The film “Repo Man” does a great running gag about this. EVERY possible retail item is generically labelled. At one point, Harry Dean Stanton’s character says “Let’s get something to drink.” The next shot shows him putting a six-pack of cans on a deli counter. All the cans are generically marked “drink.”
I sometimes get annoyed at how remarkably pristine every movie home is. Whenever they show someone’s home, it always looks spotlessly immaculate, as if nobody had set foot in there for ages. And if the home is a city apartment, the windows always have a spectacular view of a night-time city-scape. Nobody in movies ever lives in a place with a view of a parking lot or brick wall.
I started reading books in the original language whenever possible in order to practice that language, improve my vocabulary,etc. Now I do it because slugging through the dictionary is less painful than seeing “the grim reaper” translated as “la segadora torva” (which back-translates as “the scowling tractor”) instead of “la Parca” (Death, for those who weren’t paying attention). “La segadora torva” sounds to me like a John Deere painted black, with studs all over and one of those reaping/packing attachments worn in the position where cars following it get to see the sharp spikes in all their 2-foot-long glory: the meanest 10mph in the whole highway system, dood.
(segador, male word, is the person who reaps… segadora is the machine you use for reaping, so a tractor)
The long drawn-out “Noooooooooo!” when the hero see his best buddy die. Even worse when the camera pulls up into the sky and rotates, showing the hero clutching his fallen buddy and raging at the gods.
And scenes that end with a repeated line of dialog with a beat in between: “Be afraid.” beat “Be very afraid.” It’s an escape hatch for a writer who can’t figure out how to end the scene.
Or the “I’ve got x days to retirement” schtick. I recently watched To Live and Die in LA which I’ve always heard great things about backintheday and couldn’t stop laughing at the stupid cliches, especially that one.
I get jarred out of the movie in a pissy way when I see historical characters given a moral whitewash to sync with todays ideals. For example, In The Patriot Mel Gibson is a southern plantation owner who has black field hands. When someone assumes that they’re slaves, Mel gets all offended. He is totally disgusted by the existence of slavery. GET REAL! He would have owned slaves! His character suddenly lost all it’s depth and became nothing more than a caricature of “The Good Guy” at that point. For the rest of the movie, all I could see him as was a revolutionary Dudley Do-Right.
You mean LA doesn’t have 10-digit dialling yet? I assumed they would by now and so LA-based writers & directors & whatnot might find it natural to have a character give out their full 10-digit number. I have to when I give out my number, since 10-digit dialling is necessary here in Beantown, so I wouldn’t think twice about a movie character giving a 10-digit number to another character.
I assume 10-digit dialling is necessary in lots of other metro areas as well. Am I wrong?
Bad Wire-Fu.
I can suspend disbelief in a lot of things. The genetically engineered mutant taking out 50 badguys while running up a tree without breaking a sweat, no problem, but when the GEM changes direction in midair due to wire-fu swinging, I can’t stand it.
Occasionally it done on purpose (like Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, where someone bends backwards and slides on her feet under the table), but it still irks me to no end.
What sucks is when it’s done unintentionally, like the trailer to Serenity (I hate to harp on what I want and still hope to be a great film) There’s the part where one guy gets hit and flips up and the hitter grabs his legs. Neat move, but it’s obvious (to me) that his body is swiveling at his hips when he was hit at chest level and should be swiveling about there.
Basically, my eye notices physical contact, and human physics involved and that’ll draw me out of a movie.
Agreed. I was similarly pissed when in the recent movie Troy it was assumed that anyone who believed in the gods was simple-minded and foolish. At first I thought it was just a thinly veiled anti-religious streak, but I think it’s really just the complete lack of understanding on the part of the writers that the Greek gods weren’t just fairy tales and superstition. They were a huge part of religion and culture, and the story of the Illiad is significantly weaker when they’re removed.
I was reading a Michael Korda and I had to stop because of god-awful dialogue. It was about a young woman who married an elderly rich man, and of course, his family had all sorts of suspicions about her motives.
In the backstory, before they’re married, the woman has lunch with the elderly gentleman. He asks her about her work and she says…
Wait for it…
“It’s very varied.”
:eek: :rolleyes: :smack:
I couldn’t get past that line. I don’t know if Korda didn’t catch it when he wrote it, but when you read it you realize how stupid it sounds. I had to give it up because I would read paragraphs and realize I hadn’t absorbed anything because I was so stuck on that stupid asinine sentence.
I’m with you big time on this one. *Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon * had some seriously impressive martial arts sequences. But then they throw in all the unreal jumping around and running up walls and it completely wrecks it for me. I’m so much more impressed by real fighting, even if it is choregraphed and helped along by editing. An exception was the first Matrix. That movie provided a reasonable rationale for doing super human maneuvers in my opinion.
Another thing that irks me to distraction is when weapons have the unlimited ammo cheat code turned on. The worst offender I remember for this was *Commando * which combined unlimited ammo with poor continuity. Arnold has five rounds left on his MG ammo belt. So he whips around to shoot someone else and bam, the belt is magically down to his knees again! Hey arnold save a round for me and get me out of this film!
There’s a great Simpsons episode (Saturdays of Thunder) where they parody this (and the “I have x days until retirement”). Homer is at the movie store and watches a part in the new McBain movie. McBain’s partner, who is retiring, even has a boat named “Live 4 Ever”. So of course the buddy gets shot by their criminal nemesis. McBain clutches his fallen buddy and looks to the ceiling.
:rolleyes: :smack: