The Internet has made film geeks even geekier
February 24, 2007Now I admit I’m one of those people who sometimes gets bothered by continuity problems in a movie. That’s where something is inconsistent in a movie scene, enough that it irritates the viewer and breaks the suspension of disbelief.
One that always stood out to me was in Get Shorty, where John Travolta’s character drives up and parks his mini-van such that the passenger side with the sliding door is facing the street. Yet in the very next cut he’s showing off the remote sliding door which now faces the sidewalk instead of the street. Because the vehicle has somehow re-parked itself in the opposite direction, with the driver’s side facing the street.
That kind of discontinuity drives some people batty. And thanks to the Internet now even the most minute errors are disseminated for all the world to see. The latest one that I like is a cardboard box in The Black Dahlia had a UPC symbol even though those weren’t printed on anything commercially until several decades after the setting of the movie.
Yeah these are stupid but it’s kinda cool that there’s film geeks geeky enough to notice these flubs. And dedicated enough to want to publicize those flubs on sites like IMDB.