You know that THING that instantly turns you off, has you gnashing your teeth and cursing under your breath?
For me I think I have figured out it is thin character motivation, nothing turns me off a movie more than when a character does something extreme and unusual out of the blue for no discernible reason. Mother of three abandons her kids to stow away on a traveling circus? You better make damn sure I understand what is going on in her mind or I will just roll my eyes.
I even appreciate when a writer or director comes back years later and apologizes, like Spielberg saying now that he is a father he understands how unrealistic the end of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind is and that he would have wrote it differently had he been a father at the time.
I hate coming-of-age movies. Hate hate hate. Not only are the acutely embarrassing, they’re always completely unrealistic. They’re written by adults who have forgotten that teenagers are broke and mostly can’t drive.
When some scriptwriter/director takes a classic story with well developed characters and plot and pisses about with it because they want to “ramp it up”.
I watched a Sky TV production of Treasure Island last week - a story that every 9 y.o. should read, with clear lines between good guys and bad guys, and an ambiguous Long John navigating treacherous waters between them.
The Sky production turned Dr Livesey into a coward, and Squire Trelawney into a grasping amoral prig who tries to cheat Dr Livesey and Jim Hawkins out of their share of the treasure and dies due to his own greed. Oh, and Benn Gunn (Elijah Wood for goodness sake) is a gone native nutter, not a lonely old pirate who has been alone on the island for three years with the ghosts of his own misdeeds.
The production had it’s good points - the pirates were genuinely bad, and Eddie Izzard was brilliant as Long John Silver - seductive and evil and calculating and your best mate up till the point he slid a knife into your ribs. And then he would swear into your dying ear that he would avenge your death. Philip Glennister as Capt Smollett was great, too. The location and ship scenes were top class.
It didn’t make up for the rest, though. It was so bad, I had to read the book to get the bad taste out of my mouth. What a waste of cast and location and sets and time.
Sometimes I wish movies didn’t have to have a protagonist/plot - In some films I’d prefer to spend two hours in “movie world” and not have the last half of the film turn into yet another cop/romance/action vehicle.
Also, it’s a sore spot (with me, at least) that with DVD/Blu-Ray technology, nobody bothers to make “rating-specific” versions of movies, instead preferring to spend $20,000 on commentary by the person who makes the clothes.
For example, you have a perfectly good alien invasion movie that, for whatever reason, has a graphic sex scene in the middle, earning the sucker an “R”, and too many uses of the word “mother-scratcher” for comfort. OTOH, it’s a movie your 10yo will love, but you don’t want to hear “mother-scratcher”-this and “mother-scratcher”-that for 2+ hours. If you had the choice to select which rating edition you would want to see, you would select the “PG” version of the film, plop the 10yo in front of the TV, and say “enjoy this.”
But no. We got to have the unlistened-to commentary. Or all 5 trailers. Or other useless bullshit.
90% of romances. And I don’t even watch romcoms or any romantic movie, really. Which makes it worse. Oh yes, let’s grind the whole fucking plot to a halt while everyone does some fucking! Aargh! The world is at an end and you people met nineteen hours ago and you think it’s OK to play hide the sausage? And do any of you have a CONDOM?!
There are app. 10% of romances in the stories I watch leave me wanting more (Ladyhawke, oh, Ladyhawke, you will always have my heart,even with your cheesy 80s techno music.)
There are levels of Marvel Science which I have no problems with and others that just…
in the first chapter of TV series Merlin, there is some glassware shown which requires 19th century techniques to make. I’m not watching any further lest a Bunsen burner jump out of the screen at me.
It’s similar to the reason I left Dark Knight; the CGI’d Two-Faces is anatomically impossible and that didn’t so much take me out of the movie as shove me away. Why do I accept dudes with wings but not dudes whose eyeball moves normally despite the fact that half its muscles are missing? Beats me, but we’re not talking about rationality here.
I don’t care for the modern technology.
[I watched a Mexican movie this weekend filmed outside in natural light with one camera and really like it. Then I watched a Spanish movie filmed mostly inside with one camera and really, really loved it. I don’t speak Spanish but a few captions were enough.]
Shaky Cam
3D just for the sake of 3D
Forced love interest plots in otherwise good action movies
Children in peril drama
Torture scenes
Unrealistic weapons
Unrealistic computers
Flashbacks
Formulaic romantic comedies (two people don’t like each other or are other wise attached, fall in love and get together, have a big argument/misunderstanding, get back together at the end.)
That eagle sound they play whenever a desolate place is shown
I absolutely will not watch any movie with awful things happening to children or animals.
I want movies to have a plot, be internally consistent, and have at least one character I care about. If the film is SF or fantasy, I will suspend belief about the FTL travel, the existence of magic, etc.
I happened to watch a bit of National Velvet at my mother’s last weekend, and was distracted to the point of making a comment on how they were yanking the hell out of that poor grey pony’s mouth (the one used for pulling the dad’s cart). I kept thinking ow, ow, ow. (“Pie” the non-piebald chestnut, was guh-ORGEOUS. Me want!)
As for my pet peeves/sore spots:
Most romantic movies. Hate most of them, usually because I get irritated and impatient with the way the characters fall in love–they usually barely know each other and make stupid decisions. I’m also hugely distracted by very large age gaps–the 50yro actor with the 20yro actress, that sort of thing. Ew. As you might conclude by that, I absolutely despised Pretty Woman. EVERYthing was wrong with that romance, in my book.
Incidentally, I’m female. I just happen to hate chick flicks.
“Tokens” in the cast, especially when it’s historically inaccurate.
Characters who have been one thing all their life and are converted to a completely different point of view after one brief exposure to it.
Bullets that spark upon impact.
Action heroes with apparently inexhaustible magazines of ammunition.
Action heroes who can run through a fusillade of bullets and not get hit once (though their return fire is always deadly accurate).
Screen adaptations of best-selling novels when the role of the inevitable woman is changed purely to give her something more important to do.
Screen adaptations of best-selling novels when the role of an independent woman is changed purely to make her the leading man’s sidekick.
Screen adaptations of best-selling novels that are true to the original three-quarters of the way through the film and then change the ending entirely.
Screen adaptations of best-selling novels that change or omit a key plot point to “trim” the script (for whatever reason).
Remakes of classic films that are jazzed up with, e.g., CGI, superfluous plot elements, or “updated” characters to make them appeal to “today’s audiences” (read: “teenagers”).
Movies in which every (male, at least) character is slimy, jerkish, or crude. On very rare occasion I’ll meet someone like that, but my world is not filled with people like that. It makes me wonder what sort of company the director keeps.
Can’t think of any examples, sorry. But they tend to be low-budget movies.
One thing that really bugged me about 24 was that every time terrorists struck, the President had to make a decision to go to war that very day. The US faced that very thing right around that time frame, and we got to see first hand how that was not realistic.
Clumsy exposition of the “as you know” variety. Lazy, lazy writing. When the only way a screenwriter finds to impart important knowledge is by having one character explain to another character what they both already know I am going to lose interest very quickly. Worst offender recently (for me) was when I finally watched the first episode of “Game of Thrones” and almost every freaking character was obliged to deliver a chunk upon introduction.
I’m another one who can’t stand seeing bad things happen to animals. It never fails, you see an animal hanging around the lead character and you know fluffy is doomed.
I really, really hate vomiting scenes. I’m much better about it than I used to be. It used to really disgust me; now it mostly just pisses me off. If there’s no value in filming a close-up of someone’s butt while they’re taking a crap, why do we have to actually see this morning breakfast spewing out of their mouth(not that I want to see either) Do people really puke that often?
Like in Contact when Ellie had to explain what prime numbers are. To be fair, that was in the novel as well. Sagan was a great writer but sorely needed an editor.