There’s no secret compartment.

There’s a certain amount of fakery we can handle with our movies; a sleight of hand that is part of the pact between filmmakers and audience. We obviously don’t believe everything we see on film can happen. But we expect a certain level of adherence to reality. And there’s an egregious breach of this in the holiday film classic Elf, in which the title character, Buddy, is sitting at the dinner table with his new family.

They’re enjoying a lovely spaghetti meal together, and he asks for syrup. Syrup for his spaghetti. I am not even going to to address the stereotypes this perpetuates about elves and their diets. I will accept that as an innocent, albeit insensitive oversight.

The real problem is that when told there’s no syrup at the table, he shrugs it off, and informs the table he has an emergency supply. He then reaches into his right coat sleeve and pulls out a small bottle of syrup.

We hear no Velcro ripping.
We hear no buttons being unsnapped.
The angle at which he pulls the bottle out makes it impossible that it would stay there, stuck up his sleeve, without some mechanism for keeping it in place. Yet from both a visual and an auditory standpoint, there is no indication that this is the case.

This flies in the face of physics and reality, and sadly, will probably ruin the film for most, as it should. Other than that, it’s a watchable piece of cinema. But seriously: don’t treat your audience like idiots. We’re not gonna take it.