The dog never dies, unless the movie is solely about the dog dying. Children almost never die, unless their purpose is to create a reason for the hero to go on a streak of vengeance.
Either that or a blow to the head will instantly kill someone, usually unintentionally.
Ranchoth - What are you talking about? Shots to the head ALWAYS cause a dramatic exit wound. They just don’t create a bullet hole in anything after passing through the head.
Also, IIRC from my high school, it isn’t so easy to segregate people into stupid characteritures. 4 hot chicks walking around acting like bitches to everyone would probablty be told to fuck themselves. The captain of our football team was big, goofy and pimply faced but also a pretty good guy who dated oddball girls. He wasn’t some arian Nazi.
Also the high school outcast usually has some disfigurement like short or brunette hair, glasses, or intelligence greater than that of a turnip.
The proper way to hold a gun is sideways and the proper way to hold a knife is with a reverse grip (maybe that’s correct for all I know)
Construction equipment is never locked, allowing anyone to commandeer a buldozer or drop a container on someone’s head (containers are often stored 50 above the loading dock).
There are a lot of 26 year old partners or VPs in companies (not counting dot-coms) (hmmm - graduate college at 22, Bschool or law school at 24, partner in 2-3 years.)
There is a big clock in the mission control style IT department full of strapping programmers counting down to 12:00am 01/01/2000.
No one ever gets tired in a swordfight. (Why couldn’t Aragorn kill the entire army at Helm’s Deep by himself?)
Police officers can go right back to work after shooting someone. (In reality, the cop is placed on administrative leave while the shooting is investigated.)
Cops can beat up suspects, and everyone will look the other way. (In reality, this would get the cop suspended or fired, plus the suspect would sue the city for police brutality and/or civil rights violations.)
Heroes maintain their exceptional muscular development and high-level combat skills even when they spend years in retirement, drink themselves half to death, become junkies, or are subjected to long periods of imprisonment or deprivation.
No matter how primitive or savage the culture, or how awful their living conditions, there’s always at least one woman in the tribe who has perfect teeth, no leg hair, no armpit hair, perfect skin, manicured fingernails, has never had a child even though she’s well into her child-bearing years, and just happens to look like the currently fashionable standard for the hero’s culture.
Hospitals have no nurses or only those wearing starched whites with a “diaper” cap.
No 6 hour wait in the ER. No reams of paperwork. That is, of course, unless you’re the husband and your wife just arrived 5 minutes after starting labor, she already in the delivery room.
Babies are born wrapped up.
There are no ICUs. Anyone going to the hospital, no matter what the problem, goes directly to a private room (unless its a comedy) and is sleeping comfortably when everyone remotely interested shows up.
There is no road kill.
Medieval peasants had easy access to dentists and orthodontists. They brushed their teeth three times a day and never suffered the effects of scurvy on their teeth.
If there is a kid in a school play, all the kids have random, elaborate foam costumes. The storyline of the play seems to be nonexistant, since one kid is a tooth and another is a big wedge of cheese and they’re both pinwheeling around the stage. If it’s a Christmas pagent, then they have live sheep and camels on stage and one kid flying around on wires as an angel.
If you go grocery shopping, you must buy a big French bread and some carrots with the greens still attached. Also, if you buy oranges, you’re bound to drop the bag and have them roll away.
And no matter what culture she grew up in since birth, she’s very likely to have an extraordinarily Western mindset about love, marriage, etc. (The Princess Jasmine Principle.)
She also either speaks English perfectly or learns it in such a short period of time that the language barrier is rendered unimportant. This is, of course unless it’s a comedy playing on the “no speak english” joke of the day.
Happens in real life, too. Haven’t you ever seen pix of Yasser Arafat? (How does he do it?)
Here’s a movie un-truism: Movie gunshots sound a lot louder, sharper and cooler than real-life gunshots. Just compare the gunfights in any action flick with TV news footage of real-life gun battles, as in the Iraq war. Real-life automatic weapons sound like . . . like sewing machines that really like to spit.
In a science-fiction combat movie such as Star Wars, fighter craft and their weapons make big, audible noises even when they’re flying through a vacuum.
In slasher films, teenagers who have sex will shortly be murdered. In real life, teenagers who have sex might make all kinds of trouble for themselves but rarely attract the attention of serial killers. But this is not really an “un-truism,” more an artistic convention of the genre, which hardly pretends to imitate life at all. In real life, serial killers are not terribly interesting, anyway – they’re a bunch of sorry psychotic losers, nothing like Freddy or Jason or Leatherface. And they never go on a rampage that leaves 10 or so horny teens dead in a single night – they kill one or two victims a week or even one every few months, spread out over a period that might last years, as in the case of the Green Lake killer. (Mass murderers – the kind who might shoot up a schoolyard during recess, or climb up a water tower with a sniper rifle during rush hour – are a different breed.)
Not exactly true. Gunfire sounds much different caught on TV camera mic’s than it does in person, and the movies are trying to capture the in-person effect. When you hear automatic weapons fire up close in person, it resonates MUCH more than it does in news footage. Por ejemplo, the movies Blackhawk Down and Heat REALLY get automatic weapons fire sounds right, particularly Heat.
Not doubting you, *Rik, but movie handguns are much louder than their real-life counterparts. Real-life pistol shots are quite often mistaken for firecrackers, whereas a movie pistol could only be mistaken for a Civil War cannon.