Every time a police car arrives or departs, it makes a short “BwOOP-bwoop” siren blast. This happens on tv as much as in movies. There is never any reason for the cops to do this. If two cops are standing outside the station talking, the car pulling away in the background will make that sound. Or if they’re arriving at a murder scene, without siren or lights, they’ll blast the siren for no good reason. Apparently the producers aren’t sure we’ll know it’s a cop car, so they have the special effects guy scream “HEY, THIS HERE IS A POLICE CAR!”
As for “kids and animals never get hurt”: A major exception was that movie in which Tom Hanks was a cop partnered with a big, lovable dog that drooled constantly. It was a lighthearted flick that made you love the dog, and then the dog was shot and killed in the end!
Tom Hanks was on a talk show once saying that the dog’s death sank the movie. He suggested that the Disney company, which produced the movie, should use the topiary gardens outside their studio to spell out “Don’t kill the dog!”
Way back in the late 50s, in one of their movie parodies, two characters are talking on the sidewalk at night. In the street is a man spraying water from a hose and on the back of his coat is: MAKING STREETS LOOKED LIKE IT JUST RAINED COMPANY.
My peeve is that, in movies, women will kick men in the crotch or slap them hard enough to break their noses, and the guys just grunt in discomfort for a second or totally ignore it. (And this is usually meant to be funny.) And thety often slam into these men for SAYING something they don't like.In the last panel of Mad Magazine’s parody of “The Fugative,” Richard Kimbell (sorry, can’t remember Mad’s name for him) walks at night past a guy hosing down the street to give it that “just rained” look.
—Good Lord choke! That’s it exactly. Drawn by the great Mort Drucker, whose caricatures were usually dead on target.
On a similar note, back when MAD was a color comic, they did a story where Maggie's usual abusing of Jiggs was drawn in a more realistic
style, with disturbing effect.
And I would NEVER want to own a sidewalk fruitsellers' cart in a city where Clint Eastwood worked as a cop. He must have had a grudge against fruit stands, he seemed to have gone out of his way to drive through them.
Finally, there is a wonderful moment toward the end of a 1940s serial (I don't want to give the title in case any cliffhanger fan haven't seen it) where the villain and hero are exchanging shots in a lair. The evil mastermind stands up in plain sight, says something to the effect that the hero has had six shot shots but HE still has one bullet left-- and the masked man promptly plugs him. "Did it not occur to your Oriental mind," our spy-busting hero gloats, "that I might reload?"I’ve thought about this. If she has a column, she might also do regular other duties, such as reporting. I seem to remember her mentioning that she had to meet her editor and once I think she said she was covering a function. If this is the case, she’s never seen doing anything mundane like waiting for a phone call.
I hate it when characters, in any kind of detective or forensic capacity, are reviewing some crucial piece of film or video, and then they start doing impossible things with it. “Freeze it there! Okay, now enlarge that frame! Now make it less fuzzy. Okay, now sharpen up those details. Can you just take out those shadows? There!” Resulting in a nice clear, pin-sharp, super-duper hi-res portrait-of-the-year image of the suspect. From what was a tiny blurred reflection on the corner of a paperweight.
I know all of these clean-up techniques are possible up to a point, but in movieland they always take it to ridiculous extremes that just don’t make any sense. If the pixels only caught a blurred image, you can’t ‘unblur’ them back to a sharp image - the information just isn’t there in the frame.
This happens in both movies and TV series, even in TV series which usually have higher standards. I like “CSI” very much, but they’ve done this kind of impossible editing at least twice in the series.
I also hate it when ‘angry’ characters approach some table or desk and sweep everything off it on to the floor with one dramatic sideways sweep of the arm. I’ve seen some angry people in my time. I’ve never seen anyone do this, and if in fact nobody ever has done it in real life I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. Yet it’s a very well-established movie cliche, and I just hate the sheer wastefulness of it.
Another pet peeve (I’ve got hundreds, but I’ll spare you) is actors supposedly playing musical instruments that they can’t play in real life, who can’t make arm/hand gestures even remotely close to accurate. This includes all those ‘guitar’ players whose right hand just goes up and down in a strict 1-2 strum pattern, often bearing no relation to the beat whatsoever, and whose left hand never moves at all. This often happens with highly-paid (and supposedly talented) actors, on big-budget movies. You would think they could get someone in for half a day to just say ‘Do this with this hand, and this with the other hand, and it will sort of look okay’.