Someone who is spectacularly and profoundly incompetent in some area of life is set up, usually by some misunderstanding that everyone is too awkwardly nervous to correct, into performing in that exact area. Like Big Boss misconstrues something that WifeOfJoe says about Joe Employee, thinks it means that Joe Employee can sing, not just write musical jingles, and thanks him for being there since NO ONE ELSE is available to sing the song for the commercial and give him a corner office and a promotion, all for THANK GOD being able to sing. Which he can’t. And rather than explain, oooh no, better to nod and then go apeshit for 90 minutes trying to figure out how to not end up making an ass of himself.
Example C:
Protagonist does not know he is inept at something to the point that trying to do it will provoke ridicule instead of admiration. Like Susie Datageek not only signs up for the ski trip but to participate in the slalom competitive event in order to be accepted by the In Crowd. Susie Datageek can’t even stand up while wearing skis. Everyone who likes her can’t just tell her not to do it though. Of course not. Let’s do something surreptitious behind her back to bail her out. Somehow. Which will backfire. And she’ll find out. And be very angry.
Example D:
Uncle Intolerable is coming for dinner. Ten minutes of Uncle Intolerable in the living room is, well, umm, intolerable, but it would be impolite to act on that by telling him he must leave. So we get a long drawn-out cringefest. Uncle I is not likeable but netiher are our protagonists and their cringing. Probably right around the time they are finally going to issue an ultimatum and make him leave, he’s going to do something like save their kitty cat and they’ll be briefly thankful and he’ll interpret it as an invite to stay permanently.
It all amounts to: JUST FUCKING TELL THEM, YOU ASSHOLE. It’s not entertaining. It’s not funny. I just can’t stand it.
But Pep–what if it was Jim Kirk seeking revenge on Captain Kor for murdering Spock, just before Spock and Jim declared their undying manly love for one another? WHAT then?
Can’t stand anything that involves what we refer to in my family as Idiot Plot: i.e., the plot **cannot ** and **will not have **moved forward unless a major character behaves like a fucking retard.
Ugh, these. These, these, these, and anything remotely related to them. The Awkward Moment just makes me squirm all over, inside and out.
On the other hand, I love their opposite, where someone is underestimated and then shows the hell out of everybody.
Captain Kirk would try to arrest Captain Kor per Federation guidelines. Only after Kor refused to be arrested would Kirk open fire.
But really, Wrath of Khan is a good illustration of how the revenge fantasy should play out. People who are that driven and bloodthirsty are terrifying and cause a great deal more harm than usual revenge fantasies ever show.
Buddy movies where one of the buddies is a human and the other is an animal, typically a dog, sometimes a dog that talks, or whose inner thought life we have access to, and where hijinks and antics ensue that involve bodily functions or fluids/solids, general clumsiness and ineptitude, embarrassing misunderstandings etc.
Nanomachines. They’re basically magic. They’re intelligent, they can self-replicate out of any arbitrary material, and basically do anything the writer wants them to do, but they don’t do any of the hundred other things such a machine would logically be able to do, because that would make them unstoppable.
Yeah, pretty much that sort of thing. Basically, the situation is almost always too contrived to be believable or satisfying. So, what Bryan said. Or, when the protagonist does bother to explain, the wife of 20 years suddenly trusts the really creepy-looking stranger instead of the husband, the detective ignores mountains of evidence and maintains that the case is cut-and-dried, the shrink with decades of experience dealing with delusional patients has no clue that this case is different, etc.
A nice, original twist on that trope, however, can be quite refreshing and enjoyable for me.
Well, there are always those moments when the protagonist manages to explain himself and his wife or whatever starts to believe him, but then the 9 year-old girl with the ailing cat will walk in and innocently claim “Uncle Jim, you said you’d help me with my pussy,” and the wife misinterprets and gets angry and the painfully insipid hilarity which I’d hoped was finally over gets a new lease on life.
When I was a kid, movies with cats as villains. Why is the cat ALWAYS the evil villain and the slobbering dog the hero? In fact, if you ever even see a cat in a movie, the cat will be dead before the movie ends (killed by the villain, most likely).
The cop solves the case and saves the day by beating up a perp, driving like a maniac through traffic, dissing the Internal Affairs guy or planting evidence. Or the spy who tortures the prisoner, illegally wiretaps a citizen of his country, or kills the bad guy when he could just as easily have captured him. And any authority figure who protests is naturally shown to be naive, a prig or an idiot. So any movie, basically, that shows the Constitution and laws as obstacles to national security. Um, hello? We live in a democracy under the rule of law. That sort of cowboy shit is illegal - or ought to be - for a reason.
Because you know the guy is in the right, but, despite copious evidence right in front of their faces, the Powers That Be refuse to see it and idiotically keep hunting the guy, while letting the real villian run free (variation: they’re villians themselves). Typically this will go on and on for most of the movie/episode, driving me the f*** out of my mind all the while.
And Dr. Kimble being found guilty just means that the defense didn’t bother to do a square cm x square cm search of his bedroom floor for DNA evidence (i.e. a hair from the One-Armed Man).
When the so-called heroine becomes just as bad as the person/people she is hunting, yeah, that bugs me (thinking specifically of Kill Bill here). I guess I’d take Gandalf’s advice to heart, not to deal out death and judgement, not even the very wise can see all ends, etc.
ANy movie where the plot mostly involves people embarassing themselves or others. It just makes me squirm. I hated “Borat” and "Meet the Parents: for this reason.
There was some horror movie I saw as a kid that you’d like: the cat defended a little girl from getting her breath sucked out by some evil gnome thing.