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The missing rear view mirror in a car.
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The music conductor that just waves his arms and has no concept of rhythm.
If:
- Your story takes place in a setting with pre-industrial technology
- You cast a dark-haired actor to play a role
- You consider it vitally important that the character have blonde hair
Then bleach their eyebrows, dammit!!!
Oh man…I take back the parking thing. What I want to stop is the thing where an entire room full of people suddenly produce a perfect performance of a work that they’ve never rehearsed before ever. Professional musicians - even the most supremely talented ones - rehearse their asses off to produce the top quality performances they give. It doesn’t all just magically crystallize. Really the only time this might work is a jam session with a group of extremely experienced jazz musicians playing a standard. Otherwise it’s going to be rough at best.
And multiply that several times if dancing is involved. And lighting. And…hell with it, let’s just burn all copies of Sister Act 2 and have done with it.
Altering the story so much that it barely resembles the source material, then using the tired old “It’s a different medium. You have to tell the story differently” to justify it. No, you aren’t telling the story differently, you’re telling a different story.
Stephen King cites this as the most expensive ego trip you can take. Paying millions of dollars for film rights of a popular work, then altering the story to make it “better.”
I still go with computer hacking to the point where it is ludicrous. Total strangers walk into a business, go up to their computer and get right to work changing data in it.
Sex scenes. Just do away with them.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve had sex. I LOVE sex. Not since jr. high has a girl been worried about me seeing her goodies. And I’ve never torn clothes off, broken anything or heard anyone shrieking like howler monkeys.
Please. Just stop.
And the post sex scenes where the naughty parts are being kept hidden. You just had wild, passionate sex with this person, and now you are covering yourself with the sheet?
If you must have sex, please build up some sense of tension in the movie. It doesn’t do it for me if they’re having sex within five minutes of meeting, it’s just fucking disgusting to me. You don’t know jack shit about that guy and you’re letting him put his dick in you! UGH! And especially when the entire plot has to grind to a halt (I’m looking at you, Jessica Jones, and lots of other movies) so the actor can get their rocks off.
People talking to each other in a nightclub with live music have to *SHOUT. YA KNOW, BECAUSE IT’S LOUD IN THERE. *
People who light cigarettes have to finish the cigarettes. None of this one puff then ground it out for effect. That’s not what smokers do.
David Caruso will be summarily executed.
The best instance of this I’ve seen (that is, the actor really seems to be playing the piano) is in the “Alien Corn” sequence of the 1948 movie Quartet. Dirk Bogarde (as the aspiring pianist) and Francoise Rosay (as the actual concert pianist) both sit down and start to play, and before they make the obligatory cut to showing hands only, you can see the whole person, arms and hands and face and torso, and they really do seem to be playing. I don’t know if either could actually play at all (Rosay did have some background as an opera singer) but the effect in the film was flawless.
The worst I can think of is Sam in Casablanca. He just flops his hands up and down with no particular relationship to the music.
The same thing for piano keyboards also applies to computer keyboards. Find an actor who knows how to touch type. And what’s with googling some obscure subject and getting the right information in two seconds?
As a former bartender in a live rock bar where I worked approximately 15’ from the stage, yelling is the worst way of communicating in such a situation. Lip reading and pointing is the best. If you’ve got something more than “margarita no salt” to order, then get close and speak in a normal voice. People shouting in my ear hurt worse than the amplified music.
What I’d change is people who are driving cars and looking at the passenger. Keep your eyes on the damned road! Even when I was a kid, I’d ask my mom how they kept from getting in wrecks. It makes me anxious.
This stresses me right the fuck out. Old XFiles episodes have this a lot; where Mulder will look at Scully constantly, for several seconds at a time. One of my favorite movies, Midnight Run, has this way too much - Robert DiNiro and Charles…Grodin? Are fighting all the time, so they keep looking at each other, and I’m like YOU’RE DRIVING!
Character walks into a bar, orders a drink while having a (usually) tense, brief conversation with someone sitting at the bar, then character walks out without ever receiving or paying for the drink.
My rules (oh god I have so many):
If there’s no reason why a role has to be male, then 50% of the time, cast a female. Same thing if the role doesn’t specifically call for the actor to be white, try an Indian.
No romance in movies where it doesn’t specifically need one. Man trying to save his girlfriend? Sure, romance, female lead, etc. Man caught up in the apocalypse and trying to survive? No, he doesn’t need to find another survivor that just happens to be a 30-something, attractive female who’s single and is willing to sleep with him. Sometimes he finds an old woman who was a cat hoarder. Sometimes he’ll find 2 teenage brothers, sometimes he’ll find a former army guy who is paranoid that the zombies were created by the government.
This didn’t use to bother me, but now I just find it so lazy. For phone numbers, no more 555, use a real area code from that area and just make up the rest of the numbers. I don’t care if you accidentally get a real person’s number, it happens.
If people sneeze or cough, don’t edit that out. Just leave it in the film. It bothers me that I can watch a whole movie and never once see someone sneeze or trip or cough.
When someone says “Turn on the news”, the TV shouldn’t turn on to the exact news broadcast where the announcer conveniently repeats from the beginning the big story. It should turn on to cartoons or something, or the shopping network, and the person should have to find the right channel and the anchor should already be in mid-sentence.
Use an actual bird scream for the bird shown on screen? The American Bald Eagle sounds like a chicken, show that.
And they have to say “bye” and wait a second before they hang up instead of just ending the conversation like an angry telemarketer!
And no more people twisting and turning their bodies like you’re playing VR. Real video gaming looks like a dispassionate couch potato barely paying attention to what’s going on on the screen
In the same vein, no more stuff like they hate each other initially, then the man forces himself on the woman with a kiss and she struggles and then a second later kisses him back. James Bond should have been slapped dozens of times by his “Bond girls” by now
And how hard is it to get your fucking facts right! How can a character say "I grew up in mun-au-chee, New Jersey? Google it, and you’ll find out it’s pronounced MOON-auk-ee! Spencer Reid, boy genius, pronounced Samhain phonetically. It’s So-ween, dumb ass.
I find this thread to be interesting and informative. My biggest takeaway from it is that most Dopers seem to have a much more… I don’t know, pedantic (?) TV watching experience than I do. “Pedantic” may not be the best choice of words, but I can’t think of a better one.
My fix would be to completely modify cliffhanger etiquette:
[ul]
[li]I’d either eliminate cliffhangers entirely, or make them subject to maybe a quadrennial limit, like the Olympics.[/li][li]Failing that, shows would not be allowed to end on a cliffhanger in consecutive seasons: if Season 4 ends on a cliffhanger, Season 5 has to end with a resolution.[/li][li]Shows can’t end a season on a cliffhanger unless they’ve already been renewed for the following season. This would have the extra-added benefit (from my POV) of virtually no show ever ending Season 1 on a cliffhanger.[/li][/ul]
Oh, and if I could have one more, no more ambiguous series finales, ever; I don’t need every series to end HEA, but I can’t abide ambiguity from my entertainment.
I imagine you might feel differently if you had to go through a period of three or four months where a couple hundred drunk college kids a day were calling your house.
It annoys me how most of the times anyone in movies or TV gets stabbed anywhere, it’s an instant off switch for their entire body. Good guy sneaks up behind evil henchman #3168Z, stabs him in the center of the back, henchman goes down silently, apparently dead before hitting the ground (and usually with hardly a trace any blood spilled). Um, no.
The instant, super-easy neck snap all action heroes seem to be capable of is a variation of this, and equally annoying.
Make people use computers the way real people do. Use a mouse. You can’t type in a few dozen keystrokes and get the plans for the tunnels under a building. The machine isn’t going to beep and boop as it chugs along. Unless the movie is set in the 1990s, you shouldn’t show a 1990s style progress bar. And you probably aren’t going to be able to access secure data unless you actually know someone’s password.