I have a question: does it bother you guys as much as it bothers me when two characters in a film are talking in a moving car, and the character who's driving keeps turning to look at the other character for inordinately long amounts of time instead of watching the road? I understand the mechanics of how these scenes are shot, and that the actors are generally not thinking about mimicking the act of driving so much as connecting with each other in the moment, but usually I'm sitting there thinking WATCH THE ROAD! YOU'RE GOING TO CRASH!!! Once you've noticed it once it seems to happen all the time.
The two examples I've seen recently are in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, where in the opening scene Willem Dafoe does it, and in Mamet's Homicide, where I think it's Joe Mantegna doing the driving and William H Macy in the passenger seat. What makes the latter scene funny is that as I was starting to panic, they do nearly crash due to Joe's inattentiveness. At the time I thought maybe David Mamet has the same pet peeve as me and was subtly making fun of the convention.
