Corrected entry: When they leave the gas station the first time before returning to pick up Olive, nobody is pushing the VW.
Corrected entry: Grandpa is wrapped in the hospital sheet from the time the family sneaks him out of the hospital until the funeral home picks him up out of the VW. He would have also been dressed in a hospital gown and wearing an ID bracelet which would have contradicted Richard's story that he died while they were driving.
Correction: We don't know for certain that he is still wearing a hospital gown and bracelet when the funeral home picks him up. Someone in the family could have thought as far as to remove them and dress him in regular clothes. Or the people at the funeral home failed to notice until they had arrived at their offices. Either way, it is not shown on screen, but entirely possible.
Corrected entry: When Dwayne is listening to his mom and Richard argue at the motel, he is on the left side of the bed. After Frank gives him the remote, he turns the tv back off. Then we see him from the bathroom angle and he is on the right side of the bed. When they show him from the top view again, he is back on the left.
Correction: There isn't a mistake here at all. The reason Dwayne seems to be at different sides of the bed at different angles is only because, the angles are changing from his reflection in the mirror on the wall, and the angle over him.He's in the mirror, he's not changing sides of the bed.
Corrected entry: When the family first has to push the van, there is one yellow bumper sticker that says "Honor Student". Whenever we see the back of the van from that point on, there are 3 bumper stickers, none of which are yellow.
Correction: The "honor student" bumper sticker is blue. And all three stickers are there in the pushing scene. Only one is hard to see because mom is in front of it.
Corrected entry: In the scene in the motel when Grandpa is putting Olive to bed, when she first gets in, there is only one pillow lying flat. When the camera shows her again, she is propped up with two pillows. There was not enough time for her to rearrange the pillows, at least in my view.
Correction: There are always two propped up pillows on the bed. It's just tricky to see the second pillow until Olive leans against them.
Corrected entry: When Richard is at the hotel looking for Stan Grossman, Richard calls Stan's cell and proceeds to locate him in the entrance hall. Stan picks up his cell, looks at it, and then hangs up (as demonstrated by the beep his cell makes before he puts it back in his pocket). However, Richard's phone keeps ringing, which should not happen if Stan has already hung up.
Correction: Stan never answered the call, so couldn't have hung up. He just ignored the call. From Richard's end, the phone would continue to "ring" until voicemail picks up.
Corrected entry: Right at the beginning of the film, Dwayne is bench pressing. In one shot, taken from above, his hands are close to each other and in another, from behind him, he holds the bar wider.
Correction: The weight training scene is filmed as a sort of montage (like in the Rocky films), and skips from the bench presses to press ups, etc. The shot from above is one type of bench press, in the shot from behind him he is gripping the bar further apart, as this works different muscle groups.
Corrected entry: In the scene where the boy speaks for the first time in 9 months and he has left the family car to cry about 30 metres from them, the shadows formed by the boy and his sister (when she joins him to offer comfort) point in a direction completely opposite to the rest of the family back at the van when there is a close up on them. So as they move from one group to the other, it's obvious one group was filmed at different times of day.
Correction: Not true, the shadows cast by the family in this entire scene are relatively the same direction. They all go to the left of the group and the boy. The angle is the same each shot. The only difference in the shots is exposure, which is why one shot looks a tad bit darker than the other. They were filmed at relatively the same time of day.
Corrected entry: In the scene where the family watches the son screaming his first words in nine months, the shadows are elongated to the point where it must be early morning or late afternoon. However, the family has already been in the hospital for much of the morning and they don't get to the beauty contest until 3pm, so the scene should be occurring around midday.
Correction: It depends on what time of year it is. Here, in November 2006, it is already getting dark by 3:30pm, and is fully dark by 4:30pm. We start having long shadows around 2pm.
Corrected entry: (WARNING - BIG PLOT SPOILER.) Near the film's end, the alienated teenaged kid makes the traumatic discovery that he's colorblind, therefore spoiling his chances for his big dream of the air force. But it defies all credibility that nobody would have noticed in 15 years. Yes, it's possible that he was always as isolated and alienated as the film shows him to be, and therefore not have paid much attention in school or had many close friends. But it's not possible that at no time in 15 years would someone - teacher, parent, relative, etc - have asked him what color something was, or that in some other way colors would not have come up in conversation.
Correction: Not true. I had a friend who did not discover he was color-blind until he had his vision tested to get his driver's license at 16 years old. Red and green just looked like different shades of brown to him, and he just knew which position the traffic lights were in to know what the light was. He knew "this" shade of brown was red, and "that" shade of brown was green. He could tell they were different colors, but not see them the same way a non-color blind person would. Often he would wear different color socks, because they looked pretty much the same to him.
Corrected entry: A part of a sheet that Grandpa was wrapped in is apparently trapped in a back van door and is visible as the van pulls away from the hospital. Later when we again see the back of the van, the sheet is no longer there.
Correction: The portion of the sheet that was outside the van could easily have been torn away in wind, or been pulled inside when they realized the sheet was out the door.
Correction: There wasn't a need to push since they were parked on a small hill. When everyone is back in the van (minus Olive) you can see the van roll downhill giving it the momentum for it to start.