You didn’t kill off you main characters in TV back then. You just didn’t do it.
And there are plenty of times when the main characters seem to be in danger and escape.
In movies, it really upsets me when Scarlett Johansson does not get naked, look into the camera, and say "I love you “zebra.” That’s a drag.
Almost any of these pet peeves can and have been done very well.
OK one thing that really bothers me is that in films, when a husband is unfaithful, he is an asshole and the other woman is a total slut. When a wife is unfaithful, she needs to and the her lover is so romantic.
Often, movies have narrators who are lazy screenwriters re-using the book’s narrator, who is not even necessary to the story. IOW, he/she is a superfluous character, present only in the book to act as an interface with the reader, a detective putting the story together, a reporter getting the story–but in the film, we have an implausible camera filming scenes the fucking narrator isn’t even present for anyway, but he’s still blabbing away telling us shit we can see for ourselves.
It really annoys me that they don’t put the deleted scenes back into the movie when it’s released on Blu-Ray (or DVD, for that matter). Especially when they’re “finished” and only cut for pacing/length reasons - given the vast amount of storage space on a Blu-Ray Disc, I don’t think there’s any practical reason they couldn’t get some university graduates at the studio to spend a day putting the scenes back into their “original place” in the film - but also having the “theatrical” version available as well on the disc.
If a person has a flashback, DON’T SHOW THE PERSON HAVING THE FLASHBACK! If the footage of said flashback is not from the eyes of the character, it’s an interpretation, not a flashback.
Characters acting on knowledge that they don’t have, but that the audience does.
Movies with plots that wouldn’t make any sense save for the fact that the plot and characterizations are so well-worn that the audience is assumed to understand why the characters behave the way they do.
Plots that depict characters making their way through a series of arbitrary obstacles. For example, in The Rock some guys have to break into Alcatraz by diving through a working furnace at exactly the right moment to avoid being burned to death. I call these “Miniature Golf Movies” because such sequences are like making a putt through a windmill.
There’s obstacles and obstacles. There are car chases which manage to do things that are roughly equivalent to going over the Golden Gate while the characters are supposed to be in LA… usually the geographical features aren’t that instantly recognizable, but which will kick out of the movie anybody who happens to know them. Car chases in Miami involving I-95 with no traffic during daylight, excuse me while I pee myself laughing. No traffic on the Palmetto, ok; on I-95? Yeah right! Not even at 3 am!
As for Jeff’s third complain, often there’s an element of “really? That was the only, only, only possible way?” - yeah, it’s been done that way because of the Rule of Cool, but there’s cool and there’s colder than a witch’s tits, ok? The second is not the epitome of the first.
And for the second, there’s many characterizations which are complete shorthand. When was the last time you saw a police sergeant on office duty who didn’t have a gut bigger than an 8-month pregnancy? Italian or Jewish mother? You know you have the Kraken in a skirt. Etc.
The Rock explains this one. Sean Connery “broke out” of Alcatraz over a few weeks, doing more and more outside his cell to prepare for his eventual escape. But the door that is right next to the furnace looks from the inside, so he can use it to get out, but not to get back into his cell every night.
Therefore, he had to learn the furnace timing so as NOT to go around another way and alert the guards he was out of his cell. This is the same reason they use this door in the movie. No reasonable person would assume this is possible, and thus, that door isn’t covered.
Here’s one that’s been annoying me lately: Almost all of the time, women are the ones who scream, while men at the most might shout or gasp but never scream.
I am so sick of women screaming. Even action women scream. Don’t scream, just beat it with a hammer until it stops moving.
Also I am sick of little tiny waif girls beating up 90+ guys. It’s completely lost its charm for me.
Sequels that betray the internal logic of the earlier ones.
Example: Blade: Trinity. They spend two movies establishing that normal people are incredibly easy to kill by vampires. Then in the third one you have normal average humans like Ryan Reynolds who is capable of hurting them with their fists, and taking a punch without getting decapitated.
Agree with both of these. I also dislike gratuitous harm to animals or children.
I won’t finish a movie if all the characters are unlikeable. If you want me to spend 90+ minutes watching your movie, I need at least one person in that movie I can actually care about enough to have an interest in what happens to him/her, and can stand to spend that much time with.
My biggest pet peeve is shaky-cam fight scenes in which “gritty” editing is supposed to stand in for the fact that the filmmakers didn’t want to bother with any actual fight choreography. The Bourne movies are the worst offenders.
Children who are bumbling idiots and always need rescuing.
Women who are bumbling idiots and always need rescuing.
When a cat is shown it’s constantly meowing. The same meow for every cat.
When someone’s pet gets killed. I love it though when they’re very careful to keep their pets safe, like in “Salt” when Angelina Jolie’s character puts her dog in her backpack and takes it to the little girl to look after.
Long, drawn-out speeches from the bad guy when he’s itching to kill someone, giving just enough time for a rescue.
Any movie where there’s “mistaken identity” or “people who look like twins and trade places” is intolerable to me. It was probably an old concept when Shakespeare did it. Just stop the madness!
Did I ever mention my dislike of The Little Sister? The one that’s sent to live with the heroine after their parents die in a tragic car crash? The one that acts out drinking, smoking, drugging, climbing out the window at night to meet boys, needing constant attention and supervision, the one that interferes with the heroine’s job and love life, who is often kidnapped by a sneering villain and held hostage until the heroine finds some violent and clever way to free her sibling? I hate to sound mean, but if I was a 30-ish single woman and my pesky little sister showed up on my front step, it would be three days tops until I bought her a one-way bus ticket to Aunt Fern in Wichita.
I’m complaining about arbitrary obstacles, not just any obstacles. An arbitrary obstacle is one that doesn’t arise naturally from circumstances, and is only there to provide yet another problem for the protagonist to solve. When Dr. Richard Kimble is cornered at a dam spillway, it’s not an arbitrary obstacle.
The kind of thing I’m complaining about is parodied in Galaxy Quest, when they have to get through some kind of machine at risk of being smashed to death. The whole time this is going on, Sigourney Weaver’s character keeps complaining, “There’s no reason for this to be here!”
Yeah, I know, but it still seems like a putt through a windmill to me. Is there any other furnace in the world that works this way? And why is it still running in a prison that was abandoned decades earlier.
Alcatraz was never abandoned. Tours go through there to this day. As for why it works the way it does, it was built in the 20s/30s, so it didn’t seem all that far-fetched to me.