movie characters who check a watch that doesnt match the time on the clock behind them...

watched a heist movie last night and the whole plot hinges on a 2:15 deadline. guy looks at his watch, it clearly says something like 10:10, which is the catalog photo pose, so the prop people just grabbed it out of the box and never set it. then theres a wall clock behind him reading 4:40 nobody on that set owns a watch apparently

and it was a nice watch too, automatic, looked like a real one. you hand an actor a three thousand dollar prop and cant spend eight seconds pulling the crown out and turning it i paused it to check, which my wife says is the reason nobody wants to watch movies with me anymore

the digital ones in older movies dont bother me as much because you cant really read them on screen anyway. but an analog face is right there and anyone can read it, thats sort of the point of them

so has anybody else caught one of these or is it just me pausing things. bonus points if the movie keeps telling you how many minutes are left and the hands never move...

the insert shots are worse though. half the time the closeup of the watch is a totally different watch on some hand model's wrist, and they set that one perfectly to 2:14 so you get both kinds of wrong in one scene... 🤦

also an automatic thats been sitting in a prop drawer would have stopped days ago anyway, so teh 10:10 might have been the most accurate thing in that movie

the insert shots are worse though

lol "both kinds of wron" is fitting, they ran out of letters same way they ran out of watches. my uncle was a hand model for exactly one jewelry ad in like '96 and he still brings it up at thanksgiving like he was in Heat or something. ngl his hands are honestly pretty mid

scruffy_pockets your uncle got to be a HAND MODEL?? wow rub it in why dont you!! my hands are mostly paper cuts and telescope eyepiece grease... i'd bring it up every thanksgiving too lol i'd probably forget which ad it was though... i cant even remember where i left my star charts!!

STARGAZER6. you LOST your star charts?? the actual star charts?? *clutches pearls* *dramatic zoom* how do you even find teh sky now and the eyepiece grease confession on top of that. i need to sit down. this thread was about wrong watch times and youve torn my whole family apart

lol datawrangler you're too much i actually snorted my coffee!! but back to the watches... the one that drives me crazy is when the clock behind them says 3:15 and they look at their watch and gasp like they're late for something and then the very next scene it's broad daylight at 10 in the morning!! my grandson Tyler catches these faster than I do, he paused the TV twice last weekend just to show me... he's twelve and already smarter than his grandma lol... speaking of clocks, I watched a Dateline the other night where the whole case came down to the timestamp on a gas station camera being off by an hour from daylight saving... so maybe the movie people just never set their clocks back either!! anyway I need to go walk down to the pond, there's a great blue heron that's been standing on the same rock every morning around 7... and I know it's 7 because I check my watch and it actually matches lol... Just my two cents!!

STARGAZER6.

oh my goodness I saw that thread too... honestly the eyepiece grease bothered me more than the charts!! the charts you can just print off the internet, Tyler showed me a free app where you point your phone at the sky... but grease on the glass?? that's how you end up with a smudge you can never get off, ask me how I know from 30 years of patients' glasses lol Just my two cents!!

wait how did we get from movie watches to star apps lol i once cleaned my glasses with a buttery diner napkin and everything had a little glow for like three days, kinda liked it ngl anyway id honestly respect a movie more if the watch in the closeup had a big greasy thumbprint on it, at least then you'd know someone actually wore the thing instead of a prop guy grabbing whatever was in the drawer

lol "both kinds of wron" is fitting, they ran out of letters same way they ran out of watches.

lol your post died right at "my uncle was" and now i NEED to know what your uncle was. and yeah the insert shots are the worst part, they clearly reshot the watch closeups months later with whatever watch was lying around the prop truck. thats what i'd call a TIME crunch (intellectual humor, dont @ me)

well must be nice glitterfuel... some of us cant even get through a movie without Tyler asking for snacks every five minutes and here you are spotting insert shots like a pro I'd never

Spotting it isnt a skill, its a curse. honestly once you notice the watch never matches the clock you cant stop seeing it, and suddenly youre rewinding a heist movie at 1am to check if the guy's dial moved between shots... the worst one is when a guy in a period piece is wearing a quartz. you can tell because the seconds hand ticks instead of sweeping, and nobody on set cared

lol the quartz tick thing is gonna haunt me now. like, the one that gets me is when the watch in the closeup says exactly 10:10, because thats how every watch ad sets them so the hands look like a smile and the logo shows. so the prop guy just pulls it out of the box and nobody bothers to change it, and now the bomb has 30 seconds left at 10:10 in the middle of the night

my uncle wore his watch on the inside of his wrist and swore it was so he could check the time during weddings without anyone noticing. everyone noticed. i kinda want to see a movie character do that though, at least it would tell me something about the guy