msmith537: the rookie is by the book, the veteran is the loose cannon.
Bad guys do that coin flipping along the back of their fingers thing. (Saw “Road to Perdition” last Sat.)
In an audience (in the movie) - one person hesitantly claps, then someone else, then there are several solitary claps from various places in the crowd until it builds to thunderous applause and a standing ovation.
After the final showdown, when the Good Guy has defeated the Bad Guy and holds a gun to the Bad Guy’s head, who’s begging for his life… and the Good Guy shows mercy and lets the Bad Guy go. Then the Bad Guy walks away, but sneakily tries to attack the Good Guy from behind with a knife he’d hidden in his boot! Oh no! So, the Good Guy has to shoot him in self-defence, and all moral dilemmas are beautifully dodged. I’d like to see the Good Guy either letting the guy live or shooting him in cold blood, and then living with the consequences of his choice.
If I sees anudder oversized-silhouetted-slowly-spinning-fan-inna-warehouse-wall shot, somebody’s gonna get hoit.
I hate it when people clap after movies in the theater.
HELLOOO! THE ACTORS CAN’T HEEEAAR YOOOUUU!
How about the thief who’s going to go straight and retire to pursue his/her dream of running a jazz club/sailing the Carribean/owning a baseball team, etc., but has to pull off the ONE LAST BIG SCORE to do it??? Jeez, that one’s as old as the whore with the heart of gold!
The good guys sitting in their car, watching the villain enter/leave his house.
The villain looks all around him to check he’s not being watched, and TOTALLY FAILS to see the guys sitting in the car across the road, watching him.
Geez that really annoys me.
Virtually all parking garage scenes involve a car or foot chase and a gunfight. The parking garage seems like the perfect place for moviemakers to make this kind of scene. There’s lots of concrete for bullets to ricochet off of, lots of car windows to shatter, lots of metal to pierce holes in, and lots of places for everyone to hide from each other. There are lots of parked cars to crash into, and since most cars have fuel in them-- hey, let’s have some 'splosions while we’re at it! Plus, it’s usually dark, and if they get to the top level someone can either jump off or fall off of there or drive his car off the top ledge. If the garage has one of those wooden or plastic arms that gate off access to the garage someone will usually drive right through it.
If a guy in a movie is watching TV and holding a bat, club or some other instrument that could easily smash a TV screen, something he sees on the TV will piss him off and he’ll smash the TV screen with said instrument.
Closely related, normal-looking woman in glasses and a lab coat become a hottie in spike heels with her hair down/glasses removed.
Just yesterday I was channel surfing and stopped briefly on some piece of crap starring Ashley Judd. She was talking to Morgan Freeman in a bar and said, literally “This is a conspiracy, and it goes way higher than anyone knows. Charlie, I need you sober!”
Folks, they’re not even trying anymore. They’re taking the old scripts, crossing out the characters’ names, and tripling the budget.
Any action movie/thriller/horror movie where the good guys are being hunted by multiple armed bad guys, and when they disable one of them they either don’t take his gun or somehow conveniently drop it before getting a chance to use it.
This happened to me IRL when I saw Rocky IV. I’m not kidding. The worst part…? I had gone to the movies with a friend and he was the one who started the applause.
I wanted to die.
My pet peeve is the secondary character whose only purpose is for comic relief. Double whammy if the character is black or gay (or black and gay) and that becomes a source of humor.
“Ah, Francesca Fiore. You know I don’t like American movies. Always it is the car chase, and the guy get the girl …”
– David Foley as Bruno Ponce Jones from “The Kids in the Hall”.
They did the “shoot him in cold blood” thing in one of those Lethal Weapon sequels. It wasn’t that great.
How about nerdy white people doing cool “black” stuff? Could we stop with that already?
Oh, and aliens whose technology is thousands of years ahead of ours, yet their most effective weapon is some lame little laser-beam thing that’s barely more destructive than a pistol.
The good guys will disable the timer bomb exactly 1 second before detonation.
The bad guy appears to be dead, but suddenly he/she rises up and attacks the good guy one more time.
I clap at the ends of movies. Well, good ones, anyway. Applauding in movie theaters isn’t about communicating with the people on the screen, it’s about communicating with the other people in the theater. It’s a public statement of approval for the shared experience of watching a good movie.
Anyway, I’m personally sick of movie trailers that cut to an explosion right before someone says a swear word. Like, “I’m getting too old for this sh-” and they cut to building blowing up. Occasionally, they’ll mix it up with someone saying, “I’m going to kick your a-” and they cut to a car flipping over in a dramatic and physically unlikely fashion.
Uh, guys, I think he’s talking about a crowd onscreen, as opposed to the audience in the theatre. This cliche was very funnily parodied in Not Another Teen Movie. The guy was always starting a slow clap that’s supposed to turn into a roaring ovation at the wrong time.
The hero is trying to take some action to thwart the monster/earthquake/volcano/whatever, and the mayor (or whoever) squlches the efforts because it will be bad for tourism/business/etc.
Jaws did it quite well, but you see it in just about any monster/disaster/whatever movie ever made. In Dante’s Peak the mayor believed the hero (of course she had the hots for him anyway), but the chairman of the select board didn’t want to scare off investors in the upcoming…oh why bother.
Young hipsters are going to shake up the stuffy establishment and show them how to party!!! Puh-leeez.
Any movie where the government is secretly evil and scarily able to do cool stuff. We don’t trust them to buy toilet seats at reasonable prices, yet we think they could pull off a huge, worldwide conspiracy involving thousands of people?
Any movie where the Bad Guy and the Good Guy drop their arsenals to settle it “man to man.”
Any movie where simple precautions would’ve solved the huge catastrophe (i.e. Jaws, yes business might be bad, but maybe a few lifeguards or boats on Bigass Shark Patrol?)