[ul]
[li]Old people makeup. It *never *works, and you spend the whole scene trying either to overlook it or to figure out *why *it doesn’t work[/li][li]Actors with only one name[/li][li]Plastic surgery that’s above the character’s paygrade[/li][li]Smokers who:[/li][LIST]
[li]Don’t inhale[/li][li]Don’t know how to hold a cigarette[/li][/ul]
[li]A lead role played by the director’s offspring[/li][li]Oprah’s association with the movie, in any way shape or form[/li][li]Beyoncé[/li][/LIST]
I’d modify this to “almost never works”. Really good makeup and a capable actor can produce wonderful results. Dick Smith, makeup artist extraordinaire, did a great job aging Dustin Hoffman for Little Big Man, and Hoffman was up to the challenge of acting believably old. Smith later on did the same to David Bowie in The Hunger
Haven’t seen either one in a long, long time. But I’ll add a couple more rule-proving exceptions: the original (the only) Sleuth, as I remember it, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Caveat is I haven’t seen either one since I was a child, but they utterly convinced me at the time. Maybe I shouldn’t watch them again . . .
???
Which rule was Sleuth breaking? No Old Age Makeup in that.
Personality disguising makeup it DID have, but that’s a whole 'nother thing. And if you want to see more of that, rent The List of Adrian Messenger.
– Filmed in Southern California but pretending to be elsewhere
– Phony accents, especially for the South
– Singers “acting” and Actors “singing”
– Mixing animation and live action
– CGI battles
– Voiceovers and narration by dead people
– M Night Shyamalan
– Movies with over 10 A-list actors in the cast
– Sean Astin
If at any point in the movie, someone yells “NOOOOOOOOOOO” the movie is henceforth ruined…
In the original, the makeup worked, IMO, specifically because it changed not only some of the details of his general experience, it also made him look a great deal older, so you were even less likely to see through the deception.
I forgot one! CGI jumping! Why they can’t get that physics right I don’t understand, but no one has ever CGIed a character jumping without looking entirely fake.
Also, an addendum to the final item on my original list:
[ul]
[li]Any American actor with an accent, or *any *diacritical mark, on their name[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]Long drawn our fight scenes where one or the other character had plenty of opportunities to kill the opponent. [/li][li]Heroes that are sentimentally noble where it’s not treated like a tragic flaw, and their nobility leads to greater damage. [/li][li]Collagen lip projections[/li][li]Poor pacing in the editing[/li][/ul]
I think CalMeacham makes a good point. Often, the problem is not the make-up itself. There are some truly brilliant make-up artists around, and modern prosthetic and other ‘ageing’ techniques mean almost anything is possible. The problem is that very often the actor underneath all the make-up doesn’t know how to* act* in a manner that is convincingly ‘old’. The make-up itself may be a perfect realisation of an old person’s face, but if the acting isn’t up to par, the illusion will fail.
My contributions to the list:
-
scripts written by a committee, with plenty of signs that studio bean-counters and the ‘marketing by numbers’ people have reduced the movie to a supposed money-making formula, even though this is a self-defeating process. The very act of trying to make sure the movie will appeal to a target demographic tends to create such mediocrity that the film is a flop.
-
trying to get by on star power alone. Most projects never get the greenlight unless star names are attached. Stars are important. They help a film to ‘open’ well, and some of them are stars because they are, actually, good actors that people like to watch. But simply laying out enough millions to hire some ‘star’ names has never been sufficient to make a movie ‘good’ in any sense of the word, a lesson that some producers seem unable to learn. Dreck + star power = still dreck.
-
auto sequels. It seems Hollywood is churning out more sequels than ever. The lazy faith that if a film did well, a sequel is automatically a good idea, is one of the industry’s incurable addictions. It seems everyone in Hollywood has drunk the ‘sequel’ Kool-aid and will keep doing so no matter what. No-one seems able to say, ‘Sure, the movie was great, but if we tried to do a sequel it would probably suck’. Even though this is more likely to be true than not. Good job these people don’t run the catering business. They’d figure that if you enjoyed the meal, they could heat up the leftovers tomorrow, serve them on a plate and you would enjoy that just as much if not more.
Does Nicholas Cage count as a thing?
I agree with bad accents.
And I agree that musicals make lousy movies, I just can’t accept characters breaking into song. If aliens ever see these, they will be scratching their pods against their braindomes.
Bad chase scenes, especially where someone is two feet back, then half a block, and then two feet again, etc.
Sounds and aerodynamic maneuvering in space.
Aliens that look like humans with skin diseases.
Anytime the line “I’m too old for this shit” appears.
I’m going to disagree on this one, with Sunset Blvd. as my cite.
-Gratuitously changing established characters in remakes to black people.
-Vacuous eye candy not having a nude scene.
-A character dressing in drag.
Nope, with one or two exceptions that I admit I can’t explain, it never, ever works. The Reader? Nope. Benjamin Button? Nope. They can’t subtract tissue, as aging actually does, they can only add it. Or CGI it, which is still too young a technology not to be noticeable. I’ll grant that in those less-than-a-handful of exceptions, it’s probably the actor as much as the makeup artist who makes it work, but still, it’s enough of a general rule almost to discount the exceptions and state unequivocally that it never works.
Films filmed in Toronto, pretending to be Chicago. I love My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but only by ignoring the “Windy City” references…
Films where symbolism is stuck in with no regard for the actual story that is being told. Case in point: The Bridges of Madison County (ok, not a great film or book, bear with me). Eastwood just stuck an excited yellow dog in the movie, chasing a car. It had no resonance to the rest of the film, in fact it was just there. Why? I have no plans to see that movie again, but I think about that yellow dog at times and still wonder: why? I can BS and say it represents Francesca’s untamed sexuality or whathisname’s fear of a deepening relationship or the futility of railing against convention or whatever, but it really doesn’t mean a thing and we all know it.
Films that don’t evoke the heart of the book they’re based on. IOW, the details don’t have to be exact, but the sympathies of the book must be adhered to. GWTW rid Scarlett of 2 of her kids, but the overall temperament of the book remains; The Ya-Ya Sisterhood, not so much…
Scenes filmed at night. I don’t care, I can’t see a fucking thing and it’s irksome. Takes me right out of the film.
RE voicovers by dead people. I disagree, with American Beauty as my cite.
Middle class characters with fancy houses or apartments, especially NYC apartments. TV is worse with this one.
[ul]
[li]A poster/DVD cover with the guy holding the girl off her feet, and they’re both [/li]laughing at the viewer. This not only screams “chick flick,” it screams “bad chick flick”
[li]A guy and a girl standing back to back, arms crossed, smiling at the viewer–“terrible chick flick”[/li][li]Heads badly photoshopped onto bodies[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]A blurb that says “From the producer of” or “the creator of” or some such bullshit[/li][li]A blurb from Peter Travers of the Rolling Stone[/li][li]A blurb from aintitcoolnews.com[/li][/ul]
Any screenwriting credit with more than one “and” in it is always a bad sign.
The introduction of a song that was a hit from 1964 to 1970 almost always wrecks at least a scene for me, especially when the movie is set before or after that time period.
The presence of a Wayans who is trying to be funny.
Not nearly as bad as a Wayans trying to be serious.
Any trailer that starts, “In a world…” is promoting a bad sci-fi flick.
Moveies where a character in a big city gives directions to a cabbie that are total nonsense.