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Many Eyes, Shallow Bugs, and Spider-Man
Danious writes Seems
Spider-Man is clocking up 'bugs' at
movie-mistakes.com faster than any previous movie (now 95 and counting). The reason, according to this Independent article, is not that it may have more mistakes than usual, but that 'huge numbers of people are going to see it - and that makes for lots of pairs of eyes checking every inch of the screen.' The top movie is currently 'The Matrix' with 147." A lot of the bugs simply aren't really errors, and I'm sure the comic book guys out there can debate them.
I had never heard of this site. I have always relyed on IMDB to tell me everything about a movie. Ive always found it interesting that normally, after a DVD comes out - more goofs are added. Also, some movies you can clearly tell the goof information came straight from the director's mouth in the commentary track :P.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
"A lot of the bugs simply aren't really errors"
they're features.
-metric
How about Matrix II RC2 that will fix majority of the bugs from Matrix I?
I would agree that the romance plot may not have been done exceptionally well, but to say that it's useless is a bit strong. Parker's relationship with M.J. is one of the cornerstones of his personality. Without her, he becomes Batman - a vigilante. With her grounding him, he keeps his ties to the 'real' world in a way that would be impossible with just his Aunt.
Most of the "mistakes" that are being filed are NOT mistakes, just kids inventing mistakes. The owner of the site confesses that he hasn't seen the movie yet (he's in the UK), so he's not really in a position to make any judgement calls on these.
Doug: In episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we to believe, that this is some sort of a [the three nerds chuckle] magic xylophone or something? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
June: Uh, well, uh...
Homer: I'll field that one. Let me ask you a question. Why would a man whose shirt says "Genius at Work" spend all of his time watching a children's cartoon show?
Doug: [embarrassed pause] I withdraw my question. [starts eating a candy bar]
For some reason the Simpson's Comic Book Guy always seems to show up here. It's a movie about a man who has turned into a spider. Jumps between buildings, shoots webs, scales walls, supports the DMCA. Why do we care about its "bugs" (snicker) again?
"Alec, Alec, regarding that so called "silent" propulsion system in "The Hunt For Red October", I printed out a list of technical errors which I think you'd enjoy discussing."
"Question: Is your name Ridley Scott or James Cameron?"
"No, it's Homer."
"Well then, I would thank you to stop peering at my screenplay, Homer. And if I see a movie where computers threaten our personal liberties, I will know that you stole my idea."
I'm sick of people saying this. If you knew anything at all about the character you would know that the "silly romance plot" is exactly the type of thing you see in Spider-Man. In the comics the Mary Jane plotline is just as much a part of the comics as anything else, hell for the longest time it was the -primary- plotline. Personally I think the movie did an excellent job of translating it to the big screen.
Sigs are awesome huh?
this site is full of ridiculous attempts at uncovering something wrong. after realizing that half of the errors were simply stupid, i expected one that the red in his suit was three shades too dark ...
here are some of my favorite "errors":
Why didnt Green Goblin just take off Spiderman's mask when he knocked him out with sleeping gas? Wasn't he interested in knowing who Spiderman really was?
How come you never see Peter's mouth move when he is talking in the Spiderman costume? The mask is spandex just like the rest of the costume, so you would see evidence of Peter's mouth moving when he talks.
During the scene when the boyfriend arrives to MJ's house with a new car, the vehicle is clearly a Plymouth Prowler, which has a V6 engine... on the sound track, there's an unmistakeable exhaust note of a very throaty V8.
kids with too much time on their hands? i think so.
Some people just don't pay attention or think they see something when they don't. For example, one mistake was listed under LOTR about seeing a car drive by in the scene with Frodo, Sam, and the scarecrow. Maybe I'm blind, but I didn't see any movement at all in the background. Another mistake filed several times was for Harry Potter about a player falling on sand appearing out of nowhere in the Quddich match. Maybe if they had payed attention when the camera showed the entire field they would notice the goals are mounted on sand pits.
Movies do make mistakes, but it seems that the bug watchers also need watchers of their own.
IMO (and a lot of other people's, too, from what I've read), the biggest mistake was releasing the movie with such shoddy CG work. I mean, there are such glaring problems in there that even non-3D artists like myself are picking up on. Lighting is off, textures are too smooth, physics are way, waaay off, footfalls are off, and the character motion is incredibly un-lifelike. Every time I was ready to really get into the movie, I kept getting snapped back to reality by the poor 3D animation; I think it kept Spider-Man from being a great movie, rather than just a good movie.
I know why it is the way it is, though. The movie's release schedule got bumped up several months because of business decisions about the optimal time to release it. It makes me shudder to think of what might be awaiting us when The Hulk or the Fantastic Four gets made. Are the studios going to bank on the franchise, and to hell with quality?
I wonder how Sam Raimi feels about this? Is he really satisfied with the crappy CG work in Spider-Man? Considering how much money this film is making, it would be really great if, for the DVD version, he re-animated those scenes to make them more believeable. What's his email address? Maybe someone should start a petition...
Ok, besides the fact that if I see another "Spider Man" story, I'm going to scream...(the hype has, for me, moved it into the same category as Titanic, ie "do not ever bother to see because I'm so sick of hearing about it")
This whole "spot all the mistakes" thing is pretty common among people with no social skills and one of the reasons people hate "nerds".
Case and point was a informational session for a technical school's adult education technology classes(Oracle, C Programming, etc. etc.)
This one guy sitting behind me kept interrupting the guy giving his presentation and:
-correcting him
-disputing points that were(obviously) the presenter's/school's opinion, not statements of fact
-clarifying what he felt were overly general statements made by the presenter
Example(making up everything here):
"...and networking equipment stocks are taking a dive"
(in our pretend example world, networking stocks overall have in fact been declining)
Nerd: "Actually, Cisco systems was up 3/4 this morning."
How many of you reached for the reply button to correct my statement, even though I said "making this up"? Tada, you are one of those ANNOYING NERDS.
After about 5 minutes, I was ready to turn around and bitch-slap him and say "SHUT THE HELL UP!" The presenter was trying -extremely- hard to put up with the guy, who, at what was basically a sales pitch to a dozen or so people, felt it necessary to act like he was engaged in a DISCUSSION with the presenter, who was giving a "why we feel the time is appropriate for you all to take a class with us" PRESENTATION.
This kind of behavior is about as socially clueless as you can get; ignoring the interrupting and the fact that you just don't engage in a debate with someone giving a formal presentation(there's a reason one is called a debate and one is called a presentation)...it's bloody hell annoying when some asshole is sitting there finding fault with your every other word.
Want another example? There's a clip of a Red Dwarf con where some #$@%ing anal nerd fan says "In episode blah blah, where you were running from the Blahs, how was it that you were able to accelerate away on that motorbike when you were holding a gun in your throttle hand?"
Chris Bare(sp?) simply laughed...and never answered the question. The audience thought it was funny...but the guy asked the question dead serious. He was probably wondering why everyone was laughing.
What would be my answer? BECAUSE HES A #$%@ING ACTOR AND HE WAS SITTING ON FAKE BIKE ON A SOUNDSTAGE WITH A BLUESCREEN BEHIND HIM SHOOTING AN IMAGINARY GUN AT ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Keep in mind this is a series where, towards the end, people start getting hit on the heads by plastic alligators falling from the sky....and the special effects are REALLY bad on purpose(look on the P2P services for Red Dwarf A to Z; Patrick Steward is featured and talks about this...he almost called his lawyer because he thought it was a Star Trek ripoff, but after about 30 seconds, started laughing and stopped reaching for the phone, and loves the series now.)
Go see the @#$!ing movie and watch it for what it is, a story.
How many kids do you know that sit at bedtime and say "Oh, no daddy, that couldn't be. Bricklayer's unions would never let the pigs build that large a structure without hiring union workers, and the permits from the town take at least 2-3 weeks; besides wolves are pack animals..."
Looks like the site is already down.
;)
Mirror at http://openglforums.com/spider/index.html
I even took the pop-ups off for you guys, aren't I nice?
-Vic
What's wrong with going to a movie and simply enjoy it? You either like it or not. Who cares if the CG work is not up to someone's standards or there is a costume error. I have better things to do with my time than watch a movie numerous times to look for all mistakes. Who cares if you didn't hear a footfall when spiderman landed. Do you also complain about all the noise spaceships make in scifi movies?
Starship Troopers. ;)
Method of processing duck feet
It couldn't have been a land-line either, as the phone system in the US won't give you a dial tone if the other party hangs up. [...] Obviously whoever wrote that scene hasn't used a phone for about ten years. Or maybe just never got hung up on.
Friend, this is not a new observation. There are certain conceits that we use in making movies and TV shows that are not realistic in the strictest sense. We use them because they make for a better movie, or because the audience is used to seeing or hearing them.
For example, find any movie from the past forty years or so that features a scene of two people driving as seen from the hood of the car. Chances are good that the car has no rear-view mirror. In some instances, you can even see the spot on the windshield where the mirror used to be mounted. Chances are also pretty good that you never noticed. That's because some directors feel-- rightly or wrongly-- that the presence of the mirror right in the middle of the screen, between the two characters, is distracting or unappealing to the audience. So it goes. This is not an error. It's a very deliberate choice to deviate from strict realism in an effort to more effectively tell the story.
Same basic thing with the dial tone anomaly you mentioned. In movies, when the character on the other end hangs up, you hear a dial tone immediately. Not because that's what you would hear in real life, but because the movie or TV show works better that way. It's kind of like a little clue to the audience: hey, so-n-so just hung up. You, sitting in the theater, get the point immediately, and the story moves on.
That's the thing with movies and such. If it advances the story, it's okay. Movies exist to entertain, and they don't lose points for inaccuracy.
So basically what are commonly referred to as movie mistakes break down into three broad categories: plot holes, continuity errors, and deliberate decisions to differ from the strictly realistic.
You don't get any geek points for finding moments in movies where the director-- or sound man, or whatever-- deliberately chose to break with reality. That's part of what making movies is all about.
Nobody cares about continuity, either; hell, Kubrick even used continuity breaks as a stylistic conceit. Remember the rape scene in A Clockwork Orange? There are continuity breaks all through that scene; they were deliberate, intended to make the scene more frenetic and disorienting to the audience. More recently, Spielberg did the same thing in a couple of scenes in Schindler's List. But in general, if you go looking for accidental continuity breaks, you will find them. There's nothing exciting or cool about them.
As for plot holes, we can talk about those if you want. Sometimes people cite plot holes that aren't holes at all, like the fact that nobody guesses that Clark Kent is Superman despite the fact that they look exactly alike. That's not a plot hole, it's a plot feature. Other plot holes arise as a result of the movie-making process: the fifth replicant in Blade Runner that later got ret-conned into being Deckard himself. Other plot holes are legitimate, but they ultimately are like that one loose thread on your sweater. You could pull it, but the whole sleeve may unravel. So you just leave it alone, and keep on wearing your warm, comfy sweater.
"Movie mistakes" are, in my opinion, just not all that interesting.
The plural usage is "Stories"
At least look it up first. "Storey" is a fairly common, albeit somewhat old-fashioned, spelling for the word that means a level of a building. This is as distinct from "story," meaning a tale. "Storeys" is an accepted word, found almost exclusively in the UK, for what us Americans would most likely call "floors."
The worst kind of nitpicker is a mistaken nitpicker.
William Shatner: You know, before I answer any more questions there's something I wanted to say. Having received all your letters over the years, and I've spoken to many of you, and some of you have traveled... y'know... hundreds of miles to be here, I'd just like to say... GET A LIFE, will you people? I mean, for crying out loud, it's just a TV show! I mean, look at you, look at the way you're dressed! You've turned an enjoyable little job, that I did as a lark for a few years, into a COLOSSAL WASTE OF TIME!
[ a crowd of shocked and dismayed Trekkies.... ]
I mean, how old are you people? What have you done with yourselves?
[ to "Ears" ] You, you must be almost 30... have you ever kissed a girl?
[ "Ears" hangs his head ]
I didn't think so! There's a whole world out there! When I was your age, I didn't watch television! I LIVED! So... move out of your parent's basements! And get your own apartments and GROW THE HELL UP! I mean, it's just a TV show dammit, IT'S JUST A TV SHOW!
Charlie: Are- are you saying then that we should pay more attention to the movies?
William Shatner: NO!!! THAT'S NOT WHAT I'M SAYING AT ALL!!! HEY, YOU GUYS ARE... THE LAMEST BUNCH... I'VE NEVER SEEN... [ walks away from podium ] I can't believe these people... I mean, I really can't understand what's....
[figz@figz figz]$ kill -9 `ps -ef | awk '$1=="figz" { print $2 }'`
I think the Open Source analogy of the article title is particularly apt.
...". Obviously the director did like the way it looked, and the movie character did it differently.
One of the claims of Open Source development is that, with many developers being able to examine the source, bugs will be found quickly.
One problem with this idea is demonstrated by the nature of the "errors" submitted by viewers of the Spider-Man movie. Most are not technical errors, but disagreements like "I don't like the way that looked" or "if I was doing that I'd
The problem, of course, is that making a movie, playing the part of a fictional character, and such is hard work, but complaining about what you don't like is easy. This doesn't bug me too much about movies, but it does bug me about Open Source development.
Take a look a the Bugzilla database sometime. Some bugs are things like crashing or standard noncompliance, but an awful lot are "I don't like the way that looked". I remember a bunch about whether mouse-overs should activate text fields, or what the PgDn should do.
Now, in most cases, the developers are following platform conventions or trying to keep the interface consistent. Unfortunately, like the Spider-Man viewer who hated the logo used in one scene, some Mozilla users simply don't like the decision, no matter the reason.
I agree that, to a certain extent, one has to accept "that's the way it happened in the movie". I hope that the people critiquing computer programs will accept that sometimes "that's the way the program does it".
The reason people call it fake is that they act like they are fighting when they are not. No, this doesn't mean they aren't athletic. But their athleticism is the sort that comes from putting on a good stuntman show, not the kind that comes from actually wrestling. The part in the movie that felt fake is that in real life "pro" wrestling, there would have been choreography coaching beforehand since the "wrestlers" are just putting on a show, not really having a contest where they don't know who is going to win.
In the movie it was presented like it was a real contest between the participants.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I'm a nerd/filmmaker, and never having been to this website, I decided to give it a go. Man, what a mistake even loading it was. Most of what people have pegged as "mistakes" (to give themselves a strange feeling of accomplishment or to receive some sort of notoriety I'd wager) are actually techniques commonly used by myself and my colleagues to emphasise certain aspects of the story, de-emphasize others, and generally attempt to slyly shift the audiences focus around from story aspect to story aspect. If people are missing where there were people, we want you to concentrate only on the people we've left in the shot. If "shadows look wrong," usually we're trying to alter your perceptions.
We aren't perfect by any means, but no production would ever get as far as a theatrical release with that number of "non-acknowledged/planned" errors in it. Try editing a film in a darkened room for 15 hours at a time for several weeks, watching each clip over and over and over and over ad nauseum and then tell me you didn't catch these so called "mistakes". I hate armchair quarterbacks, people in line at Fry's who pretend they know so much about their "1 Gigahertz hard drive," misinforming their buddy that they need a new "motherboard chip," and most of all, unqualified film critics who think they've discovered America every time they "uncover" one of our deliberate attempts to change their perceptions to our ends.
Allow yourself to be immersed, suspend disbelief, and it can only be a win/win situation for us both.
Good day.
-NewtonEatPalm!