To get twitchily annoyed when someone playing a piano in a movie...

[CogitoErgoSometimes]

... isn't actually playing it? Not so bad if the camera angle doesn't show their hands but, if hands are on display, it is NOT OK to just flap them vaguely about over the keys and think no-one notices.

AIBU or was it a mistake to open the Baileys early..?

I think it's safe to say that TV/film representations of almost anything are almost guaranteed to be wildly inaccurate because if it were too much like real life we would all be bored witless! Although, in fairness, a lot of the time the sound for these things will be added on afterwards just as a matter of practicality, so things like tap dancing are bound to suffer when it comes to the sound editing.

Zing have you seen Lincoln? A quilting buddy has reported a very nice one in that, haven't seen it yet myself.

YANBU and in fact one of the reasons I loathe most period dramas is the fact the music is never, ever right. Shakespeare in Love in particular had me smothering myself with a cushion.

My uncle was an ER paediatrician and said ER was fairly accurate.

I hate it when anyone is swimming and are being hailed as brilliant but you can clearly see they're not!

It's so sloppy. Surely a half-decent actor can make it look convincing. Or a hand-double could be employed to play.

By the way, does anyone know of any actors who actually play their own piano parts? The only one I can think of is Uncle Albert in Fools and Horses, who plays the piano in the pub sometimes.

I am not musical at all but I noticed this for the first time last night while watching the Gavin and Stacey Christmas special. Mick is 'playing' the keyboard but he barely moves his hands! Just hovers them above the keys. It drove me mad, why didn't they just change the camera angle so that we couldn't see his stupid, limp, hovering hands?

biryani as someone up thread has mentioned, Hugh Lawrie always does at the end of Jeeves and Wooster.

My Dad always used to rant on about tanks and battleships etc (yawn!) eg "They can't have had those tanks at the battle of Blahdeblah, because the ones with seventeen rivets on the gun turret weren't invented till 1943"

I'd say "Dad, it's a film about the horror and tragedy of war, and the cost to humanity, it's not really about the tanks" and he'd reply "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, love I know but why can't they get these blardy things right all they have to do is look in a book... " repeat until fade.

I miss my Dad.

Stuff like this drives DH and me bonkers as well! DH used to be in the army and is v interested in military history, so anything to do with wrong uniforms, wrong weapons, wrong equipment, stupid strategy or tactics etc earns a massive rant at the TV.

I dont think lawyers can watch legal dramas either.

balloon never watched Jeeves and Wooster* . Will do now, though.

Balloon, you can come round ours any time and listen to DH because I am positive he is channeling your Dad.

We've actually stopped watching programmes before when they've got computer stuff really wrong, can only suspend disbelief so far!

Do not start me on historical anomalies. My children used to shout in unison SHUT UP ABOUT THE TOMATOES every time we watched Merlin.

Don't get me started on the lycra in Robin Hood.......

MurderofGoths what you mean that ten year olds hacking into the US defence computer, then making it grind to a halt seconds before armageddon by making it play noughts and crosses against itself is far-fatched? Surely not!

Or are you claiming it is unbelievable that a computer nerd could have programmed a whole computer system to collapse, and this could not be fixed by anyone, not even his boss, yet an eleven year old girl at the point of exhaustion and traumatised by being chased by velociraptors could get it sorted and back on-line in 30 seconds?

Balloon, Jurassic Park is fine in that respect - that's why they turned the park power off, because it cut off Dennis' program (which hadn't collapsed the system so much as overridden various sections). The thing that gets DH and his computer nerd mates laughing is the line "it's a UNIX system, I know this" - granted, it is UNIX, but it's the strangest interface and would have been much more realistic just as a terminal...

I'm totally with you all on the fake instrument-playing, though!

It's like the current advert with Tom Jones and Kenneth Wossisname - there's no way Wossisname is playing that piano !

biryani Holly Hunter plays for real in The Piano. One of the many awesome things about that film.

I'm from a Nordic country and I can always tell fake snow. These days CGI snow is getting better, but that still leaves the clothing that's usually just wrong. It doesn't matter how big and thick your coat is, it's not much use to you if you leave it open and don't cover your head. For example The Game of Thrones, we are meant to believe it's Really Cold beyond the wall, but is anybody wearing a hat of any kind? They are completely missing the basic rules of staying warm = alive.

I am a plane geek.

I get annoyed at inaccuracies in films - even stuff like people rushing through security waving passport etc and getting on their flight.

Don't get me started on Flight...

Dudley Moore did his own playing, of course, he was genuinely a good pianist.

Jurassic Park - ah, that strange UI with the graphical representation of the file system, do you mean? That was a Silicon Graphics which was the first UNIX I ever knew - that was actually real! (it was a slightly useful application if you needed to find out where large files were hiding back in the days when you had less than a gig of disk ...if you couldn't figure out how to use 'find'...your DH will know what I mean ) But not the sort of machine a small girl would have been used to playing with, at the time they cost about as much as a house.

It was the scientific computing that made people who knew about it snort in that film, that would just not be how you'd deal with the DNA sequences.

Yes! Drives me mad (I'm a musician, in case you didn't guess )
But my Dad is a historian and as others have said, you just can't watch a historical drama or film with him as the inconsistencies drive him crazy. He spends the whole time saying things like "collars like that didn't exist in the year xxxx", to the point where you can't concentrate on the story at all!
You'd think producers would get in some better experts.....

I am horsy and incorrect tack drives me bonkers.

Robin Hood Prince of Thieves drives DH bonkers as he knows about arrows and when various bits of metal were first melted.

there are people in a place where dinosaurs have been created from bugs in amber and its the computer stuff you're picking holes in.

Ah, but the DNA stuff was mostly dumbed down for the park visitors, Errol - I don't recall seeing any "real" data? I think the weird choice of interface was just to make cinema-goers feel more engaged; Hollywood seems loath to use realistic terminal command-line type stuff, presumably because it doesn't look fancy enough...

Not that I'm a huge Jurassic Park fan, of course, despite it's shortcomings

YES, TSS suspension of belief is one thing, but they could portray the real stuff accurately!

Couldn't agree more. And the other thing that really irritates (only one other thing that irritates I hear you ask) is when the person is pretending to play music and their hands aren't even vaguely in the place on the keyboard that might produce the note that's being played. And as for music being played before it was supposedly written.....
Hmmmm is all I can really say on here!