More stuff that begs some major eye-rolling from me…
A hero doesn’t blink as he’s pummelled in a fight. Yet he winces the minute his girlfriend dabs one of his bruises with a teacloth.
In bed, the blanket will be neatly folded in a diagonal manner so as to cover the woman’s breasts and the man’s waist.
Lesbians have long fingernails.
If a lesbian or gay couple is seen having a happy life, one of them will, by the movie’s end, be struck by some terminal illness, if not death.
In the morning after scene, the woman will have full make-up on. The man or woman will wake up alone to find their partner either in the kitchen making breakfast, or on the balcony/beach/near a window, staring wistfully into empty air.
What about this morning after bit? The woman is obviously naked under the sheets, but the man gets up and you see he’s wearing underwear! Uh, why did they do the nasty with him wearing it? And if you’ve just boinked someone, why do you bother covering up? I mean, after all, if it was really good (which it was, right? People never have lousy sex in the movies), then the two of you have already seen each other’s goody bits, so why the modesty now?
That happens in Bridget Jones. Renee Zellwenger’s rolls away from Hugh Grant just after doing it and she still has on her very tight cleavage-inducing bra. Not that I had any real desire to see her ta-tas, but it looked pretty strange.
I saw The Mummy Returns yesterday and it was okay (just like the first one), and it had a few parts that bugged me:
Brendan Fraser’s character hasn’t aged since the opening battle sequence in The Mummy, even though that battle took place 16 years before TMR.
The boy is Fraser’s son, but he has an English accent. Granted, the kid grew up in London, but he should have acquired some American inflections from Dad.
How did they get that secret army out there in the middle of the desert so quickly?
One character had a falcon trained to deliver messages. Every time the bird returned, he was in a different location. How did the bird find him? When pigeons were used like this, it was a one-way trip, from the field to the pigeons’ roost, which they could find because it was always in the same spot.
A jet-propelled dirigible. Stop and think about that one. It was at that point I gave up any attempt to take the movie seriously and stuck it out only to see if it got any more ludicrous.
The thing I hate most about movies (and I hate a lot of things about movies) is when they suddenly play some inspirational music really loud at a point when we are supposed to either cry, cheer, or get all warm and happy. To top it off, all the characters look at each other and express the emotion we are supposed to experience, too.
I don’t like the idea that some asshole in hollywood think I can be manipulated that easily. It is even more insulting that they don’t think we’ll know how to feel, so they make the actors show us how to “smile for mommy.”
I am NOT your dog, bucko. You’re going to have to write an eloquent story in order to make me cry/smile/get warm fuzzy feeling.
Here’s a vote for (against?) those dots that appear in the upper right hand corner to designate reel changes (cigarette burns according to Tyler Durden). You’d think that after 100 years of movie making they have something better. I look forward to the next Star Wars movie and/or seeing a pure digital movie to see if they are still there. I also HATE when a “remasterd” tape still has them. Why leave them in if a VCR tape is never switched? Arrrgh!!!
Ah, but it’s worse than that. The cat is always in the cupboard, you see- in fact, it’s always in the upper cupboard, where it could never actually reach had a grip not shoved it in there.
When talking on the telephone, no one ever says goodbye. Ever. Only once, out of pure anger and uncontrollable fury, have I ever hung up on someone without saying goodbye. In fact, actually hanging up on the telephone is quite the opposite from its movie counterpart:
Reality Me: Uh-huh. Oh, yeah. Sure. I’ll be there. Okay. See ya then. Right. Third house on the left. Got it. Love you. 'Bye.
Versus
Movie Me: Sure, be there at eight.
Sometimes I wish things really were more like the movies.
I hate it when programers are portrayed as always working in really dark, secluded rooms. This is especially true if the programmer works for the government.
Oh, and I just remembered another annoying thing about The Mummy Returns: Early in the movie, we learn that O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) has a weird tattoo on his right arm and that it’s been there since he was a child.
So how come he didn’t have it in the FIRST movie?! :mad:
16 years? I must have gone to the bathroom when they mentioned the time difference. I didn’t realize it had been that long. I figured 8 (or however old the kid was).
The dirigible was what set me off as well. Oh, my physics teacher would be forking his eyes out at the sight of this.
I hate it when couples wake up and start making out right away. It especially makes me squirm if they are supposedly hungover from the festivities of the night before. I guess actors are immune to morning breath.
Nobody ever finishes a meal or a drink.
All VCRs and tape recorders will make noise when rewinding or fast-forwarding. Actors also have an amazing ability to rewind to the exact spot they want (and it never takes more than three seconds.)
Nobody ever gets lacerations from jumping through windows.
Parking is always available right in front of the busy downtown building the actor is going to.
My biggest movie annoyance is pretty odd. It involves every movie ever to feature Santa Claus, or just about.
The grown ups adamently insist that there is no Santa Claus
Presents from Santa appear under the tree, and this doesn’t bother the adults a bit.
I don’t know about you, but if gifts I didn’t buy appeared every year in my house, I think I’d believe that someone was breaking into my home to put them there. How can they believe there’s no Santa but not worry about how the presents got there??
Other minor annoyances are movies that demand too much suspension of disbelief in science.
Think about the 6th Day’s method of cloning for example.
Or, in Species the woman was half alien, half human, right? Then she mated with a human. Her kid, which should have been 75% human, turned out to be more alien than she was…
Then there’s plot continuity.
I love Drive Me Crazy but in one scene Chase is telling his friend, Dave, not to go pick up drunks at a party, but Dave drives off anyway, leaving Chase standing in the parking lot. In the next scene Chase is getting out of the car with Dave at the party.
In ** Buffy The Vampire Slayer** Merrick tells Buffy he needs to show her something in the cemetary right now. As they talk the sky is visible through the gym windows, and it’s a bright sunny day. Cut to the scene in which they’re arriving in the cemetary- it’s pitch black out. Is the cemetary in another state, or did they stop at McDonalds first?
In ** The Red Planet** the all decided in the first 1/3 of the movie they are going to die because the packs that contain O2 are empty, but then the air turns out breathable, yahada yahada. Then, towards the end of the movie, as one of the characters is being attacked by the “Nematodes” (uh…shouldn’t they be worms then, not beetles?) he throws lead guy his pack and says " Here. You’ll need the extra O2 for the ride home." Did you manage to refill it somehow with no equiptment to do so, or are we supposed to have forgotten the earlier scene in the movie?
I have to agree with Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park being a major annoyance. Crichton has a habit of taking a relatively simpe idea and investing it with grea importance, then explaining t at tedious length. I think he just took Chaos Theory as a convenient “hook” because it’s new and trendy and he’s interested in it. As noted above, chaos wasn’t responsible for the failure at the Park – incometance and sabotage were. (These people didn’t think to shoot the Velociraptors BEFORE they cut the power to the fence? I the book, programmers are inept, for instance in building dinosaur counters that don’t actually count dinosaurs.) Have you noticed that the plot of JP is the same as that of Westworld? The ideal fantasy park set on an island somewhere, where technology creates a World of the Past for fun? THe tag line for WW was “…where Nothing can go wrong!” The only reason Chaos Theory didn’t show up there was that it hadn’t been invented yet (or at least hadn’t made it out of the laboratory into the Public Mind). When they first showed WW at MIT, they preceded it with a slide giving Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. This brought big cheers.
Yeah, The Mummy Return bit it in a lot of ways. They lost me when the evil character sent the wave of water downstream, and the good guys in the dirigible were forced into a side channel leading to the Lost World.
So let me get this straight. Bad guys were going upstream, right? Villain turns around and blasts good guys, sending them into the LW, right? Which means that the bad guys missed the side channel they were looking for, right?
Oh well, it was a big, dumb movie, and I went into it knowing that. Sometimes, I just want to sit back and watch a big dumb movie. So I did. And it was.
Guess I should get upset over all those people seeing P**** H***** then.
It’s the details that drive me nuts. Like Jess, I would like to see historical accuracy, at least in the broad out lines. Clearly, for story purposes artistic license will be taken with the events. That however is no excuse for botching the details. It costs millions of dollars to make a full-length movie. They have caterers, transportation people, carpenters, electricians, all sorts of theater crafts people, all being paid perfectly good money. Why can’t movie producers spend a few bucks more and go hire a reenacter type or a historian to keep track of the details. The details are constantly screwed up. For instance:
In every John Wayne US Cavalry v. the Indians movie, the Army is armed with Winchester lever action rifles, and is equipped with post-WWI horse equipment. NO, no, no! Up through the Spanish-American War, the US Army carried Springfield single shot, trap door breechloaders, with cavalry using a short barreled version. All during the Indian Wars the Army was using left over Civil War equipment and uniforms.
There were no high explosive artillery shells until WWI. There were explosive shells but black powder did not produce great gouts of flame. The best you got was a flash-bang on the order of 4th of July aerial bombs.
Soldiers during the Indian Wars were lousy shots. They never got enough practice to become good shots.
The wound made by a relatively slow moving, large caliber, soft lead bullet is truly horrendous. It doesn’t drill a hole. It rips a cavity, smashing and splintering any bone that gets in the way. A bullet wound to the shoulder with its complex of bones, blood vessels, and nerves was, with luck, a crippling wound and in any case was immediately disabling. A man hit with one of those slugs went down right away and probably did not get up again for a while.
In modern shoot-‘em-ups, high velocity bullets keep bouncing of ordinary automobile windshields, with sparks, yet, and all the good guys are regular Dead Eye Dicks.
In the first movie, the first time we see O’Connell is when he’s an officer in the French Foreign Legion (which is very unlikely; Legionnaire officers were nearly all French) fighting a battle in the ruined city where the mummy is buried. After the battle, O’Connell runs off into the desert, they cut to the secret society watching him, and then they cut to Evie at the Cairo Museum and a title says it’s many years later (I’ll have to see the opening again to be sure exactly how many; Starz is showing it AGAIN on Sunday).
It may not have been 16 years, but it was certainly longer than 8.
So would a historian. The jet engine wasn’t invented till the 40s; TMR takes place in 1933.
Oh, and how about this for a plot hole: Once they found out that the mummy is scared to death of cats, why didn’t they carry cats around with them?
of cats, why didn’t they carry cats around with them?