… or even worse, somebody will get a phone call from somebody saying “Turn on channel 12!” because there’s something important on the news, and they go to the TV and turn it on to the beginning of the story even though it has to have been at least 30 seconds since the person who called the hero saw the story start.
That’d be Jim Rockford. Sort of a trademark move.
People never smoke a whole cigarette in the movies. It irks me when a character lights one up, takes two puffs, then throws it down or puts in a glass of liquid. *Especially * if that character just bummed it off someone.
On a related notes, in YA literature, if the protagonist is a girl and she mentions needing to go to the bathroom, you can be sure she’s about to discover she started her first period. Otherwise characters never go to the bathroom at all.
Coffee. Hot coffee lava is poured into the star’s cup and is immediately gulped. I’d have blisters on my tongue if I did that.
Also, no one ever fills coffee cups. They add *some * coffee but never enough to fill the cup. Gilmore Girls is notorious for this.
I thought it was a major breakthrough in cinematic realism when Michelle Pfeiffer was playing solitaire on the computer in “What Lies Beneath.” She couldn’t sleep or something.
Whenever a woman is getting ready to go out for the evening in a movie, she always puts on blush with a giant makeup artist-y brush, and she’ll usually finish up by putting the blush somewhere it doesn’t go like her chin or her nose or something. Just a little tap-tap of imaginary blush on the nose for that finishing touch. Or she puts on lipstick or mascara, but you will never see her trying to conceal her under-eye bags with concealer or putting on some foundation and blending along the jawline.
Also, in the middle of the night when a female wakes up she’ll have makeup on most of the time. In the morning she won’t have one false eyelash hanging off her bangs or anything, and her gloss will still be on.
It’s also very common for someone with a full face of makeup to start splashing water all over her face in a public washroom any time anything emotionally distressing happens. Then she will stare at her wet face in the mirror and sigh, reach for a paper towel to dry off and then someone will start talking to her while she’s holding the paper towel. I don’t know why that’s such a common scene but it drives me nuts because the character is always wearing makeup and in real life, unless you’re going to go wash it off, you can’t just start throwing water at your face and rubbing it with a brown industrial paper towel any time you get bad news. It’ll go all over the place.
I could have sworn he was eating something in one hand, and peeing with the other. It’s a very quick shot. I’ll have to go back and check it out.
You rarely see characters worrying about birth control when they have sex in movies. Very rarely is a condom mentioned, or we see someone take her birth control pill for the day.
Contact lenses are another thing we rarely see. Frequently we see characters wearing glasses randomly in movies, but then without glasses in other scenes. Are we to assume they’re all farsighted and only need the glasses for reading?
Lucky enough not to be menstruating? You almost make it sound like having a period is the norm, and there’s but a brief window when you’re not that you can have clean, blood-free sex. The average woman is menstruating less than 1/4 of the month, that leaves 3/4 to not be menstruating. And a little rinse? What for? DO most women “rinse out” down there before sex? 
None of the ones I have ever been with ever did anything of the sort before sex.
Actually, I do recall one movie where the lead female character is having her period and the male seducer can’t…well…seduce. Showgirls.
The thing is, though, do you really want to see people in movies and TV do half of these things? There is really no reason to have someone randomly go to the bathroom, or sneeze, or be having their period. Agreed, though, that somes things should be “put in” the movie, like saying goodbye after a phone call, or closing doors, but most of these things are neccesary and if they actually DID happen, might be distracting and possibly confuse the audience.
“Why did he sneeze? Is that important? Will we find out he’s sick later on?”
Survival movies are movies where people are in the woods or on a desert island or on a snowy mountain peak with no bathroom for days and days.
Unless it’s a comedy, you’ll never see anyone forget something important. In thrillers, people always call up the hero and give him some ridiculously complex instructions or phone numbers and you never see them jotting them down.
If I were the hero, I’d be halfway there and be wondering “Was that 514 Oak Terrace or 451 Elm? And was the password ‘The Dove flies East from Vladisvostok’ or ‘The Hawk flies West’?” I’m pretty sure the bad guys would be taking over the world while I was still looking up addresses in Mapquest.
I was surprised at seeing a notable exception to this in Sea of Love - Al Pacino’s character is a detective investigating murders of men who answer dating ads, and he gets involved with a woman (Ellen Barkin) who’s a suspect. They get hot-n-heavy, then Barkin’s character goes into the bathroom and is in there for a while. IIRC, he starts suspecting she’s getting a gun ready or something, when in reality she was putting in her diaphragm. (It’s been well over a decade since I saw the film, I might be a bit off on the details.) That’s kind of for plot development, mind you - intended to heighten the suspense - but it was a good use of that detail.
People often get staggering drunk on one or two beers.
A corollary to this is that someone can chug copious amounts of hard liquor with showing no ill effects at all. I’m thinking particularly of Bogart’s Philip Marlow, when it was manly to be able to hold your liquor.
Man, even in my knee-walking, snot-slinging alcoholic days when I had great tolerance to alchohol, that much alcohol would have had me passed out, throwing up, or both.
I just watched “House of Sand and Fog” this weekend, and in the scene where Jennifer Connelly’s character is talking to her brother on a payphone, I believe she says “goodbye”, although he has already hung up on her at that point.
Poor people. You rarely see anyone in films who is poor. The bulk of folks are either middle class or upper class.
You don’t even have to go that far. What about when they’re being chased by the bad guys all day, and they’re filthy and sweaty (Terminator)? Or when the guy’s being held captive and the girl visits him and they kiss (Braveheart; Gladiator)? All I can think about in those scenes is, can you imagine what his breath smells like? :eek:
The one that bugs me is, PEOPLE DON’T FINISH THEIR DAMN DRINKS. They go to a bar, order a beer, take one sip, pay the bartender (sometimes), AND THEN THEY JUST TAKE OFF!!!
And I have seen men shave in movies, but I have never seen a man rinse his face after shaving.
I do remember seeing something that you never see. It wasn’t in a movie, it was on the old Batman t.v. show. I remember seeing it, but I don’t remember which episode, and I’ve never seen it since. Batman says something, Robin says, “What?”, and Batman repeats what he said, verbatim. It had absolutely nothing to do with the plot; it was a goofy thing they did just to be strange.
Or how about when someone clicks on a mouse? The click can be heard five miles away. And it’s always slow. Nobody ever double clicks on a mouse, it’s always CLICK…CLICK.
Stuff you never see…
Characters complaining about someone else’s cigarette smoke.
Or suggesting that a smoker might want to think about quitting.
Actually, it’s part of the plot in Dead Again.
[robotic voice]Can I have a cigarette? Can I have a cigarette?[/rv]