In addition, they give a ton of irrelevant information before a one-liner that furthers the investigation.
Police: *walking up to a man gardening. We want to talk to you about your neighbor Jim who was murdered last night.
Man: *continues gardening. Yes, I heard about that. Terrible thing. You know Jim was always a great guy. Taught my son how to play baseball since I couldn’t do it after my arm surgery. He was always there to help with carrying the groceries in and drove me to my follow up appointments. His father and my father went way back. Were together on the beaches of Normandy if you can believe that. Were best buddies their whole lives. And these flowers I’m planting, we cross bred them from each others garden; beautiful aren’t they? Wonderful breed that resists frost in early spring and the wives love 'em as well and we always saved money on flowers for anniversaries and the like; my wife was impressed but Jim’s wife just thought he was cheap. *nudges the officer. He he.
Police: Did you see anything suspicious last night?
Man: No. Well, come to think of it, there was a strange van in his driveway after midnight, I heard a gunshot and the van sped away. Does that help?
Actually, according to one ex-cop I know, some people are like that. They’ve got their moment in the sun when somebody actually wants to hear what they’ve got, and by god, they are going to give you every last circumstantial detail connected with it.
I hate the plot element where one clarifying conversation, usually a *short *conversation, would clear up a whole big misunderstanding. The guy is about to spill it. “No, you see, I was actually talking to…” And then he’s interrupted by something. A ringing telephone; an ice cream truck going by; someone else popping their head in the door…and he doesn’t finish what he was about to say. He knows it’s critical! WE know it’s critical! But somehow this distraction causes amnesia or ADD or something and he never bothers to finish his thought. A marriage crumbles; friends have a major falling out; the alien invasion commences as planned–all because the guy stops in mid-sentence. It makes me want to yell at the screen.
I often wonder if that’ll be a side effect of getting old(er), that I’ll lose that last thread of self-censorship and just go Full Monty Burns in a movie theater: “You call that suspense? We all saw Chekov’s Chainsaw half an hour ago!” “No, YOU sit down! Doesn’t this bother you, too, Numbnuts, or is the rest of you numb, too?” "Well, of course I’m making a scene… because the DIRECTOR forgot to!"
Or even better when it comes back full circle and the neighbor murdered Jim and lied about the van because Jim ripped him off about a patent for the flowers, or his father claimed a medal at Normandy that belonged to HIS father, or that his son’s arm was ruined because of improper pitching techniques. Bonus points if Jim made him feel like less of a man for carrying his groceries.
The short series on Netflix Fallet is great, but the tired trope of, “wait, I have to tell you something very important but your leaving too fast for me to say one sentence that’ll resolve the plot” was done over and over again. Almost as bad as the, “I know I have a gun to your head but I’m here to help I just can’t say why and you have to trust me”.
The one where every nightly news broadcast has to end with the newsreaders chuckling to each other about how amusing they found the final trivial human-interest bit at the end. Just once, I could do with “you know what, Lavinia? I’m just not that into cute roller-skating puppy dogs.”
Also It’s a Wonderful Life. Movies/shows about movie/TV producers who say, “I love A Christmas Carol/It’s a Wonderful Life because it’s public domain, so we don’t have to pay anyone for it!” is getting to be a trope of its own.
Characters pointing this out within the show seems to be becoming a trope as well.
South Park parodied this; it turns out that Earth is the location of a reality show where aliens, as a contrast to the fairly universal “one species per planet” in reality, put different species on a single planet to see what would happen.
Books written by reporters are easy to distinguish from books written by academics. If a reporter writes a book, every idea will be introduced by a portrait of and/or interview with an individual to illustrate how that idea affects the life of a person. 99% of that is worthless and drives me crazy.
Like those giant alien robots whaling away on each other for hours in the Transformers movies. Other than laying waste to wherever they happen to have been fighting, nothing changes.
Alien invasions that consist of gigantic city-sized spacecraft hovering ominouslya few thousand feet above the world’s major cities (V, ID4, Transformers, Avengers, District 9, etc) :
If you are going to blow up the cities, why does every city need it’s own ship firing at point-blank? Why not just bombard them from orbit with nukes, death rays, inanimate carbon rods or whatever?
If you are going to deploy a ground invasion, why not land the ships somewhere and deploy the ground forces instead of shuttling them back and forth?
If you come in peace, don’t ominously hover above a major city much in the same way a brick doesn’t.
Every chase scene that ends with the pursuee running up to a dead end and getting caught while trying to climb a fence.
I was at a writing seminar where a former Chicago sportswriter-turned-scriptwriter wanted to wow us by showing his rejected pilot, which had several familiar tropes, including this one. I asked him — in all sincerity — why he’d gone with such familiar bits. Was there some storytelling element I was missing, like tropes helping the audience focus on the plot?
I have never seen a face turn sour so fast. He couldn’t even acknowledge that these were cliches. Seems like Hollywood does that to a lot of writers.