nitpick with great respect, I assure you.
“That’s a Smith and Wesson, professor, and you’ve had your six.”
I believe that what you say is not contradictory to what I said. In other words, it is showing a man who by all rights should be leading a productive life, is, instead, sort of in slacker mode. Showing that he has the traits of a responsible member of society underlines the fact that he is in a position (lost his job/playing in the minors) that doesn’t match.
Anyway, I’ll have to say that I am overall pretty disappointed in the direction that this thread took. I really was looking for cliches that movies use to communicate information: Movie shows you X; therefore, you know Y. In other words, I’m looking for a series of sort of “go to” images that (lazy, perhaps) film directors have available to them when they want to get some kind of idea across to the audience.
Most of the resopnses here were of the kind – “This is what always happens in the movies, when it isn’t necessarily so in real life” – a rather uninteresting series of observations to my mind.
I suppose I can hope that the resurrection of this thread might get me more of what I was looking for.