# Things in movies that really bug you ... **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 16, 2000, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466 "2000-11-16T16:00:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 11
**Author:** ![No\_Bones](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ba8739/32.png) [@No\_Bones](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/No_Bones)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2000, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/201 "2000-12-22T20:44:10Z")
The worst thing is that every car accident ends up in a huge pretty fireball. And every fireball in a building has time to chase people down a few corridors and up the stairs to the helicopter on the roof. ---
**Author:** ![B\_P](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/fbc32d/32.png) [@B\_P](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/B_P)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2000, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/202 "2000-12-22T21:14:46Z")
I’m way behind on this thread, but I had to jump in before I forget what I wanted to add (I apologize if these things have already been covered)… I HATE, HATE, HATE it in those teenage movies when the supposed “ugly” person is really a model in real life. PU-LEEZE! So we, the brain-dead audience, must suspend all disbelief and just go along with the fact that this amazing-looking teenager is really an ugly outcast who just can’t seem to get the girl of his dreams. Then we’re all supposed to act all happy and surprised at the end of the movie when the girl finally _realizes_ that he really is a great guy after all. Putting glasses, messing up his hair and putting bad clothes on a model _still_ makes him a model. Nineiron also brought up some “things in Television sit-coms that are bad.” I hate it when “generic TV family” comes home from _anywhere_ and apparently, have not spoken or talked to each other at all in the car on the ride home, because as soon as they walk through the front door, _that’s_ when they decide to talk to each other. I guess all conversations in transit do not exist in televisionland. ---
**Author:** ![caircair](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/91b2a8/32.png) [@caircair](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/caircair)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2000, 9:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/203 "2000-12-22T21:27:24Z")
And re: the computer typing complaint, same goes for old movies where some obvious non-musician is supposed to be playing the piano. They don’t show the hands, but you can tell from the arm movements that they are NOT playing the music – they don’t even know WHAT they’re doing! ---
**Author:** ![you\_da\_man](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/ac8455/32.png) [@you\_da\_man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/you_da_man)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2000, 11:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/204 "2000-12-22T23:39:15Z")
I hate to see “product placements”, where a building they keep entering and leaving has a Levi’s billboard. ---
**Author:** ![toonerama](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecae2f/32.png) [@toonerama](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/toonerama)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2000, 4:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/205 "2000-12-23T04:09:39Z")
The Philadelphia Story … Hepburn, Grant, Stewart et al. It’s the wedding day and at the last moment, the groom is rejected in favour of another man. They decide to go ahead with the wedding, but with the other man. Everything goes off beautifully. Well, hang on a moment, wouldn’t the chapel have been half full with all the rejected man’s family?? Apparently, it didn’t matter. Great movie all the same 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![TroubleAgain](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e480ec/32.png) [@TroubleAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TroubleAgain)\ **Post date:** [December 23, 2000, 8:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/206 "2000-12-23T08:41:36Z")
Okay, to avoid a spoiler, I’ll say that i just saw a movie where an obvious soon-to-be victim dripped a liquid into the top of her computer monitor, which instantly exploded, piercing her jugular with a shard of glass from the screen…OOOOOOkay…I’ve yet to lose one of my users that way, no matter how many of them pour liquid in the monitor. The monitors in MY world just go pzzztt–sputter----smoke…dead. ---
**Author:** ![ianzin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/ed655f/32.png) [@ianzin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ianzin)\ **Post date:** [December 26, 2000, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/207 "2000-12-26T05:04:00Z")
Excellent thread. A great list of movie cliches is here: [http://www.moviecliches.com/index.html](http://www.moviecliches.com/index.html) Regarding things that annoy, as opposed to just being a cliche, I’d offer three. I hate it when a whole rack of bad guys, armed with serious kick-ass automatics, can’t hit the good guy because he uses the brilliant evasive technique of _running a little quickly and crouching down a bit_. Could the writers either not equip the baddies so well, or make the hero do more to earn his escape? It’s very annoying when angry characters reach out just to _sweep every object off a nearby table top or counter._ Does anyone ever really do this? And what’s the point, even dramatically? But the most annoying thing of all is actors pretending to play **musical instruments** that they can’t play. It’s really not that hard to at least strum the damn guitar approximately in time to the chords we hear, or move one’s hands over the piano keyboard in approximately the right way. You’d think if someone was worth several million dollars per appearance, they could at least muster the motor skills necessary to make it look vaguely real. But oh no, it’s too much trouble. Time after time, we see ‘guitarists’ who - intriguingly - _don’t need to move their left hand at all_! And ‘pianists’ who could be either (a) knitting a sweater or (b) in a coma for all the relevance their hands have to the music. It’s very refreshing when some films get it right, such as ‘That Thing You Do’ where the actors either actually played the song or at least knew exactly how to do so. ---
**Author:** ![Kaitlyn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/73ab20/32.png) [@Kaitlyn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kaitlyn)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2001, 10:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/208 "2001-05-26T10:11:20Z")
Though I do agree with much of what has been written here, I did want to comment on a few things. > [@](#): > > Nowadays, scientists are at least acknowledged as being more specialized, but they don’t seem to ever know anything outside of their particular fields; witness the poor, dumb paleontologists in Jurassic Park, who are so utterly clueless about Chaos Theory (and, who, until metting up with Mr. Malcolm, had never even heard of it!). > Perhaps even worse is the poor layperson, who is assumed to be completely ignorant about anything scientific (and thank goodness there just happens to be a scientist around to explain what’s going on!) - witness Tommy Lee Jones’ character in Volcano, who doesn’t even know what ‘magma’ is!! Witness also the crowd of ‘students’ working with Grant at the beginning of Jurassic Park, who laugh when he explains the whole dinosaur-bird relationship. In the real world, any students on such a dig would be well aware of such ‘fantastic’ ideas (and would probably have been exiled into the desert if they found such an idea ‘new’ or ‘unheard of!’). In such scenes as you describe, the purpose is to explain things to the audience, and the on-screen character serves as a surrogate for the audience. When clumisly done, it can be really annoying. > [@](#): > > 1. Text is often 74 point font, so that the audience can read it. > 2. Characters read aloud what they are typing. I don’t know anyone who does that in real life. The director needs some way to communicate to the audience what the person at the computer/typwriter is typing/reading, and these have become the common way to show it. It has taken the place of the voice-over as a character writes a letter. > [@](#): > > Pocahontas: > Also i am pretty sure that the tribe/clan that pocahontas was a member of shaved their heads, so she should’ve been bald too. And FPK, i think you’re right it was a different john, i’ve seen paintings of Pocahontas in textbooks and she looks nothing like the Disney interpratation (sp?) And Pocahontas seldom sang duets with her cartoon boyfriend to fully orchestrated music. > [@](#): > > 1 - Say lines right out of a high school history book (example The Patriot, when Mel Gibson says “Well, I’m against Taxation Without Representation, but …”) Well, in this case, it is entirely reasonable to have the character saying this. It _was_ one of the rallying cries of the American Revolution. > [@](#): > > - The entire city breaking out into simultaneous song and dance thing kind of puzzled me for a while there, too. Um, that’s how a musical works. This is like complaining about a war movie having battle scenes. > [@](#): > > - Also, a train carrying Uranium, when crashed, will result in a horrific explosion (they made a made-for-TV movie about this. But I don’t remember what it was called, because I didn’t watch it, because of the aforementioned impossibility.) > > KJ, this was Atomic Train (watching unbelievably bad movies is my hobby), and it was even worse than you heard. You see, Uranium (according to the movie) is just a more powerful form of dynamite, and produces a bomb-quality chain reaction simply by being set on fire. At least the makers of this turd had the decency to blow up Denver, rather than having the hero save the day at the last second. Ok, I watched the mini-series, and it was horrible, but not for the reasons stated. It wasn’t a train full of uranium. The train was transporting a decomissioned, decades old, Russian nuclear warhead which is to be dismantled. It is made abundantly clear early on that there is a remote possibility that the fire caused by the train’s derailing could set off the conventional explosives and trigger the warhead, so an agent is sent in to dismantle it on-site. Some idiots in a forest fire fighting helicopter scoop up some water, and dump it on the train, and that (somehow) triggers the bomb. It seemed at least plausible (if not entirely realistic) at the time. > [@](#): > > Any character sucking on a toothpick, or a match, or anything other than a cigarette, that’s no longer politically correct, except for the villain. I remember there was a Sly Stallone movie–I forget the title–and the posters showed him with a matchstick in his mouth. You could tell that the producers wanted a “cool smoker” type of effect, but they obviously weren’t going to use a real cigarette. > > Stupid. Completely stupid. I’ve seen people sucking on toothpicks IRL on many occasions. They are frequently used by people who’ve quit smoking as a kind of pacifier to help satisfy their oral craving. But the match thing seems stupid. The movie was Cobra, and there were many other reasons to dislike it. Die Hard 2: One of the main plot points established early on is that the planes on hold think that they are in contact with ground personnel. They believe that they will be landing soon, and have no idea that they are going to be kept in the air until their fuel runs out until very late in the movie. They don’t divert to alternate airports because they don’t think they need to until it is too late. To add to the list of stupid computer images in movies, the worst I’ve seen is in _Disclosure_. Michael Douglas breaks into Demi Moore’s hotel room to access a multi-million-dollar virtual-reality system with a Roman-gothic museum theme designed to be used as–get this–a database. And in _Blown Away_ a bomb is attached to a computer, and is set to blow up when the person at the computer either stops typing, or the computer runs out of memory (Speed with a computer). A computer graphic is counting down the bytes left until no memory is left, and of course the bomb is disarmed with just a few bytes left. There are so many things wrong with this that I’ll just make one comment. It would take days, at least, to exhaust the memory of even a very basic computer just by typing words in a word processor. Ok, now my pet peeves: 1. Characters played by actors much too young. For example, Nicole Kidman as a Neurologist with her own private practice in _Days of Thunder_, at an age when she would still have been in medical school. 2. Race Cars in movies must at some point be driven off of the track and onto surface streets. 3. Any ending that effectively negates the entire plot of the movie that preceded it: _Other People’s Money_ and _Out of Sight_ are particularly egregious examples of good movies marred by stupid tacked-on endings. 4. It’s apparently ok to murder a bad guy if you say a cool one-liner as you do it (_Lethal Weapon 2_). 5. The good guy fights over whether to kill the bad guy, decides against it, and then the bad guy attacks the good guy, providing the good guy with a self-defense excuse for killing the bad guy. ---
**Author:** ![Nukeman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ce7236/32.png) [@Nukeman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nukeman)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2001, 10:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/209 "2001-05-26T10:32:11Z")
I dont know whether this has been mentioned already but the thing that most pisses me off is the fake movie OS. [Somethingawful.com](http://Somethingawful.com) did a great article on it: [http://www.somethingawful.com/features/samofos/](http://www.somethingawful.com/features/samofos/) The most irritating recent example of this was in ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’ when she is sitting at her computer and an e-mail arrives and completely blanks out the screen flashing ‘YOU HAVE MAIL’ and proceeds to type it across the screen like the guy was typing it right then. RRGH. ---
**Author:** ![Spiny\_Norman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9de0a6/32.png) [@Spiny\_Norman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spiny_Norman)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2001, 11:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/210 "2001-05-26T11:20:46Z")
Baloo: > [@](#): > > Pssst! ChiefScott, ExTank and others. Help me out with examples, huh? My personal pet peeve: Movie characters fire rocket launchers or recoilless weapons without EVER having problems with backblast - i.e., the flame and hot gases coming out of the non-business end of a bazooka, for instance. That isn’t just a moderate “bang”, it kills people. People will fire weapons of this type from inside buildings (suicide by gas pressure), out of moving cars etc. etc. The worst I’ve seen yet was a villain firing a M72 light anti-armour rocket tube out of the side door of a helicopter. (It even reloaded and - judging by the explosions - carried a at least a 10-pound warhead. Not bad for a 5-pound weapon.) Tactics and basic infantry skills are, generally speaking, rotten. I remember watching one of the Rambo flicks where Sly himself, super-soldier extraordinaire, runs along a rocky ridge, _on the very top of it_, perfectly skylining himself for everyone within miles. No soldier with a week of basic training would do that and expect to live. Of course, lots of stupid mistakes are due to the fact that good soldiering make for bad pictures. If a lot of your troops are in clear view to a cameraman, they would be to an enemy as well. Proper use of background, lighting and cover, and avoidance of visible movement have been drilled into infantry for ages. Dispersion, camouflage, humble use of terrain - all of this makes for piss-poor pictures. Then again, it must be annoying to an instructor who rented a bunch of tanks and 500 extras for his movie to be told that realistically, for 95% of the time there would never be more than two tanks and 30 soldiers in sight to any observer, anywhere. S. Norman ---
**Author:** ![Drastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Drastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Drastic)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2001, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/211 "2001-05-26T18:25:29Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Number Six \* > 5. The good guy fights over whether to kill the bad guy, decides against it, and then the bad guy attacks the good guy, providing the good guy with a self-defense excuse for killing the bad guy. Ah, the cheap moral justification. I hate that. If you’re going to kill someone for revenge (or Justice, or whatnot), then suck it up and pull the damn trigger. If you’re not going to, suck it up and don’t. The ending of the first Lethal Weapon was a very egregious example of that, at least number two didn’t–though of course they made the final killing okay by an appropriate one liner. I can also live happily if no movie ever again uses the “It Was Just A Cat, Whew! Arrgh!” audience-jump-tactic. You know the drill; something’s lurking around. Long tense scene of searching for aforementioned lurker. Score is very soft or conspicuously absent. Searching… …searching… …searching… JARRING CHORD! BOXES KNOCKED OVER! Ohh, thank goodness, it was just the cat, who looks quizzically at the freaked character, meows, and wanders off. Character calms, turns, and gets an axe in the head. Which ties into the other observation–if you’re behind someone, intending to kill them, DON’T WAIT FOR THEM TO TURN AROUND FIRST. Just do what you intend to do. ---
**Author:** ![jab1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ee7513/32.png) [@jab1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jab1)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2001, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/212 "2001-05-26T19:14:55Z")
I’m glad you resurrected this thread. It’ll allow us to throw tomatoes at the new dumb flicks coming out this year. F’r instance, the new [_Pearl Harbor_](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=1337056) evidently has a scene showing the Sun rising in the west. ---
**Author:** ![darian00](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dfb087/32.png) [@darian00](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/darian00)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2001, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/213 "2001-05-26T20:00:46Z")
> [@](#): > > \*\*Which ties into the other observation–if you’re behind someone, intending to kill them, DON’T WAIT FOR THEM TO TURN AROUND FIRST. Just do what you intend to do. > \*\* But part of the fun is watching their expression just before their head opens to receive the aforementioned axe… My addition here is the stupid digitized sound effects that the superfly way cool computer programs have whilst doing their unrealistic graphic effects. The Omega Code (I can’t believe I actually watched this movie) in particular was guilty of this. ---
**Author:** ![Tuckerfan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/eada6e/32.png) [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2001, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/214 "2001-05-26T20:38:51Z")
Oooooh, I’ve got LOTS of these, but I’ll only inflict a couple on you! _ **MI:2** _ when Ving is perfectly content to fire a machine gun from the helicopter at people until they put a hole in his jacket, _then_ he grabs the rocket launcher! WTF? Jesus! Have we learned nothing from **James Bond** movies? Hit the bastard with everything you got as soon as you can, so he doesn’t keep bothering you all the damn time! Then there’s the “second grab.” You know, you think you’ve killed the bad guy/gal, only to have him/her come back and make one last attempt. Also crappy editing in _ **MI:2** _, the car blows up, rolls over and _you can seeing the fucking hole where they fired the stub of a telephone pole to make the car flip_! Chrissakes! How can you miss that? Or movies where there’s a plot device simply so they can pad the film out, even though they ran out of ideas hours ago. _ **Armageddon** _ is a perfect example, they run out of ideas, blow something up, that lets them go on for a few more frames, until they have to blow something up again. Or crappy camera tricks that some film school wannabe thinks are cool. Those of you who’ve seen the Stallone version of _ **Get Carter** _ know what I mean. Or movies like _ **Kidnap and Rescue** _ (or whatever that Russell Crowe film was where him and Meg started doing the nasty.) Plot sucked, but damn, the cinematograpy (sp?) looked great, and most of that was done by the second unit crew. Obviously _somebody_in that production had talent, why didn’t anybody else? ---
**Author:** ![jab1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ee7513/32.png) [@jab1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jab1)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2001, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/215 "2001-05-26T21:06:56Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Anake \* > What movie that really gets me is **The Lost World: Jurassic Park**. Malcolm’s girlfriend (Sara?), had a million chances to die. > > \ > > Now poor Eddie, he risks his life once to HELP his friends (can’t say that much for Sara) and he DIES the first chance he gets! I would have wanted him to live and Sara to die. The careful ones always die. This is called “irony.” Screenwriters love irony. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Bad\_Astronomer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f05b48/32.png) [@The\_Bad\_Astronomer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Bad_Astronomer)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2001, 2:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/216 "2001-05-27T02:07:37Z")
> [@](#): > > _Originally posted by Mauve Dog \* > \*\* > Nowadays, scientists are at least acknowledged as being more specialized, but they don’t seem to ever know anything outside of their particular fields; witness the poor, dumb paleontologists in **Jurassic Park** , who are so utterly clueless about Chaos Theory (and, who, until metting up with Mr. Malcolm, had never even heard of it!)._\* They wouldn’t have learned anything from listening to Malcolm anyway. He descirbed chaos theory all wrong. It’s even worse; he attributes the failure of the park to chaos, but really it was Nedry trying to steal the DNA. None of the bad stuff would have happened otherwise. Crichton appears to have an anti-science bent in his writing. That certainly irritates _me_. Gaping plot holes bug me too. Why didn’t they hear the TRex at the end of the movie? They made such a big deal of the ripples in the water earlier! (Of course, that’s because the TRex was added to the finale at the last moment by Spielberg; good idea, but it left a monster (haha! ha!) plot hole.) ---
**Author:** ![pesch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pesch/32/4925_2.png) [@pesch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pesch)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2001, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/217 "2001-05-27T05:15:28Z")
Possible SCHREK spoilers coming ahem . . . Ripping off incredibly impressive scenes from other movies. Once is kinda cute, but I’m really starting to hate them when they’re popping up more and more often. Particularly these: The scene from “Robin Hood” showing the POV from the missile. In Schrek and some other movie (now mercifully forgotten) and, of course, P\*\*\*\* H\*\*\*\*\*, which updated it by using a bomb. The scene from (I’m guessing) Matrix in which character jumps up, freeze frame/rotate image, character kicks out destroying bad guys. In Schrek and I’m sure another movie, now mercifically forgotten. This stop-and-go spastic editing’s become so popular in music videos and commericals that it’s an automatic sign of creative bankruptcy. The couple coming together to kiss in which the camera rotates aroundandaroundandaroundandaround until I wish one of them would break away and puke because they’re dizzy. That was used a long time ago and, again, was pretty neat the first time someone used it. In fact, to high-jack my own thread, there’s a lot of Schrek I didn’t like. Most of it was full of inside pokes at Disney and Michael Eisner, nodding winks at other movies and very few good lines. And do I want to take my son to see a film in which Gingerbread Man is being tortured and yells “Eat me!” at the prince? (So cute to see him stagger out at the end, using a candy cane for a crutch) :rolleyes: Oh yes, one more thing that annoys me: watching a car blow up three times in a row, shot from different angles. OOOOOOHHHHH, big BOOM, WOW! :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2001, 7:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/218 "2001-05-27T07:31:24Z")
First of all, my appologies if I repeat anything. Also, I have been drinking all day and there is nothing on TV except for a Universal Soldier sequal on HBO staring Van Damm. That in and of itself is enough to annoy me. > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by pesch \* > The scene from (I’m guessing) Matrix in which character jumps up, freeze frame/rotate image, character kicks out destroying bad guys. In Schrek and I’m sure another movie, now mercifically forgotten. This stop-and-go spastic editing’s become so popular in music videos and commericals that it’s an automatic sign of creative bankruptcy. My movie annoyances: I am completely sick of the technique used in the Matrix. It basically involves taking dozens of simultaneous pictures using a string of cameras at slightly different angles. The result is that the subject appears to freeze in place while the camera pans and zooms around them. I am also sick of professional wrestlers in movies. It started with Hulk Hogan in Rocky 3 and ended with The Rock in The Mummy Returns. John Woo films. I an only stand so much of: A) Good guy and bad guy shoot at each other at point blank. Whoops! Both are out of bullets!. Clever quip and roll away to reload. B) Good guy and bad guy on opposite sides of a wall. Clever remark then both begin blasting with two pistols. (Neither is hit) C) Jumping in the air on wires, blasting with pistol in each hand. Moving last words. ie “Leave me… save yourselves…ugh”. How about “get…me…fucking…hospital!”? Modern pop songs in period pieces (ie A Knights Tale and Moulon Rouge). Haven’t seen either, but the concept annoys me. Spy movies where a person is must work for a shadowy government organization or die. You can only remake ‘Le Femme Nikita’ so many times. Computer graphics that now make every scene so overwhelming that it borders on the ridiculous. Thats all I got for now. I’m off to bed. ---
**Author:** ![illuminati](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e47774/32.png) [@illuminati](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/illuminati)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2001, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/219 "2001-05-27T16:35:44Z")
I hate the fact that in almost evry big Ameriaca action film the bad guy is always Britsh or Russian. ---
**Author:** ![dodge\_this](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e5b9ba/32.png) [@dodge\_this](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dodge_this)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2001, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466/220 "2001-05-27T16:44:35Z")
I have something else to say about John Woo movies - Please, no more fluttering slow-motion pigeons/doves. No more fluttering slow-motion black trenchcoats. I know it’s a trademark thing, but it’s starting to look a little contrived. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466.md?page=10) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/things-in-movies-that-really-bug-you/41466.md?page=12)