In this era of jump the shark and television without pity and tons of TV shows and movies that basically lampshade and make fun of all the cliches of TV shows and movies, I find it fairly surprising when I actually encounter pure unadulterated cliches in their native habitat… particularly in recent things that should know better.
NOTE: This is NOT just another thread for “hey, have you noticed how there’s always a loaf of french bread in the grocery bag”, etc. This is for situations in the mostly-post-cliche world where you really thought what you were watching was going to be conscious of such things and avoid them, and then wham, cliche!
Two examples:
(1) The movie Unstoppable with Denzel Washington trying to stop a runaway train. This movie had good actors, good production values, a basically decent director (Tony Scott)… and yet the entire thing was just one enormous cliche. The characters were cliche, their motivations were cliche, the situations were cliche, the ending was cliche. Even all the social commentary (people being laid off, life tough for salt-of-the-earth middle America) was cliche. Most irritating was this: so there’s a runaway train with dangerous chemicals on board. The weaselly evil corporate guy and his minions come up with a scheme to get it back under control by lowering a guy onto it from a helicopter. The good station chief (played by Rosario Dawson… and I’m sure that young hot latino women frequently hold that job at freight yards in Pennsylvania) is of course against it, and of course it turns out to fail completely, costing several good men their lives. Then our heros (Denzel and his sidekick) eventually stop the train by… jumping onto it from a pickup truck driving alongside.
So dangerous stunt with moving vehicles proposed by corporate weasels = terrible abrogation of their responsibility, doomed to fail. Dangerous stunt with moving vehicles proposed by our heroes = heroic.
(2) My wife and I have just started watching the british show The Hour, a serial drama about a BBC news program in the 1950s. Again, it has excellent production values, an excellent cast (McNulty from The Wire!), generally great writing, and a novel and interesting setting. Except that there’s a conspiracy plotline which is absolutely 100% by the book. I literally laughed out loud when the main character started posting things on a wall and connecting them with pins and string. It’s SO eye-rolly and so out of place in an otherwise really quite good production.