Details, details, details

I just finished watching "Atonement," which was nominated for an Oscar as Best Picture in 2007.

It's a great movie, but there was a blunder of staggering proportions in it, and I'm amazed no one involved with the film caught it.

For those of you who haven't seen it (or don't remember), the movie opens in the summer of 1935. After a series of events lasting no more than a day or two, we're told four years have passed, and three British soldiers are holed up in the attic of a barn in France. The Germans are advancing, and the fall of France seems inevitable.

Small problem: World War II hadn't even started in the summer of 1939. France didn't fall until 1940. I guess the screenwriters flunked math in grade school. Oh, they got the time elapsed correct later in the film, but somehow missed the early reference.

Maybe it's because I'm a journalist, or maybe it's because I have a bit of a perfectionist streak in me, but stumbles like that in movies drive me bonkers.

I'm sure you have spotted howlers in movies, too.

Take the scoreboards in "Hoosiers." Please. (rimshot)

Mind you, I love that movie. I own it, and have lost track of how many times I've seen it. Along with "The Hunt for Red October" and "Major League" and a few other films, it's a movie I can't seem to turn off 'til the end no matter what stage of the flick I've stumbled across when channel-surfing.

But the first time I saw "Hoosiers" I noticed that in game footage they always seemed to have the scoreboard out of sequence. You'd see a play and the score would be 34-29. Later in the same game, the score would be 12-8. Huh??? Did nobody think of those details? Was there not a way to adjust the scoreboard somehow after the fact for the sake of consistency? It happened in more than one game, no less....

Movie moments like that, for me, are the equivalent of somebody dragging a record player needle across an album. Wha????

Imagine having the Allies storm the beaches in high heels. Such gaffes are jarringly out of place.

Another head-shaker in "Hoosiers" is depicting ready-to-harvest corn as the playoffs are unfolding. That would be in the spring, and every farm boy knows corn is harvested in the fall. I would suspect many a city-slicker knows that, too, because most crops are harvested in the fall.

Early in "The Wizard of Oz," Dorothy walks along the fence to the pig pen -- and then falls in. When Bert Lahr picks her up, her dress is perfectly clean. Having grown up on a pig farm, I can tell ya --- nope. Huh-uh. Never could happen.

In "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," the .....whatever he was called, I don't remember.....punched his body through the windshield of the helicopter to get inside. In the next scene, the hole in the windshield is gone. I think I've noticed that in commercials featuring footage from the movie, too.

There are entire Web sites devoted to mistakes in movies, but I've never paid much attention to them. I try to enjoy the movies I see, watching to see how they tell the story and develop the characters (that's the writer in me, I'm sure). I understand "creative license," even if it sometimes makes me chafe.

But every once in a while there's a whopper of a blunder that I just can't ignore. As far as I'm concerned, "Atonement" could have walked away with the Oscar for Best Picture, and I'd have been perfectly fine with that.

Yet I'll also remember it as the movie that had France falling to the Germans before World War II ever started.

Wow.