Last night I started out watching Sweeney Todd with my wife.  It is rare when we get to actually watch a movie together and there was actually something on HBO we had not already seen.  I must admit, I did not do any research on this particular movie, but I had heard it received some fairly good reviews.  5 minutes into it we realized it was a musical and take a guess on what genre I typically dislike.  Shows about Music (Rock Star, Spinal Tap…) no problem.  Shows delivered in music format (Sweeney Todd, Hairspray…) suckage.  After about 15 more minutes we decided it was not worth wasting our together time on so we switched over to WALL-E.  Again, no research on the movie and caught a little off guard by the fact there were only mechanical sounds until near the end.  This was not the best I’ve seen out of the Dreamworks studios.  It had its cute moments, but didn’t hold our attention very strong.  We stuck this one out, but I’ll definitely do a little more Googling before the next movie night.

I decided to go check out the latest news stories on the web and ended up turning the TV on to have some background noise.  Hitman came on HBO and even though I had already seen it previously, I kept it on mainly because I was too lazy to find the controller and hunt for something better.  Again, I would not put this in the “good” category, but it has its moments if you like some action and blood on your screen.  What I did think was stunning was the formula damsel in distress.  When I saw it the first time, I was intrigued by her face tattoo.  I also distinctly remembered something about that tattoo bothering me on first viewing.  I made a mental note to pay closer attention when her scenes came on to see if I could figure it out.  Often times my brain will pick out something odd, but it takes me awhile to clarify what it is.  I think made a comment on this before, but I tend to take mental snapshots over time and if two snapshots don’t correlate well, the spider senses initiate.

Part way through the movie she shows up for the first time:

Kind of a cute tattoo don’t you think?  Subtle image yet striking since it takes commitment to place it on such a noticeable location (unlike Tyson who is just an idiot).

Here are a couple of other snaps so you get the feel for the placement and lack of symmetry on the other side.

Our hero (holding the gun in the previous picture) kidnaps the woman and hauls her off to interrogate her.  The scene cuts away and returns with the lady sitting in the middle of a dark room.

Spider senses ignite instantly, but it passed the screen pretty quickly.  She continues to respond to the main character’s questioning who eventually passes in front of her.  As soon as he walks by, we are left with this shot

There it is.  The two contiguous snapshots didn’t line up.  Do you see the difference?  Guessing you did since I framed it for you, but yes, the tattoo switched sides.  My brain didn’t like this one bit.  I decided to spend a little time tracking down an explanation.  As it turns out, there is a mirror in the room which would produce the same effect if the camera chose to shoot through the mirror instead.  I strongly doubt this since on closer inspection, the mirror is way to dirty to get those shots.

From that point on, it stays on the expected side

So, thanks to the director intentionally or accidentally putting this into the film, I wasted 1.5 hrs figuring out why I was so bothered after the first viewing.  Okay, maybe not wasted since I did get blog material out of it, but none the less, I could have been playing Rock Band 2 or reading some materials that have been building up lately.  I would have to think the actress would notice something like this if they had tried painting it on the wrong side of the face since it is such a stunning style element… and even if it got through that litmus test, someone should have caught it during production.  Of course, there are others things that make it through the splicing process that somehow make it out (see Lethal Weapon Movie Goof on this page).

Spider senses under control now, issue successfully identified