This one is just me:
[ul]
[li]A modern plant hybrid or variety in a period film. Honestly, I don’t expect them to research it to that level of detail, but when I see a 19th Century veranda with pots of say a Salvia cultivar that I know was introduced only a couple years ago, it costs me a second or two of concentration.[/li][/ul]
Oh, yeah, a character talking to a headstone in a cemetary.
Oh yeah, and movies where a car goes northbound on the Lake Michigan Bridge, then southbound on Lower Wacker, and ends up in Lincoln Park.
Which reminds me, any kind of modern stuff in a period movie. Particualrly anoying were modern destroyers shown docked in Pearl Harbor.
Stunt voice casting in an animated film. I don’t care that you got Robert Deniro to voice that character if John Goodman (or someone I’ve never heard of) could have read the part better.
And, having the wrong wildlife. In The Jewel of the Nile whatisname’s character had been collecting birds in a South American jungle at the beginning of the film. He had a cockatoo in the cages. Or macaws in films set in Africa. Or the wrong types of snakes (an anaconda in Borneo?) (I know that is a personal peeve and doesn’t usually ruin a movie for the average moviegoer.)
OK? Same thing for me: new world animals in old world settings, or vice versa.
Lately, these white-vested african ravens that are turning up everywhere.
I was going to say, “Any Wayans,” but didn’t think Marlon wrecked Requiem for a Dream. But maybe Damon in Bamboozled was bad enough to negate this.
And another thing: a musical instrument being played by an actor with no interest in what that activity is supposed to look like. It’s like watching someone eat soup with a fork.
I’ve been wracking my mind for an exception to this one, and I think I finally found it: it’s not true only if the director’s name is John Huston.
In honor of Watchmen:
-people either dying or screwing to the tune of Hallelujah (ANY version of the song, at this point)
Fat suits don’t work, either. There’s just something about them, and I can’t put my finger on what it is, but an actor in a fat suit - even the modern, really good ones - just don’t look like a fat person. They look like a person in a fat suit. I don’t know why it is, dammit, but it is.
I’ve got three more:
Characters falling in CGI. They can CGI a lot of things, but people falling never looks quite right.
People spontaneously breaking into a Motown or oldies rock classic, as in “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and other such pictures. It’s amazingly stupid to put something this ludicously impossible in movies otherwise devoid of the impossible. If it’s not a musical, for fuck’s sake, don’t have spontaneous musical numbers. Especially if it involves kids (e.g. “Stepmom.”) Children don’t know Motown.
Movie posters where they show the faces of the stars, and their names are directly above the faces, BUT THE NAMES AREN’T ABOVE THE RIGHT FACES. Why the FUCK do they do this? Fuck! It drives me insane!
Another exception: the BBC production of I, Claudius. I started watching it four or five episodes in, and was later astounded to see Brian Blessed* and Sian Phillips at their real ages in the first couple of episodes. Remarkable, especially considering how low-budget the rest of the series was (NOTE: “Low-budget” in this case is NOT a synonym for “cheap”, “cheesy”, or “low-quality”.)
Diacritical marks on actors’ names ruin movies? How so?
RE: Old people makeup. . . I admit to being impressed with Benjamin Button, mostly because I wasn’t impressed with it, i.e. it was very subtle and not overpowering.
Being an afficionado of CGI, I have puzzled over this one a lot. I am stunned at how the best animators in the world still don’t seem to be able to figure it out. Spider-Man was full of bad physics, as was Lord Of The Rings. It disappointed me greatly.
Last year I decided to give character animation a try, and the first thing I tried after a run cycle was jumping, to see if I could pinpoint how difficult it was, and where it was the CG animators were going wrong.
They claim they can’t motion capture jumping, because it just looks “wrong” but I find that hard to believe. If they think their hand-animated jumping is better than what motion capture does, then they have a screwed up view of physics. And perhaps they do, they possibly are more interested in cartoon physics than real physics.
They seem to not understand the concepts of mass, inertia, and follow-through. All they know is which frames to begin and end, and that half way through it’s at the top of a parabolic arc.
Anyway, here’s my first, and only, attempt at a CG character jump. Ignore the walk cycle, that’s horrendous, but I am almost happy with the jump, for a first try.
I can think of one exception to this. In The Big Chill a bunch of the folks are preparing some meal in the kitchen with the radio playing, and they start singing and swaying along as they continue mixing the salad or whatever.
Sorry Jim, that’s not an exception: that’s the most egregious example of the horribleness of this cliche.
Any of the cinematography styles that I have termed the O-Visions. The ones I have enumerated thus far, whose titles should be fairly self-explanatory, are as follows:
Shake-O-Vision
Cut-O-Vision
Blur-O-Vision
Pan-O-Vision (occasionally extended into its subset, Spin-O-Vision)
Dark-O-Vision
Each of the O-Visions is designed specifically to prevent the audience from being able to tell what the hell is happening in the scene. Why this is considered a good thing, I don’t know…I believe the original idea was to disguise the fact that the film in question did not have a budget for stage combat training and/or special effects, but these days they’re used ubiquitously just for shits and giggles.
You can knock, say, Kevin Smith for his camera work (or lack thereof) all you like, but at least when I watch his films, I can tell which character is doing what. Maybe more “innovative” directors should take a lesson.
I will see your Hallelujah, and raise you the Carmina Burana and that Hawaiian version of Over the Rainbow.
That’s not bad. But it doesn’t feel quite perfectly natural.
I think the thing the animators usually get wrong in a jump is that they don’t seem to account for the center of gravity. As I understand it, it’s the center of gravity that follows the elliptical arc; the arms and legs move largely* independent of that.
*I do understand that flailing arms and legs will have some effect on the trajectory, but this seems often overlooked as well.
I think the biggest flaw in your animation sample comes just before the actual jump; the pause seems unnatural. Some video games like NBA Live or NBA 2Kwhatever seem to do a pretty good job most of the time with motion-captured jumps.
But yeah, the most glaring CGI failure in Jackson’s King Kong for me was when the islanders were pole-vaulting to the boat…not convincing at all.
On the other hand, it apparently is relatively easy to animate dinosaurs jumping, because in 1993 they did pretty damn well with the velociraptors in Jurassic Park.
(of course when I say “relatively easy” I mean, “relatively easy for probably the best computer animators in the world.”)
