Of course, everyone you ever met in your entire life, along with their parents, dates and pets, will come into your bathroom while you’re in the tub. Good thing you used lots of bubble bath.
Later, you will invite a friend over to fix up with a friend of yours, only said friend will be more interested in you. Particularly interesting if it’s a same sex friend.
That’s another cliche that bugs me. Every bath has frickin’ bubbles in it. Who’s got the time for that crap?
Most people have very mundane jobs and rarely go to work and when they are at work mostly they are doing personal things. Yet they all can afford spacious apartments, fabulous wardropes, and expensive vacations.
Charmed had fun with this one, with the heroines being chased around by various villains from old slasher films. One of them hides in the shower, then says “I’m being chased by an axe murderer, and I hide in the shower?!”
Shaun of the Dead has Shaun flipping through several stations before he gets to something relevant.
For the record, I always read your username to the tune of the Human League’s new wave hit “Fascination”. You know: Keep feeling fascination/Passion burning, love so strong/Keep feeling fascination/Living, learning, moving on
Except, of course, it’s Prelude to fascination…
Hostile Dialect,
Hostile Dialect, Narcissist
Actually, I thought Shaun found the “relevant” story right away, on practically every TV station, but kept changing the channel because he was the sort of bloke who didn’t care about the news.
Ah, could be. I wasn’t paying close attention.
Hostile Dialect,
Hostile Dialect, Narcissist
My big one is the dun-dun-DUN Dramatic Childbirth. Women give birth without any complications or problems, sometimes even without screaming, all the time. But on TV or in film, birth does not exist without some crisis.[ul][]Even what’s meant to be a peaceful, natural delivery will be interrupted with someone feeling that it’s a good time to have some sort of emotional breakdown/betrayal. (Donna on Judging Amy.)[]The unmarried parents will have a last-minute crisis about their baby being born out of wedlock and panic about it as the baby is practically crowning. (Lethal Weapon 4.)[]The mother goes into labor at the worst time, when she’s stuck somewhere and cannot leave to get to the hospital. (Piper on Charmed, or the baby born in elevator.)[]The mother goes into labor marked by an immediate scream-worthy, hair-raising contraction that lasts five minutes or longer and water that breaks with cups of liquid literally gushing from her crotch straight down to the ground. (Baby Mama and Nine Months)[]The mother has a beautiful, happy birth then starts going blue and non-responsive from a horrible post-partum hemorrhage that can’t be stopped, and she may die, or at the very least lose her uterus, unless there is a medical miracle. (Carol Hathaway on ER).[]Some dreadful, inexplicable mishap occurs that’s happens less than one time in 10 million pregnancies, and the baby is stillborn. (Maddie on Moonlighting, Carter and Kem on ER.)[]Some dreadful accident or crime takes place and puts mother and baby in grave danger, necessitating an emergency c-section to deliver a preemie and a brave fight for life. (Abby Lockhart on ER, various women on various Law & Orders.)[]The mother has a non-remarkable labor and birth, but we’re then treated to her emotional meltdown as she makes the ultimate decision to follow through on her plan to give the child up for adoption.[/ul]There are probably more, those are just the ones that come to mind without thinking too hard about it.
I think writers finally got a clue, but the old “Gotta keep him on the line for three minutes so we can trace the call” bit was kept going long after it was rendered moot by *69 and caller ID.
Everything that Jenny Schecter does on L Word bothers me, does that count?
When a computer guru runs a complicated program and has to rapidly type on the keyboard to get the program to continue running.
I do not use many complicated computer programs but when I do, all I usually have to do is watch the computer do its thing, and maybe hit the “y” or “n” keys.
Interestingly, at least one real-life computer program does, in fact, work this way. PGP (or GnuPG) needs entropy to generate keys, so it works a lot better if you slam on the keys in random fashion and move the mouse around a lot while it’s doing its thing. That’s not anything you’d run in an emergency/a bank-robbing situation/anything cinematic, though.
Hostile Dialect,
Hostile Dialect, Narcissist
The computer thing poses a real problem for directors, Roger Ebert’s written about it a couple of times. Chances are the lion’s share of people here aren’t reading out loud as they type (especially if you’re corporate time-stealing ;-))… yet characters in movies will have to recite what they type even when in a room alone, because reading text being entered on a screen is boring and is usually only shot a few letters at a time.
How about this one? This was mostly a lot of 80s movies, then it died out for a while, and came back with some crappy teen movies in the last few years.
Turns out ballet and generic rap music do mix! Watch the life lessons that can be learned as two kids from opposite sides of the track find out that their love is strong enough they can battle their families to go hang out for a while and learn little bits of each others stereotypes. Turns out that uptight prissy whites can have fun doing something they thought only poor kids/different ethnicities did, and “working class” can make a scene at girlfriend’s dad’s country club when he pitches a fit by standing up and accusing them all of being (gasp) shallow and elitist. But eventually downtrodden parents and Muffy and Todd see their kids are happy and learn that other cultures besides their own are probably okay, in moderation. The valuable life lessons? Hormones are stronger than the prejudice of your parents! Deep, man.
Three pages, and nobody has mentioned the walking-in-the-rain bit. I really hate this device. Girl dumps guy, so guy decides to go out and walk in the rain, just in case the audience is too stupid to understand that he’s miserable. This is more prevalent for actors like Keanu Reeve, who only has one facial expression, so the audience is understandably confused about what emotion he’s supposed to be feeling. The walk in the rain can be modified slightly to standing-and-staring in the rain, or sitting in the rain. Nobody ever goes for a walk in the sun when they feel crappy. Pneumonia and the subsequent recovery is always preferable.
The obligatory hawk/eagle scream any time the scene is outdoors. See, you-- the dumbshit movie goer–is incapable of understanding that there is a world beyond the city, so if we have the effects guy insert a hawk scream, you’ll be able to then understand that the scene is not unfolding in a supermarket.
Any cop show: they’re interrogating a suspect, and say “A witness saw you at location X.”
The suspect always responds “That’s impossible! I was at location Y!”
Who says “that’s impossible?” Why don’t they just say “That wasn’t me! I was at location Y!”
While this can be a cliche, it was explained in Friends that Chandler only starting smoking in high school because it calmed him down during his parent’s divorce. And it’s a huge crisis on the show because he quit a few years before the show started and only smokes again when he’s stressed out.
The joke is that he’s usually stressing out over something that most people just shrug their shoulders to.
If you’re actually a father, this one will really frost your shorts.
For me, a big one is the car chase scene. I find it needless and boring and always fast forward through it in a rental.
But if this weren’t the case, the human race would die out, since the vast majority of sex in the movies is had between people who haven’t had sex with each other before.
The only time anything interesting happens in a high school or college classroom is in the last minute or two of class, and it is always interrupted, or at least punctuated, by the ringing of the bell that signals the end of the class period.
You need to rewatch the scene, then. The dialog from each channel splices together to give an idea of what’s happening.
[Channel 4 News]
Krishnan Guru-Murthy: Though no one official is prepared to comment, religious groups are calling it Judgement Day. There’s…
[VH1, playing “Panic” by The Smiths]
Morrissey: …Panic on the streets of London…
[ITV News]
News Reporter: …as an increasing number of reports of…
[Football]
Football Commentator: …serious attacks on…
[Channel Five News]
News Reporter: …people, who are literally being…
[Nature documentary, leopards eating a gazelle]
Documentary Narrator: …eaten alive.
[Sky News]
Jeremy Thompson: Witness reports at best are sketchy. One unifying detail seems to be that the attackers in many instances appear to be…
[T4]
Vernon Kay: …dead excited to have with us here a sensational chart topping…