound continues, left right left right. Cut back to the boots and now they are right left right left, one step out of time with the constant marching sound.

Correction: These are drug-induced visions, and scenes cutting back and forth to different moments in time. We are not watching continuous shots or events.

johnrosa

Threshold - S2-E15

Corrected entry: The science behind what happens to Paris in this episode is fundamentally flawed. The Doctor states that Tom is "evolving," however the smallest unit of evolution is a population. An individual cannot evolve, only mutate. Also, evolution is not a predestined process as it is apparently portrayed in this episode. It is a random occurrence, and so there is no way to know what humanity will evolve into.

Correction: This is not a scientific error, but a grammatical one, and since the doctor is a humanized facsimile of its original creator, it is simply a semantic choice of the original programmer. In common usage, mutation and evolution are often interchanged by the user, even if the absolute literal definition is not 100% accurate.

johnrosa

9th Oct 2007

Grindhouse (2007)

Corrected entry: During the final car chase of Death Proof, there are scenes where a roll cage is visible behind the driver's head, most other scenes there is no roll cage.

Correction: After a careful review of the chase, I am certain there is no shot in the chase that shows either car minus a roll bar. It's either obviously there or the angle doesn't offer a view of it's location.

johnrosa

27th Oct 2007

Transformers (2007)

Corrected entry: In the scene where we first see Megatron in the Hoover Dam, they go on about many technologies reverse engineered from him. and one of those is space flight. The problem is that the United States weren't the first ones into space, the Soviets were. Unless Soviet scientists could sneak into a top secret military bunker, research Megatron long enough to reverse engineer everything and sneak out unnoticed.

Correction: Or the US got its better space tech from Megatron while the Soviets, using their own tech, started out first, but were quickly surpassed. It is said we got our space tech from Megatron. They don't say we weren't beaten into space by the Soviets.

johnrosa

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