I’ve been thinking about this for some time, and have posted little comments here in there in various posts, but it’s time for this to have its own thread. A thread, as you know, is a sort of conversation that geeks have when they use their computers.
Some things in real life just don’t translate well from real life to whatever entertainment medium they are translated to. The viewer just might not get it, so it must be explained in ways that often, if not always, make the characters look a little stupider than they should be. Or perhaps they require slightly different laws of physics in order to read from the audience.
Some examples to start you off:
In Jurassic Park, Malcolm must explain chaos theory to Ellie. You would think that a scientist like Ellie would understand chaos theory. She probably does. But most audience members won’t. Malcolm is really explaining it to them.
In many movies there is an “establishing shot.” For instance, before a new scene, we’ll see Big Ben, and hear the opening strains of Rule Britannia. This is to let us know that the next scene is not, in fact, still taking place in Skokie, IL.
The stage whisper: A whisper so loud that the deaf lady in the cheap seats can hear what is going on, while the other people on stage are oblivious.
I like your concept and even tried to get into this sort of thing not long ago under the guise of cliches that annoy.
Stories without explicit exposition are indeed hard to get into, even by a “hip” audience. But we just saw an interesting attempt to do just that. I recommend a recent movie Nine Lives (2005) where the audience must get engaged in a “slice of life” without a batch of explanatory junk.
But to address your OP, I still find it awkward to watch shower scenes where the only activity involved is letting water run on the person’s head. I take showers to get clean, not just to play like I’m standing in the rain.
Thanks, although I should point out that I don’t want this to turn into a movie cliches thread. Although some cliches are for verissimilitude, such as the nearly victorious villain who, at the last minute, reveals the entire plot.
“Ah, the T&V 300 Submicroautoloader. Powered by blow-back gas compression and firing a continuous pulse of microflechettes at 96 rounds per second with dynamic laser target acquisition and blast hypersuppression. An ideal weapon for a sniper. But we didn’t come here to discuss guns, did we, Mr. Arkasian?”
This bit of dialog not only lets the main character explain what the heck that funny device the other guy is waving around, it establishes the main character as an someone with an encyclopedic knowledge whose expertise in the subject is vastly superior to his interlocutor.
The stage turn. When Actor One passes behind Actor Two, who is facing the audience, Actor Two keeps his back to Actor One while turning to keep up with him. This is to keep Actor Two facing the audience, but it never makes any sense to me. You see this little stage turn all the time–an actor moving with camera logic rather than human logic–and it always grates on me.
One time when a movie did have verisimilitude, the most realistic scene I can remember, was when the women are sitting around talking about black men and white women, and intraracism too I believe, in Jungle Fever. I’ve been in the room for those discussions and it was just perfectly done.
More in line with the OP, when people in a field have to use the full words for things that you know they always refer to by the acronym/initialism.
The way people sit at a table to eat, with three or four people crowded on one side with the other side completely empty.
CSI does this all the time, with the techs explaining things to each other. Really, guys, I think Nick knows how to raise a serial number off a gun. There’s no need to have Sara explain it to him.
You see something similar in soap operas, where actor one is facing the camera and holding a conversation with actor two, who is behind his back, but also facing the camera.
Presumably done because of lack of shooting time and cameras.
ST:TOS did this in the Gamesters of Triskelion. When Chekov was talking to the big Russian alien, he turned his head in shame every time he spoke. This way he could cheat out to the only camera they had left that day. Apparently that was shot pretty late at night.
A door on either side. Kitchen table with no seats with their back to one directions. A television (we assume, it’s rarey actually seen) and couches and chairs facing in the same direction as all the chairs in the kitchen. A staircase along the back wall.
If it’s an apartment, the stairs are gone, and the doors lead to teh hall and bedrooms, respectively.
Very rarely the doors will be on the back wall, instead of the sides, and the couch will face sideways, but never towards the back wall.
What’s on or against the front wall is never seen or mentioned.
“Every single piece of dialog in the DaVinci Code, a book by bestselling author Dan Brown that concerns the alleged bloodline of the descendents of Jesus, a prophet from the Middle East, who is the deity-made-flesh of Christianity, the world’s largest religion,” jjimm typed into his PC from his living room in Oxford, an ancient university town in England renowned for its Medieval architecture that has strange, somehow mysterious, carvings.
I read an interview where Koenig referred to the director of this ep (forget the guy’s name) as “some song and dance man, who was lost in television and didn’t know what the hell he was doing.”
I hate it when a shot is framed of a driver exiting a car so that the camera blocks the driver’s door, and he slides across the seat and gets out of the car on the passenger’s side.
In a way, this is typical of everything in theater (and, to a lesser degree, the movies and other performing arts). Everything has to be somewhat exagerrated so that the audience can see it and understand it. So emotions are writ large, voices are more powerful, enunciations more defined. Comedy has exagerrated "takes. Seduction uses exagerrated sexuality.
Props are bigger. I was props master of a company for a while. When we did “Taming of the shrew” we needed a “pennyworth of sugar”. A simple sugar cube won’t do – it looks like nothing when you’re in the audience. We gave the actor a styrofoam cube maybe 3-4 inches on a side. A penny bought more back then. And the audience could see it.
“The alien intelligence is sending us a message using only primary numbers, which, as you know, are numbers that are divisible only by one and themselves.”
I’m going to nitpick and say that the OP seems to be asking for the OPPOSITE of verisimilitude… that these are conventions which don’t seem real, and that ask us as the audience to suspend a little bit of disbelief, in the name of making the movie or whatever work of art flow smoothly and easily.
Examples of verisimilitude would be the situations that buck convention, that have you saying ‘no, most movies don’t get as real as this.’ Or am I missing something?
