Here are a few of my movie peeves which y’all have graciously reminded me of in this thread:
When the soundtrack gets so loud that you can’t hear the dialogue. A total distraction, obviously. Kenneth Branagh is notorious for this. In Hamlet, for example, I could barely make out what the ghost and Hamlet were saying in their dramatic first meeting – not a good strategy to drown out the dialogue in a story where the language is antiquated and the audience is already probably struggling to understand what’s being said.
The not saying goodbye on the phone – or not giving the person on the other end of the line enough time to say what it is they’re probably saying – is a problem for me. We have a training video at work that I have to watch monthly for a course I teach. The acting is awful, granted, but the scene where the phone rings, the boss picks up without saying a word, listens for a few seconds, nods, and then puts the receiver back down without ever acknowledging the person on the other end of the line just drives me nuts. I mean COME ON, PEOPLE! I can live with a half-assed effort for this kind of production, but a no-assed effort?!?
I’m another one who gets very annoyed that every time someone gets in front of a computer, they immediately begin clacking away on the keyboard and never, ever mouse around. Who does this? I recognize that this has become a standard film convention to indicate that the computer user is furiously working at their machine, but we’re a generation into computers with mice – maybe it’s time to revise the convention.
Cinematography can often take me right out of the movie. The current love of shaky cam – for that *cinema verite *feel – just pisses me off. My eyes don’t jiggle when I’m running around, so why the hell should the camera? I recall that there is one scene in Carlito’s Way – ONE SCENE – that was shot in steady cam, while the rest was shot normally. Obviously it was done that way for a reason, but I then spent the next ten minutes deconstructing the filming technique in my head instead of just enjoying the movie which ruined the show for me.
Product placement can be a serious distraction. I’ll jump onto the hating on Goldeneye bandwagon and say that the BMW in that movie was 1000% superfluous. I mean, we get a detailed description of all the car’s gadgets when Bond gets it, which is a clear Bond movie signal that a chase scene is imminent and it will require all the gadgets to be used. And then… nothing. Bond drives around the countryside in his spiffy new Beemer, then hands it over to what’s his name, the CIA guy, and we never see the car again. WTF was that, aside from an unusually shameless plug for the car? Now, admittedly, that movie lost me before the opening credits, but that was just one more straw on that camel’s broken back.
As for nudity, hey, I’m all for gratuitous nudity. When I get pulled out of the movie is when necessary nudity gets fudged, as with the previously noted strippers at work but not getting naked, or Katherine Heigl doing several nasty sex scenes with her undies on or the sheet over the woman’s chest but not the man’s. But the worst one for me was in Beowulf, where our hero decides to fight Grendel in the nude (kinky!), but then the film makers go to heroic lengths to hide Beowulf’s weiner behind carefully placed furniture, candelabras, etc. It turned what shoud have been a big, dramatic scene into a complete farce. All I could think of for the entire scene was the “Son of the Invisible Man” scene from Amazon Women On The Moon. Not exactly the mood I think they were aiming for. I mean, if you’re gonna have your hero strip down completely and parade around naked for the next 15 minutes, then fucking have him naked! Don’t then turn around and obsess over hiding his shame. That’s just stupid. If you’re so afraid of having a penis on screen, then have him in a loincloth or something.
I’m sure I’ll think of more later, but these are a few biggies for me.
