You and my mom. Her pet peeve is women lying in hospital beds, whether dying of horrible diseases or in long comas, with full makeup and false eyelashes.
Another: Women with perfect long fingernails after working on the farm, changing a tire, climbing a tree to escape rabid wolves, or any of a thousand other activities that are death to long fingernails.
A cliche in Fifties movies, which happily fell by the wayside, was women wearing makeup, styled hair, girdles (never visible of course, but you just knew they were there), stockings, and high heels to EVERY occasion, including pursuing Zontar the Thing From Venus into the depths of a cave.
Speaking of which, how many movie caves are as wet and muddy as real ones?
–Empty gun is now garbage and must be thrown away. Nevermind that it’s a $2000 H&K.
– One character is leaning in the window and talking to a character sitting in a cab. Character leaning in the window gives the roof two quick pounds with his fist; cab drives off immediately. Who does this? And what cab driver heeds it? “I’ll turn the meter on after your buddy gives me the international ‘all-clear-to-drive-off’ signal.”
– Rebel Good Guy has just been reprimanded by his superior, and turns to leave the office.
Superior calls out to him.
RGG pauses, with his back still to the superior, (and camera), then slowly turns around and faces him (us).
Superior then finishes his sentence.
RGG says a smart-aleck comeback, turns around again and leaves.
Superior shakes his head in mock anger yet with a respectful grin.
– Hero with gun must lose it if it gives him an advantage, and he must lose it off the side of a cliff or tall structure, while the camera follows its descent into darkness. (c.f. X-Files, In The Line of Fire, Shoot to Kill, Bladerunner, etc).
I don’t really know who handicaps horses in TV world because it seems that the 50:1 shots always come in first.
Rarely do clubs play music with lyrics- it’s usually just generic dance music, and if it’s a sitcom the dance floor is fully lit. No matter how many people are in the bar/restaurant/club/party, you can only hear the main characters- the ones in back have lips that are moving but there’s no sound coming from them.
People on TV and in movies type lightning fast and with their fingers not in any particular position on the keyboard. (One of the worst offenders was the Jarred’s Room sketch on SNL- I refuse to believe Jimmy Fallon could type in the first place but the character he was playing would enter 40 minutes worth of code in three seconds flat.)
ANYTIME an old person makes a comment about having impure thoughts, it’s hysterical. A 100 year old man will always pinch the butt of the young female lead and 90 year old women happen to know who Ricky Martin is (and will reference his butt).
ANYTIME a man has to don drag to get out of a tight spot (and that’s often), some guy (usually the loser character from the sitcom) will hit on him.
Not only do people leave their food uneaten in restaurants as mentioned above, they often leave either without paying their check or tossing some bills they don’t even count out onto the table.
In western cartoons; immediately after an aerial battle/dogfight, when the enemy plane(s) inevitably go down, we always see an appropriate number of parachutes open. (Likewise, you always see the right number of crewmen jumping out of tanks, war-robots, etc.)
Number 1, I don’t think the kids have to see all the parachutes open onscreen, all the time. I think they can figure out/rationalize that the pilots got out “offscreen” without it having to be spoon-fed to 'em.
And second…come on. I can understand if you don’t want your kids watching some Cobra trooper getting his intestines bayonetted out in full color on a fine saturday morning, but I’d like to think kids who’re old enough to appreciate dramatized military action in their entertainment can cope with some implied death. Especially if it’s the villains buying the farm—I mean, when I was a kid, I think I’d figure that a character who signed up as a death-machine pilot for a supervillain pretty much knew the risks he was getting into, if he didn’t outright have it coming.
Oh, and, uh…even in “modern” type aircraft, it usually looks like they just “bail out.” No ejection seat or anything. An irritating technical nit, that.
And they’re noisy! Even when there’s no need for the computer to give the user an auditory cue, it’s constantly beeping and whirring. In fact, even if any one of those sounds was meant to serve a purpose, it would be drowned out in the computerized cacophony.
Another unnecessarily noisy device is the digital clock. In a time critical segment, a close-up of a clock or a watch will regularly appear on the screen. During this close-up, it beeps every second! Do any of you guys have a watch that beeps every second? Or does it only beep while you’re looking at it?
I did, back when I still drank alcohol. never caused a fuzz, the bartender would just pour up from one of the taps and it would be fine. Just ordering a “mineral water” in a restaurant or diner isn’t usually a problem either, even if they have several brands.
When the bad guy is white and American, he’s likely to have a southern accent–or rather, an actor’s crude approximation of a southern accent–even if there is absolutely no reason that he should. The film version of Stephen King’s *The Dead Zone * shows how far back this cliche goes, and Syriana is a more recent example.
I think they should start marketing a line of Disposable Guns that they could start seling at drugstores, convenience stores, and bait shops. They wouldn’t be terribly accurate, but the intended market is henchmen and second bananas, who aren’t expected to hit anythig, anyway. And they just throw away the gun after they’re finished! Everybody wins.
Well, of course. If Zontar the Thing From Venus came all the way to Earth for our wimmin, it would hardly do for them to show up looking like a bunch of slobs, now would it?
When I worked in a deli, one woman came up to the counter, and in the fakest New York accent possible, said “Ham and swiss on rye.” I asked her if she wanted light rye or dark rye. She gave me the most confused expression I’ve ever seen, as if to say “They never ask that in the movies!”
In a sitcom, this exchange is common:
Character A: Ha ha, we could stick toothbrushes in our ears!
Character B: What kind of an idiot would do a thing like that?
Character Idiot: (Bursts through door) Hello!
In many sitcoms, people are best friends with their coworkers. Often the coworkers will come a-calling at the strangest hours. They will ususlly vacation together as well.
If someone is using a photograph of a building to find that building, he will always approach that building from the exact same angle as in the photograph. He will then hold up the photo to compare the two. That way, us audience members can be sure he has arrived at the right place.
Establishing shots are always unambiguous. You’ll never get lost as long as you see:
Big Ben, accompanied by Rule Britannia
The Eiffel Tower, accompanied by accordian music (usually Lady of Spain)
Waikiki Beach, accompanied by a steal guitar doing an upward glissando by an octave.
[hijack]Back in middle school I went to a minor league hockey game with a friend and we both got free clocks with the team logo on them. They audibly ticked every second. He put his up in his room, and I slept under it one time and had a dream that I was talking to Alanis Morrisette and every time the clock ticked (every second) she puked on my hands. He took down the clock.[/hijack]
Speaking of audio cues (we were, weren’t we?), I always enjoy it when mechanical devices make mechanical noises only when we need to be reminded of their mechanical nature. For instance, normally Data could pass as a regular human, but pop open his skull flap, and suddenly he’s beeping, whirring, buzzing, and flashing. Or Star Wars - Luke’s mechanical hand, again, seemed perfectly normal from the outside. But when he pops open the little flap to work on it, it starts making clicking noises with every movement. Or yet again, the Terminator movies. Most of the time, the terminators appear totall human. But let them get one small little hole in the human covering, or, worse, be reduced to their mechanical skeleton, and it’s “whirr, clonk, clonk, whine”.
I guess they just have really really good soundproofing materials in the future that happens to look just like human flesh.
Along these same lines are Hollywood’s attempt to pass off the likes of Demi Moore or Julia Roberts as poor, working class single mothers…complete with perfectly arched eyebrows, salon highlighted hair, and a body that has seen more gym time than an NBA star.
Don’t even get me started on how Hollywood tries to pass off Toni Collette (size 10) as “fat.”
Well, of course she’s fat. It’s that same world in which Kate Winslet is fat and Jeaneane Garofalo is the fat and ugly one. (When she was in The Truth About Cats & Dogs) :rolleyes:
A scientist that does research using animals is evil and sadistic.
Researchers in movies (Spider Man 2) call press conferences about their lastest discovery. No mention about publishing the results in a peer-reviewed journal.
Biological or medical research is either funded by the military, a private company or a (very rich) individual.
And they always have perfect teeth. Everybody, male and female. Or at least, almost everybody. No matter how far down on the economic scale they may be, no matter what the time and place, the teeth are perfect. They may be peasants in medieval Europe, but the teeth are flawless. They may be poor dirt farmers in Texas back in 1926, but their teeth don’t have a single thing wrong with them. They may be American Indians on the frontier in 1823, but they’ve got a magnificently pristine set of choppers.
Here is the story that I tell new students in the lab:
When I first started in research, I took care of the lab mice. Since we wore paper shoe covers, open-toed toes were OK to wear. One project involved giving female mice a series of hormone injections to make them produce lots of eggs. One day I dropped the syringe and it landed in my toe :eek:
I swore off of sex for about two weeks and always wore closed-toed shoes everywere in the lab.
