I’m hoping others will mention the little things they always seem to do in movies and shows that you never do yourself in real life.
One that I get itchy when I see it is where somebody uses a key to get into their house, apartment, hotel room, dorm room, whatever, and as soon as they’re inside the place they toss their keys onto the nearest surface like a table or a desk or even pitch them into a box or jar. Do you ever do such a thing with your keys? Mine go back in my pocket. I just wonder if any of these people decide to leave suddenly and forget their keys.
In the shower, how often do you just stand there and let water run on your head? Does anybody ever use soap? Does anybody ever wash their ass? Their genitals?
I won’t even get into the whole thing of leaving the headlights on when you get out of the car. Since newer cars have time delayed lights, I have quit getting all antsy when that happens.
When somebody goes up to a door and knocks, they rarely wait a count of 3 before knocking again and if the person hasn’t answered the door in a count of 5 one of three things will happen:
the knocker will leave
the knocker will break the door down
the knocker will start pounding on the door and/or yelling
Does the knocker ever allow somebody in the back of the dwelling to make it to the door?
Same thing with phone calls. One of two things will happen:
the person answers immediately, as if all they do is sit by the phone.
after two rings, the caller will hang up, assuming the person isn’t available for calls. I’ll rarely hang up before letting it ring six times.
Whenever there’s a panic situation and somebody has to get to a car and drive away quickly, the keys are always in the ignition.
If there’s a close-up of the ignition, the car will blow up.
When I walk in the door the keys go on the second nearest table to the door. Is that close enough? Why would you want to put your keys back in your pocket to then sit on them?
I let water run on my head all the time. If the shower’s hot enough, it feels great. I’ve never understood “quick showers”. The point of a shower is to relax and if you’re late, you’ve got a built-in excuse. “I was in the shower.”
I have never seen this happen where it didn’t become a plotline later.
And now to the question at hand. Cliches don’t bug me. They are a shorthand way for the plot to get from A to B without things taking 18 hours. The only real-time adventures I want to sit through are those of Jack Bauer. So if there has to be a scene of aggressive knocking to spped things along then I don’t care.
OK, maybe the lack of goodbye bugs me. Seriosuly, who doesn’t say anything before they hang up?
My grandfather, but he’s the only one I’ve ever encountered who does this.
I’ve noticed that any time a TV or movie parent has to comment on the music their kid is listening to, the band tends to have an aren’t-those-band-names-outrageous name and horrible sound.
I hate the scene with the hero disarming the bomb and the countdown clock. Here is this scene that is supposed to be pregnant with tension, but we all know from our first James Bond movie that the hero always disarms the bomb. What a pointless, non-dramatic moment.
When I walk in my door, I throw my keys on my counter. I had no idea I was buying into some sort of Hollywood-backed social experiment.
My favorite cliche is when Good Guy and Bad Guy fight, and it ends with GG pointing a gun at BG’s head. Then GG decides not to shoot him, because “he’s not worth it” or “I’m better than you” or some such nonsense. Then he walks away and (everyone knows what’s coming, right?) BG pulls out a gun, so that GG can turn around and shoot him without dealing with any pesky moral ambiguity.
Now now, I seem to remember the opening scene in American Beauty ; Kevin Spacey was scrubbing his John Thomas in the shower, and quite dilligently too! :eek:
On TV shows, why is it that no one ever knocks before walking into someone’s house? If someone actually does knock, one of the characters who lives there will yell, “It’s open!” instead of stopping what they’re doing and actually going to the door. Of course, the person who comes in is always who the residents are expecting and never a crazed mass murderer or even a common thief.
OK, I know they do these things because of time constraints but still, it annoys me.
On Everybody Loves Raymond, Marie and Frank always know when everyone is in the kitchen at Raymond’s house, so they go around the house so they can come in via the kitchen door, not knocking, of course. They live directly across the street so it makes a lot more sense for them to use the front door, but they only do that when everyone is in the living room. Again, it’s a time-constraint thing but it just bugs me.
Other things:
The hero or heroin have to jump in a lake or have to be in the pouring rain. They’re always dry and well-coifed within minutes of getting out. Their clothes may get torn but they’re pretty impermeable to dirt.
No matter how bad a beating the good guy gets, he continues with his mission with nary a whimper.
I hang my keys on a wall plaque when I get home, unless I forget and automatically return them to my pocket.
And of the person who hangs up, the other person will either
Look at the phone before hanging up.
Or continue saying “Hello? Hello?” I can always tell when someone hangs up, can’t you?
No one ever washes dishes. This annoys me for some reason.
King Kong really annoyed me because that girl always ended up in a slip or a skimpy little dress. In the era they were filming it in? She wouldn’t have run out in the end in just that flimsy little nightdress. And it was snowing! So - all the movies where the girl is dressed inappropriately.
I guess I just hadn’t analyzed my own actions enough when it comes to keys. The other responses have caused me to think about it a little more and I now realize that I go to the buffet drawer where I stash my wallet and keys and (if it’s a bright day) sunglasses. Since I go to that much trouble, I guess the jarring effect of just tossing them somewhere is what was bothering me. Even though my key ring is down to car and house keys, with no others needed, it’s simple enough to keep them in my pocket, but I usually take them out at home.
Oh, another thing that doesn’t actually doesn’t annoy me but I find strange is when architectural rules are broken. For example, on Seinfeld, the hallway outside of Jerry’s apartment is straight but that can’t be because of the way Jerry’s kitchen juts off the living room. Also, judging by the layout, his bedroom is about the size of a walk-in closet, not big enough for more than a double bed.
I understand the key thing. I may toss them, but I have a set place to toss them. I don’t just toss them on the counter, for sure they will be lost the next day. I keep a bin next to the phone for keys etc., and it’s easy to toss them into there.
These both depend greatly on location. In more rural areas, or even some suburbs, it’s common for folks to leave their doors open, and for neighbors to just drop in. And entering through the backdoor is often viewed as a sign of familiarity: Salesmen and strangers use the front door, but friends and family come in the back (yes, even if the front door is closer). If a neighbor should happen to come in the front door while everyone is in the living room, well, living rooms have windows, don’t they? You don’t need magic sitcom-ESP to know that everyone’s in the living room; you just look in the window.
In horror movies, a victim, usually the hero or heroin, tries to warn people, usually the police or other authority figures, by simply stating what happened, not thinking, even for a second, that mentions of ghosts, monsters, or aliens will be met with total skepticism. Nobody ever tries to state the events in vague terms, or even lie, which would be much more helpful. For example:
“I saw a werewolf.” should be “I saw a wild animal.”
Or instead of insisting that the killer is someone who was killed years ago, just saying something like “I wasn’t able to get a good look at him”, or maybe “I think it’s a copy cat killer”.
Basically, anything to keep the authorities involved, without them thinking that you’re a loon.
I HATE that every time a cat is onscreen, the sound folks have to add in a “meow,” just in case you didn’t know it was a cat. “What IS that furry four-legged thing walking across the…<MEOW>…OHH! It’s a CAT! Now I can go on with the movie…”
Being an equestrian and owning horses, I’m even MORE irritated by the insertion of whinnying sound effects whenever a horse is on screen. NOW you know those are HORSES! It’s also amazing how many TV horses whinny with their mouths closed.
And FTR: the whinny sound they use most sounds exactly like my girls when they are expecting their dinner. So are all movie horses just hungry??
There are very few people on the planet, even experienced snipers, who could be called crack shots at a distance with a handgun. Except in movies, where the hero can take a shot at 200 yards so precise it can cut through a rope, and this when they’re wounded and had two seconds to aim and pull the trigger.
It even works with flintlock pistols (the most notoriously unreliable weapons ever when more than a few feet away from a target). The same goes with arrows- my favorite “Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t have made that shot” moment is probably in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves when famous Brit outlaw Costner fires two arrows simultaneously and they both go different directions and take out two different badguys, both of whom are killed instantly of course because it never took more than one arrow to kill a guy.
Speaking of period movies, I love the fact that standards of beauty have remained exactly the same for the last several thousand years. You’ll read that in the late 19th century big was in for men, but don’t believe it, the guys looked more like Leonardo DiCaprio and only the villains wore period facial hair. One of my favorites on this theme was also in Gangs of New York: Cameron Diaz, a pickpocket mol from the slums who has survived a botched C-section that left her scarredlifts up her blowse to reveal her toned and tanned abs. Also, blow dryers were evidently invented before electricity because even poor farmers like Charles Ingalls obviously used them.