Don't call us, we'll call you... scene from Babel.
In the Venn diagram of life, "film buff" overlaps significantly with "socially awkward pedant". That's just the way these things go. But even we socially awkward pedants need a species to which we can feel superior. And that species, I propose, is the goof-spotter.
These are people for whom cinema is nothing more than an arena for pointscoring and one-upmanship - a concentrated campaign to undermine the magic of cinema by tugging at loose threads until the whole tapestry unravels. And when they can't find any loose ends, they create some, feverishly identifying errors that no sane person with half a life, the need for regular sustenance and a passing interest in personal hygiene would have the time nor inclination to underline.
Here's one such supposed lapse from the recent Children of Men, as posted on the Internet Movie Database: "Most of the soldiers are using the SA80A1. This version of the rifle would have been completely phased out by the time the film is set, as it has been already by the SA80A2." Perhaps you would argue, as I would, that the goof-spotter in question should not be allowed near the SA80A2, or anything more dangerous than a loofah, until a full psychological report has been completed.
Goof-spotters, who delight in the smallest continuity lapse, have always been with us, but the rise of IMDb has given their pettiness a new outlet. Every film listed on IMDb has a section devoted to goofs, in which readers are invited to reveal errors they have spotted on screen. Not the thematic, stylistic or narrative shortcomings on which a critic will typically seize, but the common or garden mistakes that the director didn't notice, or couldn't be bothered to correct - cars glimpsed in the background of The Adventures of Robin Hood and the western Hang 'Em High, or a 1940s-style police badge from Singin' in the Rain, which is set in 1927.
Coming across a howler can sometimes be a peculiar delight. The first imperfection I can remember spotting for myself was in the 1980 thriller The Island, in which Michael Caine falls, left side down, into a pool of mud, only to rise to his feet with his right side thoroughly soiled. Thereafter I became briefly alert to every boom-mike that dipped into shot, every tattoo that seemed to roam around an actor's body whenever the shot changed. Such imperfections don't radically shake our faith in films we already love - though I'll admit it was a disappointment to see a row of electronic parking meters flashing cheerfully in the opening sequence of the 1950s-set Far From Heaven - but they can provide extra satisfaction in the films we don't.
It must have been for this reason that I was browsing the goofs section for Alejandro González Iñárritu's film Babel, a work crying out to have its pomposity punctured. But what I found there, to my unexpected satisfaction, was a goof-spotter's goof. Someone had pointed out that Brad Pitt's character is heard talking to his children and their nanny on the telephone at the end of the film, when in fact the children had already been separated from the nanny earlier in the story. What the goof-spotter revealed here was his or her inability to keep up with a fairly basic non-chronological narrative. Without spoiling Babel for those who haven't yet seen it, the same telephone call occurs at both the start and the end of the film, and when we hear it for the second time we are in receipt of information that we didn't know before. The goof-spotter may as well have moaned about John Travolta rising from the grave in the last third of Pulp Fiction, or the scenes in Memento being placed in the wrong order.
Reading this, I did what every right-minded citizen would do and sprang into action, correcting the goof and ensuring that it has now been wiped from the website. For I have decided to become Goof Warrior, waging a war on the goof-spotters and their unnecessary nit-picking, and trying to suppress the feeling that outwitting them may in fact be more tragic than goof-spotting in the first place.
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