What are your sore spots re movies?

[Poysyn]

Bullets that cause people to fly through the air when hit.

Soldiers whose helmets stay on their heads during action, even though their chin straps hang loose beside their faces

[CalMeacham]

@BwanaBob

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!

Heck, it was old when Plautus did it in The Menaechmi, which Shakespeare ripped off.

I mean that literally – Plautus ripped it off from an earlier Greek play. I’ll bet anything that play was a ripoff of an earlier one.

[terentii]

@Daylate

At least this was one of the things that they did right with in Flyboys. The CGI let them portray those old biplanes with excellent accuracy, right up to the point where they put radial engines in them, instead of rotaries. It appears when aviation is concerned, most Hollywood types are very deficient in expertize.

Movies like Midway, in which F6Fs are magically transformed into F4Us upon leaving the carrier deck, make me groan. Like, nobody’s gonna notice, right?

WWII movies that show airplanes with post-WWII markings (that red stripe wasn’t added to the national insignia until 1947); or, like in Wackiest Ship in the Army, planes that didn’t even exist during the War (“Excuse me, was that an S2F you just launched off that angled-deck carrier?!?”)

Or Patton (otherwise an excellent film), in which anachronistic American tanks masquerade as German Panzers. Why in heaven’s name can’t they either disguise them with appliques (like the Tigers in Kelly’s Heroes and Saving Private Ryan, which were actually T-34s), or just build full-scale motorized mock-ups?

[Lynn_Bodoni]

I’ll see your “White Rabbit” and raise you “Paint It Black”.

[Beware_of_Doug]

Fonts. FONTS. FONTS.

In any 20th century historical drama, the only type that can be used is what comes supplied with Microsoft.

[GreedySmurf]

@RickJay

Indeed, I am reminded of the scene in “The Hunt for Red October” - which is generally a pretty fun movie - where Ryan, at the end, gets a gun. While this enables the hilarious moment where Alec Baldwin makes fun of Sean Connery’s accent, it’s stupid and pointless. Up to that point Ryan was the hero of the story by using his brain, and then in the end he executes a guy. It cheapens the final scene, in my opinion.

Sorry to say Rickjay, but if you’ve got a problem with that bit it’s not the movie makers fault, as that’s how it went down in the source novel. With Ryan taking out the GRU agent personally with a pistol. With the full context and additional background provided by the novel though it is not as jarring IMO.

[Mean_Mr.Mustard]

Pointless and endless car chases* and explosions.

And 3D. For sure, 3D.
mmm

*unless original and done extremely well

[jordanr2]

@AmericanMaid

I hate narration. I would rather be shown than told. If a movie needs an omniscient narrator, it’s an indication of poor writing.

I don’t think this is necessarily true - look at what Scorsese did in Age of Innocence.

[jordanr2]

A few things that get on my nerves:

• Blends of horror and comedy. An amusing line or two doesn’t bother me, but I find it very hard to enjoy things like Cabin Fever and Evil Dead 2 - I’m fine with laughing and with being horrified, but the two don’t go together for me.

• Neat little “touches” - e.g. a historical drama bringing in some element of a character’s life that would only be known to someone versed in the background of the story (I can’t think of any examples right now, but I seem to remember Shakespeare in Love having its share of things like this). Feels like pandering.

• Aphoristic dialogue - the best (or worst) example I can think of is the line in Closer where a character proclaims angrily: “You know what a human heart looks like? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood!” A few scenes later, another character says something to the effect that “All I hear are your words! You can’t do anything with your easy words!” I know it was adapted from a play and this nonsense may have worked better on stage, but really now.

[CalMeacham]

No, but imagine how much better 2010 would have been without the narration. Or how much better Blade Runner is without it.

If a cartoon has to resort to an aging male comedy star to "narrate"it and expolain what’s going on, it’s a failure. That’s what they did with Metamorphoses and the Thief and the Cobbler, two films that should have been superb pieces of animation.

[DrDeth]

@gaffa

On the other hand, sometimes things have to be explained to an audience that may have spent every math class passing notes to each other. But it’s nice when the writer knows this and has the other character object to being patronized. My favorite example of that was this scene from The West Wing:

Except that of course Marbury is being “exceedingly stupid.” First of all the British Raj lasted just under one century (altho the East India Company did have control over parts of India for quite a bit before that) so “for several centuries” and thus his timeline is wrong. Next “ my kingdom has ruled India” is wrong as that rule ended some 5 decades previously, so his tense is wrong. Finally, he’s trying to give the president some advice- but indeed as Leo points out, the President can’t create Maharajas, so the advice is useless. Perhaps his vaunted education didn’t take hold.

[DrDeth]

@CalMeacham

No, but imagine how much better 2010 would have been without the narration. Or how much better Blade Runner is without it.

.

I love Harrison Ford’s narration. I don’t care for the later cuts.

[RikWriter]

@DrDeth

I love Harrison Ford’s narration. I don’t care for the later cuts.

Totally agree.

[MsRobyn]

@buddha_david

(4) Any time two characters have to explain something solely for the benefit of the audience, like what a maharaja is, or the rules regarding FBI wiretaps, etc. Yes, it’s important to explain such things for the 2% of people who don’t already know, but when you have Tommy Lee Jones in Volcano, playing a senior vulcanologist, have to ask his co-worker what MAGMA is, you need to hire a better screenwriter.

In all fairness to Volcano’s writers, Tommy Lee Jones played an emergency management guy. Anne Heche was the seismologist, who would likely have had to explain what magma was because no one had dealt with a volcano in their backyard before. In fact, that was the basic premise of the movie. So, yeah, the movie was kinda horrible, but not because of that.

[Richard_E.Nixon]

@Justin_Bailey

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.

Except that there was no furnice of that kind on Alcatraz. And even if there was, why would it still be functioning more than 30 years after the prison closed?

[Robot_Arm]

@CalMeacham

If a cartoon has to resort to an aging male comedy star to "narrate"it and expolain what’s going on, it’s a failure. That’s what they did with Metamorphoses and the Thief and the Cobbler, two films that should have been superb pieces of animation.

But if a cartoon has an aging male horror star to “narrate it” and expolain what’s going on, it can be fucking brilliant. That’s what they did with How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

[SciFiSam]

People who wear glasses but are somehow able to function fully even after losing them halfway through a film.

Having a character have an allergy as a way of showing that they’re a loser.

Small children who are oh-so-much wiser than all the adults around them; perhaps they imbibed a lot of knowledge from the dictionaries they apparently swallowed.

@Soylent_Juicy

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.

That Salt scene surprised me, because I think it’s one of the few times I’ve ever seen a character treat a beloved pet as if it really were a beloved pet, and one that needs actual care. Often I’m left wondering who the hell is looking after the dog that the workaholic detective supposedly loves.

[Ethilrist]

People who get beaten up, hurt and thrown around throughout the entire movie and just keep bouncing back like they’re Wolverine, rather than just getting progressively more and more fucked up as the day goes by. Die Hard actually handled this really well… by the end of the movie, Willis looked like it hurt to think, let alone run around…

[LC_Strawhouse]

Any movie about Italian-Americans which uses “when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie” on the soundtrack.

Movies about immigrant families with over-conservative parents and the other usual boring cliches.

Anti-British “historical” movies (this is way overdone)

[Rysto]

@GreedySmurf

Sorry to say Rickjay, but if you’ve got a problem with that bit it’s not the movie makers fault, as that’s how it went down in the source novel. With Ryan taking out the GRU agent personally with a pistol. With the full context and additional background provided by the novel though it is not as jarring IMO.

On the other hand, in Clear and Present Danger the novel Jack Ryan also fills in as a gunner on the helicopter in the climax.