I hate comedies where a character is placed out of his or her element in some sort of magical sense (like, switching bodies with another character), and the “comedy” is derived from his or her initial fish-out-of-water social reactions. I don’t know why, but that AWKWARD factor just gets to me for some reason. I don’t find it funny, I just find it cringeworthy.
I don’t like car-chase movies anymore, or even car chase scenes. Its been done and it has most likely been done better. When a car-chase scene begins, I immediately wonder how long it will take and if there is time to run to the bathroom.
Horror movies. Halloween was cool. Everything after it was just gratuitous gore.
I won’t see horror movies and in general won’t see a movie if I know I’m going to come away feeling sad.
I won’t watch movies or TV shows that have idiot plots. No, I don’t find people who behave like idiots funny. Nor is being a perpetual klutz funny in most cases. I love The Gods Must Be Crazy, but in that movie, the guy is a klutz only around the woman he’s smitten with, and it’s BECAUSE he’s smitten with her that he becomes self-concious and clumsy. Otherwise he’s a quite competent, if somewhat shy, man. Plus, of course, !ki explains to the baboon that the Coke bottle is an Evil Thing, which isn’t something one sees in most movies.
Generally, I avoid movies that are generally described as heartwarming. I find that they rely on cheap manipulation of the audience’s emotions, and I hate being manipulated. I also don’t like movies that celebrate idiocy, which is a bit different from having an idiot plot.
I’ll watch movies with kids in them, but not movies that celebrate a kid’s brattiness, as in Dennis the Menace or Problem Child.
I refuse to watch films that hinge on a misunderstanding. 85 minutes of it will be the main character getting tied up in this misunderstanding. The last 5 minutes will have the misunderstanding cleared up.
It makes me itch and I just can’t watch it.
Looks like a lot of consensus on the unwatchability of those misunderstandiings / cringe / awkward / squirm plots. Latest Netflix disk to be ejected in mid-episode at our apartment: Chuck. GF said to me after the pilot, “shall we go on to the second episode, or is this too stupid to live?” We decided to see if it improved. The “eject button” moment was when Chuck has decided (on very flimsy evidence from the NSA dude he has no reason to trust) that CIA lady is trying to kill him and/or his family, and since she participated in cooking the feast his sister spent all day cooking, the food is obviously poisoned so of course he’s going to ruin the food to keep people from eating it. Nope, not watching that. <EJECT>
Any chick flick. The characters will either die (tear city) or fall in love (diabetes coma city) or fall in loev and die.
That’s why the movie pretty much always ends there, so you can pretend they lived happily ever after, and the person who they left at the altar suffered no lasting consequences from being treated so badly.
But since the person left at the altar is such an awful person, you probably don’t care about him/her, anway.
The third-best-thing about Four Weddings and a Funeral was Charles’ (Hugh Grant) frank admission, after leaving his bride at the altar, that what he had done was unspeakably horrible and he was probably going to hell. 
The Graduate addressed this trope a little bit by showing the initial exuberance of Dustin Hoffman and (escaped bride) Katherine Ross slowly turning into sober, worried, “WTF are we going to do now” expressions as they silently ride away on the bus.
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Crude “frat guy” comedies with lots of bodily-function humor, fart jokes, beer, and childish sex humor.
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Anything with too much vomiting in it. If it’s once and well telegraphed, I’ll look away. But I don’t like watching people throw up.
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Anything that has animal abuse in it. I don’t mind things like the Tyrannosaurus stepping on the dog off screen or something, but I don’t want to watch animals get hurt. I especially don’t want to watch beloved pets get hurt maliciously or within sight of their owners. This goes double if the animal is a cat.
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Anything primarily about babies (raising them, birthing them, old curmudgeon learns to like them, woman who didn’t want any gets pregnant and discovers heretofore untapped wells of maternal instinct…ugh).
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Splatter horror movies. Love psychological horror, but leave the viscera to the written word (where I love it just fine).
I’m with you, an Idiot Plot where saying WILL YOU ALL PLEASE STOP AND LISTEN TO ME FOR 30 SECONDS WHILE I EXPLAIN THAT IT’S NOT SO??? would bring the whole thing to a screeching halt, is a problem. As is squirm for squirm’s own sake: I hate being humiliated in public, why should I enjoy watching it happen to an innocent?
As for foolish science vs. conquering spirituality, y’know I would find it kind of refreshing to have it be some sort of honest-to-goodness classic miracle, as opposed to fluffybunny “power of love” untreated newage.
(And though I like well-executed “maverick/underdog” scenarios, once in a while I’d loudly cheer for a plot in which the rogue outsider’s untested, widely laughed-at, far-out on-a-hunch theory results in Epic Fail and everyone has their arses barely saved by the establishment squares’ proven, well-tested conventional mainstream methods)
So, has this plot ever happened in a movie?
Should we open a new thread asking about it?
Sure, but when it’s in a movie you don’t recognize it because it is:
“Hotshot who isn’t from around here comes in with his big-city ways and tries to change the beautiful culture of the place.”
That’s why I never watch sitcoms anymore. 99% of the plots revolve around simple miscommunications or misunderstandings that would be cleared up in a heartbeat if anyone had the brains or balls to deal with it.
I’m late to the party, but this is it. I want my vampires nasty, evil, dangerous, and vile. Sexy can work if they’re all of the former, but I’d shove a stake into every True Blood / Twilight vampire in a heartbeat.
I always thought Ross should have married the man at the alter. Hoffman was a loser.
Most bad movies are easy to avoid, but I sometimes get suckered into watching these types of movies because they’re supposed to be good:
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movies involving “cyberspace” or “virtual reality”
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movies with a lot of CGI (like watching someone play a video game)
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movies where it’s normal for characters to shoot thousands of rounds at each other without effect (this becomes godawful boring after a few seconds. can you tell I didn’t like The Matrix?)
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anything with vampires, or religious themed thrillers with angels/demons (both boring AND pretentious)
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anything with superheroes, or “based on a graphic novel” (everyone else seems to love this stuff)
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low budget movies about immigrant families in the US/UK/Australia and their wacky culture clashes (they always have titles like “Chop Suey and Cornbread”).
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any tedious “puzzle” movie: a crime happens, an investigator tries to figure out what happened, the witnesses have physical/mental blocks or are not cooperating, lots of conflicting flashback scenes, and finally at the end they show what really happened (and there’s some ridiculous twist)
I think romantic comedies are brutal. But the single biggest plot that annoys the shit out of me:
A couple is going to get married… a third person (usually a woman, but could be a man) enters the picture and screws up the marriage. The third person always ends up with the person they wanted, and the other person is left out in the cold.
A movie like “The Wedding Planner”. It fascinates me to no end why these movies are loved by women and are thought of as “romantic”. I don’t think my wife would have thought it would have been romantic if I punted her for our wedding planner.
Not only are these movies predictable, unrealistic and stupid, but they go against most people’s moral compass. And yet, they are churned out continuously by Hollywood. Do people enjoy these movies because they hate their spouse and secretly wish they would have married/banged/whatever their wife’s sister, or their husband’s brother?
Gah! I’m getting annoyed just typing this.
-The formulatic singer biographies. They came from humble beginnings, they were discoverd, fame-money-fame-money, it all came so fast they crashed and burned with drugs, bad times. Ending A - they die, ending B - they comeback.
-Movies where the main character joins another culture and becomes one of them. Fine. But they become the “best” or “one of the best” of them by learning their ways in a couple of weeks. Tom Cruise Last Samurai.
-Any movie where character(s) have to dress as the opposite sex to fit-in/be-accepted/hide-out/etc. hilarity ensues:rolleyes:. I hate them all equally. Even the ones people love (WongFoo, Tootsie, etc.)