Boom Mic Operator should have been replaced

Rating: 5/10 (23 December 2004)

The movie itself had it's funny moments and I honestly enjoyed watching it but I soon became distracted by the number of times the boom microphone appeared at the top of the frame. My wife first pointed it out to me early on in the movie and from that point on our main attention was to watch for it and tap each other on the knee when we saw it. Now, I've seen the microphone appear at the top of movie before but usually only once, maybe twice. In this movie it appeared at least every 5 minutes. At times the Grey fuzzy wind-cover of the Mic looked like someone was dangling a dead cat above Dustin Hoffman's head. I can understand a flaw like this in a low budget independent film or a home movie but this is a big budget film with Hoffman, DeNiro, and Streisand for goodness sake. Someone (director, editor, test audience) should have caught this before it left the studio.