I would like to see...

I would like to see a movie where once the dweeb proves he’s awesome, and the girl who he’s been pining for but has acted nothing but bitchy towards him suddenly starts throwing herself at him because of his newly discovered awesomeness (see: How To Train Your Dragon), I’d like to see the ex-dweeb kick her ass to the curb. It doesn’t have to be rude. Just something simple like “You’ve treated me like slime for years, and now that [condition X has happened] suddenly you’re into me? No. I’m the same person now as I was before, and I see who you are now. Good bye”.

I would LOVE that.

-I would like to see depictions of gays who are not victims, perfect, sophisticated, gym-bodied, or basically “the absolutely perfect guy next door who finds time to do squats when he’s not singing along with opera, volunteering at a soup kitchen, holding down a six figure job, and enriching the lives of every person around him between groomings”

Speaking of soup kitchens,

-A TV show or movie that does not use homeless people to absolve the sins of yuppie characters, and portrays homeless people not as just silent wonderful people in the background but as a demographic that includes families and people who ran into bad luck AND also includes a lot of addicts and mental patients

-A show that features an argument between a religious character and an irreligious character in which neither one is a total charicature

-A segment on bullying in schools that does not treat it as exclusively a gay issue (while gay kids do often catch hell in school, not every kid who ever got bullied was gay or even suspected of such, though you wouldn’t know that from Anderson Cooper and other do-gooder shows)

-A movie where a (usually great looking) woman realizes the guy she spurned because he wasn’t cool/good looking/rich/whatever the guy she spurned him for who turned out to be a jerk is that he isn’t, so she goes back to ordinary guy at the end, and he tells her “Fuck you, I’ve moved on” and walks away with his less movie-star good looking new girlfriend
ETA: Or, what Jilaad said before I did above. (And why is the guy never seen as vapid even though he’s overweight and plain but the girl is a total babe?)
-A sci-fi movie with a military character who isn’t a total order following automaton and the hero isn’t a totally enlightened sensitive guy

-More stories like MAUS with characters who survived horrible and unimaginable suffering and persecution and hardships and indignities you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemies… but are also intolerant mean bastards/bitches instead of just a noble font of “Life is wonderful if you just believe in yourself and love others!” wisdom. Based on people I’ve known who were like this, including a guy who survived years ina Vietnamese P.O.W. camp and many old black people who lived through Jim Crow and old people who when they were young broke their backs to support their family working for fifty cents a day during The Depression or people who were dealt horrible hands due to illness or the loss of loved ones— but the sad part is, these things don’t necessarily make you a better wiser person, or a worse one for that matter. (The graphic novels Maus/II is one of the few to do this; the writer’s father is a racist-stingy-selfish old bastard, who happened to survive the Holocaust.)

-Shows that feature interracial dating/marriage/relationships where the race factor really isn’t mentioned (I love this on Doctor Who and some other British shows)

[QUOTE=Anaamika]
a movie or a book in which a white guy goes to a native tribe, and learns their ways, and becomes one of them - and then the chieftain’s daughter will have nothing to do with him, preferring to marry the man she’s always loved her entire life.
[/QUOTE]

An interesting twist I’d like to see is that white guy goes native, and chieftain’s daughter leaves for his people because she likes their technology and education and material culture better.
OR, chieftain’s daughter is a vapid moron.
OR, the tribal people turn out to be easily spooked with a superstitious, xenophobic, barbaric, and cruel streak (as, sadly but truly, many primitive and not-so-primitive people throughout time and space have been)

Nuh-uh! It would be funny if the heroine did, as the formula goes, marry the nerdy stalker and HE was the one who promptly starts cheating…yada yada…and at the end of the movie the big rich alpha male met up with her again and told her, You realize now you should have married ME when I’d asked you all those years ago!

I would like to see…

Actually, I’m male, middle-class, white, and heterosexual, so… I’m good! :slight_smile:

I feel like Joss Whedon must have done this at some point, but… a situation where the plucky heroes come up with a crazy plan to save the day that everyone else thinks will never work because of x, y or z drawback… and sure enough, it utterly fails because of x, y or z drawback.

I would like to see…

An action movie where a man is accused of a crime he didn’t commit, goes on a cross-country chase evading law enforcement to find the real culprits, clears his name, and is then arrested and prosecuted for all the laws he broke while doing so.

Sex scenes where the character’s don’t do it with their underwear on the whole time, apparently put it back on immediately after climax, or lie under an L-shaped blanket that comes up to the woman’s chest but only up to the man’s waist.

A loose cannon, cowboy cop who plays by his own rules and is therefore discharged from the force on his first day.

A movie about the American Revolution that portrays the British as sympathetic characters and the American rebels as ignorant, greedy slave-owning provincials.

A science fiction, fantasy, or action movie that doesn’t have a love story shoehorned into it.

A movie where the main character is abruptly killed by a freak accident two thirds of the way through in a manner that is not foreshadowed and is not relevant to the plot.

A movie where it turns out that science is good and the guy who says “There are some things man wasn’t meant to tamper with” is portrayed as a fanatic who would get everyone killed if they’d listened to him.

Alien females with erogenous zones other than tits and ass.

A movie starring a professional wrestler, athlete, pop singer, or reality TV persona, and which does not suck.

A modern, big-budget action movie without gratuitous CGI.

A constitutional amendment making product placement punishable by flensing.

A movie where you can’t stand right next to lava and feel no effects as long as you don’t touch it.

A sitcom where the main characters don’t work at “the office” or have a job that requires them to do about one hour of actual work a day and yet manages to pay all their bills.

A movie where a white guy takes in with the native tribe, learns their ways, falls in love with the chief’s daughter, and then helps his friends defeat them and take their land anyway and makes the chief’s daughter his slave.

A buddy cop movie where the black cop is straight-laced and professional and his white partner who is sassy, full of attitude, obsessed with sex, and understand’s what’s down in the real world.

A World War II movie where the big breakthrough is made by the British, Russians, Canadians, Australians, Chinese, or Free French, and the Americans are consigned to a support role.

A movie about the Iraq war that doesn’t whitewash anything.

A movie that consists of nothing but an hour and a half of Tom Cruise being beaten up, in brutal and gory detail, with every attempt he makes at defending himself only making it worse, accompanied by harsh and merciless psychological mocking of his sexuality, his failure as a husband and father, and his complete worthlessness and lack of value as a human being, leading to his attempting to commit suicide but instead being forced to live and suffer eternally, a la Prometheus, in constant pain and with full knowledge that everything negative that has ever been said about him is true.

A movie or a TV show where the Jewish guy isn’t the smart one. I’m not saying he should be dumb, just that someone else should be the smart and sensitive guy. The Jewish character can be the tough guy or the ladies’ man.

I’d like to see Hollywood die a rapid death and independent film rise meteorically. Not “Indie” films, mind you. Just non-Hollywood, so we can break free from its evil grip, have realistic budgets, and experience true creativity at last.

Unfortunately whatever would rise in its place would soon be just as bad, but there would be a golden period until then.

Hard to point this out without spoiling, but at least it’s a pretty minor side-plot.

STARDUST does this.

Lethal Weapon et seq.

Also, if comic books count, QUANTUM AND WOODY, even more so.

… a hollywood movie, where people brush their teeth properly in the morning, instead of mere 2 or 3 strokes with the toothbrush.

Like this?

I still often (probably mis-)quote a Jeremy Hardy line: “They say that beauty is only skin deep, but strip the skin off Tom Cruise and you’re left with nothing but a deep feeling of satisfaction”

I want a film where computers aren’t used as a real-world proxy for magic.

A gay protagonist in a movie that is not, per se, about homosexuality. Like a typical action movie with a same-sex romance subplot thrown in.

Speaking of romances, a romantic comedy in which the couple learns, perhaps too late, that all the previous wacky hijinks were signs that they should never have even met, not signs that they were meant for each other.

And more science being good, please.

Poor Desmond, the bleeding effect was already giving him temporal location and identity issues, you want to add gender issues on top? :stuck_out_tongue:

“Desmond are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m just lost in thought.”

“About what?”

“I… I kind of like being a woman…”

IWLTS kids who behave like kids and not miniature adults dispensing wisdom waay beyond their years, to adults with regards to the adults’ romantic entanglements.

IWL the people making such a movie to notice that the request is for an “average-sized house”, not a “roach-infested closet in Manhattan”, which appears to be the other option for American current-day movies.

IWLTS a Spanish “set in a shared flat” comedy series with a believable floorplan. They all seem to have stolen the set of Friends and proceeded to paint it piñata colors.

Actually, Manhattan apartments as depicted in TV and movies are quite large compared to what characters would be able to afford in real life.

Sitcoms use unbelievable floorplans because they’re essentially built as theater sets with no fourth wall and no ceiling. They’re not built as actual free-standing structures.

There have been plenty of such depictions. There was a period in which gay people didn’t appear in movies at all unless they were either swishy designers or deviant serial killers. The difference now is that producers have realized that it harms minorities to portray them only in negative stereotypes. In an ongoing development, they have decided to portray homosexuals and other minorities in more positive lights, but the problem is that they still haven’t been mainstreamed.

So long as the default assumption is that the “hero” or the “regular guy” is a straight, white, Anglo-American man, most attempts to depict people who don’t fit this rubric are going to become tokens. Every gay guy becomes “THE gay character.” Every black woman becomes "THE black woman character.

The same is true of depictions of “primitive” societies. There was a centuries-long period in which they were always depicted as superstitious, cruel, etc. Now there is some recognition that these are harmful stereotypes. If there is a tendency to create a positive stereotype, that’s a step in the right direction towards mainstreaming. But either way, what the best situation would be would be to admit to complexity in all societies. People are generally still people, regardless of their social setting, and as a group they will have the same levels of stupidity and cruelty as any other group.

And even then, your complaint about gay characters seems misplaced to me. I can think of many gay characters who aren’t perfect. Cam and Mitchell on Modern Family, for example, have lots of flaws. Then there was the depiction of Prince Edward in Braveheart as an effect coward whose boyfriend gets summarily tossed out a window.

It seems to me that your perception is very narrow. Bullying of gay kids is focused on right now because of a series of high-profile incidents that resulted in deaths. There has been an effort to raise awareness about bullying of gay kids. But that doesn’t mean that society as a whole has historically ignored bullying of others. After Columbine, there was indeed a focus on bullying of misfits or outsiders. There have been highlights of girl-on-girl bullying that has nothing to do with sexuality.

There are tons of movies in which the hero is a military character.

You’re comparing a serious story like Maus with mass entertainment? If complexity is what you’re looking for, you should be watching more serious movies, rather than Hollywood-style mass entertainment.

This will become more common as interracial relationships become less remarkable in real life. When black actors can get roles that weren’t specifically written as black characters, you’ll see a step in the right direction.

This is Disney’s Mulan.

I would like to see a fictional movie or TV show about ants or bees in which the main character isn’t male.