It’s a cliche of action movies that all you have to do is sneak up on a guard, give him one good whack on the back of the head, and he’ll silently collapse into unconsciousness, right?
Years back, there was a mediocre, forgettable action movie starring James Brolin (!) called “High Risk.” The one very memorable (and admirably accurate) scene involved Brolin sneaking up, stealthily and quietly, behind a crime lord’s watchman… he takes his handgun, gives the guy the traditional whack on the head…
And the guy yells “OWWWW!” at the top of his lungs! Thinking he just didn’t hit the guy right (“this ALWAYS works in movies!”), Brolin gives him another whack. Out comes another loud “OWWW!”
Not only is the thug NOT knocked unconscious immediately, his pained yelps attract everyone’s attention, and all surprise is quickly lost.
While alot of these examples seems to be simple plot twists rather “breaking the rules” I have to agree with the nomination of Scream, as the charcacters explictly discuss the rules of horror movies and how to apply them to ensure their survival. Scream 2, did the same thing regarding horror sequels. BTW:
the drew berrymore seen in Scream was pretty damn scary, especially her last call to her parents.
Unfaithful - the writers don’t try to rationalize/explain why a happily married woman would have an affair. It’s not like when a male fools around the audience has to be given a reason!
Good flick, too.
I think Donnie Darko breaks a lot of rules. The story is structured much like Memento yet is quite different too. The issues it addresses is staggeringly complex for a movie intended for the mainstream.
[spoiler]…Because in it, not only do the Doctor and his Assistant live, but they “get away,” without “repenting” for their actions! The Doctor himself actually has his own brain transplanted into another body to escape death and capture, and after following a PROPER recuperation regimen, he doesn’t turn into a blood-thirsty monster, completely vindicating his research and discoveries![spoiler]
“Tampered in God’s domain” indeed…Score one of MAD SCIENCE!
I’m not sure whether to applaud it or not, as I had mixed feelings about the film, but a few years ago I rented a French film called Cross My Heart. The plot (which I understand is similar to a couple other books and movies: A child’s (single) mother dies and his class joins him in trying to cover up her death so he will not have to go to the child welfare authorities. It’s basically a comedy with dark aspects but
instead of a sappy happy ending, in the end the kid ends up in a bad orphanage where he has to get a hold of a knife to defend himself. His friends visit him once but it seems pretty clear he will not see them after that. I had really been expecting some relative to come out of the woodwork or something.
There was a film from the 50’s that I liked, Westward the Women about a wagontrain of brides going to California. Back east, when the guy who founded the California settlement they’ll head for speaks to them, he says “By the time we get there, one in three of you will be dead.” And that’s the way it happened. Indian attacks, abandonment by most of their escort, a flash flood. An off screen rape and murder by one of the escorts, who is then shot by the team leader. One of the girls is pregnant already. Several are widows. One widow has a child, a boy of 10 or so. The boy is killed by a backfiring gun, while he tries to show some of the women how to shoot.
This was about as real as it got in those days. Of course Robert Taylor does end up with Denise Darcel, the French girl with a shady past. But when those women finally arrived they looked like hell. But when they’d cleaned up and were standing across from the menthe oldest woman, who spoke for them, stood up for their rights and said “You can look us over but don’t think you’re going to do the choosing!” She went on to explain about the pictures of the men *they’d * picked out, months back.
This was a movie about tough women, and made that long ago too.
In case anybody here hasn’t seen the classic Western Shane:
Early in the movie, Randolph Scott comes to town and faces off with the bad guy, hired killer Jack Palance. The typical audience of the time would be assuming Scott was the hero of the movie; he was much better known at that time than Alan Ladd. So they must have been shocked when Palance blows Scott away, grinning evilly!
See, this kind of bugs me. I think that it’s far too often that a movie or TV show will get praised for being “daring” and “unconventional” when all it’s really doing is trading one cliche for another.
That scene in Deep Blue Sea is a perfect example of this. It’s not imaginative at all; it just says: “It’s a tired cliche when movies do A, so we’ll do B. Hence, shock and edginess.” It’s like taking a true/false test and answering “False” for everything instead of “True.” You have an equal chance of getting it right, but you’re not being any more intelligent. Sure, lots of times in real life, stories end with unhappy endings, and people die unexpectedly, but that doesn’t happen every time.
Back to the OP, the most recent example I can think of is Lilo & Stitch. It was still a happy movie, of course, and was still very sentimental. But it also broke a lot of the standard Disney formula conventions. For one, there really wasn’t a “wise-cracking sidekick;” all the characters needed to be there. And the biggest surprise for me was with the main character Stitch. He wasn’t a misunderstood bad-boy with a heart of gold; he was a genuine bastard for most of the movie.
A Clockwork Orange for using “Pomp and Circumstance” for something other than a graduation. The entire score is great, but that really stuck out for me.
I second that! It’s a fantastic movie. The only recent Disney (non-Pixar) film to rival it is The Emperor’s New Groove, which also doesn’t have any wisecracking sidekicks. It only has five major characters, all of whom are essential to the plot. Furthermore, it breaks some Disney cliches:
The family portrayed has both a mother and a father.
One of the protagonists is, like Stitch, a complete bastard through most of the movie.
It also has characters in the movie point out a plot hole and then decide to ignore it. I laughed my ass off.
I said it before, and I’ll say it again: The Emperor’s New Groove is what we would’ve gotten if Chuck Jones were to do a Disney animated movie.
Oh, one more “broken rule” you missed: Groove features a pregnant mom, and whose pregnancy is not integral to the plot. Heck, I think she might have been the first pregnant human female we’ve seen in any Disney cartoon…
Forgive me of my sins of bumping up an old topic. But I read this one yesterday and couldn’t resist when I saw no mention of two of the greatest movies that fit into this catagory.
The first is the movie Fallen With John Goodman and Denzel Washington. Great movie. Well made.
In the end, the killer wins. Everyone else dies, even the main characters.
And the other movie (which is basically a dark comedy about what one expects from movies) is Very Bad Things
I can’t even begin to use a spoiler to describe the rules and unexpected thing that movie takes. But anyone who has seen it will know what I’m talking about.
the mom has helped uncover the place where Samara’s body is hidden. The body is removed from the well and the audience thinks, “OK, everything’s going to be all right now.” But the little boy says, “You weren’t supposed to help her!”
