Things that bug you that are standard in film/TV

[Mr.Frink]

*Originally posted by Annie-Xmas *
** There’s also Bobby Martin from All My Children. He was the 9 year old brother of Tara. Seen a few times, went up to the attic to polish his skis, and never returned. I think there was a reference to him being in a military academy once. **

The show gave a wink to the audience on this one. Several years ago a character was locked in the Martin’s attic – Over in the corner was a skeleton.

MY TV/MOVIE PEEVE:
On news broadcasts, the newsreader always reads the story the main character is interested in twice. As his friends yell at him to come into the room the TV is playing, we’ll hear the announcer say: “Repeating…the Newberry appeal has been denied…” Unless it’s the space shuttle crashing, I don’t hear my local news broadcaster do the whole “Repeating…our top story tonight is…” thing.

[Skywatcher]

*Originally posted by Mr. Frink *
**MY TV/MOVIE PEEVE:
On news broadcasts, the newsreader always reads the story the main character is interested in twice. As his friends yell at him to come into the room the TV is playing, we’ll hear the announcer say: “Repeating…the Newberry appeal has been denied…” Unless it’s the space shuttle crashing, I don’t hear my local news broadcaster do the whole “Repeating…our top story tonight is…” thing. **

The local news repeats their top stories but not until just before they sign off or the halfway mark if it’s an hour show.

[FairyChatMom]

Not a real biggie, but this always bugs me - the bathrobe across the foot of the bed. If there’s a noise in the middle of the night, “Mom” or “Dad” gets out of bed, fully pajama’d, and pauses to put and fasten said robe before investigating.

Well, in my real world, nothing on the foot of the bed would last more than a few minutes before being kicked to the floor. Secondly, if you’re in full jammies, why do you need a robe too? Third, if you hear a strange noise, especially if you have young kids, you’re going to be flying out to investigate, robed, clothed, or otherwise. (Yeah, I’ve done the nekkid in the middle of the night dash to the baby’s room…)

Oh, yeah, and slippers go on at the same time. Heaven forbid we leave our bedroom less than fully attired in the middle of the night.

[godzillatemple]

*Originally posted by BiblioCat *
Everyone, without fail, even if they have a dishwasher, will have a wooden dishrack by the sink with dishes in it all the time.

Actually, this describes our house (except that our dishrack is plastic and not wooden). The house had a built-in dishwasher when we purchased it, but neither my wife nor I see any need to use it. Maybe when we have a few kids and the amount of dishes we generate per meal increases, but who knows. And yes, we tend to leave some dishes in the dishrack pretty much all the time.

Barry

[Love_Rhombus]

Why is it, in any romantic comedy, the Male Lead’s girlfriend/fiance/supposed True Love is so totally unlikeable that you can’t understand why he’s involved with her in the first place? Sure, make her disagreeable enough that you want them to break up, but not Uber-Bitch.

On the same note, the annoying jerks in horror movies, or really any movie: why do people hang out with these individuals?

Any time the lead takes a lot of crap with a stupid smile 'cause it’s “funny.” This is why I couldn’t stand Meet The Parents. I could not have dealt with all of the father’s little games and insinuations. I’d have said, “Look, buddy. Do you have a problem with me? If so, spit it out.” It’s not a patience thing or showing you’re the “better man”, it’s just taking crap.

[Logan]

*Originally posted by X~Slayer(ALE) *
**One other thing bugs me about the movies. Directors who have never picked up a comic book in their lives but think they can make a long standing popular comic book character better by changing their powers, race, origins or costume.

Then the marketing follows the movie and screws up all the storylines for the comic books. **

You’ve obviously been reading the last couple of years of “X-Men”

[Sampiro]

Small towns that have a murder every other week (every soap opera, MURDER SHE WROTE, IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT). You’d think sooner or later they’d go the way of SALEM’S LOT.

Speaking of HEAT OF THE NIGHT, did you know that there are almost no middle class or well educated black people in the south? There are a few drug dealers and pimps who drive flashy cars and wear lots of jewelry, and there’s a cop, but most of them live in desolate regions with unpainted houses where chickens and children play in the dirt roads and mournful acapella gospel music plays out of the countryside whenever the white people drive up to check up on the murder. This is done in every episode of HEAT OF THE NIGHT and countless movies set in Mississippi whose producers seem unaware that the same subculture which gave us mournful gospel also gave us jazz, R&B, and Rock’n’Roll.

Most irritating example of superfluous use: in the play HAIRSPRAY, about as frivolous a musical as you can get without resurrecting Paul Lynde or Robert Preston and with a soundtrack written by the same composer/lyricist who did SOUTHPARK THE MUSICAL, sandwiched between songs with lyrics like “Lancelot had Guinevere/Mrs. Claus had Old St. Nick/Romeo had Juliet/and Liz Taylor had a Dick…” and a song about Cooties is, you guessed it, a mournful gospel number called “I Know Where I’ve Been” in which Motor-Mouth Mabel drops character for a moment to have a “but seriously folks… racism is bad…”. One critic said something to the effect of “it’s about as in place as saying Kaddish for Holocaust victims would be in THE PRODUCERS”.

A Canadian co-worker who moved to rural Georgia from Toronto, incidentally, was shocked by the number of integrated middle-class neighborhoods and the number of blacks in professions. Watching TV and movies, he actually thought most blacks were still sharecroppers (the ones who weren’t lucky enough to raise white folkses chirren, anyway) who lived in perpetual terror of burning crosses if they stepped on a white man’s shadow. I think he was actually disappointed since he had his liberal indignation all wound up and ready to go.

[you_with_the_face]

These things get on my nerves:

Women getting stranded on deserted islands with there being no issue about their periods.

When the kids look nothing like the parents, nobody seems to care. See Lisa Bonet from ** The Cosby Show**. WTF?

Phone numbers are always known by heart and can be dialed very fast, without the actor even looking at the keys. Perhaps because the first three digits are always 555.

Take-out chinese food is always eaten out of cartons, with chopsticks, and there always seems to be a lot of it.

The token black person never has a significant other or love interest.

The token black woman always has big curly, Cree Summer-ish hair and lacks a distinct personality. I refer you to the black chick in The Craft. The story would have basically been the same with or without her character in it.

The white person (in a black movie) always tries too hard to be “down”. When other ethnicities (Arab, Indian, Chinese) make an appearance in a black movie, they too get laughs by over-employing hip hop slang.

The girl that every guy falls in love with is a clutz. She must find some way to trip and fall to the ground in some charmingly embarrassing way, or be hit in the head with a fuzzy object by her own doing, in at least 35 scenes of the movie. And the guy will take this to be a sign that she is “so real and down-to-earth”. Sandra Bullock, this paragraph is devoted to you.

Cats are amazingly docile creatures in movies. They will allow you to pick them up and hold them like little limp stuffed animals.

And finally: men in movies do not have penises. If they did, why don’t they ever show them? They don’t seem to have a problem showing naked beaver. Why can’t we see rooster?

[Evil_Captor]

Why can’t women see rooster?

Because the Hollywood suits have decided a cock-a-dudle-won’t-do!

Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

[BraheSilver]

*Originally posted by Marley23 *
**If memory serves, somebody actually designed a clock (shaped like a baseball, I think) that you could shut off by throwing. Don’t know if it worked. I’ve never REALLY seen anyone do this - most clocks are plugged into the wall, which makes throwing less practical. But I can’t even imagine the number of times I’ve WANTED to do it. I think I’ll have to at some point, just so I know how it feels. **

I did, in fact, have a digital alarm clock shaped like a hand grenade that had to be thumped pretty damn hard to make it shut off. The problem was that a) you had to thump the bottom, so your toss had better be perfectly oriented or else you’d just have the alarm going off across the room and b) you had to really huck that thing. Wall-shaking, paint-denting, shoulder-twingingly hard. It wasn’t worth the effort just for the novelty value.

[shijinn]

Originally posted by **SNenc **
They even had Jerry get called by a telemarketer once, which resulted in a great joke, but had no bearing on the rest of the plot.

erm, what was the joke?

[skaterboarder87]

*Originally posted by shijinn *
They even had Jerry get called by a telemarketer once, which resulted in a great joke, but had no bearing on the rest of the plot.

*Originally posted by shijinn *
**erm, what was the joke? **

Apparently, it had “no bearing” on the rest of his post either

[shijinn]

no i’m just curious, i remembered it as something funny and usable, but can’t recall how it ran.

[Largo62]

*Originally posted by you with the face *
The girl that every guy falls in love with is a clutz. She must find some way to trip and fall to the ground in some charmingly embarrassing way, or be hit in the head with a fuzzy object by her own doing, in at least 35 scenes of the movie. And the guy will take this to be a sign that she is “so real and down-to-earth”. Sandra Bullock, this paragraph is devoted to you.

Never mind that. Send me Sandra Bullock and she can trip and hit herself with fuzzy objects all she wants. I like that stuff.

[j_kat_251]

(Answering a telemarketer’s phone call)
JERRY: I’m sorry, I’m a little tied up now. Give me your home number and I’ll call you back later… Oh, you don’t like being called at home? Well, now you know how I feel. (hangs up)

[Annie-Xmas]

The top of the kids-who-don’t look like their parents are the three daughters in * Full house *. Their father has dark hair, their mother was a dark haired Greek woman, and they had three blondes?

The oldest daughter looks more like best friend Joey and is named Donna Jo (D.J.). Infer what you will.

[shy_guy]

I can’t remember if this has been mentioned, but…

Everyone has perfect complexions. If even a teenager ever gets a blemish of any sort, it’s only when an entire epsiode revolves around it. The blemish will also be huge, but when it miraculously dissapears just in time for the Big Date, he will never again have less than perfect skin.

[Fish]

I know I don’t have to explain why the movies and TV do these things. Everybody knows that it’s Hollywood shorthand 2-second character building. Nobody looks for a phone number, for instance, because the audience would get the impression the character is meant to be forgetful. For the same reason, nobody on TV watches TV unless it builds character, because sitting slack-jawed and staring at a screen doesn’t tell you anything useful about the person (Archie Bunker and Al Bundy are two examples of television’s TV junkies). Characters use Macintosh because it’s a quick-hit characterization: this person is hip, different, and definitely not a high-tech geek. Plus, the iMac case looks great on film. Looking for parking doesn’t tell you much about the character, either. And so on.

Milk cartons are used because the thing’s opaque; you don’t have to hire a continuity girl to check the level of milk in each shot. Ditto for ceramic pitchers. The Germans-with-a-German-accent thing is just laziness and a mistrust that the audience will stay focused on subtitles – even in Patton, which used real German, the scenes were all exposition, no action. Slow enough to read along, as it were.

And the strip club thing in cop movies is so that the director can audition two dozen naked women in his office, with two dozen of his closest friends in the crew (the DP, the assistant DP, the casting director, the gaffer) looking on.

You guys know all this stuff, I’m sure. Nevertheless, yeah, Hollywoodworld does make for a very irritating subculture of Real Life. My personal pet peeves:

1. People pay bills, sometimes, but the never have to wait around for the change (unless they’re characterized as a penny-pincher).
2. Most of the time, characters squint and flinch when they fire guns, even when portrayed as top-notch CIA or special forces killers. There are some notable exceptions (in T2, Cameron had his cast take weapons training; Clint Eastwood in general; and lately, Bruce Willis). Trained shooters keep their eyes open so they can see what they’re shooting at.
3. TV shows that add characterization five seasons in. This was mentioned, but good grief, it bugs me. My example is always from Deep Space Nine where Worf explains that he’s protective of weak humans ever since he played soccer on Earth. Ugh!
4. Characters with bad, bad, bad accents. See Keanu Reeves, Kevin Costner, et al.

I guess most of my peeves have to do with the chronic laziness of the filmmakers, rather than the shortcuts in character and plot that film demands.

For those who want to see an entire book of movie pet peeves, see Roger Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary (ISBN 0-8362-8289-2).

FISH

[Bruce_Daddy]

*Originally posted by HPL *
**Cops, Combat troops, and people who really should know how firearms operate show they really have no clue how it works. The tip off is usually when said character decides to pump the shotgun or rack the slide on their handgun a good half a dozen times a single scene, despite the fact that after the first time you do it, you’re just tossing perfectly good ammunition onto the floor.
**

Also, the ability to slam a clip into a handgun implies mastery of said weapon.

And who pumps a shotgun with one hand?

I won’t even speak to the whole cocking of the gun crap.

Holding guns at a 90 degree angle (palm down)

puts NRA membership card back in pocket

[Slithy_Tove]

I’d like to see an action movie where, somewhere during two hours of fighting and racing and climbing and repelling and swiming and spring-boarding away from explosions, the hero stops and says “hey, I’ve really gotta stop and take a shit!”