Say, can we take it as a given that any plot has been done to freaking death, if tvtropes has a page on it?
No, The Sure Thing had a different plot – the girl with the jerk boyfriend and the one he was lusting after were two different girls.
Can we retire girl is sent to live with [insert relative] for [pick one: summer; school year] and thinks she won’t have fun, but meets the love of her life?
And ride horses!
As far as race relations go, can we agree that it is no longer shocking, daring, cutting-edge, radical or in any way unusual for a white woman and an African-American man to date and/or marry? Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was forty-three years ago.
As far as literary plots go, I’ll nominate “A young Jewish man comes of age in New York City”.
One that I’d like to see buried for good is the ‘Aha! Even crazier than you thought!’ plot.
Person accused of some heinous crime. Isn’t getting a fair hearing because he is written off as mad, bad, evil, good-for-nothing or whatever.
Heroic lead steps in, takes the case, seeks to right the wrong while exposing the inadequacies of the system and everyone’s knee-jerk prejudices. Successful acquittal, soaring music, rueful looks on the faces of all those who should have known better.
Final twist: the guy really was guilty all along, and is a whole extra level of bad/crazy/sinister that no-one, let alone the hero, ever guessed.
Except that we all guessed it, because it’s been done forever.
Not every sports movie - case in point, Bull Durham - but in general, Thudlow Boink is right. I don’t need to see another Bad News Bears “fumbling underdogs come together in a journey of self-discovery to finally defeat the heavily-favored whoevers” story.
AIRC, the Bad News Bears didn’t win, actually.
To be fair though, Lawrence of Arabia is based on T.E. Lawrence’s life so I don’t think it’s fair to lump that in with the likes of Dune et. al.
Gay coming of age is damned near as trite, especially since they’re usually so paint by the numbers with saintly queers and closeted homophobes and the mom who comes around and oaj dif alz jj a;djf aoijdjfia lal. Worst of all are the one-man shows. I swear when I lived in Georgia there was about one of these a week usually performed by the writer. (For those not aware, I’m gay, which I mention as evidence that it’s not the subject matter that irks me so much as the repetition.)
I recently read a memoir by Orson Welles’ daughter Christopher Welles Feder. She has absolutely every reason to be bitter about her world famous father: he was basically a gargantuan presence both literally and figuratively who floated in and out of her life for a day or two once every few years and the rest of the time she had no idea even how to contact him. He was a deadbeat dad who was always delinquent with support, didn’t contribute a penny to her after she turned 17, frequently disappointed her, could make the most offensive and belittling comments, and didn’t even meet her husband until a decade after they married.
What I liked about the memoir though is she didn’t let the disappointment and anger she had with him define her life. She doesn’t blame him for everything that went wrong in her life or seem to dwell on what a bad father he was. Basically it’s “I had a bigger than life world famous father who I barely knew and who I wanted to slug whenever I wasn’t with him and then adored when I was with him- oh, and my mom was a racist ice queen bitch. BUT, here’s the story of my life and how I became a well adjusted happily married person in spite of them.” Basically she lived her life, Orson was like a favorite uncle who’d call her up every few years to say let’s do lunch, and she didn’t spend the next few years til she saw him again dwelling on what a completely selfish bastard he was (or how he doted on his third daughter).
I mention this because it’s nice reading a celebrity’s child memoir- for that matter reading most non-celebrity childhood memoirs it seems- where the writer doesn’t blame everything on a bad parents, celebrity or otherwise, and an unhappy childhood. She realized “He’s never going to be Father of the Year” (my words, not hers) so enjoy him for what he is- a charming larger than life character with fascinating stories who you’d think hung the moon if he weren’t your dad- and get on with your life because he’s never going to change or try to atone for the past. So many memoirs these days seem to be in some sort of pissing contest for “My parents/childhood/past/teen years were worse than youuuurs!” Christopher (she was named that because Orson wanted a boy) is actually irritated in the final chapters when, long after her father’s death, she became the only member of Welles’ biological family to seek out and befriend his longtime companion Oja Kodar (a relationship that lasted far longer than any of his marriages) and how much the mistress still let Orson control every aspect of her life 20 years after his death.
To be really fair, though, you have to consider that Robert Bolt’s script for Lawrence of Arabia, like his script for Doctor Zhivago, takes huge liberties with the source material (even though they’re Lawrence’s own writings, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and that recent scholarship suggests that he didn’t really “go native”.
A bit off topic, but his Thomas More in Man for All Seasons is one of the most whitewashed dramatic licenses in real:literary transition as well. Among other things nowhere is it mentioned that this man of great conscience had ordered the death by burning of at least six Protestants when he had power and it was one of the reasons he had so many enemies. Still a great play though, but on par with Shaffer’s biographical plays in terms of historical accuracy (not that either playwright would deny for a second that biography was never their point).
Have you ever seen The Bad News Bears?
Safecracker/Jewel Thief/Cat Burglar wants to “retire” but is forced by a former colleague to do “just one more job”. How original. :rolleyes:
Yeah, but a psychological story is more interesting to me personally than a “It’s a BIG CONSPIRACY by the CIA/NSA/Secret Government Agency/Huge Multinational Corporation With A Lot To Lose/Aliens/Entity From The Future Trying To Keep Something Bad From Happening.”
Mild-mannered or seemingly innocuous man just trying to enjoy his retirement is actually a badass when pushed too far by young punks, due to his former military service/criminal history/Eastwood-ness.
This was used to good effect in Target, starring Gene Hackman. He played a man whose son was annoyed that his dad was the most boring, middle-class white bread guy imaginable. It turned out that Dad (Hackman) was seeking the most mundane life possible after his earlier career as a CIA covert operative.
If we ever see another Hollywood SF movie with virtual reality in the plot, it should leave no slightest doubt at any point in the story, either on the audience’s part or any character’s part, as to whether what’s going on at this moment is reality, or virtual reality, or another layer of virtual reality within the last one. Like, virtual reality should have a different color-scale, or something. I mean, it’s not as if that were the beginning and end of the idea’s potential. Remember, Neal Stephenson managed to work VR into Snow Crash quite well without any such ambiguity.