By Chris Cosci

To err is human. That's about all you really need to know; forget about that whole "forgiving is divine" aspect. People make mistakes. Often. Very often. It's a part of life. The trick is to try concealing those mistakes so that others don't find out about them. However, when your mistake is filmed, projected onto a 30-foot movie screen, then eventually released on DVD for people to analyze frame-by-frame, hiding your mistakes becomes a little bit trickier.

For most people, movies are source of entertainment. They provide an escape from the mundane schedule of daily life. Of course, that doesn't stop people from bringing their daily life into the theater so that it can start ringing during an important piece of dialog, but that's another issue altogether.

While most people sit back and enjoy the show, others are busy looking for mistakes. These people treat the movie as the target of obsessive scrutinizing -- a test to uncover the fallacies of movie creators. They hunt for flaws with the sharp eye and keen observation usually reserved for trained detectives. Their uncanny ability to spot even the subtlest of errors is enough to inspire the question: don't these people have anything better to do?

Obviously not. Movie flubs have long been a source of amusement. Some have become infamous, such as the anachronistic wristwatches and sneakers supposedly spotted in historical epic films like Ben-Hur and Spartacus. However, these blatant errors are left for amateurs to find. The dedicated flub-spotter is concerned with mistakes that are far less important.

There are many Web sites that focus on such mistakes, occasionally listing hundreds of errors for a single movie. For example, one of the many flubs found in the movie Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone involves the crimps in Hermione's hair. In one scene, depending on the shot, her hair has either very deep crimps or very loose crimps. Of course, the movie does take place at a school of witchcraft and wizardry, so maybe her hair was just cursed.

If you didn't strain your eyes enough looking for that minor detail, there are plenty of faint errors to be found in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Apparently, in the first movie, there's a scene where Frodo reaches for an envelope in a chest. When he pulls it out, the envelope flap is up near his fingers. In the next shot, the envelope is reversed with the seal opposite his fingers! How could anybody miss that?

Most Web sites report that you have to "look closely" to spot the errors. How many people really watch movies like this? Call me crazy, but I thought it was more important to pay attention to such pithy details as the dialog and the characters. Instead, flub-finders invite audiences to carefully observe R2-D2's legs in the latest Star Wars film to see how they aren't always flush with the ship's hull in one scene. They also tell you to watch the water beneath the shark during one tense scene in Jaws; that way, you can briefly see a part of the mechanism working the model shark. Let me just say, if I'm watching a movie and a shark bursts from the water and grabs somebody with its teeth, I'm not looking at the water.

Could these errors have been prevented? Absolutely. However, this brings us back to where I started: people make mistakes. Can the people who find these flubs honestly say they never make mistakes of their own? Wouldn't it be great if movie producers showed up at these people's jobs and started pointing out mistakes? "Hey, shouldn't you have punched those holes about an eighth of an inch to the left? And look at that staple -- it didn't quite fold over properly when you attached the receipt to the expense report. You actually get paid for such shoddy work?"

The people who look for movie gaffes argue that movie studios spend millions of dollars on movies. With such a budget, these mistakes should be spotted and corrected before being released to audiences. Still, this argument ignores the basic fact that most people just don't care. Sure, an obvious error can distract viewers away from the story for a moment. However, if someone's enjoyment of a movie is ruined because the position of a character's shirt collar seems inconsistent (see Titanic), perhaps it's time to consider therapy.