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What is your most annoying (minor) movie trope?
What is a relatively minor trope that is in way more movies than it should be that just bugs the crap out of you?
For me it is knowing that the driver/pilot AND copilot of any vehicle will get killed when the antagonist and protagonist are in a vehicle together. No pilot ever uses autopilot either so the plane just goes into an instant death spin immediately afterwards.
Women wearing makeup and having no body hair, almost as if they are somehow innate female qualities. This is especially noticable and annoying in post-apocalyptic movies or other types of survival or "minimal society" movies. Women wearing a flawless full face of makeup right before going to sleep or when just waking up in a film is also always a good laugh.
Likewise fully styled, blown-out hair with plenty of products and spray. I can barely make that happen on a weekend, forget after the Apocalypse.
Personally, I love the inverted use of this trope in the first episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
She goes to bed with perfect hair and makeup, but once her husband goes to sleep she gets up to put on face cream, hair rolls, everything, then goes to sleep. She wakes up early to clean up, really make up and do her hair. She returns to bed a few seconds before his alarm goes off and she’s “perfect”!
I had a girlfriend once that did exactly that, I've seen her real face like a year into the relationship. Never really understood why she did that.
The Yellowstone prequel (1819 or 1856 or something) got me when the main girl had pit hair. Was off putting for a moment and then I realized... yeah that makes total sense. I can't remember if the guys beards got longer over the course of the journey though.
I agree. I get there has to be “some” makeup, but it has to be subtle/believable. The thing that also gets me is the perfectly straight and pearly white teeth, come on!
Pit hair made an appearance in one of the Twisted Metal episodes, and I had the same reaction, huh that makes sense. I also then make me question how one of the main characters had a perfect haircut and no beard.
Similarly, I'm always amused by the women who wake up with lipstick on (and other makeup, but that one's always noticeable).
Yeah, that gets to my fiance as well--fully tanned, totally hairless/well groomed women in makeup 200 years after the collapse of civilization
"It's quite a bit of work to look like that in a functional society let alone the apocolypse!"
i saw an article on Ang Lee having trouble finding hairy hippies actors while filming 'Woodstock'.
...surely you just let them know in advance to stop shaving for the role, though?
At least Tarantino got that part right for the Manson cult members.
People hanging up the phone without saying goodbye. It happens so much in movies and usually seems really out of place
Similarly, they rarely say hello. Typically the conversation just starts right away. "Hello" is reserved for the horror of "Hello? Hello?! WHO IS THIS!?" as the other side heavily breathes into the mic.
So many people who call me at work hang up without saying bye it isn't even funny. "Anything else I can help you with?" "No." click
I'll admit to jumping off meetings immediately after saying bye. I'll sometimes hear the beginnings of the reply before audio cuts out.
No shit! That bugs me so much we're trying to live in a society guys!!!
I just finished watching a show in which one of the characters subverts this. "That jerk is always hanging up on me, I'm gonna call him back." She does, berates the guilty protagonist and then hangs up on him.
The protagonist looks confused, he has no idea.
I actually liked that trope in Heat. Al Pacino constantly banging down the receiver without saying goodbye was an awesome part of his character.
It's funny, growing up on American movies I thought that was an American custom. Same thing with repeatedly saying the name of the person you're talking to.
Or how they manage to fit in the relationship to the person talking.
"Tom, as your brother, I must call to let you know that your pizza is ready...."(hangs up with nothing else said)
One thing I would like to note about this, while it’s annoying in movies it does help to solidify the character names into your mind.
That being said, there’s good real world reason to keep saying people’s names when talking to them. A persons own name is the sweetest word in the world.
Edit: extra letters baddd
Oh yeah it definitely serves a purpose. And I must admit that it wouldn't be personally the worst habit to have, I'm terrible with names.
Honestly I don’t get why this annoys so many people. Because the real problem is that they’re on a voice call instead of just texting.
My peeve is the filmmaker expecting me to read a text on someone’s phone that only takes up a tenth of the real estate on the screen. If you want me to read a message, fill the screen with it.
My mother does this all the time. Maybe too much TV.
Even vaguely emotional moments are and always have been for nerds. Saying goodbye is for betas.
Is this a joke?
Obviously?
Hilarious.
Eh, so-so.
It is yes.
IIRC this was improvised because the phone actually went off a few other takes.
Mine is reused stock sound effects. Unless it's being lampshaded (Wilhelm scream, for example), which is delightful to me. But the dang "rusty hatch opening/closing" noise that everyone always uses
pillspulls me straight out of the fiction immediately.Ha! There was an episode of This American Life where they interview this guy who is a big fan of birds and he knows all these bird sounds/noises. And one of his annoyances was hearing a bird who only lives in continent x somehow happens to be singing in continent y where the movie takes place. The sound crew on the movie likely just found a random bird sound and figured "eh let's play this sound while the characters are going on their morning jog"
Continuing the bird theme, that American Eagle screech that's so familiar is actually the sound of a red kite. It confused me the first time I heard a kite thinking "why does it sound like an eagle from a hollywood film?"
Brian Regan has a bit about this.https://youtu.be/2eBRu6DWDkU
Yeah, I noticed this as for some reason Hollywood has equated "mysterious jungle" with Kookaburra laugh.
Likewise in every anime that takes place in the summer I wonder if they have super regular sounding cicadas or if the sound designers keep using the same soundclip as an in joke.
Oh no apparently Japan does just sound like that in the summer.
I think that in Neon Genesis Evangelion they abused it too to reiterate that the weather is different since the second impact.
It’s more amusing to consider the opposite — that a bird enthusiast is deliberately playing an elaborate joke, finding the most impossible bird sounds possible and inserting them in movies all through their career to mess with people.
Is he the same guy who caught them adding fake bird noises to golf broadcasts?
I always laugh when movies reuse the old stock sound effects that were used in the original Doom.
Any video game really. Movies will typically only use a sample once or twice, so you don't recognize them between movies. Video games will reuse samples over and over. So it's very obvious when a movie uses a sound that has been previously used in a game.
Doom doors were really common as a random hydraulic sounds for a while.
Ultima Online had a certain potion drinking sound effect that pops up tine to time. They also have some animal sounds that get used all over.
Theres a particular set of computer beeps that Xcom Interceptor used for menus. It's not super common but it always stands out to me.
My absolute favorite though is the sound Civilization 2 uses for very low tech units battling. It's made from two separate clips of the Black Knight from Monty Pythons Holy Grail.
My brother and I played that game all the time and must have heard that sound effect hundreds of times. We saw the movie for the first time together and freaked out the first time we heard it.
World of Warcraft really trained me to notice the most common stock horse sounds. It takes me out of a scene in any movie when I hear them.
On the other hand, I was at a stable a few weeks ago and heard a horse make a noise that sounded like it was right out of a videogame. So maybe horses just don't have a lot of unique sounds they make and it's not really the same stock sound over and over again?
Yes! I love hearing the Doom sound effects still! I believe most of them were stock when Doom used them (like the imp death/camel sound), but Doom definitely made them memorable.
There is an industrial 'ka-klunk-WIRRRR' sound at the beginning of the TOOL album Lateralus first song 'The Grudge' that is in, like, 500 movies and tv shows, i swear.
I enjoy Red Letter Media pointing out every time they hear the "breaking pottery" sound effect.
I actually really dislike the Wilhem scream. It's one of the few stock sounds I recognise and it always take me out of the immersion of the movie. If I see a film on the theatre, or even at home, I want to be immersed in that world. That scream instantly reminds me it's not real and takes me out of any immersion to the degree it ruins part of the experience for me. I wish it could be removed from all films.
Same. It pains me to my core that all three movies in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings used it.
Very much so.
Hearing a Wilhelm in like the second cutscene of Baldur's Gate 3 got a big eye roll out of me. At least they got it out of their system very early on, I can respect that.
It kills me though (and not in a good way) when I'm well into a movie and they pull out ol reliable, like... really? You really had to use that sound effect for this sequence/death/etc? It's almost always shoehorned in, like not even lazily so—it feels like they (screenwriters, editors, whoever) sometimes go out of their way to put the obligatory Wilhelm in at the worst, most conspicuous moment possible.
Fair enough. It also takes me out of the action, but in the same way as other in-jokes do, which is a pet favorite of mine. It's the laziness of doing it unintentionally that bugs me most.
My roommate in college felt the same way but even she had one exception: Inglourious Bastards. In which their Wilhelm scream is included in a corny propaganda film within the movie.
Yes this one. I was going to post about the sound effects of animals.
No, not all horses, bears, and big cats sound like that.
Horses especially are frustrating because they barely make that whinnying noise to begin with yet movies have them do it every five seconds, lest you forget it's a horse and not a donkey. Cherry on top is that it's the same whinny every time too.
Every cat who has ever walked across the screen in the background lets out the same yowling screech like its tail just got pulled
My least favorite is the stock "kids laughing" sound. My wife says I'm a heartless bastard but it really pisses me off when I hear it.
I somehow knew exactly what that was going to be! Thanks for sharing, it certainly solved the mystery. I'm pretty sure there's also a stock baby crying sound that I've heard a million times and I'm willing to bet that's from the same set.
Haha, I love the rusty hatch opening/closing sound because it is ubiquitous in Stargate SG-1. The characters will just be walking through the halls talking and you'll hear it in the distance. It's so overused that it's hilarious, like the Whilhelm scream. I like to imagine the creators are having fun with it.
Funny, I'm the opposite. I love it when I recognize a stock sound effect, it's like a little game to me. The pottery shattering sound is probably the one I hear the most besides the Wilhelm scream.
I registered policeradiochatter.com a while ago because that particular subtitle/closed caption sticks in my head. I'm still looking for a good use for it!
in terms of movie sound effects, my pet peeve is that helicopter whine as they are lifting off. that's not what helicopters sound like when they lift off, it's what they sound like when they get their blades up to speed. when they lift off, they just get louder and "WHOP"-ier.
I played the first Far Cry video game so many times as a kid. I hear that rusty door opening sound effect everywhere.
My partner despises the Wilhelm scream even as a joke. It drives him nuts. Can ruin a whole movie for him.
Using prop coffee cups that are obviously empty: It is incredibly disingenuous to see actors gesture about wildly without spilling the coffee cups in their hands. And by pretending to drink from them, this nothingness implies a coffee that is without taste. Gross.
Being a foodie for me has been all negatives and no positives. This is one of them.
I was advised before to have a measuring cup nearby to fill prop bottles with the same amount of liquid on takes...
I was also advised that when they inevitably stitch two takes together there'd be continuity errors all over the place.
So, damned if you do damned if you don't really.
This is why in the reality TV show Love is Blind they use solid gold-toned metal wine glasses. It was to prevent continuity errors (i assume they edit the hell out of that show) and it became something the show was known for.
Hahaha, that's pretty clever! There's always a work around but at the end of the day it often comes down to "Does our target audience care?" and more often than not even top level continuity editors get over ruled.
Ugh people pretend chewing, or talking with food in their mouths. You raise a good point though, people make a lot of little faces or expressions when they've just eaten or drank something depending on what it is and how it tastes, and that nuance is lost on most actors or directors.
But dammit, I can't remember the last time I took a bite of something, half chewed it, then said something, mouth stuffed, while pointing my silverware to make a point but it happens all the time on film. Most civilized people wait until their mouth is clear to talk lol.
It's one of the things I love about The Wire. If a character is shown chowing down some meal, odds are they won't nibble at it. Same goes for drinking.
I agree, I absolutely hate this. I hadn't realized before, but you're right, it's almost like it's implying drinking flavorless coffee, which is super gross. Besides overtly hating it, I think I've always been midly grossed out by it but never really noticed.
I get why they don't have liquid in the cups. But why can't they throw a few fishing weights into the bottom of the cup, and put a lid on it? Then it has the weight and looks natural, and no need to do continuity management on the level of liquid.
At least the movie Chef had real food. More movies being authentic that way has helped.
Many movies would be improved by dropping the romance subplot.
I genuinely feel this way about, like, half the television I end up seeing. Drives me up a wall.
Not really a small trope though
It often is. In these cases, where the romance seems tacked on and doesn't really serve the plot/character development/etc., I think it's usually better not to have it at all. It's hard to do romance well, but films that make it a big part of the story tend to do a better job of it (e.g., actually demonstrating chemistry between the characters).
Like Valerian and the City of a thousand planets.
Great set and optics, but that will-they-wont-they was so stupid. Plus, both leads lacked charisma.
There are TV shows that are mainly about the romance that would be better without them.
I do enjoy romance quite a bit. Especially romcoms. This week I saw two with Barbra Streisand -- What's Up Doc and The Mirror has Two Faces. Delightful. But yeah, sometimes, it is a distraction.
Or at least by skipping the sex scene. Like in The Matrix Reloaded, like... it was obvious at the end of the first one that Neo and Trinity were going to have sex (and who cares BTW), I didn't need to see them doing it, or the rest of Zion.
Infinite fuel in a post-apocalyptic world.
People (and script writers) don't seem to grasp how complex the process from crude oil to "works in a civilian vehicle" -pipeline is. And fuel doesn't keep forever, there's no way you'd find fuel anywhere 15-20 years after all production has stopped, most likely even sooner.
The real choice is either horses (if the apocalypse isn't the zombie kind or the zombies don't eat horses) or bicycles.
As a former battery engineer, car starting batteries become a problem long before that. They're all dead and permanently useless once they hit a winter after 6 months of not being used.
A good portion of EV issues are from the 70's tech 12V battery getting messed up :)
Better yet, they put in the absolute minimum spec'd battery for the electrical load. It's like they plan on that failing every 2-4 years for the lolz.
This, and ammunition after the first few years. Gasoline goes bad, ammunition not so much anymore, but it's still not like you'll hoard it—you gotta shoot the zombies and raiders. And then what? While black powder might be relatively easy to make, smokeless is extremely dangerous in so many ways, and the ingredients are significantly more obscure. It'd be an absolute luxury.
I get the appeal of bows and crossbows, but where are my post-apo movies with black powder guns?
that's a good point, muskets would probably be within the realm of possibility to make and maintain with simpler tools, I suppose most post-apocalyptic properties lack traditional line combat, so a bow has a bit more versatility than a musket.
I was assuming existing guns could be maintained. The tools for reloading ammunition aren't that complicated, so one could easily melt lead and pour black powder into spent casings. Not sure how many guns would still cycle automatically, and cleaning would be harder, but it should work.
In the end, if you're making guns, too, I think shotguns are an easy choice when you lack manufacturing precision.
Any gas operated system would get badly plugged by running cast lead ammo. The copper jacket keeps the lead from clogging the gas port. You could easily fire black powder cartridges with lead projectiles from a modern semi-auto rifle, but it would function like a straight-pull bolt action.
Yeah, you'd need to find some quality penetrant to clean that. And those go bad, too. Oops...
"what a day, what a lovely day to ride my...
It's more in homage territory, but Turbo Kid was kinda like that
I tried this out. Converted a 12 valve Cummins diesel Dodge one ton to run on waste veggie oil. To test it I had disconnected the fuel line and had a funnel and short fuel line hanging from the open hood and running directly into the injector pump. It ran fine on waste veggie oil. Also tried brand new veggie oil from the store. No problem. Then I tried transmission fluid. No problem. Also tried hydraulic fluid. No problem either. I tried a bit of used filtered motor oil but it wasnt as happy with that unless it was diluted with a bit of diesel, but the fact is, a diesel can run on just about any kind of oil and the original builder actually built them to run on peanut oil.
I gave up on veggie oil though one VERY cold winter day. Even with the veggie diluted with one third regular diesel and heated with multiple heaters, at -25c it coagulated, the engine lost power and stalled out. It only had to warm up to be fine again but having an unreliable vehicle at that temp is not an option in winter in Canada. Plus, no one mentions it, but waste veggie oil is sticky as hell and after working with it for weeks, all my tools, the truck bed, the pumps I used to collect it and everything it touched was sticky and gross. Hated that.
True. There's a reason that the UN (and others) use special Toyota Land Cruisers with diesel engines.
The purity of fuel in the developing world isn't the best and those cars will run on pretty much anything that can ignite :D
(I kinda want one, but they don't adhere to ANY emission standards anywhere in the western world)
Top Gear (post-Clarkson) did a video about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z_V5ggUo2Y
Much cooler than tricycles.
I'd argue adult-sized tricycles would be better. Don't need to worry about your balance or learning how to ride a bike if you don't already know, and it's more stable overall. You also don't need to worry as much about it overturning on bumpy terrains while fleeing for your life.
Yeah, you'd need a build a convoy of cargo bikes and have the scouts on faster MTBs =)
(Now I really want to see a realistic movie about this)
Trikes are more stable than bikes only at low speed or when going straight. Bikes are more stable when taking corners at higher speeds because the rider's center of mass leans into the corner, which counteracts the tendency of top-heavy vehicles to tip over when turning.
That's why trikes are pretty much relegated to low-speed tasks (like toddler toys and newspaper delivery).
They addressed this in last of us and I thought it was very interesting. They have to stop and siphon fuel a lot more often because they get way less milage out of it.
When there's some kind of countdown going on (like a bomb is going to explode or something), and they keep cutting back to the timer to show how much time is left and ramp up the tension. Seems like invariably the laws of space and time get thrown out the window in those situations. Like they'll show there's 30 seconds left, cut away and have over a minute of dialogue or action, then cut back to the timer and now there's 20 seconds left. What??
Don't even need a timer. Just any time a character mentions some time limit, I'm instantly on alert to see how long it actually takes. I've seen scenes with characters explaining "we'll only have 3 minutes to do X", with just the explanation taking up those three minutes. It's just there to add tension and fails because the scene's length almost never matches up to the supposed time limit. Definitely a big pet peeve.
When it actually lines up, it can be amazing though. It's part of why I enjoyed The Wave from 2015. It's a Norwegian disaster film about a tsunami, and from the very start it's emphasized that once the sirens go off, there will be ten minutes to GTFO before the wave hits. Film builds up to the wave, sirens go off and the chaos begins in one of the most intense cinematic sequences I've ever seen. When it started, I checked the clock. At the end of the sequence, I hit pause (in large part because we needed a break after that scene), and looked at the clock again. Ten minutes had passed. Phenomenal film in all aspects, but that alone catapulted my respect for it.
Somewhat similarly I always paid attention when someone went underwater in a movie. When I was a kid I’d try and hold my breath for the whole time they were under and I’d always fail, often by several minutes
I think that’s why I loved the underwater scene in Mission Impossible — the scene is long enough that it’s at the very edge of what I can do myself (sitting down in my living room, with no physical activity demanding higher oxygen supply), but I can tell that with training it’s possible to do IRL
The Bear has an episode like this where it's 20 minutes until they open the restaurant. It's a single shot too.
I was absolutely knackered right after because it was so intense. Great episode though.
I'll excuse this if it's plausible they're showing a bunch of concurrent actions consecutively. Like if 3 different fights are happening in the same 30 seconds, it would take 90 seconds to show them all.
Just please defuse the bomb/escape the collapsing secret base before you give your speech about true love.
I like to believe that the reason this happens is that the tense situation would release adrenaline, and your perception of time becomes longer. So that 30 seconds passing as 10 is how it would feel to the people in that situation.
Arrested development did a play on that trope https://youtu.be/NvuY5fdtmwE
Fight Club does this to some extent in the final scene. Brad Pitt says there's 60 seconds until detonation, then the scene goes on for 5m until it explodes.
While there are a lot of them I could bring up, the one that hits closest to home is that the characters in the movies or TV shows who drive classic, well taken care of, cars are 100% of the time not the kind of people who would own and manage to keep running a classic car.
I just finished watching Love on Netflix and there is no way in the world that a character like Mickey would own a classic 1968 Mercedes. Yeah, sure, the girl who can't keep a job, gets high constantly, drinks beyond exhaustion, has emotional issues of a teenager, has a coke addicted ex, somehow drives a mint 1968 Mercedes. Sure, that's very likely.
I kinda liked Californication on this; David Duchovny’s 911 Porsche was in dire straights because he didn’t have either the money or wherewithal to keep it maintained.
Brooklyn 99 did it too, Jake Peralta's 68 Mustang was a total piece of shit and casually gets sold in a throwaway gag because he's awful with money.
This made me really want to get a beat up 911 convertible I could drive around and not care too much about… until I realized how much the maintenance costs would actually be. Sounds like they’re very expensive and not reliable at all in old age.
I don't know what maintenance is like, but they're really not cheap to buy in the first place.
I love that show! My favorite podcast is co-hosted by Mike Mitchell who plays Randy on Love. He's an asshole of course on Love but actually really endearing. Love makes me wish I saw Paul Rust in a lot more stuff, super funny guy
Oh yeah! I love Doughboys! Been my favorite podcast since episode 6 when Jordan Morris mentioned it on Jordan Jesse Go. I figured I'd listen to Jordan's episode and been listening since then!
When the protagonist is in need of a car and they find the keys in the sun shade.
For me, it worked exactly once, in 1991.
Terminator 2. First, kiddo shows the terminator that
understanding human behaviors can be more efficient than violencepeople keep keys in the sun shade. Then, the terminator shows it indeed does learn. Never really about the keys.I don't have any evidence to back this up, but my gut says that's an old rural thing that was mildly better than leaving it in the ignition.
Yeah, I think it must've been. I just watched The Birds a couple nights ago and saw the keys above the sun shade and this idea finally clicked for me. In a small town like that, there'd be little reason not to leave the keys in the car. Who's going to steal a car in a small town where everyone knows each other?
Yeah or if you're in a bad area you make sure to put your keys in the gas cap and lock the car...
First I heard this, but it makes sense.
Odds of a mugger taking your keys much higher than opportunist checking the gas cap.
In those neighborhoods its best to just leave the car unlocked if you'd rather keep your windows intact.
Clearly you've never had a crackhead in Watertown, New York try to pry your rims off the car without removing them and then steal your gas cap.
I've been to Watertown once to visit a friend. He took me to a strip club that was in a doublewide trailer. We watched a girl climb off a guys dick, come over and offer herself for the weekend. I thought I had seen it all in rural GA. Nope.
Using fighter jets at point-blank range.
Why do you fly an F-whatever within swatting distance of the Big Monster just to have whatever you shot at it be swatted away along with your plane?
The damn things have ranges measured in tens or hundreds of kilometers, for a reason.
I feel like over-the-horizon operations are far too low-stake for a kaiju fight. We need rocket punches and swords and near-miss flybys! If you aren't outrunning your own explosion then you are too far away.
Artillery and accurate missiles are just too boring.
The bad guy getting killed because he used his smartphone and someone shot a few missiles at his location and leveled the block from 200km out just isn't interesting.
Godzilla can't die because the ASW wing of a fleet carrier tracked him swimming underwater and directed a nuclear submarine to fire a nuclear tipped SLBM on his location.
If you want a realistic movie about modern militaries (or near future scifi) it has to be a character drama tangentially related to war, like Crimson Tide. Movie/TV writers intentionally don't care about getting combat accurate when it messes with their stories
OMG I almost mentioned this one. Like the range for the missile load you have on your plane is measured in MILES why are you flying (and exploding) right into the kaiju's claw?!
That and the ground troops who just keep on uselessly shooting their handguns at the 100 foot tall creature or impervious cyborg that just took out 100+ of their fellow police/army mates. Are we supposed to believe that their final though was "Well gee, I saw this thing take out hundreds of other people shooting at it byt MY bullet will be the one to bring it down! YEEEEEEAH!" <squish>
Especially when the thing they're shooting at isn't attacking and they'll just piss it off. I always want to see the ground troops look up and then look at their gun several times then just walk away saying "nope" and after tanks fail to even penetrate the thing's skin/armor or even make it look their way, they also stop and start getting people to safety rather than pointlessly attacking.
Meh, it looks cooler this way though. It would visually make LESS sense to do it the correct way.
Characters standing there staring at a situation a real person would have noped out of in a minute flat.
"You just don't get it, do you?"
Many movies ruined! I’ll start looking out for this one!
YES! Came here to say this - this one drives me nuts every time!
The second anyone whips out a computer I start cocking an eyebrow. I enjoyed Skyfall riiiight up until the whole dumb hacking sequence, and THEN suddenly everything in the movie seemed ridiculous to me. Even though I was watching a James Bond movie for over an hour. (Well, then they established Bond's parents' last name was actually "Bond" and not a code name, so maybe it wasn't just that...)
Skyfall has high highs and low lows, and that was the lowest low for me. Even in the realm of made-up movie hacking, I couldn't suspend disbelief. A magic spell in the servers would have been more believable. And the sneaky subway train attack.
But yeah it's bogged down by other garbage, like making James Bond not an alias for a listless phantom of a state assassin, and instead the full name of a well-loved boy with parents and a past was a terrible choice. The villain was really thematically cool, but as a functional villain in service to the plot, he was a clown who consistently failed for dumb reasons. Just really established that we are far away from Casino Royale and entering the Spectre era of Bond, not a fan.
The code name thing is interesting, but we already knew this was his 'real' name since the 60s, no?
Yeah, but like his penchant for bow ties, gin, and marrow-bones I figured that would be a detail about his character left behind with Craig Bond.
Even earlier than the film actually.
Bond's family, background and family history (including crest and family motto "Orbis non Sufficit" or "The World is not Enough") were introduced in the Fleming novel "On Her Majestys Secret Service" in 1963 which was actually pretty faithfully translated for the film version in the 1969.
The Bond alias theory is just that though, a theory.
Bond has had a family history, a well fleshed out background (parents dying in a skiing accident, lived with his aunt, got expelled from Eton) and even a family crest with a motto "Orbis non Sufficit" since the original Fleming novels (I believe it was On Her Majestys Secret Service it was introduced) so there's nothing silly about that aspect of the movie.
Characters driving and moving the wheel uniformly to the left and right every second.
If they were really on the road, their car would be twitching left and right.
No one ever finishes their breakfast. Every show lays out a giant spread of "this complete breakfast" with pancakes, toast, bacon, eggs, orange juice, etc, and no one ever takes more than two bites before exiting the scene.
Drinks in bars too.
“A beer, please.”
Has one sip, leaves cash on the bar, then walks out.
Psychopaths looking like psychopaths - you know, that cold tough face, threatening body language, all that stuff. I had the "luck" of knowing a few real-life psychopaths and they were some of the most charming people you can meet - "life of the party" types. The only realistic portrayal of a psychopath that I know of is the TV series Weeds
Also, as someone with an East-European accent, I find it funny how this type of accent is associated with mobster types in movies. It is most often a Russian accent and I don't have that, luckily - out of curiosity, can Western people even distinguish a Russian accent from Polish or Czech accent? However, people in the West don't seem to associate me with the Russian mafia, so it's all good.
Slavic people tropes are a category in itself... but I guess every group of people has their tired stereotypes in movies.
Is the weeds psycho to whom you're referring that drug kingpin Slash mayor?
No, I am talking about the protagonist, Nancy Botwin. If that surprises you, maybe you learned what a psychopath is from the movies (which is most often incorrect).
That was my point - that real-life psychopaths can be cute, charming and smile a lot. They do not appear threatening on sight and it takes time to recognize them. Like Nancy in the series - as a viewer, you like her at first. It takes multiple seasons to discover that she is self-centered, entitled and narcissistic, lacks empathy, is manipulative, callous, disregards rules and morals, lacks impulse control (that includes her promiscuous sexual behavior) and lies constantly.
BTW, when people say "psycho", they might refer to people who are psychotic, not psychopaths, right? I am not a native English speaker so I don't want to confuse - being psychotic is a separate thing.
You're correct on that last paragraph -- though generally "psycho" is just a more intense synonym for "crazy" when most people use it, the average person doesn't know what psychosis is.
Thanks for the detailed response.
Your English all seems pretty spot on. I think psycho is ambiguous in its reference as well, for better or worse.
It occurred to me you might be referencing Nancy but it's been a long time since I saw it and I was curious as to who you meant.
Your description of what makes Nancy a psychopath is quite interesting - I reckon you're probably right.
Curiosity well satisfied. Thanks.
I hate that people don't close doors behind them.
Stringer Bell had the right idea.
Main character has had a bad accident and is now paralyzed. In the hospital or during rehab, if there's a tray of food in front of them, you know for sure that thing is going to be swept to the floor in a fit of rage.
And there WILL be jello on that tray.
Now, I haven't spent a lot of times in hospitals, but the few times I stayed at a hospital where they had to bring me food, or when my parents were at hospitals overnight and they were brought food, jello was 100% of the time on that tray.
This is in the US, so it may be different in other countries.
I don't think it's "minor" but by far my biggest annoyance in movies is when someone goes to investigate a place they know is or might be dangerous, and they don't tell anyone that they're going there so they are obviously doomed and no one is going to find them afterwards.
It happens even to trained people like cops, like, just call off in the radio "I'm going inside Sunset Av. 1534 send a patrol just in case" but they DON'T.
Oh man.. Yeah, that one gets me too. Not a call, not a text, not even a note on the fridge.
"Man, the serial killer only kills at location x at midnight. Guess I'll go sneak off to location x at midnight. Should I tell anyone? Nah, I don't want to wake anyone up.."
A second annoyance tied to this one is when they get to location x where the Big Bad has already killed a bunch of people they don't kill them for some reason.
haha or one of the characters finds a note from a different character: "gone to suspicious murder site at designated murder time <3 "
and then they follow after themselves to rescue them instead of taking 3 seconds to also call the police
Just once during a chase that runs through a hotel or restaurant kitchen, I'd like to see an internationally wanted assassin slip on a wet patch of floor or get burnt and/or stabbed when they start shoving everyone out of the way.
Having worked in a few kitchens, there is a decent chance the crew is knocking that guy out before he gets past the dishwasher. There's a lot of pent up tension and rage in your standard restaurant kitchen...
I just started watching The Bear but it certainly captures that agression and tension (I've known a lot of chefs in my life).
When an n digit code is being "cracked", with each digit revealed in order, yet it takes just as long to crack the first digit as the last even though there are only 10 possibilities for the last digit.
Funny enough, the least contrived scenario you could get Hollywood-style cracking of one digit at a time would actually depend on it taking longer to crack each successive character until the last. (But we're talking nanosecond-scale differences.)
Say the passcode is
34397and the system is vulnerable to a string comparison timing attack.The general idea is that the system will reject
30000faster than it will reject34000because the first one takes two character comparisons (3=3: true,0=4: false) to tell know it's wrong while the second takes three. So you run through the numbers one place at a time (10000,20000) until you find one that takes slightly longer to reject (30000).The difference is so minor that it probably won't be apparent on your first try, but after enough failed attempts you start to see that
[012456789]0000are rejected faster than30000. Therefore the first character of the passcode is3.To get it to go as slow as it does in the movies, we'll need to add a couple more contrivances to this scenario:
All that said, cracking the last character is different. It will probably be faster than the ones before it because we don't have to use timing information to figure out if a guess was correct. If it's correct we'll know it because the system unlocked.
Aren't there 10 possibilities for each digit, though? Maybe I'm misunderstanding you.
You're right, it doesn't make sense on many levels. If you're cracking a code, you typically don't find one digit at a time; you have to get every digit right at once. But it's especially painful when it takes 10s to get the last digit, particularly when you see all 10 possibilities flash past many times before it finally settles in the right one.
The only real-world example I can think of this being a real thing is something like NTLMv2 in windows passwords being patched on top of NTLMv1 for backwards compatibility - where the first 8 characters of your password are encrypted using an outdated standard and the subsequent bytes being encrypted harder.
One time back in the day I had a close friend and industry colleague who worked with a lot of government agencies and abided by all the high-security protocols he could think of. He figured his laptop contained no secrets that could compromise his business. One time when I was servicing his laptop I gave him the heads up that I could probably get his domain passwords from the registry. He said no way that's possible, so I gave it a shot with ophcrack and a few dozen gigabytes of rainbow tables. The way windows passwords are cached means the first 8 bytes are encrypted with one algorithm and the rest are done with another. Anyway, I called him up and told him I've cracked the first 8 characters of his password. He was absolutely incredulous, saying that's impossible, that's not how passwords work, until I told him what those characters were and he told me to immediately stop what I was doing. I convinced him after that he should be using full disk encryption in his line of work.
I hate it when two characters who are motivated to kill each other have guns pointed at each other, and...they just keep pointing their guns at each other and don't shoot. Why wouldn't you immediately shoot the other person in this scenario? Why give them the chance to shoot you first? Sometimes these scenes go on for several minutes this way!
I also don't understand scenes where someone pointing a gun at an unarmed person moves to be within hand's reach of the unarmed person. Usually they do it in the context of acting even more threatening than they were before, but it's such a wholly stupid thing to do that it makes the scene flip from tense to funny.
Yes that annoys me too, however there is a version of this that bugs me even more.
The good guy(s) will kill, main and destroy numerous henchmen (often implied being under duress or threats of death from the Big Bad themselves) but the hero suddenly develops a conscience and can't bring themselves to kill the Big Bad.
That is the absolute worst.
... one of them says "we're not so different, you and I." I'd pull the trigger right there and then just to avoid hearing the bullcrap.
This worked exactly once, in John Woo's The Killer (1989). There was a palpable, backstory-driven ambivalence between the two gun-pointing characters that lent real tension about what would happen next. Not to mention the use of two very charismatic and talented actors, Chow Yun Fat and Danny Lee.
Every attempt to use this scene since has been a pointless stylistic insertion, as far as I've observed.
I haven't seen that, but I can imagine that the trope was borne from movie scenes where the characters don't want to hurt each other, or scenes where they might hesitate for some other reason (e.g., being frozen in terror).
I just really hate scenes where the characters have no reason not to kill each other, like scenes where Character A was going to kill Character B, but then sees that Character B also has a gun drawn on Character A, so they don't. I think some directors have somehow gotten into into their heads that two people pointing guns at each other is some kind of mutually-assured-destruction scenario.
Empty coffee cups (either don't have characters drinking and moving wildly at the same time or just fill water or something).
Anything to do with computers. Especially hacking.
People casually use guns. I have never held a gun and seeing one makes me nervous. But we see movie climaxes where some common person like me picks up a gun and accurately shoots someone. Then we get a moment of confusion "wait who got shot". I'm pretty sure getting shot makes people flinch and shout in pain, not silently drop dead in slow motion
That's not really unrealistic to keep standing a bit after being shot, even a fatal gunshot wound won't necessarily kill you right away, and if you're in a tense situation like a gunfight then it's fairly normal to be on so much adrenaline you wouldn't even feel the bullet. Could be a fatal wound or could be a finger being blown off, it's pretty normal to just ignore it until it gets brought to your attention (or until you die, if it's fatal)
And I'd also say your average American, especially one who doesn't live in a big city, is probably fairly familiar with and comfortable around guns, even if they don't normally have one.
Actually, that part I believe. I used to know someone who got shot by a 7.62x39mm assault rifle (unintentional discharge by his friend). He was hit right under his collarbone. The way he described the situation, he did not feel pain, just something like a strong tap on his chest. He said that he was confused at first and it took him a while to realize he was hit. Then he started to feel dizzy and needed to sit down. The ambulance arrived and he said it felt surreal but he was conscious all the time.
Depends on gun and distance. A newbie has a better chance hitting somebody at less than 50 foot with a rifle than a handgun. A handgun maybe if less than 10. The mystery comes from the fact an unpracticed person will not handle kick worth a damn so the odds are still pretty high for a miss.
I've not watched someone die from a gunshot, but when it comes to stopping of brain or heart, a quick, silent slump is not outside the realm of possibility. That said if it was anything other than an incredibly lucky instant kill I'm inclined to agree.
Then again, I've cut myself with a knife and not realized till I go to wash my hands minutes later. So maybe some military folks could weigh in and give more firm answers.
If you read Black Hawk Down there's several mentions of people getting shot and not noticing it. Both from the first person accounts of the soldiers who were shot/saw their buddies get shot, and talking about shooting Somalis and seeing them keep running like nothing happened.
And I mean the same is true for pretty much every first person account of a war where guns are used, adrenaline is just that much of a drug. I'm just using Black Hawk Down b/c I remember it had a couple examples towards the start.
When every dialogue is more or less each character trying to one-up the other(s) with a wise-sounding one-liner. Happens a lot in movies with larger-than-life premises like superhero movies.
You know how people say they come up with the perfect comeback in the shower for an argument they had 5 hours ago? It's as if these characters pause time and think of the perfect reply. It gets obnoxious, especially when the conversation is otherwise without any substance.
Yes, and by extension, those scripts that are just too damn clever for their own good. All the characters seem to be amazing at similes, metaphors, jokes and public speaking. Whereas in real life, people get their words mixed up, say "hmm", "er" and "like" a lot, and generally don't always come across as super intelligent.
When a sci-fi movie has some kind of alien race or craft and it turns out the whole age of microelectronics is based on what we've been able to reverse-engineer from their technology. It's basically implying we're just a bunch of idiots and humans could never have come up with the technology we have on our own, yet those same movies also portray us as smart enough to beat the aliens at their own game and use their tech in some clever way to save the world.
flashy fireball explosions. 'The Hurt Locker' got it right, it's the pressure wave.
English people as the bad guys or the asshole boyfriends.
This happens a lot in kids cartoons. The bad-guy butler/other servant of the king is frequently English and always always calls the king “sire” like it’s the 1400s. Hate it
So this one I comprehend and have a theory for, even if I don't like it.
American production companies, producing films primarily for American audience.
Part of film is escapism. They don't want to risk alienating the male audience (particularily for the action flicks) by subconciously having them associate themselves with the good guy who wins than the bad guy who gets dumped on.
I'll bet you a nickle thats why English UK dubs exist at all (for American films).
People in survival situations yet for some reason they still are clean, nice clothes, clean shaven and obviously have makeup on.
I mean, really?
People with American-style whitened teeth in medieval battle scenes.
People (but especially women (and especially girls)) saying "I was never good at math" / "I'm not good at math." Like they need one single thing to make the character relatable and automatically, it's not being good at math.
Why would you stereotype this & set this example for kids even more than it already is??? As a female math major I started noticing it very young and it's always really pissed me off.
You have to admit that saying "I was never good at math" is something people often say in real life. So, if you're writing a movie and you want to write a dialogue scene where the character is saying something a real person would say, it would make sense to say "I was never good at math," if it's relevant to the scene.
If two characters are on a date eating pizza, and while discussing how good the pizza is, then one of them says "I was never good at math." That would be lame, that's just bad writing. Nobody says "I was never good at math when it's irrelevant to the topic at hand.
On the other hand, if you have two people who are at the bar trying to pick each other up and one of them says "I'm Stacy and I'm a high school math teacher, what's your name?" Well in this case it would be okay for the other person to then say "Hi Stacy, I'm Joe and I'm hoping you could help me solve a problem because I was never good at math," then that could be a possibly good reason for one person to say to another that they're not good at math.
This is no different than if you had two characters on a date eating pizza while discussing how good the pizza is and then one of them says "I don't know how to drive cars with manual transmission." "Uh, what? We're talking about how good this pizza is."
But if you have two characters who are trying to break into a car and one of them notices it's a manual and says "I don't know how to drive a manual, do you? No, then let's break into another car." That would be acceptable.
I have two responses to that:
I think there is definitely something to this, though I feel like it goes further than a movie/ TV trope. My partner is maths-loving person and since being with him I can't count the number of times that someone, on hearing about his interest, has has said that they hate/ can't do maths. I think the use of bad-at-maths as a character trait is somewhat circular. The saturation of such characters means that many people feel happy to express similar math-hating sentiments and, at the same time, the extent to which hatred of maths is expressed by people means that giving this characteristic to a character is an easy short cut to relatability.
It really is a shame though, because characters who enjoy maths could go a long way to making maths feel more approachable for kids, as you say. And showing girls in media who love maths could be especially valuable in addressing gender imbalances in further maths study.
Re your second point, I do think Buffy is not the best example of this (though I also can't think of another one right now). She does like maths but, of the top of my head (and possibly revealing just how many times I've watched the show), it's also shown that she's bad at/ dislikes history, French, English and biology at various points. She's not really good at any school subject - which is different, I think, to just bring bad at maths as a character trait.
Captain Amazing has got to master his powers and beat up Doctor Incredible! But he can't get his powers to work, so a supporting character gives him a speech and tells him to "git gud," and through a heroic use of willpower, he's able to pull through and save the day! It's kinda like the movie version of "have you not tried being depressed."
Not really a trope but prop chip bags annoy me because they never get to top right. They are too uniform and clean, like someone perfectly cut off the top of a chip bag below the heat seal.
That's probably what they did for consistency. Much easier to tell an intern to cut a new bag at that exact location.
They don’t use actual chip bags at all because the crinkle interferes with the mics and overrides the dialogue. They’re all made specifically for movies and tv out of non-crinkle material
Don't know how much of a trope this is, but I stopped reading both One Punch Man and My Hero Academia because both have a character who decide to beat the shit out of people that are essentially magical firefighters because of whatever dumb reason and people are expected to like these guys.
It's presented like they expect the audience to go "well they are bad guys, but what a deep and interesting point they make about society" and its the dumbest thing to act like everyone in the My Hero Academia world would be jaded enough to cheer for the murder of superheroes in a world where essentially Superman exists and regularly saves all their lives.
I mean, we have plenty of people IRL who would do exactly that, it doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination. You can probably think of a time when someone, perhaps a public figure, complained about something that regularly saves millions of lives.
Car chases that are not organic to the plot of the movie; that are only there to placate a mindless audience.
that's when i'm thinking, "this is the computer game tie-in."
When the protagonist is in a firefight and surrenders and the enemy stops shooting. They were shooting to kill so why stop? If the protagonist was killed during the firefight isn’t that mission accomplished? If you wanted them alive don’t shoot in the first place. Makes no sense.
Ah yes, or when the entire enemy army/gang/crew/henchmen just stop and automatically surrender the second the Big Bad is killed. That is some instantanous and incredibly high level battlefield intelligence information distribution for everyone to know that that ONE shot was the shot to end the conflict.
"Born sexy yesterday"
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency has a fantastic play on this trope in the characters of Bart and Ken: a delightfully naive psycho mass murderer and her male companion/guide she kidnaps and terrorizes.
Fight scene, scenario 1:
The battered hero lies helpless on the floor, utterly outmatched by his opponent. The extremely muscular and lethal henchman lumbers over to him with murderous intent. The hero tries to crawl away, but there is no escape.
In a display of awesome physical strength, the henchman reaches down, picks up the hero with ease, and then... throws him across the room, to safety.
Fight scene, scenario 2:
The expert martial artist weaves effortlessly around the hero, using fists and blunt weapons to repeatedly deliver powerful blows with pinpont precision. No matter how valiantly the hero defends, each non-lethal strike lands true.
The martial artist has toyed with the hero enough. It's time to finish this. He picks up a bladed weapon, and... misses every time.
This is more in video games, but you see it in shows. There’s always some ancient civilization who mysterious disappeared and left behind some random technology that only the hero can utilize.
I love the concept of precursors, but it's often so, so lazily written, not really relevant to the story. Just glued on top of it to provide deus ex machinas that they made for zero reason.
And out of all the detritus and debris and unimaginable items left behind, they (heros or bad guys both) always find the one thing they need. Just once I'd find it so cathartic if the hero picks up an advanced salad fork or the three seashells intead of the McGuffin.
Whenever they have to light something on fire, they throw a Zippo in it (I presume because it's a "cool" dramatic gesture). First of all, I don't know a single person IRL who has a Zippo on them at all times. And after they throw it in there then what, they just run to the store to buy a new one for the next shit they need to burn? Matches are way cheaper, guys...
Everyone having a zippo availaible is silly, but matches go out if there's even the smallest bit of wind or you hold them wrong. Maybe if you light a whole matchbook it could be dropped or thrown without completely going out. Cigarettes can stay when dropped lit, so I'm not so mad when people use those as movie lighters. I would love to see the main bad guy give their evil speech in a movie, then pull out like, a balled up shopping receipt out of their pocket and light it with a normal bic lighter. Then gingerly tossing a little fireball.
Is this the same zippo that was left to them be a father figure who is deceased after being misunderstood or disgraced?
i hate then trash cans catch on fire:
a. the smoke detect doesn't go off, don't these guys ever cook at home?
b. every fire sprinkler head in the office goes off, that not how FPS work. (minor pass if the girlies are in white blouses & no bras, i'm a fanatic for some details.)
Most skydiving scenes, I am a former skydiver and most of the time the free fall stage only lasts 45 to 60 seconds, when a skydiving scene is like 5 mins it just ruins it.
Do you like it when characters shout at each other mid-fall?
Lol, yeah, to hear that you would need to be screaming directly into the ear
Probably not a minor one, but I do love a movie where the "good guy" doesn't win. Or at least it isn't all tied up with ribbons at the end. Also the trope where in all parallel scenes there is impending doom only for it all to be good in the end.
'No Country for Old Men'
would the cattle gun guy qualify?
I find it maddening when the main protagonist is in the midst of a fight or a calamity, in real peril/in danger of losing and... time has suddenly passed,the peril or danger presumably has ended, and the character is in a different location and on to the next adventure. I'm always like WTF just happened? How did he win/get away/survive? What happened to the baddies? And it is almost always handwaved away or.not even addressed. I always assume that they don't know how to end the scene and think that audiences won't care (it's borderline contemptuous).
My husband and I call this "Sahara-ing" in (dubious) honor of the Matthew McConaughey movie Sahara. They Sahara'd a heck of a lot in Sahara.
I haven't seen Sahara (2005?), but this kind of a cut is usually played for laughs and not used more than once (unless it's a running gag). Does this movie do it seriously?
If memory serves, Sahara did those scenes in ernest and about 5 times. It's something I always notice.and comment on now that I've been traumatized by Sahara, lol. Also Matthew McConaughey's hair was distractlingly perfectly dyed in the movie.
The "Chosen One" trope. The prophesy says this relatable underdog will experience challenges, do great things and save the world. No shit movie, that's what a boilerplate film protagonist always does. I didn't need the movie to spell that out for me.
I think that counts as a "major", not minor trope. It's as ancient as any mythology, straight out of The Golden Bough.
the hero on foot gives chase to the bad guy to in a auto.
This one's particularly annoying because the protagonist usually ends up taking some kind of shortcut, cue running through a crowded area and causing chaos, and somehow ends up at the bad guy's car just as they're driving by. As if they knew that the timing of that event would more or less work out perfectly, but dangit, the bad guy obeyed all the traffic laws and got caught because of it.
There has been at least one film (one of the Bonds? Bournes?), but probably a few, where they play on the audience's expectations of the scene and the protagonist ends up in front of the car, getting hit by it. That they're playing to the idea that it's unexpected is ... almost insulting, frankly. They should really try to come up with something more interesting.
Sherlock (BBC) S1E1, i thought this one was well done.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8fgy3f about 47 min.
Lighting a cigarette, taking 2 drags and then throwing it away. Cigarettes ain't cheap, no smoker is gonna do that.
The over the shoulder 1:1 conversation shots where the back of the head person's lips are off. I just remember starting to notice it at some point and now it's everywhere, even in the highest budget films.
Car chases where the two vehicles are hilariously mismatched and yet apparently have competitive performance. For example, the hero is in an awesome sports car and the bad guys are driving a cargo van. Inexplicably, the cargo van either manages to keep up with the hero's sports car or, conversely, the hero has trouble somehow keeping up with the villains' cargo van.
Clever use of heavy traffic can neutralize this trope, but it's rarely used for that. More often than not, the chase is supposed to be exciting despite the fact that the higher performance vehicle should quickly and easily get away from the slower, more mundane vehicle in the chase.
I love a good car chase, but so many of them are ruined by this. Put the hero and the villain in equally cool sports cars!
ENHANCE!
you know, they're looking at a 8b image and ...
Why is the “over the shoulder shot but not actually talking” so annoying? I know they do it to show the reaction of the other person, but it just bugs me so much!
For me it's because it breaks the immersion. It switches from something I've been watching and believing to a shot that looks patently artificial, and then it switches back. They could show people's reactions from the side and if they don't want to go to the bother of having the actor speak or at least mouth their lines, then I wish they'd just get the reaction as a side shot.
I've never seen it quite like this; this would be far preferable to what I see: they are moving. You can tell the actor is delivering some dialogue in the shot, but it's not the same dialogue that you are hearing. As a human, you can just instinctively tell the subtle movements their head and body are making don't match up to how a person would move when saying the words that are being said. I noticed this a few years back and is been driving me crazy ever since. It happens in literally every such shot, in every movie I've seen, going at least as far back as 1980.
It just feels so lazy and insulting to the viewer: They want to cut in that viewpoint. They could easily find the part of film where the actor was delivering the correct line, but they just can't be bothered and chop in any old crap, and assume the viewer won't notice or care. I usually assume they are using it to cover some sort of bad take, or a swift cut between 2 different takes.
If they were just standing there silently, and the shot had been filmed that way and inserted deliberately and with purpose, then at least it would feel like an artistic choice, instead of just lazy.