little things that peeve ONLY you in movies

How about the “explosive in microwave” device? I think I first saw this in Batman Returns:

  • Set explosive device in microwave.
  • Set timer on microwave for 30 secs (or so).
  • Bomb will explode exactly when the timer reaches 0:00.
    One part that bugs me is the dubious science involved in these bombs. But seriously, why does the bomb explode only when the microwave is done? Where did anyone learn to itme this so precisely?

I’d set it for 20 minutes, just to be on the safe side. Plus, then the hero would think there was plenty of time to get out.
:smiley:

greyseal

I just don’t agree… It’s not that you’re wrong, I just think it’s a long shot. I think it would have had many opertunities to come up

remeber, I’m talking about things that might be accurate, but you would change.

Some of you have great ones… I think the horse things by Hello Again and Ruffian… and I REALLY like Greenlady’s “555” comments.

One other example I have is for Disney movies, like in the Lion King… at first it’s a dramatic story when the kids father dies by a stamped. So our minds are set that, even though there are talking animals, the rules of nature apply to some extent… then we see a lot of slapstick crap and things we don’t take seriously that mushes up the first part of the movie. I’m not saying it can’t be funny, but not the roadrunner funny. I don’t know specifics of what I’m talking about, because it’s been very long since I’ve seen one of these. If any of

remeber, I’m talking about things that might be accurate, but you would change.

Some of you have great ones… I think the horse things by Hello Again and Ruffian… and I REALLY like Greenlady’s “555” comments.

One other example I have is for Disney movies, like in the Lion King… at first it’s a dramatic story when the kids father dies by a stamped. So our minds are set that, even though there are talking animals, the rules of nature apply to some extent… then we see a lot of slapstick crap and things we don’t take seriously that mushes up the first part of the movie. I’m not saying it can’t be funny, but not the roadrunner funny. I don’t know specifics of what I’m talking about, because it’s been very long since I’ve seen one of these. If any of you know what I’m saying and better clarify, that would be cool.

Sorry about that, it always happens

How about a “happy end” where there’s no need? Gaaaaah.

There are countless of them. Two comes to mind.

“The Vanishing” * the remake *

“The Game”.

blehhhhh

I think I know what you mean about Dysney movies. They always try to make it grand, with all the animals in the jungle to witness the birth of a king… and for a while, you don’t care that you’re watching conflicts between talking lions, it’s beautiful the way the animators make these seanes look. But then somthing stupid happens and realize, THIS is for a kid, not me. The Blue Genie in Alladin didn’t have any material a man would repeat at work. It tries to act hip and bring in the teens, but it doesn’t because Disney is out of touch with anything a 15yo+ deals with. I’ve watched the Disney channle, and I don’t even know if I would want my kids watching. It’s SO damn bad. When you look at programing for children, no one tries to look hip without ruffling any feathers more than Disney. Other show don’t try to be hip… they just act themselves. The show “Recess” was good though.

Anyway, back on subject

Women who run for their lives on high heels. :confused: * get those things off, you’ll run much faster. *

Women [and men] who get out of their bed with every hair on place and mascara still on their lashes. * please tell me how they do that. *

Here’s the scene:
[ul]
[li]Slasher Murderer walks into rooms[/li][li]scantily clad woman smashes him over the head with a pool stick, knocking him down[/li][li]runs away, only to have the murderer get back up and persue her.[/li][/ul]

Keep hitting him with the damn pool stick. He won’t get up if his face is a broken, bloody mess. Just keep hitting him in the face with the pool stick till he is dead/unconscious, then call the cops. YEASH!

The heroine in Crocodile Dundee actually did this at the end. Of course, she was running towards something rather than away from it. If a monster had been pursuing her, I’m sure she’d have kept her heels on and ended up tripping and falling.

Has anyone in Hollywood ever heard of Vatican 2? I ask because nuns haven’t worn floor-length skirts since I was in 1st grade (about 35 years ago), but that’s STILL the outfit you always see nuns wearing in movies and on TV.

The same goes for cats–every time you see a cat, you’ll also hear a “meow,” even though most cats I’ve ever known don’t meow unless they have a reason to. Suitable reasons (to a cat) include trying to get a human’s attention, but do not always include simply entering an unoccupied room, as Hollywood would have us believe.

And trains: trains don’t blow their whistles unless they’re approaching a level crossing or there is something on the track that might be able to move, such as a cow. Hollywood trains blow their whistles whenever they’re shown on camera, without a level crossing or cow in sight.

There must be more of these, but those are the first that came to mind.

Yeah, I hate that, too. I know foley artists usually work with a sound library, but come on guys! Sometimes it’s really obvious! The three most obvious cases I know are:

  1. That one loud, long scream that goes like:
    “YEEEEEEAAAAAARRGHHAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaahhh…”
    The first thing I heard this in was the computer game Star Wars: Dark Forces, and every time I hear it (which isn’t very often, thank God) I think of that game. It also sounds so damn silly, so I don’t know why they still use it.

  2. A lot of “hit reaction” sounds that I first heard in GoldenEye for N64 turn up in a lot of movies lately. I swear sometimes they even include the sounds of you hitting them.

  3. Whenever a screen door shuts, it almost always sounds exactly the same.

Other things that bug me:

When VCRs play the audio while rewinding a tape. This pisses me off so much because it’s obvious to anyone that VCRs never do that IRL.

When computers everywhere are always Macs. And new ones at that. Police departments don’t have brand new iMacs. They have 10-15 year old IBMs or Compaqs.

When computers have programs that either don’t really exist or have a really stupid user interface: usually media players, chat programs, or E-mail.

When computers either have no visable OS or GUI, or it’s a non-existant OS or GUI that makes no sense.

When people talk while they’re typing.

All the recent “MTV Editing Style” that’s in some movies since a few years ago (Romeo +Juliet, Blade). This includes breafly speeding up the frame rate for a moment (and it’s always done during the editing, so it looks really bad); lots of chaotic jump cuts, close ups, and zooms that are usually filmed at an angle; and lots and lots of music.

When people complain about product placement in movies that’s not really product placement. No wait, that’s in real life. Movie characters use brand-name products too, people!!

When the Internet is mentioned or part of a plot, it’s usually in a negative conotation, such as pornography, pedophiles, stalkers, or fraud (TV dramas do this a lot.) Don’t they know the real purpose of the Internet is for cat pictures? :slight_smile:

When the Odious Comic Relief isn’t killed.

Kids and animals never get hurt.

Movies that show hacking, but it’s always the flashy, Psychidelic GUI that would crash any PC kind of stuff, and never the boring, typing out lines of code on a plain black screen stuff.

Jokes and gags in movies that aren’t funny, but are just God damn gross. Also jokes that are gross for the sake of being gross. These are the worst. Hello, Hollywood: people often watch movies while they’re eating, you know!!

The “Miss Saigon Syndrome,” where ethnic characters (usually Asians, Mediteranians, Native Americans, Indians, and Latinos) are played by non-ethnic actors. This was especially true with Asian characters in older films.

A variation of the above I really hate is what I call “Ethnic Modernization”, where non-ethnic characters become ethnic for film versions of stories, just so everything can be politically correct. This usually happens for TV movies and mini-series.

When TV remotes click. Remotes have used soft buttons for years, so they don’t click anymore.

VCRs can be paused forever.

You never hear people say “I love you.” and then “I love you, too.” Even between a husband and wife, or a parent to their child. I can’t even name a moment when it does happen.

When people have sex, they’re either both single, engaged to or dating each other, or both or at least one of them is engaged/dating/married to someone other than the person they’re having sex with. You hardly ever see married couples having sex. This actually bothered a friend of mine quite a bit.

All movie teenagers seem to have sex all the time.

When apartments or (especially) dorms are always way too big. Having a dorm room that’s 25x25 feet (often for only 1-2 people!!) is completely insane.

Also when dorm rooms or teenager’s rooms are always messy, with clothes and junk everywhere (there’s almost always a guitar, too) and with walls that are covered with posters and maganize crap that you can’t see the wall paper. Don’t forget the 24-hour rock/metal/pop music playing in the background, and that the bed is usually a bunk-bed even though they live alone.

When they show video games (mostly on TV: and they never actually show gameplay on screen) it’s usually with all those shitty “video game” noises that games haven’t made since 1985, or never at all. Also when they show controllers, When they’re not first party PlayStation, SNES, or Nintendo 64 controllers, they’re usually third party controllers of the previous, and often don’t match up with the system (when they show it). I once saw Sony PlayStation controllers with a Sega Saturn system on Suddenly Susan. Most of the above is void when the system is Product Placement (X-Box on Will and Grace, or Super NES on Rosanne), except for the shitty game sounds.

To follow the above (also mostly TV) is when people playing games play like 4-year-old kids: frantically mashing the buttons like mad. Doesn’t matter if it’s a tournament fighter, racing, or an RPG, it’s always played by blindly mashing buttons. No real game exist where you play like that. Also when the games are totally made up, whose plot or action is usualy derived from retarded comments by the players. Best example is Rosanne with “Two more swords and I’m queen of the monkey people.” (add to the fact that the audio was obviously from Super Mario World).

I swear the only truely faithful representation of a video game on TV was that one episode of Mr. Belvedere where they had a pinball machine.

Another mostly TV one. When people are watching TV shows (applies mostly to cartoons) they’re all sound and no dialogue!! For cartoons they always have these retarded sound effects playing constanly, making the show sound like a chaotic mess of gags and nothing else. It’s always WB-type cartoons with no plots, too. No TV kid seems to watch anything like the Smurfs, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Muppet Babies, or anything else. Fortunately, Rosanne once played the actual audio from a WB cartoon (Pepe le Pew, I think).

That’s all for now. I think this might be my longest post here ever.

That video game sound you always hear in movies? From Pac-Man for the Atari 2600, came out 20 Freakin’ Years ago! and i still here it all the time! It was on a Circuit City ad recently, and i’ll bet dollars to donuts it will be in at least 5 movies before the end of the year!

LMAO at:

:smiley:

Nope. Didn’t bother me.

And if you’d like for me to tell you why, feel free to start a new thread on the topic. I don’t want to hijack this fine effort from MyFootsZZZ. It might also be useful to do a little research and see if there’s been some previous discussion on the boards about Fight Club.

The “all computers in movies must be Macintosh” drives me batty. I think the biggest offender was probably Independence Day, in which the Alien spaceship was Macintosh-capatible (thank god we brought these Appletalk cables!). Amongst my friends, whenever this occurs in movies we shout “upload virus!”

Really, though, they couldn’t have played it any other way. At the time the movie was made, at least, it was hard enough getting a non-Apple computer to connect to an ordinary network, much less an alien one.

My complaints with the “upload virus” scene are more fundamental: they broke the rules they had set themselves. Earlier in the film, the scientists had said that the crashed alien craft didn’t work because “they couldn’t replicate the kind of power they use.” Well, if the power the aliens use isn’t even electricity, they’ve got a much bigger problem on their hands than overcoming operating system incompatibilities. Not to mention communication protocols…

Anyway. The “kids and dogs must live!” thing bothers me, too. Remember when Steven Spielberg had balls? Like, when he made Jaws, and the kid on the raft got chomped in a big fountain of blood? Nowadays, he makes stuff like A.I., where he can’t stand making a robot child even remotely unhappy in his sorry, tacked-on ending. If he made Jaws today, it would probably be about a largeish flounder that bumps into people. That’s one reason I enjoyed Sleepy Hollow; the kid doesn’t get killed on-screen or anything, but you know he’s a goner. Yay Tim Burton!

Many, many stupid things that bug me in movies are listed at the Glossary of Specialized Terms for Jabootu’s Dimension of Bad Movies. The Glossary refers to such idiotic conventions as the Atomic Hand Grenade, the Designated Hero, and the Monster Death Trap Proviso. It’s well worth checking out.

In the remake of Rollerball, I couldn’t get over how the main character couldn’t put his helmet on. Bugged me to no end.

That, and the awful acting, and the butchering of the original movie. Arrrgh.

I used to think that too, but the orders where the nuns still wear habits seem to be making a comeback.

Not that the film industry noticed this. It’s just a coincindence.