Movie Cliches

[tommytimp]

Especially when it's so completely generic-"And he hits a HOME RUN to WIN THE WORLD SERIES!!!!"

[spider]

Sports movies are always horrible. I ride and horse movies are the worst. I laugh and laugh everytime they slowmo the heroine leaping over a knee high log. That's the jumping equivalent of baby-steps. Now if the log was 5'+, that might be worth a slow-mo. Not all horses are ridden by creepy little children prone to randomly passing out despite what the movies would have you believe, nor do they constantly neigh and nicker and snort aggressively at people throughout the day. In fact if I ever went into a horse's stall and it started making the kinds of noises movie horses make I'd be skeered that it had lost it's tiny mind.

I might also notice if I had a horse that kept changing gender, size or color. The poster for Dreamer is particularly amusing: perhaps the reason you can't get your barren mare in foal is because it has a penis? Just sayin'

[chiqui]

Yeah, and movie horses never take a piss or a dump at an inopportune time, either.

[Deleted]

The movie 'Insomnia' is like a thriller movie cliche compendium. You've got:

+ The hero with the tortured past;

+ The cop who's not everything he seems;

+ The hooker with a heart of gold;

+ The creepy motel in the middle of nowhere during a storm with all communications dead, with accompanying lowlife guests;

+ Everyone being picked off one-by-one (can't another suspense plot be found somewhere?)

+ The 'ooh, it's all just a dream' twist revelation;

+ The evil serial killing psychotic being escorted through the empty desert in a convey consisting of a single police van with no guard in the back to subdue him and with no sedatives being administered prior to transport in order to prevent said psychotic going nuts, killing everyone and escaping;

+ The Buttoned-Down and Repressed Hell-Child of Doom (who usually wears neat suits and seems just shy, but is actually really evil! EVIL!)

+ The inevitable "well, the killer's finally dead... oops! No he isn't!" ending.

[Deleted]

I had to dredge this thread up to comment on a great cliche I caught -- I don't even remember if it was an actual movie that was playing in the other room that I overheard or just a movie trailer. Anyhow, someone in a bitter voice says something like, "Well, at least we know it can't get any worse..." Immediately cut to the next scene and you see that things have gotten worse. (Thinking about it, I realized that the "something worse" is often a clap of thunder or the onslaught of pouring rain.)

[kostgard]

mosaic said:

I'm really tired of female characters having their movie length journey of self discovery / enlightenment / tripping the light fantastic demonstrated by weight loss. Seriously, to me this implies that women are no more complicated than a set of bathroom scales. And it undermines any other developments that she has made because they all seem tied to weight loss. As if one could not occur without the other.

Just once I'd like to see a female character put on weight during her arc., still end up happy and have nobody mention her weight (a pregnancy does not count).

You know, this is why I liked the movie Circle of Friends - and Minnie Driver before she started to suck.

Her character was a bit self-conscious about her weight, but she didn't let it hold her back and she was still very charming and self-confident, and even landed the Big Man on Campus (and no one was like "OMG, what is he doing with her), who didn't care about her weight. He liked that she so self-possessed and knew who she was.

He does end up cheating on her for reasons I won't spoil here, but it had nothing to do with her weight. And after that happened she didn't exact revenge by getting a makeover and losing weight. She simply becomes a stronger and better person for it. No physical transformation at all. It was quite nice.


See Hollywood - you can have charming stories where a girl has more to offer and isn't judged solely on her dress size.

[Deleted]

It's not a movie, but the episodes of Frasier where Daphne and Niles are about to run off with each other and abandon Daphne's fiancee and Niles' new wife, but decide to turn back and face the music, reminded me of the old 'woman dumps the Wrong Guy at the altar to be with her True Love' cliche for the precise reason that it actually does demonstrate that, contrary to what Hollywood says, doing this does have repurcussions. Especially since it wasn't just a case of 'obvious jerk being dumped' (although Niles' new wife was a bit of a b***h) - Daphne's fiancee was a genuinely nice guy not unnaturally turned bitter by the experience.

As for a movie which does this, The Wedding Singer also does this quite interestingly.

[shriekingeel]

Another stupid movie/TV convention: The two-second phone call with vital information. You see this all the time: Characters are in a room talking and the phone rings. One character answers and listens for two seconds. He puts down the phone and tells the other character: "It looks like Milquetoast's body has been found floating in the Hudson Bay with a parchment copy of the Magna Carta stuffed in his mouth and a large muskrat in his pants" etc.

How can all that information be conveyed in a couple of seconds? And how can the guy who hears all that information not ask any follow-up questions?

[underjoyed]

shriekingeel said:

Another stupid movie/TV convention: The two-second phone call with vital information. You see this all the time: Characters are in a room talking and the phone rings. One character answers and listens for two seconds. He puts down the phone and tells the other character: "It looks like Milquetoast's body has been found floating in the Hudson Bay with a parchment copy of the Magna Carta stuffed in his mouth and a large muskrat in his pants" etc.

How can all that information be conveyed in a couple of seconds? And how can the guy who hears all that information not ask any follow-up questions?

I see you went on a Law and Order bender this weekend, too.

[spinsterliz]

The cliche that I hate is the one where the movie trailer starts out: "[Movie character] had the perfect life...the perfect family...the perfect job...UNTIL..." and goes on to describe some terrible event that happened to Mr. Perfect (a disease, a criminal act, etc etc). This one drives me crazy! Why should I feel sorry for someone who has the most perfect life in the universe until (horrors!) something bad actually happens to him, for once in his life? Hey Mr. Perfect, you suddenly have a problem? Yeah, join the rest of the world.

It's just such an annoying cliche, it pisses me right off!