Characters being thrown through panes of glass and not being seriously hurt, or hurt at all.
I know, it looks fantastic. The fact is that if you are thrown through a window you’ll be cut to ribbons. It’s like watching someone get their head cut off and having them just glue it back on.
But at least in “The Big Chill” what happened was possible. Oh, it was irritating, and it was cliche, and it made you want to strangle someone. But if a song’s playing on the radio, people can sing along to it, and it’s certainly more than believable a bunch of self-absorbed yuppies would do just that.
But in other movies they’ve taken it one step further; you see people engaging in sudden, nonsensical sing and dance-alongs that are impossible. You can’t just have a bunch of ordinary people suddenly break into a song and dance routine **a cappella **and not sound like a bag of drowning cats. It’s impossible. In addition to being cliched, it is every bit as fantastical as cloned velociraptors bursting into the scene and eating the characters (which, I am sure you will agree, would have significantly improved The Big Chill, My Best Friend’s Wedding, and other such movies.) It works in musicals because you go in understanding the story will be sung and danced. It doesn’t work in a Julia Roberts vehicle.
If that’s the worst part of it, I think that’s good going. A jump from a standing start wouldn’t look like my test anyway, there isn’t enough momentum built up to do what I had him do.
What amazes me the most about the lack of accurate CG physics is that it’s mathematics; it ought to be easily calculable by computers. Cloth- and collision dynamics are being done that way, so why not character physics too?
I think some of you just don’t like movie musicals. I do (most of them, anyway–movie musicals are incredibly hard to get right, but awfully easy to get really wrong).
People burst into song in musicals because the songs help advance the plot. If the songs don’t do so, chances are you’re watching a sucky movie musical.
People who are slapped in movies never seem to have red marks or bruises. Bugs me. (same with punches). I know about choreographed fights, but could they at least get the makeup right, afterwards?
I can only think of 1 musical, ever, I kind of liked – All that Jazz. First, because it had nice tits in it, and second because it was about a choreographer and broadway shows, so it almost kinda made sense that the characters broke into song and dance once in a while.
Crawling around in heating ducts. Most heat ducts aren’t big enough for a person to get into. They’re full of dust. Like, an inch of dust on each surface. If they were large enough for you to fit inside, you would make a LOT of noise moving around in them. The covers are held in place by long ass sheet metal screws, so you can’t just get out in a different room. The sections of duct are held together by pieces of sheet metal with sharp edges. You will probably cut yourself, you will definitely tear the hell out of your clothes.
Casting actors from other than New England in movies set in northern New England (and faking accents)
It’s hard to enjoy a movie like Storm of the Century when the actors have such terrible, obvious fake Maine accents. Please do everyone the favor of not even making the half-hearted attempt to sound like real people from Maine, Vermont or New Hampshire. Stick with attempts at Boston, NYC and Chicago.
That’s fine (that’s one I really can’t stand, btw). There is nothing inherently logical about superhero movies, either (guys just don’t start to fly all of a sudden) or limericks or square dancing–they’re just different art forms.
I’ll add musicals that forget that musicals are supposed to be musical comedies, not pompous, bloviated production pieces…
See, this is what I don’t get. People who hate musicals but don’t think twice about an animated film, or a scifi action thriller, or something else that is at least inherently nonrealistic as a musical.
Exactly. He needs to lean/fall forward prior to launching to establish that momentum. As it is, he should rotate over backward and land on his ass instead of leaping forward.
The “Marion the Librarian” scene in the REAL, non-Matthew Broderick, “The Music Man” took THREE WEEKS to get right before they filmed it.
I recently watched “Walking With Dinosaurs,” and like “Jurassic Park I,” the CGI dinos worked better than the puppets or animatronic dinos. And this is a hell of an admission from a guy who’s done computer graphics since 1982 and can point out all the flaws.
But musicals are REAL! Or are you so much younger than I that the appropriate suspension of belief is not expected? Cuz I’m both an old fart and someone who’s been geeking-out the flaws in SF special effects since, er, a LONG fuckin’ time ago. and I was a Musical fan LONG before that. There seems to be a cutoff about 40 years ago.
My wife gave a paper a few years ago where she argued that part of the reason Snow White was made as a musical in the first place was to help it seem more realistic. Musicals are inherently artificial. We don’t expect the actors to behave naturally; we expect their performances to be somewhat stagey and stylized. So if Disney was worried that his audience might not accept his heroine as a real person, it made sense for him to frame her in a way where the expectations are different. If her movements are a bit stiff and stylized … well, that’s what the audience would expect from a musical.
For some reason films set in the South with bad accents are most grating on my nerves. I just watched The Big Easy again – ooh, that’s some bad talkin’.
Yeah, I know, fake Cajun isn’t the same as fake Southern, but still…
Of course the problem is, people still go to the sequels, no matter how bad they are. Sequels are easy money, and as long as they are easy money, they won’t stop being made.
Anway:
–Any plot that would be solved in the first five minutes if the main characters actually had an honest conversation.
–A non-derided plan to break up a happy couple so the main character can get some.
