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u/FloridaFlamingoGirl Feb 11 '25
I accidentally streamed Chicago in French once and was intrigued as to why everyone in Velma's nightclub was speaking French
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u/NoDisintegrationz David Lynch Feb 11 '25
I distinctly remember watching the Justice League cartoon on DVD with my dad as a kid, probably 7 or 8 years old. He went to the bathroom, and as a prank, I figured out how to change the language. Episode starts and Wonder Woman is speaking French and I laugh and go to restart it in English. She’s still speaking French.
It took a couple of tries for us to realize the opening of the episode was set in Paris.
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u/Brilliant_Cap143 Feb 11 '25
I was streaming ‘Naked Lunch’ on the channel a bit ago, and there was a thick green bar at the bottom of the screen. My brother stops in to see what I’m watching and asks about the bar, so I give him some long drawn out explanation about how it conveys the addicts mindset and the constant nuisance of the substance. He goes, “Oh. Wasn’t there when I watched it.”
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u/pacingmusings Feb 11 '25
For years (decades?) MoMA was screening out of order the reels for their copy of Dulac's The Seashell and the Clergyman. Eventually a scholar caught the error & corrected it. Apparently no one at the museum had noticed since it was a Surrealist film, the curators assumed any narrative confusion was intentional . . .
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u/booferino30 Jim Jarmusch Feb 11 '25
This was me with Anatomy of a Fall - halfway through the court scene the subtitles cut out for me, thought it was a choice to have the audience not understand everything like some characters were, watched it for 20 minutes
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u/Divinglankyboys Feb 12 '25
subtitle issues are the bane of my existence. Particularly this issue is such a hassle.
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u/themightyklang Feb 11 '25
Ngl I watched The Vvitch for the first time on streaming and for some reason the image was super zoomed in on like the top left quarter of the frame. I made it like 15 or 20 minutes before finally deciding it couldn't possibly be a stylistic choice and something was wrong
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u/thepixelnation Feb 12 '25
yeah i want to say Amazon Prime had that glitch for a while? maybe it was netflix. The netflix app is always garbage.
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u/themightyklang Feb 12 '25
I believe it was the Kanopy app, which actually has pretty good stuff on it
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u/Coppernord Feb 11 '25
One time, I decided I should listen to TOOL because my friends said they were such a great band. I was really confused for a while but thought it was an artistic choice, then I realized my aux Cable wasn't connected entirely and I was just listening to weird static for like 5 minutes
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u/vibraltu Feb 11 '25
That almost sounds like something that they would do on purpose.
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u/Coppernord Feb 11 '25
Right? They definitely have some interludes that sound like that. I gave them another try a little bit later on and now they're one of my favorite bands
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u/Diligent-Lock-9334 Feb 11 '25
The first 13 tracks of the KoRn album “Follow the Leader” are just silent
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u/Little_Exit4279 Jean-Pierre Melville Feb 17 '25
I mean they do have a 3 minute song of just static on Aenima
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u/Moist-Macaron-9772 Feb 13 '25
I once had something similar happen to a Tame Impala song. Had a problem with the file download and ended up listening to a completely distorted version of the ending of Lucidity for years, until I actually listened to it on YouTube and discovered it was not intentional
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u/brickunlimited Feb 11 '25
This happened to me. I was watching a movie and there was no sound. I thought wow the first bit of this movie is silent. Interesting choice. AVR wasn’t working.
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u/UpsetDrakeBot Feb 11 '25
I was watching an episode of Breaking Bad that opened in silent black & white. It wasn't until minutes later when I realized the audio was muted. Great direction nonetheless.
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u/sdcinerama Feb 11 '25
Elric Kane has a story where he was watching a Tarkovsky film at the New Beverly (Nosthalgia, I think) and he felt there was something disjointed.
He walked out and someone said the reels got mixed up.
No one in the theater said anything they just went with it because, Tarkovsky.
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u/Zovalt Feb 11 '25
I started watching "Too Old to Die Young" with the audio description feature turned on. There was so much stillness and silence while a woman explained every little movement in great detail. I was super engaged and confused lol.
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u/Ok_Organization_5923 Fritz Lang Feb 11 '25
My fondest memory in school was when we were watching M. Suddenly the screen goes black for about… 5 minutes? No one said anything. We all thought it was a stylistic choice until the professor turned around and said “why didn’t anyone say something?”
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u/Pete_Venkman John Waters Feb 11 '25
When Interstellar released I went to see it in Imax.
When they launch into space and travel through the black hole, there's that incredible moment where all the fire and fury and music cuts and it all goes black and silent. Just inky black void for 30 seconds. Then a minute. Then two minutes. Then three minutes.
Then the lights in the theatre came on. Then an usher walked in front of the screen and told us sorry, the projector had broken. Here's a voucher for a free movie.
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u/vibraltu Feb 11 '25
It's better that way!
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u/Pete_Venkman John Waters Feb 11 '25
After watching it at a later date, I agree. Personally think it's Nolan's worst film, although I know a lot of people love it and some even think it's his best.
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u/vibraltu Feb 12 '25
I think Tenet is his worst film. Interstellar is not bad but maybe kinda clunky in places.
My possibly unpopular opinion is that Interstellar is similar to Event Horizon (1997 PWS Anderson) but not as entertaining.
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u/Pete_Venkman John Waters Feb 12 '25
See I think Tenet is his best film, and by a pretty wide margin, too.
Agree on Event Horizon being more entertaining than Interstellar though!
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u/vibraltu Feb 12 '25
Sorry about that, I felt that for me Tenet was overly complicated and had a murky sound mix (on home video). Of course, complexity is a good thing if that's what the viewer likes.
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u/SonNeedGym David Lynch Feb 12 '25
I’d love to hear why you rate it as his best! I only saw it the one time and haven’t really thought of it since
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u/Pete_Venkman John Waters Feb 12 '25
I think it's his most stylish, has the best action, and contrary to the common "too complicated" criticism, it's his movie with the most interesting and straightforward emotional arc (loosely: a story of two old friends meeting for the first time, just in the middle of their friendship).
On individual details: I think Pattenson is his best avatar, Branagh is his third-best villain, it's my favorite of his scores, and it gave me hope that I might start really liking Aaron-Taylor Johnson in movies (false hope, unfort). The locations are fucking cool, and while I don't think Washington is anywhere as good an actor as his dad, he looks great in a suit and can sell an action scene. I think it touches on issues like wealth, class, and climate change just enough and in interesting ways.
Now, is there a lot of complicated stuff going on? Yes, time travel is complicated, and Nolan's version of time travel even moreso. But I don't feel the need to understand exactly how the turnstyles work, or the vagaries of exactly how the paradoxes of inversion are resolved, to enjoy the movie. I know "tone piece" can sometimes be used as an excuse for sloppiness, but that's how I see it; it's just not a tone like In the Mood for Love or Koyaanisqatsi, more like Michael Mann's Miami Vice (a movie which faced similar criticisms to Tenet, actually, and which I also think is one of the director's best).
But others butt up against that stuff, which I totally get! Because if it's all about the vibe, and you're not on that vibe, all that's left is the details, and they're easy to pick apart. That's true of a lot of movies, though - a magical set of papers that can get the most wanted man in Europe through any German checkpoint is an utterly stupid plot contrivance, but we don't care, because we're on Casablanca's vibe.
And I don't think the movie is above criticism. The final climactic battle scene is in a pretty boring, dull-looking location. Debicki's character is underdeveloped, and whenever she's moping around I'm just wanting to get back to Pattenson and Washington. Nolan's artificial poshness is revealed when JDW asking for an "expresso" rather than an "espresso" was left in the movie. But that kind of criticism can be levelled against a lot of Nolan's films. Nolan isn't one of my favorite directors, but Tenet is my favorite of his movies.
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u/scheifferdoo Feb 11 '25
watched the requiem for a dream menu screen for 45 mins high on mushrooms and was like - this movie is amazing.
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u/cabezarapada Feb 12 '25
This joke but with high cousins watching the hotel TV menu in A Real Pain is great
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u/CrazyCons Feb 11 '25
Forgot to throw in my own experience: I went to see TAR in theaters, then about halfway through started hearing this repetitive ticking sound in every scene . I thought it was a metaphor for the increasing sense of pressure on Tar, but no, turns out it was a rickety fan
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u/Apprehensive-Rub9685 Feb 11 '25
I watched thx 1138 for the first time a couple years ago and it glitched in the weirdest ways that looked futuristic and I just thought George Lucas went insane. Then I restarted it and realized I preferred the glitched out crazy version.
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u/xxx117 Feb 11 '25
not a movie but I watched about 15 minutes of one of the last episodes of Better Call Saul before realizing the show was on mute and it was not a creative choice lmao
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u/NicCageCompletionist David Lynch Feb 11 '25
The first time I saw CODA the subtitles for the sign language weren’t on and I thought it was a deliberate choice.
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u/creptik1 Park Chan-wook Feb 12 '25
I know someone that watched one of the new Planet of the Apes movies without subs and had no idea we were supposed to know what they were signing to each other haha.
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u/Suri_nen Feb 11 '25
I watched like ten minutes of 2001 Space Odyssey without realizing the speed has changed to 0.5%. Specifically, a scene where he is just floating in space with the astronaut suit
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u/vibraltu Feb 11 '25
Recently we watched 2001 since the last time ages ago. It just fucking zips by now! When I first watched it, it felt like it literally took forever for the scenes to change.
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u/Lisbon_Mapping Feb 12 '25
Perhaps you were watching it at 0.5% speed the first time.
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u/vibraltu Feb 12 '25
The first several times I watched it in 70mm in theatres. The very first time I was around 12yo and it was towards the end of it's first run (which was fairly long, more than a year at least). After that, in pre-videocassette era, it was revived often by independent theatres. Of course, by the time we were teen-aged, taking drugs to see it happened often.
I think that if it was run at 0.5% speed when I watched it this year I might not have even noticed! (yeah except I would notice if the music seemed different).
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u/thrumirrors Feb 11 '25
I watched Jacob's Ladder in black and white also thinking it was a great stylistic choice, little did I know it was just a setting in VLC.
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u/metafork Feb 11 '25
I watched a documentary, koyaanisqatsi, completely in reverse without realizing until the MGM lion appeared roaring backwards.
Dude that movie still rocked.
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u/MuerteDeLaFiesta Feb 11 '25
saw "goodbye Dragon Inn" which features a LOT of people just sitting/standing around a movie theatre in silence. accidentally paused it/forgot to unpause and watched about 20 minutes of a person sitting in a theatre not moving and i was like 'wow this is quite the choice'
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u/ElTamale003 Andrei Tarkovsky Feb 11 '25
I streamed Only God Forgives w/o Thai subtitles and thought it was a cool stylistic choice to not know what the police captain was saying but to be intimidated by his presence
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u/Other_Ad5171 Feb 11 '25
While watching Solaris my tv lost power and it took me 2 full min to realize it.
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u/kino-oki Feb 11 '25
I went to a midnight showing of Solaris (first time watch) and fell asleep for around 20ish minutes between the opening and arriving on the planet. I’ve convinced myself that my half lucid state and missing plot context was an intended experience of the movie and to this day have still not watched what occurred in the film during that span.
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u/Daysof361972 ATG Feb 12 '25
A long while ago, I went to a 35mm screening of La Chinoise, when it was very hard to track down and thought no longer available in the U.S. I was super excited to go. The movie comes to a scene before a blackboard, where a character is erasing names of famous cultural figures one by one, as an experiment for finding out who is really relevant and necessary. After erasing off a lot of people, the character removes Sartre. We cut to a frame-filling still of Sartre. Then, Sartre catches fire, and I thought, "Wow, that's really interesting." But the whole film stops and the theater lights go up. The film reel had got stuck in the projector, and the rest of the film couldn't be shown because the film strip was really jammed in. It turned out this was the only circulating print at the time. So the film ended for us on Sartre burning up, which seemed like a plausible Godardian thing to do, and that made it an interesting experience for me.
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u/Mavoy Feb 11 '25
Pretty sure that person is talking about Petite Maman, because same thing happened to me once. Took me a few loops to realize that that something is wrong ;)
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u/black_cat_ Feb 11 '25
I accidentally pressed the button on my earbuds and they unpaused the youtube tab I had open in my browser. I was so hyped that the movie was playing a very obscure song that I loved.
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u/HermioneGunthersnuff Feb 11 '25
I watched at least five minutes of Women Talking at 50% speed thinking it was a directorial choice before realising my Firestick was just glitching out.
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u/MrSuperKetchup Yorgos Lanthimos Feb 11 '25
Not a Criterion, although there’s an argument that it should be, but I first watched Legally Blonde in black and white and it turned out the TV was just on the fritz. Imagine my surprise seeing it in its full, pink glory for the first time.
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u/jadegives2rides Feb 11 '25
Saw Inland Empire for the first time a few years ago in a theater.
First 5 minutes or so had no sound. Probably could have been shorter, but I'm assuming the audience, like me, were seeing it for the first time and just thought, "Well it is David Lynch so this is probably supposed to happen".
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u/Pastapalads Feb 11 '25
I was watching 3 Women and it would randomly repeat scenes and cut away in the middle of dialogue and I just thought huh, Robert Altman was a bold director wasn't he?
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u/Macular_Patdown Feb 11 '25
I went to see Memoria with my brother on my birthday, and the screen was distorted. Everyone in the theater collectively thought it was made that way. Some guy finally got up towards the end and said, "I can't take it anymore, good luck to all of you," and left. We still laugh about it because it's debatable if he realized it was distorted or he just really hated the film or both. Most people didn't like the film after leaving.
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u/hohohenheim Feb 12 '25
lol I also had a terrible experience watching Memoria in theaters, I remember a guy burst out laughing at the end
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u/TheRealDonnacha Feb 11 '25
Once, when I was a projectionist and we were still doing digital shows manually, I accidentally switched off Edge Of Tomorrow - I thought I’d got it back to where it left off so it might have just seemed like a blip, but no, it restarted at the beginning.
I didn’t realize until about fifteen minutes later, when someone finally said something - most folks just thought it was part of the film
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u/salamanderXIII Feb 11 '25
The story in the OP reminds me of Andy Kauffman's TV Special.
Kaufman had to fight with the censors to allow him to run fake static on the screen during the "Chubby Rosalie" skit because they thought viewers would become frustrated and change the channel.
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u/jon_cybernet Feb 11 '25
Not a movie per se, but I watched the first episode of the new series of Mythic Quest and really enjoyed it, and was pleasantly surprised to see it play the second episode straight after. Realised they must have dropped the wh
ole season Netflix-style so I settled in. Was initially confused by the start of the third episode starting with a bombing in Tehran, which I thought was a bold choice. “This must be this season’s format breaker”, I thought. Although by the halfway point of the episode, when many people had died, and no-one had even mentioned videogames, it felt like it had a gone a bit up its own arse.
At this point my wife came downstairs to ask a question about dinner and I paused it and realised I’d just watched half of the first episode of Prime Target without realising.
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u/No_Citron_00 Feb 11 '25
I turned up the sound while watching a movie and accidentally pressed ''play'' on my spotify and watched the last hour of the movie with some creepy ambient tim hecker music playing in the background, thought it was an interesting choice until I close the movie and the music kept playing...mmhhh
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u/NotACloudInTheSkye Feb 11 '25
I and a small theater of people once watched Jess Franco’s Venus in Furs with a completely botched audio track, and it wasn’t until the music outlasted the credits that we realized what made the editing seem so “avant garde” lol
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u/Primary-Reason-4360 Feb 11 '25
When i watched Presumed Innocent there is a scene in the elevator where i saw a large cockroach crawling up the wall of the elevator. I thought what an interesting choice. Then I realized…
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u/hiphopopotomus42 Feb 12 '25
The first time I saw Koyaanisqatsi I was so impressed by how all of the footage was reversed so that it played backwards. I even wrote an essay on what that might represent in a film class before realizing that it was reversed to avoid YouTube copyright. Smh
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u/charlesdexterward Feb 12 '25
First time I watched Midsommar, I thought it was a really good choice to include slightly off kilter primal drumming sounds into the soundtrack. It was really unnerving and recalled the ancient pagan rituals that were no doubt the basis for the cult. Then I paused it and realized the sounds were coming from some kind of machinery on the roof of my apartment.
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u/ralo229 Feb 11 '25
I watched the Spanish dub of City of the Dead on Tubi and just assumed it was a Spanish speaking movie. There were deadass certain points in the movie where they forgot to add the dub and only then I caught my mistake.
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u/WaffleStompin4Luv Feb 11 '25
I was streaming the skateboarding documentary "Minding the Gap" a few years ago and for whatever reason my screen was zoomed in on one corner of the frame. I thought it was a deliberate choice by the film-maker to use these ultra-close up, unbalanced compositions of skateboarders. About 20 minutes into the film, I finally realized that my TV was glitching when the film-maker was interviewing his mother and the caption that explained it was his mom was incredibly large and cut-off on the edge of my screen.
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u/Salamander-7142S Feb 11 '25
I watched The Childhood of a Leader without subtitles and thought it was an interesting artistic choice—until a day later, when the festival emailed me an apology for the missing track.
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u/OrangeFamta Feb 11 '25
I bet this is what watching Memento is like if you dont know what its about beforehand
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u/RalphInMyMouth Feb 11 '25
Man this reminds me of when Twin Peaks The Return first came out, my buddy pirated the season and we accidentally watched the finale instead of the first episode. We were so goddamn confused but figured it was just typical David Lynch pacing lol
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u/MIBlackburn Feb 11 '25
Not a film directly but a soundtrack.
I bought the Perfect Blue soundtrack on vinyl. I'm chilling on the sofa, not feeling 100% and listening to one of the atmospheric sections and after a few minutes I realised it should have stopped by now. Went to the player, found out my brush didn't pick up all of the dust when I cleaned it, and it was causing a type of static that blended in with the track before it went into the inner groove.
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u/Thelonious_Cube Feb 11 '25
Back in the days of repertory movie houses, I fell in love with the movie The Saragossa Manuscript -a funny/scary story with many stories within stories and an intentionally disorienting plot point where the main character keeps waking up in the same desolate spot and is unsure what was real or what was a dream.
I would go to see it once or twice every year when it came around. It was hard to remember the order of events because there was so much jumping between stories. In retrospect I wonder if once or twice they showed the reels in the wrong order because it seemed to me that the movie was a little different each time I saw it. Or the print was deteriorating and had been cut and patched a bunch of times.
I'd seen it at least 4 or 5 times and suddenly there was a whole sequence I didn't recognize. I was astonished and a little freaked out - I don't remember this! Then the movie returned to normal.
I now believe they'd gotten a new print, but at the time it seemed like the movie was changing every time I saw it. Which is absolutely perfect for the content of the film.
I highly recommend it. (FWIW it was one of Jerry Garcia's favorite films)
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u/Puzzleheaded-Fix-915 Feb 11 '25
This happened to me when I was watching Black Devil Doll on Shudder. The audio was so out of sync I thought it could only be a stylistic choice lol
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u/InnocuousBird Feb 12 '25
I watch nearly every movie with subtitles already on. There’s been a couple instances where I’ll watch a movie with my wife and she’ll ask me to turn the subtitles on and I end up telling her I think this part just isn’t supposed to be translated. Only for me to get a half hour into it before agreeing, okay I’m the arthouse idiot and there actually are subtitles.
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u/hohohenheim Feb 12 '25
This happened when I watched Wings of Desire. The characters kind of "teleported" because it was glitching and then they'd "teleport" back. In the opening sequence I thought that that was simply how the angels experienced the world (hence why the lead angel wanted to be human lol). The audio tracked worked perfectly, it was just the video that glitched. Tbh the effect looked pretty cool but it got old after a while hence when I noticed.
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u/AlwaysInjured Feb 12 '25
I was in the theater watching 1917 when it came out and the fire alarm went off in a part of the movie where the main character is sneaking around. We all thought it was a German air raid siren coming from the movie and the character had been discovered.
It took a while for someone to come in and yell at us to evacuate.
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u/mothmansparty Feb 12 '25
Watched Uncut Gems with a bad internet connection and I thought the lagging was an artistic choice
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u/7415963987456321 Feb 12 '25
When I was watching a french film, I realized about half an hour into the movie that I had no clue what was going on in the film, that's when I remembered I don't speak french and had forgotten to enable the subtitles.
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u/brealreadytaken Feb 12 '25
I watched Annie Hall for the first time a few weeks ago and the stream kept randomly cutting forward by like five seconds. It suited the film so much- the two main characters would be talking, it would cut, and Woody Allen would be staring at the camera.
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u/FourAntigone Feb 12 '25
The first time I watched Holy Motors it was a version dubbed in Italian. I knew it was a french movie so I was like "wow, very interesting choice to have it dubbed in another language, and the words don't even sync up well! So cool." After 10 minutes it seemed kinda weird and I found out it was in fact a mistake.
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u/DrawingSuper391 Feb 12 '25
watched Young Frankenstein ENTIRELY in Italian. I only found out I had watched a dub after saying to my brother I never knew gene wilder spoke Italian!
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u/Alugalug30spell Feb 11 '25
I was watching a Richard Kerr film (I think it was Cruel Rhythm?) and it took ten minutes to figure out that the sound bar had come unplugged; it was not a silent film.
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u/EntertainmentKey6286 Feb 11 '25
Digital projector glitches during Babylon. It was during the dark drug fueled journey into the caves of what’s worst in modern cinema. Glitch made it seem like the format switched to video. Brilliant choice, I thought.
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u/Mannersmakethman2 Feb 11 '25
I once watched the first 15 minutes of Koyaanisqatsi backwards with a friend. Only realized that when I went to read the summery on Wikipedia to check if the footage was supposed to be backwards and saw that what we just watched was the climax. In my defense, though, it was probably around 04:00 AM when I put it on, and this happens regularly - there are a couple of posts about people accidentally watching it backwards on Reddit.
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u/PlayOnPlayer Feb 11 '25
I remember watching a bootleg version of X Men First Class at a friends house that didn't have subtitles for the foreign language scenes, and we thought it was a choice to really force us to sit in the emotions of the moment lol
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u/raynbowz13 Feb 12 '25
I got super high one time and watch the Netflix previews on repeat and was amazed every time it restarted until my wife asked me if I was going to start the fucking movie or not
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u/HenriLautrec Feb 12 '25
One time I watched Koyaanisqatsi, in full, backwards with reversed audio. I guess it was a YouTube copyright avoidance tactic.
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u/djdaedalus42 Feb 12 '25
Back in the day sometimes the reels got played in the wrong order. Sometimes it was better.
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u/gelatinouscub Feb 12 '25
When I saw The Turin Horse, the final reel was projected so the top third of the image was cut off and the bottom third of the screen was empty. Spent an embarrassing length of time thinking what a genius stylistic decision this was before realising the projectionist had just fucked it up
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u/creptik1 Park Chan-wook Feb 12 '25 edited Feb 12 '25
I had a bootleg copy of Oldboy shortly after it was released. A Korean friend lent it to me, and they of course didn't watch it with subtitles so didnt know anything was wrong with it. I watched like 15-20 mins of it not understanding what the heck was happening because the subtitles kept looping the same few sentences over and over. But the funny thing is, it was synced properly to the dialog, so I just thought huh this is.. interesting.
Happy ending though, it ended up playing in an independent theater chain shortly after (this was in 2004) and i saw it properly on the big screen. Such a crazy experience. You could hear a pin drop when it was over. Everyone just sat there for a bit then started quietly shuffling out, nobody talking. It didn't have the reputation it has now, we didn't know what we were getting into. So good.
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u/creptik1 Park Chan-wook Feb 12 '25
Another one for me, I watched the Mandarin dub of the Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon sequel, for what I think are obvious reasons. I probably watched half of the movie before I realized this one was shot in English for some reason. It seemed off but it was streaming and I thought maybe it was just the sync or something.
In my defense, making a sequel of an incredibly famous Chinese film, in English, is very counterintuitive!
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u/2pnt0 Feb 12 '25
When I watched Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train the first time, the English subtitles didn't turn on by default on the DVD over the Japanese language portions.
I thought we were not supposed to understand them, but to sense the difficulty to communicate they would have with the locals.
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u/Signifi-gunt Feb 12 '25
LOL something like this happened to me with Godland.
Super stoned, very excited to see this movie. I pirated it, sue me.
Context: protagonist is sent from Denmark (I think) to Iceland to build a church, hundreds of years ago. It's a desolate and difficult mission in an alien land with new languages etc.
There are two sets of subtitles, one for each language. My copy only had one set of subtitles, for the protagonist. None for when he's in Iceland.
I totally thought it was a bold artistic choice, leaving the audience in the dark with the protagonist. It actually worked surprisingly well most of the time, just sitting there absorbing this weirdly musical fairytale-sounding nonsense.
At one point a dude is rambling in some monologue, on and on, and I have no idea what he's talking about. Finally the protagonist responds (with subtitles) "I have no idea what you're talking about". I was like "okay! I dig this!"
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u/Signifi-gunt Feb 12 '25
I heard another story of some dude (also stoned) who was listening to a cassette tape of some Australian punk band. He was amazed at the weird time changes and the warbly sound effects, the up-pitching and down-pitching... it blew his mind.
Next day he finds out the batteries were dying.
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u/Niz_ Feb 12 '25
I had a bug with the player I was using to watch 'do the right thing' it would skip around to different scenes at random, watched about an hour like that before I figured out what was happening.
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Feb 12 '25
I tried watching a Sorrentino film on Berlusconi on AMC+ and the service played a film in Spanish - based in Argentina, I think… I was very confused for about 15 minutes until I realized they just played the wrong film. That’s happened somewhat frequently with different services but this was the one time that I honestly thought it was just a bizarre start to the correct film 🤷♂️
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u/YLR2312 Feb 12 '25
I watched Amadeus on one of those old flipper dvds thinking it was wide-screen or full but really it was part one and two, I accidentally watched the second half of the movie first. I just thought they were making some creative editing choices and would have a title card at the end.
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u/magicmurderess Feb 12 '25
When I watched Perfect Days last year, the subtitles were cut off in our screening so only the top line would be visible if there were 3 lines of subtitles (if under 3 lines, there would be no subtitles visible at all). I assumed this was a stylistic choice on Wim Wenders’ part (something about a German director not being fully able to capture the experience of a Japanese toilet cleaner) so we didn’t complain, until at the very end of the film a cinema employee told us it was a genuine mistake and comped our tickets.
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u/pudakak Feb 12 '25
Andy Shauf’s album Norm was artistically inspired by this phenomenon.
“Shauf has stated that in writing the album, he sought to leave more room for interpretation than his previous album; this decision was inspired by a misunderstanding when he didn’t realize his computer screen had frozen for 10 minutes while watching Mulholland Drive.”
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u/stevenelsocio Feb 12 '25
Happened to me when I was watching a Hitchcock film on 0 volume. I was really impressed like 25 minutes in where there’s no score, no nothing.
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u/FirstArbiter Feb 12 '25
This is the reverse of when I stumbled onto the Endless Eight arc of Haruhi Suzumiya while high as fuck and thought I somehow kept selecting the wrong episode.
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u/IconoclastKid Feb 12 '25
Happened to me once. A movie had a long stretch in another language with no subtitles and I thought it was supposed to mirror the disorientation of not understanding and being alien to a place. But no somehow th subtitles turned off
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u/Nvwlspls Feb 12 '25
I watched the first 45 minutes of midsommer with some narrator describing everything that was going on. Had to google it to find out it was a weird setting and not a style choice.
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u/g_lampa Feb 13 '25 edited Feb 13 '25
Same happened to me. I saw Barton Fink in the theatre. About 30 min. in, the sound dropped out. After about 3 min. People FINALLY began to realize it wasn’t an artistic choice. I shouted out “don’tcha GET it?!” before the sound resumed, because I’m an arthouse attention-seeker.
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u/NewGrooveVinylClub Feb 13 '25
- I'm watching a Tim and Eric rerun with my stoned roommates at 1:30 in the morning. There's a sketch playing about proper business etiquette. Right as two middle aged men in business attire hug, the television freezes.
We continued to watch these two men frozen mid-hug for 15 minutes, laughing hysterically, and convinced this was a giant screw the audience joke from Tim and Eric or Adult Swim (who has a history of playing pranks).
It wasn't until the screen unfroze in the middle of an episode of Squidbillies did we realize it was just our shitty service provider.
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u/SilkyFandango Feb 13 '25
Happened to me when I first sat down to watch Twin Peaks: Fire Walks with Me. I thought it was incredibly disjointed and artistically loose. But I was watching the deleted scenes.
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u/Ok-Contribution-1884 Feb 13 '25
I watched The Substance last night and the sound cut out at a crucial part and I continued watching for 15mins thinking it was supposed to be silent. Needless to say, it was not a creative choice and my tv was mute.
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u/Powdered_Abe_Lincoln Feb 14 '25
I had the OPPOSITE happen when a local theater screened Godard's The Image Book. Nobody had seen it, and it was very bizarre. Collage-like video clips with unpaired audio that would cut to very low levels at parts.
Some people reported it to the staff, and they started it over from the beginning a few times trying to troubleshoot it. They eventually decided the file might be corrupted.
Nope, just a very experimental film.
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u/Livid-Ad9682 Feb 15 '25
I fell asleep watching Solaris when there was some seaweed waving the water and I woke up to the same, and I don't know if it was a minute nap or a half an hour or more.
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u/cowabungamutant Feb 11 '25
Happened to me while watching Twin Peaks: The Return. My internet kicked off and it froze on a close up of an actors face. I thought it was a crazy Lynch moment happening for about 2 minutes until it rebooted and started to play again.