Times you got hung up on throwaway details in movies

[SwampBastard]

My wife and I watched Jeepers Creepers (2001) on Saturday night. I had never seen it before. If you've never seen this 19 year old movie and don't want to read some minor spoilers, stop reading now. In the opening of the movie, a brother and sister are making a long road trip home from college for the summer. On a one-lane highway in the middle of nowhere, a big, scary-looking SUV comes flying up behind them and starts aggressively tailgating them. The truck eventually goes around them, but not before Darius notices the truck has a vanity plate that reads BEATNGU. He initially interprets this to mean "beating you," but we eventually learn that it means "be eating you." We also eventually find out that the driver is a scary humanoid monster.

I know it's dumb, but I couldn't stop thinking about that vanity plate.

• Am I supposed to believe that the monster went down to the local bureau of motor vehicles to order a custom license plate? My wife suggested that he could have just ordered them online, but I don't think that was the case in 2001 when the movie came out.
• We also learn from another character later in the movie that the creature shows up for 23 days every 23rd spring to feed. How is it at all practical for the monster to have a registered vehicle that sits there for 23 yrs between feedings? Especially when one considers that it's clearly a highly customized truck that would probably need plenty of maintenance after sitting for so long. I would accept the idea that it just steals a car when it comes back and drives that for three weeks except for the custom license plate that is clearly tailored to the creature.
• I could even accept that it might be an unofficial vanity plate that the creature made itself, except that I doubt it wants to spend its feeding time on arts and crafts projects instead of hunting. Same goes for vehicle maintenance.
• Toward the end of the film, we find out that the creature can fly at a pretty good clip and can do so while carrying a fully grown human, so why does it need a truck in the first place?!

What are examples of inconsequential nonsense like this have you gotten overly fixated on in the past?

 

[Brass Body Dave]

I loved the first half of Jeepers Creepers, then it fell apart

One thing I couldn't handle was the damn "looks like meat's back on the menu boys" from lard of the rings

 

[Squirrel09]

The first time I watched The Fellowship of the Ring I saw the "dead" Orc that lifted his head. More so a mistake by a stand in actor, but still bugged me lol

 

[xenocide]

I can't unsee the bad fight choreography in the prequel Star Wars movies. Also, that Dagger in TROS infuriates every time I remember it was in the film.

 

[Spectromixer]

For horror movies like Jeepers Creepers, I like to turn off my brain and just try to enjoy them for what they are.

 

[It’s Time To Go]

In Spider-Man 2 at the end when he's webbing away from the destroyed warehouse, I spent years thinking 'what could he possibly have attached the web to, they're on the river'

 

[Platy]

One thing I couldn't handle was the damn "looks like meat's back on the menu boys" from lard of the rings

Click to shrink...

 

[Modest_Modsoul]

What are examples of inconsequential nonsense like this have you gotten overly fixated on in the past?

Click to shrink...

It Follows (2014).

It has cool concept of why "it" follows it's victims.

But the 'rules' of why/how it follows & haunting victims added more and more inconsistent through out the movie, it irks me...

Because of that, makes me like The Witch (2015) more.

 

[y2kyle89]

This might be more that I don't understand theme park construction (or I'm forgetting something) but in Jurassic Park when they take the car of the tracks and one of the computer guys says "I said we shouldn't let them get off the tracks." Why is this rail car still a functioning car? Wouldn't taking the engine block out be step one in turning a car into a rail operated attraction?

 

[mnemonicj]

Where do the park employees go to once the dinosaurs are set free in the original Jurassic Park movie?
Do they escape? If so, how?

 

[Aaron]

I dunno how much of this is a "throwaway detail" because it doesn't seem to bother anyone else, but the ending of Crazy Stupid Love (with Steve Carrell) always pissed me off. Dude had a rocky marriage with his wife, partly due to him just not trying anymore, so she cheats on him, demands a divorce, kicks him out of the house and then gets mad at him when he starts sleeping around. But it's like... she cheated on him. And divorced him. And never (as far as I can recall) apologized for any of it. The movie goes to ridiculous lengths to contort itself into the typical "the man screws up and has to make a big public apology to win her back" romcom formula when Carrell's character was never actually in the wrong, and for all his trouble she still doesn't get back together with him. He tries to be like "heehee I'll win you back one of these days!" at the end and she just gives him this cutesy "oh you!" look and walks back over to Kevin Bacon.

Anyway I got really hung up on that but everyone else I've ever talked to about it thought it was a good movie and story so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I will give that it had an amazing twist with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone's characters, and holy shit I just realized they did La La Land together too.

 

[BDS]

Where do the park employees go to once the dinosaurs are set free in the original Jurassic Park movie?
Do they escape? If so, how?

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This is mentioned in the movie...they all evacuated the island before the hurricane. Most of the park's systems are self-sustaining.

 

[Manu]

Inception lost me the moment they said they had to go deeper into the dream, so they pulled the same device they used in the real world into the dream and somehow they used it while inside the dream to go another level deeper. You don't just do that and don't explain it.

 

[Deleted member 4367]

This might be more that I don't understand theme park construction (or I'm forgetting something) but in Jurassic Park when they take the car of the tracks and one of the computer guys says "I said we shouldn't let them get off the tracks." Why is this rail car still a functioning car? Wouldn't taking the engine block out be step one in turning a car into a rail operated attraction?

Click to shrink...

I don't think what you said happened though.

 

[Pedrito]

This might be more that I don't understand theme park construction (or I'm forgetting something) but in Jurassic Park when they take the car of the tracks and one of the computer guys says "I said we shouldn't let them get off the tracks." Why is this rail car still a functioning car? Wouldn't taking the engine block out be step one in turning a car into a rail operated attraction?

Click to shrink...

Are you talking about the first movie? They just say the doors should have been locked. The vehicles don't go off the tracks (until the T-Rex shows up and pushes it down the ravine).

Where do the park employees go to once the dinosaurs are set free in the original Jurassic Park movie?
Do they escape? If so, how?

Click to shrink...

They all (I assume) left the island on the last ferry because of the storm. They announce the last call on the PA system. It's still a bit silly that all the employees would leave while there are visitors, but they make a big deal about the park being automated.

 

[Deleted member 6056]

The Stand.

They were all in a perfectly clean power plant control room. They tell everyone to cross their fingers. They flip a light switch looking thing on a "control panel" . All the power comes on and the town has power. Everyone cheers.


I work in a power plant. That is not how it works.

There is no noise of machines. No mills to roll. No heat soak to prevent thermal shock to boiler tubes. No fans to start for combustion air. No fans to roll for exhaust to prevent the boiler flue gas from filling the plant. No lighters being checked to maintain light till the boiler is hot enough to self sustain fuel ignition. No feedwater pumps to roll.

Nope. Just one dude watching a light switch in a control room in a power plant that somehow needs no crew, no equipment, no oil or grease checked daily that had no dirt at all.


This bugged me before I worked this career. Now the pop off from me when this scene plays is legendary amongst friends who've seen it. Makes me want to hit fallout 76 sometime and hit the wv power plants in iy because I work on a wv plant and have been at the one that is where the one in 76 is located in real life.

 

[y2kyle89]

I don't think what you said happened though.

Click to shrink...

Are you talking about the first movie? They just say the doors should have been locked. The vehicles don't go off the tracks (until the T-Rex shows up and pushes it down the ravine).

Click to shrink...

Oh.

Uh, I guess I remembered a rant about something that didn't happen.

I'm gonna go lie down.

 

[formasymphonic]

The Martian.

I spent the whole movie thinking "shouldn't all of this be at like ⅓ the gravity?"

 

[MrNewVegas]

In Drive during the first scene, Goslings character has SiriusXM radio on. He has it on channel 6 which is 60s on 6 not sports radio,

 

[Sho_Nuff82]

Blade 2.

Why do the vampires in the Blood Pack have flashlights on their guns? They're goddamn vampires! Yes they're being stalked by more dangerous creatures, but it shouldn't change their basic power set.

 

[HStallion]

• I could even accept that it might be an unofficial vanity plate that the creature made itself, except that I doubt it wants to spend its feeding time on arts and crafts projects instead of hunting. Same goes for vehicle maintenance.

Click to shrink...

OP this is the same monster that spent decades sewing corpses together to cover the entirety of the walls and ceiling of its lair in a giant human quilt and you question if it doesn't have time and interest in arts and crafts.

 

[Septy]

In Goodfellas when Tommy and Jimmy killed that one Made guy in the bar the camera made a very clear point to show a revolver falling and landing far away and no one picked it up. I thought the revolver would be used to catch the main characters because of fingerprints or something.

 

[SABO.]

Same movie as OP,

WHY THE FUCK DID HE MAKE HER STOP RUNNING OVER IT WITH THE CAR?

I would have kept going till it was a pile of mush. At least pop the damn head!

 

[ruxtpin]

At the beginning of Godzilla King of Monsters the kid is making breakfast for her mom. The kid makes a plate of toast (I think at least 5 pieces), combined with a couple of pieces on each of their plates. Between the mom and the kid they've got - at least - 7 pieces of toast (plus eggs, burnt bacon, and fruit). Who in the hell eats half a loaf of bread just for breakfast?

 

[Transistor]

OP this is the same monster that spent decades sewing corpses together to cover the entirety of the walls and ceiling of its lair in a giant human quilt and you question if it doesn't have time and interest in arts and crafts.

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I don't know why, but this has me fucking dying

 

[meowdi gras]

Sounds like this could be My Bestie: The Thread. She drives me nuts with her relentless nitpicking of insignificant stuff.

 

[Kapten]

Inception lost me the moment they said they had to go deeper into the dream, so they pulled the same device they used in the real world into the dream and somehow they used it while inside the dream to go another level deeper. You don't just do that and don't explain it.

Click to shrink...

They dreamt it up so they could use it.

Like when Hardy dreams up a grenadelauncher out of nowhere.

At least that's my headcanon.

 

[Torpedo Vegas]

Walkie Talkies in E.T. and so many movies and TV shows have had people caring guns with no clips in them.

 

[IggyChooChoo]

In Us, what do the rabbits eat?

 

[astro]

Inception lost me the moment they said they had to go deeper into the dream, so they pulled the same device they used in the real world into the dream and somehow they used it while inside the dream to go another level deeper. You don't just do that and don't explain it.

Click to shrink...

They can construct things within a dream. Places and equipment and the look of their clothes etc...

The architect likely imagines it all as well as the environment.

 

[Manu]

They can construct things within a dream. Places and equipment and the look of their clothes etc...

The architect likely imagines it all as well as the environment.

Click to shrink...

I get it. But I don't think it's a satisfactory answer because they're using it as a working piece of technology within the dream.

 

[BDS]

At the beginning of Godzilla King of Monsters the kid is making breakfast for her mom. The kid makes a plate of toast (I think at least 5 pieces), combined with a couple of pieces on each of their plates. Between the mom and the kid they've got - at least - 7 pieces of toast (plus eggs, burnt bacon, and fruit). Who in the hell eats half a loaf of bread just for breakfast?

Click to shrink...

Every time you see characters eating in a movie they have way too much food on their plates. You'll see some hundred pound female character eating a 2500 calorie meal.

 

[HStallion]

I get it. But I don't think it's a satisfactory answer because they're using it as a working piece of technology within the dream.

Click to shrink...

I think like most things in the dream its just a visual approximation of an idea i.e. going down another level since the entire thing has to have a believable enough structure to work in convincing the mark.

 

[Deleted member 31333]

Not really hung up but I felt no emotion with Endgame 1 (can't remember the movie name) because my cynical thoughts made me go - "yeah you aren't really dead" with each death scene.

 

[Gawge]

Rewatching Harry Potter the thread.

 

[Deleted member 2226]

Is there ever been a horror film that makes internal sense with characters that don't behave like idiots? I don't think if you get hung up on little things you can watch that entire genre.

It Follows (2014).

It has cool concept of why "it" follows it's victims.

But the 'rules' of why/how it follows & haunting victims added more and more inconsistent through out the movie, it irks me...

Because of that, makes me like The Witch (2015) more.

Click to shrink...

Case in point: the creature in It Follows mostly seems interested in unsettling the main character than actually chasing it (why else does it grab her hair when she's totally defenseless? Why just sit still on her roof when she leaves in a car?)

It's not as bad as a j-horror film like The Grudge, but it crops up constantly.

 

[HotsauceDragon]

Blade 2.

Why do the vampires in the Blood Pack have flashlights on their guns? They're goddamn vampires! Yes they're being stalked by more dangerous creatures, but it shouldn't change their basic power set.

Click to shrink...

Humans aren't immune to high-velocity bullets, yet we carry guns around too. As long as they're used responsibly, why not?
And it's not like the flashlight will disintegrate them immediately - the first movie showed that one large vampire getting nicely toasted from the flashlight N'Bushe Wright was carrying around.

 

[NealMcCauley]

Blade 2.

Why do the vampires in the Blood Pack have flashlights on their guns? They're goddamn vampires! Yes they're being stalked by more dangerous creatures, but it shouldn't change their basic power set.

Click to shrink...

IIRC those were UV lights that would burn vamp skin.

 

[ZackieChan]

I get it. But I don't think it's a satisfactory answer because they're using it as a working piece of technology within the dream.

Click to shrink...

They dreamed of a working piece of technology they know about already? Not sure what the issue is.

 

[Tedmilk]

Hancock with Will Smith. The torsional stress on the whale he threw in the sea would mean he would have just ripped a small chunk of the poor whale's flesh off. Even assuming he was able to cradle the whale in a huge supporting sling, he wouldn't have enough counterweight in his own body to throw the thing, he'd end up throwing himself instead.

 

[Osahi]

I get it. But I don't think it's a satisfactory answer because they're using it as a working piece of technology within the dream.

Click to shrink...

Been a while since I saw Inception, but everything works in the dream? Cars, guns, whatever. So why is it strange that device would work? They set-up that dreams have layers and you can have one dreaming inside a dream.

There is really not much to explain really. These is the rules they set-up (just like how everything goes faster when you dream) and adhere to.

 

[BAD]

I almost said I felt like this for The Dark Knight Rises but actually the big details in that were bad too

 

[Box]

OP this is the same monster that spent decades sewing corpses together to cover the entirety of the walls and ceiling of its lair in a giant human quilt and you question if it doesn't have time and interest in arts and crafts.

Click to shrink...

Dude was just playing Human Hunter World.

 

[Rover]

Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne constantly with one hand in his pocket. It bothers me so much.

 

[Addi]

Just want to pop in and say thank you for not calling these details plot holes. This is exactly the type of things that doesn't really affect the plot but gets mislabeled by nitpickers online.

 

[andrew]

My wife and I watched Jeepers Creepers (2001) on Saturday night. I had never seen it before. If you've never seen this 19 year old movie and don't want to read some minor spoilers, stop reading now. In the opening of the movie, a brother and sister are making a long road trip home from college for the summer. On a one-lane highway in the middle of nowhere, a big, scary-looking SUV comes flying up behind them and starts aggressively tailgating them. The truck eventually goes around them, but not before Darius notices the truck has a vanity plate that reads BEATNGU. He initially interprets this to mean "beating you," but we eventually learn that it means "be eating you." We also eventually find out that the driver is a scary humanoid monster.

I know it's dumb, but I couldn't stop thinking about that vanity plate.

• Am I supposed to believe that the monster went down to the local bureau of motor vehicles to order a custom license plate? My wife suggested that he could have just ordered them online, but I don't think that was the case in 2001 when the movie came out.
• We also learn from another character later in the movie that the creature shows up for 23 days every 23rd spring to feed. How is it at all practical for the monster to have a registered vehicle that sits there for 23 yrs between feedings? Especially when one considers that it's clearly a highly customized truck that would probably need plenty of maintenance after sitting for so long. I would accept the idea that it just steals a car when it comes back and drives that for three weeks except for the custom license plate that is clearly tailored to the creature.
• I could even accept that it might be an unofficial vanity plate that the creature made itself, except that I doubt it wants to spend its feeding time on arts and crafts projects instead of hunting. Same goes for vehicle maintenance.
• Toward the end of the film, we find out that the creature can fly at a pretty good clip and can do so while carrying a fully grown human, so why does it need a truck in the first place?!

What are examples of inconsequential nonsense like this have you gotten overly fixated on in the past?

Click to shrink...

Hahah I think about things like this all the time in movies. Exactly: did the monster go to the DMV??

I can't think of a specific one from myself recently but this review of Yesterday is a good example. The movie apparently implies that without the Beatles there are no cigarettes, which is...a head-spinning implication.

 

[deathsaber]

I can't unsee the bad fight choreography in the prequel Star Wars movies. Also, that Dagger in TROS infuriates every time I remember it was in the film.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, the funny thing is, I'm not a TROS hater at all, I quite like the film, and in general, I can "check my brain at the door" where escapist cinema is concerned, particular sci fi/fantasy- its not real, just go with the fiction and whatnot.

But that dagger does make me a little nutty to think about.. so this stupid sith dagger was made for the purpose of standing at some specific spot in front of the death star wreckage, where it will line up with the death star wreckage (IF you stand at the right spot/perspective, which the heroes manage to literally do first try- they very well could have stood at some spot with respect to the wreck where NONE of that shit would have lined up) and some point on the hilt or whatever points to where in that wreckage the stupid sith wayfinder can be found -which then gives whoever finds it directions to the secret sith world. And this wayfinder was kept in the death star, presumably in the OT times before it was blown up, for someone to find? I guess.

Who is to say the stupid thing would still be intact, let alone still in that spot after the death star blows up and crashes onto the nearby planet/moon. And again, someone THEN made a Sith dagger for the purpose of leading someone to this wayfinder, located in the wreck which would lead them to the secret sith world. Why would there even need to be a secret sith world in the times of the OT, or a wayfinder to lead someone there?

So, it does kind of beg the question- why even bother? With all of it.. (other than making for a convoluted series of quests for some "heroes' to pursue throughout a movie).

Like I said, check your brain at the door and you will be fine.....

 

[More_Badass]

I get it. But I don't think it's a satisfactory answer because they're using it as a working piece of technology within the dream.

Click to shrink...

They're using guns and cars as "working" pieces of tech in the dreams

 

[tangeu]

Anytime there is a dinner scene or a glass of water or anything like that my brain just has to watch it an point out when the water level goes up and down throughout the scene. It doesn't ruin movies or anything but it is just something I can't shut off.

 

[Deleted member 4976]

I guess it's small because it only seems to bother me.

I really disliked the ending of X-Men: Days of the Future Past. The president cancels the Sentinel program because a mutant saves him after other mutants try to kill him and show him precisely why mutants are such a "danger." One mutant that has the power to lift stadiums sorta just casually strolled up to the president...

I don't buy that one bit for a human politician.