Contradictorily, I think it’s a very bad sign in movies where a female character is unnecessarily shoehorned in for a needless love story subplot AND when there’s no (or no interesting) female characters at all.
Still curious about this.
As a spin-off of the fat suit issue, I must mention muscle suits (examples here being Hellboy and Mr. Hyde from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). The people wearing them invariably look top heavy, short necked, and in general like they are wearing too many shirts. While it is probably a better solution than CGing a more realistic bulked-up torso onto the actor, I always find them to be distracting.
I’m going to go one better than some others and say that any attempt to do anything on a computer outside of word processing will ruin a movie. These scenes usually have a level of realism that could only be improved by the actual computer operator being a unicorn.
That makes perfect sense, and is somehow related I think to how carefully Pixar has avoided making movies that require realistic human characters. We’ll accept stiff, unnatural movements in a bug or a car, but we’re not ready to overlook it yet in ful-on humans, cf. the Final Fantasy movies.
This reminds me of another one:
[ul]
[li]When a man in drag is too aware of his drag. See Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, wherein Terence Stamp is constantly playing with his hair, but in an entirely unnatural way, having mostly to do with not knowing how to deal with his fingernails. A trans woman who’d seemingly lived most of her adult life dressing as a woman would be far less conscious of these things.[/li][/ul]
No, the ones I’m talking about are African ravens often used as stand-ins in American movies or commercials for North American crows or ravens, which are all-over black without any white at all. I’ve even noticed them used, but with the white vest CGIed black.
People who bang on buses/taxi cabs to let the driver know it’s OK to drive away. Does anyone ever do this in real life? 
I thought you were one of the ones who disliked movie musicals? I tend to like them and have no problem with people bursting into song–I’d like it if more people did so (on key, of course) in RL (but not too often).
I agree with the hitting the top of the cab–I’ve never seen anyone do that in RL.
And why does no one in a movie ever mention going to the grocery store or running errands? I know such things (usually) don’t advance the plot so they are left out, but it sure would add to the realism of it all.
Yeah, um, no.
Yeah, there are lots of mundane details like this that the American cinema’s tradition of not including anything that isn’t specifically relevant to the story dictates. This is why I sometimes think of someone like David Lynch not as a surrealist, but as a hyperrealist. Example: in Twin Peaks, they’re looking for somewhere to hold a meeting, and they find a conference room. THere’s a moose’s head on the table. They stand looking at it for a while, then go about their business. Now, because the moose head isn’t specifically relevant to the story, this scene is described as surreal. But think about it: if you were opening random doors in a Northwest US municipal building, it wouldn’t surprise you in the least to see a moose head on the wall. And if you saw it on the table, you’d think something like, “Obviously someone took it down to repair the hook, or clean it, or something.” You’d assume there’s a practical reason for taking it off the wall. So you’d look at it for a moment, and move on. Where’s the surrealism? Again, this is just a reaction to expecting the cliche that it MUST be relevant, or else why show it?
Does it count as a cliche the first time it’s used? I know you hate The Big Chill (I love it) but it was the first use, at least in a highly popular mainstream movie, of people-bopping-along-to-Mowtown. It later became a cliche because of The Big Chill’s popularity.
How many “cliches” did Citizen Kane, or Gone With The Wind, or Casablanca, or The Maltese Falcon, or more recently, The Matrix spawn?
I keep coming up with all kinds of other exceptions to many, many people’s posts (“but, but, no, wait!”), but I’m mainly onboard with the Little Big Man exception. I think that’s the greatest old person makeup in the history of films. With recent works like The Reader and Benjamin Button, the art of makeup seems to be regressing. Those were horrible (IMO) examples, but the acting was great, so that’s not it.
So, you DO like movie musicals? I’m being stupid tonight.
You bring up a good point and one I just saw demonstrated on the *Mary Tyler Moore Show *(I’m watching old sitcoms on hulu these days). Rhoda, in the meeting up with a new guy, leaves the impression that she and Mary are roommates. This is developed as awkward for Mary (because she has to keep leaving her own apt and going to “Florence’s” upstairs [which is actually Rhoda’s]). But here’s the thing: that it is Mary’s apt is never explained to the guy and after this episode, we never see Mr I Want to Be a Forest Ranger again.
I am left thinking 2 things: 1. that sitcom writers used to be better at it than nowadays because they allowed quirky dead ends like this to just be and 2. it adds a patina of realism to the whole show. Not every bit has to advance the plot or the relationship between characters. IOW, the writes of the MTM allowed the characters to breathe and develop on their own. Very refreshing.
I’d agree with you re Lynch, but Blue Velvet grossed me out so much, I left the theater. I have no desire to see it again. I see your point re the moose head and agree with it. Perhaps it says more about viewers/reviewers wanting to imbue everything with “meaning”?
It’s just a standard cliche of western literature I think: no “waste” is allowed. If you bring it in, you must use it. SOOO not like real life.
, looked at Pigeonman running 2. The problem is he is leaning backwards while running. His center of mass is to far aft, and his feet do not appear to be making proper contact to actually push him forward. Same thing with the jump, he is too upright, not leaning forward.
I think what he means is that if an American has a diacritical mark over their name, it is not because the language requires diacritical marks for proper pronunciation (i.e. a tilda ~ over an n in Spanish). Ergo, it is a sign of a pretentious actor, like a one-name actor.
Wouldn’t that time be shorter if the web thread was elastic? Especially the upswing would be shorter if Spidey’s thread was elastic, as real spiders silk is, to an extent.
How did they explain the M on the wall?
Episodes of TV shows used to be entirely self contained. No matter what happened to them one week, they would begin the next week’s show as if someone had pushed a reset button. No great artistic reason behind it, I just think it was a necessary restriction because of how the shows were made. The writer for an episode needed to start from something, and wouldn’t be privy to changes in circumstance that another writer might have left. The first show I know of to use multi-episode story arcs was Hill Street Blues.
Assuming that the maximum stretch was at the bottom of the swing, and that my web-to-ground estimate was based on that length, the shorter webbing would probably lead to a shorter period of oscillation. However, the elasticity would pull him into a more vertical trajectory near the end of each swing, giving less horizontal velocity to carry into the next swing.
Movies get lots of things wrong, but they’ve been doing it for so long that we know parts of their world better than the real thing. I’ve seen very few movies that get flying (airplanes, not Superman) or computer scenes right. So what’s a filmmaker to do; show something that a few people will know is real, or show what 100 years of movies have taught us all to think is real? If they’re telling a good story, I’ll usually cut them some slack. (What’s that line in Monty Python when they’re filming “Scott of the Antarctic” in Brighton, “we’ve covered the beach in Wintrex, which looks more like snow than snow.”)
The swinging scenes in Spider-Man looked good, but they just didn’t quite look like 180 pounds on the end of a string. I’d be fascinated to find out how much of that was deliberate.
I had real trouble with that run. At first I had him more upright, but I wanted it to look cartoony, sort of like Fred Flintstone might run, so I tried leaning him back. It still didn’t feel right, probably because of the balance reasons you’re referring to, so if I try a new run cycle I’ll play with leaning forward or upright again.
In any case, PigeonMan is not supposed to be realistically adhering to physics.
That’s like 80% of the market you’re talking about. Newsflash: the film biz is in SoCal. But we don’t want every movie and TV show to be about SoCal, so this is what often ends up happening.
Not that many films aren’t shot on location because they are, but even then it’s not unusual to have parts filmed in the studio. A lot of states offer tax incentives for filming out-of-state (or “runaway productions”) as they are called, but California recently and for the first time has finally offered tax incentive for local productions (due to the state’s budget crisis, we don’t want to lose the money that leaks out from runaway productions). So you’re gonna be seeing a lot more films “filmed in Southern California but pretending to be elsewhere”.
All fine and good, if a bit judgmental. But how does that ruin the movie?
I wouldn’t say it ruins a movie for me but one of my pet peeves is when a character is introduced and they light up to show that they are the kind of person that would smoke. Then, through the rest of the movie they never smoke or mention smoking again despite situations in which any real smoker would be reaching for the cigarettes.
Gratuitous Product Placement – especially cars.
I just watched Street Kings the other day, and wouldn’t you know it, Keanu’s character drives a nice, brand new, shiny, black Dodge Charger, which is filmed in low angles with the Dodge logo featured prominently and is never dirty throughout the movie.