Movie Buffs Look for Film Flubs
March 20 -- Filmmakers beware: There's a new set of critics out there, sitting at home picking movies apart frame by frame, and then sharing the blunders with thousands of other nitpickers.
Not only have high-quality, at-home toys like DVD players made it easier to watch scenes from a movie over and over — slowing them down, freezing them and finding any mistakes — but that very activity has also spawned an Internet rage, with film buffs e-mailing their little hearts out.
Wrong Time Span
Gladiator earned five Academy Awards in 2000, but if there was an Oscar category for flubs, the mega-hit may have been a contender for that as well.
According to film flub expert Bill Givens and the people who visit his Web site devoted to movie mistakes, Gladiator has more than 100 glitches. One of Givens' favorites is a chariot racing scene where viewers get a glimpse of an attachment that couldn't possibly have existed in ancient Roman times.
"The chariot flips over and you can see this gas cartridge underneath the chariot that was used to flip it," said Givens, who has written five books about mistakes in movies.
Anachronisms like that are a common error, says Givens. For example, even though Titanic pocketed 12 Oscars, not everything about the blockbuster was exactly ship-shape.
In one scene, Jack, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, warns Rose, played by Kate Winslet, that if she were to jump off the ship, the water below would be awfully cold. He would know, he said, from his ice-fishing days in Wisconsin on Lake Wisota. Interesting, because the Titanic sank in 1912, and Lake Wisota, a manmade lake, wasn't built until 1917.
Errors in Continuity
Another typical type of mistake deals with continuity, when from one scene to the next, things are not consistent or the flow of the story is interrupted. In one Titanic scene, for example, Winslet has bangs on her forehead, then in the next frame, her hair is combed back, and then it's back to bangs.
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