Can you tell I like doing these types of posts?

Movies have become incredibly accurate and finely detailed but every now and then a doosy slips by. I don't mean a sloppy mess of a movie like "The Dirt" that's replete with mistakes, but one where they paid outstanding attention to detail except for one little blooper. No they don't ruin the movie but they leave you wondering how'd that get by in an otherwise superbly detailed movie? two examples:

* Master & Commander: a movie universally praised for its attention to detail, but at the end Aubrey tells Mowett they will escort the captured French frigate into Valparaiso instead of letting Pullings take her back to England. In 1805 during the Napoleanic wars, Valparaiso was a Spanish colony and allied with France against England. The Surprise would not be well received there.

* Midway: Emmerich really surprised me with how well done this was, and damn if Nick Jonas was a revelation. But Navy veterans pointed out that the officers in the film wore their Annapolis class ring on their right hand when tradition was to wear it on the left hand.

Have you seen this filmmaking video by Vanity Fair? You might find it interesting...

Despite a lot of attention to detail 2001 has a few flubs, notably when Dave is opening the door of Hal’s “brain” you can see the sleeve of his space suit ride up.

A satire of women's costuming in historical movies.


She makes serious videos analyzing costumes in movies. She gets annoyed when a movie works hard on historical accuracy and then gets a costume eighty years off.

That’s a good quick view on some common mistakes. It always baffles me when I see a background prop or a cup someone is holding changes mid scene. Even without a script supervisor you’d think those things would be caught while they were being filmed.

The kid at the end of Back To The Future Part III tapping his crotch.




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Is that a mistake? Like any time we try to take a family photo, my 6-year-old is grabbing his crotch. This is probably the most realistic part of the trilogy.

Hippies in The Godfather. They can be seen walking in the casino when Michael arrives in Vegas.

In the Director's Cut of Oliver Stone's JFK, they add in a scene of the main characters mentioning "our friend, Clay Shaw" *before* Shaw is introduced into the movie. It's such a massive flub and all the more reason I want the Theatrical Cut of JFK on Blu ray/4K.

Probably the most famous one. How Hitchcock let this slide is totally beyond me.

NxNW is one of my favorite movies but I have to admit that scene is totally ruined now because my eye is automatically drawn to that kid every time.

Titanic with the date of the man-made lake that Jack Dawson talks about.

Also, apparently the position of the stars during the sinking pissed off Neil Degrasse Tyson.

Damn you Hitch for leaving that in.

During Eyes Wide Shut, the camera man (?) is visible in one of the mirrors in the bathroom when Tom Cruise talks to Sidney Pollack. This was digitally erased when the home video version was made. Like the North By Northwest flub, it was so obvious it's surprising Kubrick left it in.

Another interesting one I can't find on You Tube, is the scene in Casino, which is a long take of Sam holding Ginger in bed and halfway through it the camera man's arm must be tired because the camera is awkwardly re-adjusted, yet that's still the take they went with. Perhaps because these directors find these "mistakes" amusing.

I remember reading that Hitchcock left that in the movie because he thought it was funny, and not something that most people watching the movie would notice.

Yeah, but you need to open a book to know those errors. What I wanna know is why is there an echo out on the North Atlantic?

Not sure if it qualifies but one that always bugs me is Lord of the Rings using "miles" as a measurement. I forget the line, but when the hobbits are heading down river with Aragorn, he mentions that the orcs are miles downstream (or something to that extent) in FOTR.

Wouldn't Middle-Earth have their own unit of measure? Or at least wouldn't Middle-Earth use the most popular unit of measure (metric) not Imperial that the US uses?

I once directed a week’s worth of overnight shoots for a series of training videos for a restaurant chain with the client sitting there as we set up and watching the monitors as we shot the scenes and it wasn’t until we were in the edit bay that anyone noticed there was a non-restaurant-branded ketchup bottle on the table.

I suggested that if any employee caught that they should get a gift card but the company paid us to erase it from the final version instead.

Point is, lots of people look at these things and stuff still gets missed. Same when there is a big typo on a book cover - literally a hundred people probably saw that and it still gets missed.

How about Fatal Attraction where the covers intermittently cover and expose Glenn Close's boobs? I get that maybe the continuity guy might miss the placement of an item on the desk between shots because there's a lot of stuff to keep track of and who's watching every coffee cup anyway? But boobs out or not out in a shot of two actors in bed together? That seems pretty hard to miss.

During the 'Sloth' scene in Seven, seeing the actor's left arm pressed against his side beneath the prosthetic one has always bothered me.
Since catching that 'oops' in the movie theater, I've never been able to unsee it.
I can't believe it was left in.

I'll guess that they shot two versions, -one covered and one exposed (you would need a "safe" one for network TV, - and in editing they just chose the best takes. Not an excuse, just a probable "why"...

Pretty sure Tolkien wrote it with miles, so this would be a case of a movie actually keeping with the book it was based off of

I don't see it, can you point out where you're seeing it?

I’m not 100% sure but it looks like maybe his left sleeve pulls up a little right at the :25 second mark of that video. I’m not sure if that’s what Mabuse is referring to or not though.