The one that bugs me is the Super-Convenient Newscast:
Random person is hanging out in the living room playing Angry Birds.
Hero, frantic, bursts into the room. “Turn on the TV!!!”
Of course, when the TV comes alive the channel is correct, the volume is correct, and the timing is perfect. It starts exactly here:
“We now go to Tony for this this late-breaking story. Tony?”
“Thanks, Diane. I’m down here on Broadway where it appears a six-storey gelatinous cube is inhaling taxis. Police suggest drivers use alternate routes. Back to you, Diane.”
Just once, I would love to see them start on a shamwow commercial and then fight over whether to scroll up or down to find a news channel…
Anything that smacks of “presentism”–applying standards of the present to the past. If your tale is set in the past, make it historically accurate.
I saw the recent movie of the Australian tour of Driving Miss Daisy, and Boolie Werthan refers to Hoke Coleburn as a “man.” Totally wrong–He would have used the word “boy” for any black guy back then.
Now, now, this is not always so. Sometimes we come on in the last five seconds of a story before it changes to “ours,” and sometimes they stand in shock while the first five seconds of the next story run.
These stories are always, “Trouble continued in the Middle East today…”
The worst offender in my opinion wasn’t a movie but the show I called Doctor Quinn, Politically Correct Woman. So amazing how she acted exactly like she was teleported in from the 1990s in each and every circumstance.
And you would have to pay for them for the next century. Because some idiot watching the show on AntennaTV 65 years from now is going to pick up his phone and dial the number, thinking he (it’s almost always he) is witty.
Additionally, many areas only have one area code. Sure, here in NYC we have to give our area code when giving our number, as we have as many area codes as numbers, but less urban areas can just spit out 7 digits and people know/assume the area code. So when someone sings about ‘867-5309’, every 867-5309 in every area code gets called by fuckwits asking for Jennie. And it never, ever ends. So this isn’t so much a movie issue as a people-are-fucking-idiots issue.
Speaking of area codes. On an episode of Bernie Mac, he gets a phone message from his sister and says “Area code 201. What’s she doing in Atlantic City?”
This exchange:
Person A: “What’s wrong?”
Person B (who is weeping/bleeding copiously or possibly has one eyeball hanging out of his/her face): “Nothing!”
Or this:
Law Enforcement Person A: “Where were *you *last Wednesday night?”
Person B: “Oh, so now you think I killed Lord Twombley in the kitchen with the cheese grater???”
Or this line:
“You did your job. Now let me do mine.”
For certain types of injuries, this is realistic. If you’ve been shot or stabbed and you make it to the hospital alive you’re almost certainly not going to die. The hospital can pump you full of blood to replace what you’ve lost and stabilize the wound, and you’re out of danger. Yeah, you might walk with a limp the rest of your life, or have chronic pain from your perforated shoulder, or be in physical therapy for months to regain partial function in your hand, or roll out of the hospital with a spinal cord injury or horrible amputation. But you’re not going to die, most likely.
The dumb ones are the poisons or viruses that kill you on a timer. He needs the antidote in 43.7 minutes. If he gets it in 43.6 minutes, full recovery in seconds. If he gets it in 43.8 minutes, he’s dead.
Reminds of movies where they are protecting someone. A witness in a high profile murder case, the animated Sleeping Beauty (It was a few minutes to sunset and all they had to do was stay with her!!) and so on. The one rule was THIS PERSON CAN"T BE ALONE. It’s always, “ok you can be alone for just a few minutes during this crucial time that you absolutely shouldn’t be”.
It’s even in movies. R rated ones. “Little Nancy Callahan” is partially or completely nude almost throughout the entire graphic novel. She is a stripper, but is also stripped naked and tortured by an also naked ugly yellow dude, full frontal (son of the big bad).
Jessica Alba remains fully covered in the movie, however. So did ugly yellow dude, but I think that was a plus.
The mirror’s typically removed to get a better, unobstructed view of the actors. It’s one of those little things you never notice until somebody points it out – after which, of course, you notice it every single time!
Naturally, if the rear-view mirror is in place, there will inevitably come a moment where the driver looks in the mirror and says, “Wait…who’s that following us?”
The opposite of this: failure to call for help or administer first aid to persons with serious, but treatable, injuries, preferring rather to pound the ground yelling “NOOOO!!!” and essentially letting them die.
Also: shocking flatlines. It’s very dramatic, but it don’t do shit.
And then there’s scenes where the characters explain what words mean to one another, for the benefit of the audience, when there’s no way in Hell the character doesn’t know exactly what the other is talking about.
Example: I recently watched 47 Ronin and this happened with frequency:
“To restore honor to your family, I shall allow you to commit ‘Seppuku’. Death by your own hand.”
And later: “You are all now ‘Ronin.’ Masterless Samurai.”
I was waiting for: “I accept your surrender. And by ‘surrender’ I am referring to the Hague Conference of 1899, and as such all formal statements of the laws of war and war crimes in the body of secular international law stated therein are apposite.”
…
[li]Can we all sign a petition or something to let Hollywood know that if a character survives a gunshot, he/she was wearing a vest? Seriously, we no longer need the scene of said character pulling apart their shirt to show the vest underneath and the shiny pancaked bullets. For reals. We get it. A simple “I was wearing a vest” is fine.[/list][/li][/QUOTE]
Often they do not just open their shirt to reveal the vest but they actually rip off the vest and throw it down and maybe groan a little because the impact hurt, however, the person that shot them is usually still running around and may try to shoot them again. It’s not like those bullets are slowly going to bore through the vest material and eat through their flesh that requires them to remove the vest after being shot.
Also, isn’t it convenient how people wearing vests often let themselves get shot and the bad guy never chooses to make a head shot or even try for a lower body shot?
Any type of scene where the good guy police types are looking for the bad guy conference. They duck behind trash cans, street corners, etc, trying to remain unobtrusive. Then they find the bad guy conglomerate, all completely out in the open, discussing their bad guy plans with no effort to keep the volume down.
Then one of the good guy greenhorns steps on a twig, accidentally kicks a can, whatever. The bad guy leader says “Bruno, check it out,” a goon takes out his piece and goes searching, and they stay out in the open.
Why, oh why, if you’re plotting major secret criminal schemes, why aren’t you inside behind locked doors?
