Yes, but also please continue to participate in this thread so that I may entertain myself with your postings while putting off doing any actual work this afternoon. I thank you in advance.
The one that bugs me are villains that are disgruntled ex- goodguys, where nobody in their organization has ANY IDEA that fired/disgraced megagenius has been amassing an army/fortune to exact revenge. Then they are shocked/scared when hes back to wreck havoc. If I was a CEO, i’d be like,
“Better contact the.CIA about that scientist we fired last week for making super nanomachine monsters during his lunch breaks and stealing staplers. Just in case he decides to hijack an aircraft carrier or something”
Just about every horror movie has the scene where suspense builds, and builds and then just when you expect it … a cat jumps out, or something equally innocuous. So the audience breathes a sigh of relief, only to be followed in about 2 seconds by the real killer, or whatever! Very clichéd.
[spoiler]The Halloween episode of Community lampshades Ebert’s comments on the trope, with a side scene of a cat jumping across the shot at chest level.
Jeff: Dude, what is UP with that cat?
Troy: Is someone throwing it?
It eventually gets to the point where Jeff is actually more worried about the manic flying cat than he is about the Zombie Apocalypse waiting outside. [/spoiler]
Comedy cliche: An angry character yells at other characters, then storms out of the office, slamming the door behind him. He then comes back in and says "Wait a minute, this is MY office! YOU leave!
Bad guys are hanging out in their lair, watching TV news about themselves. Before the story finishes, the man bad guy tells a henchman to “Turn it off.”
Then there’s the guy who gets a promotion to an executive position that he clearly doesn’t deserve, and gets his own office. He spends the first 10 minutes playing with the automatic pencil sharpener.
Good Guy and Bad Guy fight, trying to kill each other. Good Guy gets Bad Guy right where he wants him, then doesn’t finish him…says “you’re not worth it” and turns his back
a) then Bad Guy makes a move for a weapon, forcing Good Guy to kill him just in the nick of time
or
b) steps overt the many bodies of Bad Guy minions who aparently were worth it.
The Iron Law of Rope Bridges: No rope bridge ever survives until the end of the movie.
The Iron Laws of Swimming Pools:
a. If someone is murdered, and he owns a swimming pool, his body will be found in the water.
b. In a comedy, someone will go into the pool fully clothed.
Here’s one that occurred to me while watching the “Ariel” episode of Firefly recently. I couldn’t find it on tvtropes, but surely it’s there, because I know I’ve seen this kind of thing other places:
Not-terribly-bright or at least not-terribly-sophisticated person prepares him/herself with all the knowledge they might need to answer questions while, say, committing some act of fraud: every minor detail of the lie they need to convince someone of, the backstory of every character involved, the fraudulent documents they need to convince the guards at the gate that they belong inside the secure facility …
only to show up, state their purpose and just be let in without further questioning.
And then you see the over-prepared fraudster nearly burst with all the stuff they have in their head … sometimes (as in the “Ariel” example) they’ll even blurt out at least a little of what they stuffed their head with, just to relieve the pressure.
I don’t know why, but this sauntering toward the camera while a fireball explodes behind him just makes me want to scream and throw things.
And it’s always a fireball. It doesn’t matter what’s blowing up, or the source of the ignition, or the type of explosives used, it’s always a big ol’ gasoline fireball.
