There was a Michael J. Fox movie, “Life with Mikey” where he played a former child star who became a manager. The plot revolved around him finding a great kid and trying to get her signed with top agencies and then get work. It was set in New York.
It was extremely accurate, given the constraints of the plot. I knew (and had been to) the real life versions of some of the agencies in the movie. Having been through that scene with my daughter, I loved the movie.
It was not a success.
Real show business is boring as hell. The writers who get it wrong know what they are doing.
An important announcement crackles over the loudspeaker in a military camp, a prison yard, or some other such location. Everyone stops what they are doing and looks up at the loudspeaker.
The one time I experienced multiple simultaneous lightning and thunder was such a terrifying experience I hope it never happens again. That twenty minutes probably took five years off my life.
The Thousand Activities in a Day. Ferris Bueller is a good example of this.
Characters, especially when on vacation, wake up without alarms, take their time getting fully dressed and showered, eat a sumptuous breakfast, complete with the pitcher of orange juice.
Then about three to four different activities in different places happen before lunch. Then a nice lunch.
Then four to five more things happen in the afternoon usually including a hilarious swimming accident which requires a quick trip to the doctor.
Then a late evening dinner with more hijinks afterwards and late into the night. Everyone goes home and we rinse and repeat for the next day.
Back in about 1971 my family was at the summer house and it was late evening when a storm rolled in, and my brother and I were watching the lightening over the lake when it decided to turn a tree about 10 feet away into smoking toothpicks. Probably the loudest thing outside of an actual bomb going off that any person would be exposed to.
Of course, the actors who play historical figures are always much more attractive than the original. Once of the biggest discrepancies in appearance between the original character and the actors who played him was Billy the Kid, who has been played by Roy Rogers, Paul Newman, Kris Kristofferson, Emilio Estevez, and Val Kilmer.
Probably the most accurate portrayal was in Dirty Little Billy when he was played by Michael J. Pollard.
More a technique than a trope, still bugs the fuck out of me:
Certain reaction shots in TV/movies. Here’s two you’ve seen:
Capt. Kirk: I am the Kirk, the creator?
Nomad: You are the creator.
Capt. Kirk: You’re wrong! (Quick cut to NOMAD, who is apparently recoiling in terror and confusion, his eyes bugging out wildly at his glaring error.)
:smack:YARGGGGH!:smack:
The Emperor is shooting lightning bolts from his fingers at Luke, slowly BBQ-ing him. TWO reaction shots from Darth Vader’s expression-filled mask before Vader tosses the Emperor into the abyss. (The Emperor can’t use the Force to levitate himself out of danger?)
We all know that when the hero has ten seconds to defuse a bomb and isn’t standing right next to it, up to five minutes of activity can be crammed in before the clock reaches one.
That’s similarly true for scenes in which a hero has to save another member of the team from certain death.
There’s nothing to compare to the last episode of Lost In Space. The Robinson family land on a junkyard planet that attracts scrap from all over the universe. (Stolen down to the last detail in Thor: Ragnarok.) Robot is on a conveyor belt to be melted down for scrap. He is just about to enter at the commercial break. He’s got five seconds, tops.
Billy walks back to the camp. The junkman has stolen their spaceship but Billy wants to talk him out of it. So he takes the space pod and flies up to the ship in space, which is moving away from the planet at high speed. Billy makes a case for love, taking a couple of minutes of screen time. He wins. The ship flies back to the planet. When it arrives there’s a touching scene. Then they remember the robot. They go over to the conveyor belt. This has taken five minutes of air time. It’s likely to be at minimum hours of real time, even with their magic spaceships.
The base of the robot is still moving, just now fully engulfed.
Yeah, I know, the show spoofed the early movie serials, which cheated like this all the time. All that means is that the trope is over 100 years old and stinks like a dead fish.
^ A slight twist on that (courtesy of Harlan Ellison):
Jack the Ripper has just dispatched a strumpet when another street-walker gasps at his handiwork from across the street and turns to run for her life. There’s a quick succession of shots of her running followed by JTR casually walking after her. After 2 minutes of this, she should be half a mile away, when she turns a corner and runs smack dab into Jack.
I’m truly sorry you have that episode of LiS lodged in your brain. “We reach.”
I started making a habit of holding my breath the whole time the character does. If I can’t make it just sitting there, I know they can’t make it swimming.
I sometimes count the number of seconds between the lightning and thunder so I’ll know how far away it was. It’s five seconds per mile. Just the other day I counted up to 2, and I remember one time it was less than 1. Distant thunder has a rolling, echoing feel to it. Nearby thunder doesn’t.
There was a bomb-defusing scene in a movie called Juggernaut that really bothered me, although it’s hardly a trope. An extortionist has planted multiple bombs on an ocean liner, and a team of experts are trying to defuse them. The bombs are identical, and the head defuser guy is working on one bomb and telling his teammates what he’s about to do. That way, if his bomb goes off, they know not to do that with their bombs. It gets down to the “cut the red wire or the blue wire” bit. He tells everyone he’s about to cut the blue wire, but he trusts his gut, changes his mind and cuts the red. It works, of course.
But think about it. That system only works if you tell everyone what you’re actually going to do. If he’d been wrong, all the other guys working on their bombs would have blown themselves up, too. If I’d been on his team I have resigned and beat the hell out of him, not necessarily in that order.
I handle the time problem by assuming that, as the camera cuts from one place to another, we’re seeing things that happened at the same time. There’s an underwater scene near the end of The Poseidon Adventure; Gene Hackman gets stuck and Shelley Winters has to dive in and rescue him. We see the two of them swimming, and we see the remaining characters talking and wondering what’s going on. I just figure those things are happening together, but the only other way to show it would be to split the screen. That means the time for us is going to be longer than it really is, if we have to experience the same moments twice in different POVs.
Can’t remember if I held my breath along with Hackman or not, but I have done that sometimes.
That’s always part of any peril situation - what events are in parallel with which events? We’re seeing different points of view. That’s why we see an explosion blow up 40 times from one charge. We get to see it from afar, from close up, from the left, from the top, from the right, from inside, from the building across the street, from the helicopter a character is in, etc.
What I remember from The Poseidon Adventure is that Shelly Winters’ character had been a swimming champion in her youth. Of course the adult in me says wait a minute, just because she could swim a mile underwater when she was 18 doesn’t mean she can still do it at 50, or however old and out of shape she was.
This is particularly egregious when characters who used to be fat are shown in flashbacks.
Fat Schmidt on New Girl was a hapless oaf before he got fit and, therefore, cool.
Even worse, Fat Monica on Friends only stopped stuffing her face to complain about light mayonnaise and to freak out because she thought somebody sat on her last Kit Kat. Really hilarious for those who struggle with weight issues.
Mispronunciations. The character on 21 Jump Street who proclaimed "I grew up in mun-au-chee, New Jersey. Well, if you grew up there, or if someone had taken 30 seconds to call the borough hall, you would know Moonachie, NJ is pronounced MOON-au-kee.