1) Long climactic fights
I declare myself old : fights bore me. Especially very long fights at the end of the movie, when there is no other possible outcome than the good guy's victory. Especially when it's between superhumans that can just punch each others ad infinitam, at least get back up until the arbitrary point where the script tells them to stay down. Just yawn.
I do appreciate inventive fights where there's something else to follow than exchanges of smacks, though : Jackie Chan's would be an example if I had the slightest interest for matial arts, but some old Bond movies also qualify, when they weaponize every object in the room.
2) Tired lines from the little book of sounding epic.
I now leave the room and slam the door if anyone says "let's do this". It's even worse when they're tired sequences of dialogues. Matrix movies are full of these. A random "excuse me", a character answers "what for", and in your head you wearily go "for that *pif paf beng*" before the movie goes "for that *pif paf beng*". I saw a couple of minutes of Avatar on a videoclub's wall tv, it went "move very slowly" in front of a heavy-sounding beast, I didn't have to raise my eyes from the DVDs I was browsing to mumble "now run" before the movie went "now run". Maybe I had watched too many Doctor Who episodes beforehand, but this sort of thing just tells me all I want to know about the film.
3) Shoehorned romance.
Oh look the old kidnapped professor happens to have a young daughter she will fall in love with the hero. Oh look the biologist jungle pilot they hire is a single young woman she will fall in love with the hero. Oh look these two characters are arguing at first contact they will marry at the end. Oh look that pretty girl is already married, her husband will die or turn out a villain. What were the chances (in addition to the microfilm of the secret temple being on the same island as the reluctant hero) ? Well, exactly 100%. If some high stake adventure happens to a man, it will also, coincidentally, lead to a romantic encounter in parallel - usually the only other survivor. Better than matrimonial agencies : get chased by a gang of ninja zombie monster spies.
3b) The suddenly romantic baddie.
Oh no the fleeing big bad has kidnapped the hero's girlfriend-to-be. Why exactly, apart to give the hero more incentive to chase him and heighten the stakes ? Well, because he has also fallen in love with the same girl, coincidentally, and he thinks that keeping her prisoner instead of murdering her like all her friends is a sure-fire way to make her enthusiastically marry him. Will she will she not. Or looks like she will after all. Oh no it was a trick, who would have seen that coming.
4) Homing baddies.
- Oh no they found us again, how did they ?
- They seem to have eyes everywhere !
- Okay yes that's not exactly an answer. I mean, we didn't even...
- Shut up and run, we have to lose them till the next action scene.
Seriously, it's a great tension when they show us the way the baddies keep trailing the fugitives, especially when there's deduction involved. But most of times, it just distracts of of the question with a few explosions and gunfights.
4b) Village-sized planets.
It's a related point, but : in a cop movie, if you want to find someone, you just need to locate their town. Go there and you'll stumble on them. In a spy movie, all you need to know is the country. Go there, you'll find him easily. In sci-fi, all you need to know is the planet's name. Fly there, enter THE bar of the planet, and you'll find your fugitive. These stories pretent to scale up their universes, they only switch labels. Relative distances and magnitudes stay the same, defeating the point.
5) The gorgeous woman's introduction.
Zoom on the feet (after arrival in the room, or exiting the car), travel upwards, remember or not that there's supposed to be a face on the top of all that, who cares, you made your point. It's the male gaze if males were imbeciles. It's fitting for parodies or cartoons, but when you play it straight, you look like a Luc Besson production.
6) "Dynamic" editing.
No, cutting to a different angle every half a second doesn't make your film more fun or dynamic or cool. It makes it look epileptic. And artificial. And insecure. Like a 50 years old director trying to appeal to the 90s MTV youth with a 1998 sequel to your 1993 blockbuster comedy. No, not thinking of anyone in particular, in case Jean-Marie Poiré asks.
7) Also : toddler-like designs.
We humans are programmed to feel all softened and protective in front of our specie's offsprings, which we recognize by the proportionally bigger, rounder heads and big eyes. So, want to move people with your creature's design ? Simply engineer them accordingly to these stimuli, and, presto, you have your popular Wall-E or Mogwai tamagochis. Insta-heartmelt. No need for artists, just technicians and a sheet of psychosocial recipe. Except it makes me feel my arm is twisted to feel for these products, and it sends me in full butlerian jihad mode.
7b) Loosely related : thinking machines. Robots with souls. Oddly, it's one trope when I can't easily life my suspension of disbelief. Again, butlerian jihad waargh. I'm a blade runner at heart. A robot that spouts a line of code about not feeling a robot is still a robot. I break it for trying to blur the line and hijack human empathy.
7c) Loosely related : Clumsy sci-fi/fantasy social metaphors. About "race". Oh I get it, you want to make a point about how we are all humans and racism is bad and we should accept each others as being part of one great human unity beyond the cultures and genders and orientations and colors and other phenotypes that arbitrarily split our perception of indivisible belonging ? Right. Then don't do it through different species, idiots ! The point is precisely that we aren't different elf-like goblin-like martian-like types of creatures with predetermined traits and "racially" encoded cognitive abilities. Accepting that we are the same as some (or some other) human minority is not the same as accepting that toasters are like us. Gaah.
8) Also I already mentioned my irritation at romanticized serial killers. No, killing at random, without personal motives, is not a prowess (of course it does make the investigation more complicated than murders with rational stakes), and it's not a form of superior intelligence (failing to feel for others is : being dumb, cognitively limited). Also, just look, for real, at some genuine forensic books and profiling studies on serial killers. They are just nauseating, lame, stupid creeps. It takes a studio executive to try to depict them as sexy evil geniuses. I mean, FFS. Also gaah.
*deep breaths*
*other deep breaths*
Aaaaanyway. I'm not the only one with cinema pet peeves am I ?
...
...
Yes I am.
I declare myself old : fights bore me. Especially very long fights at the end of the movie, when there is no other possible outcome than the good guy's victory. Especially when it's between superhumans that can just punch each others ad infinitam, at least get back up until the arbitrary point where the script tells them to stay down. Just yawn.
I do appreciate inventive fights where there's something else to follow than exchanges of smacks, though : Jackie Chan's would be an example if I had the slightest interest for matial arts, but some old Bond movies also qualify, when they weaponize every object in the room.
2) Tired lines from the little book of sounding epic.
I now leave the room and slam the door if anyone says "let's do this". It's even worse when they're tired sequences of dialogues. Matrix movies are full of these. A random "excuse me", a character answers "what for", and in your head you wearily go "for that *pif paf beng*" before the movie goes "for that *pif paf beng*". I saw a couple of minutes of Avatar on a videoclub's wall tv, it went "move very slowly" in front of a heavy-sounding beast, I didn't have to raise my eyes from the DVDs I was browsing to mumble "now run" before the movie went "now run". Maybe I had watched too many Doctor Who episodes beforehand, but this sort of thing just tells me all I want to know about the film.
3) Shoehorned romance.
Oh look the old kidnapped professor happens to have a young daughter she will fall in love with the hero. Oh look the biologist jungle pilot they hire is a single young woman she will fall in love with the hero. Oh look these two characters are arguing at first contact they will marry at the end. Oh look that pretty girl is already married, her husband will die or turn out a villain. What were the chances (in addition to the microfilm of the secret temple being on the same island as the reluctant hero) ? Well, exactly 100%. If some high stake adventure happens to a man, it will also, coincidentally, lead to a romantic encounter in parallel - usually the only other survivor. Better than matrimonial agencies : get chased by a gang of ninja zombie monster spies.
3b) The suddenly romantic baddie.
Oh no the fleeing big bad has kidnapped the hero's girlfriend-to-be. Why exactly, apart to give the hero more incentive to chase him and heighten the stakes ? Well, because he has also fallen in love with the same girl, coincidentally, and he thinks that keeping her prisoner instead of murdering her like all her friends is a sure-fire way to make her enthusiastically marry him. Will she will she not. Or looks like she will after all. Oh no it was a trick, who would have seen that coming.
4) Homing baddies.
- Oh no they found us again, how did they ?
- They seem to have eyes everywhere !
- Okay yes that's not exactly an answer. I mean, we didn't even...
- Shut up and run, we have to lose them till the next action scene.
Seriously, it's a great tension when they show us the way the baddies keep trailing the fugitives, especially when there's deduction involved. But most of times, it just distracts of of the question with a few explosions and gunfights.
4b) Village-sized planets.
It's a related point, but : in a cop movie, if you want to find someone, you just need to locate their town. Go there and you'll stumble on them. In a spy movie, all you need to know is the country. Go there, you'll find him easily. In sci-fi, all you need to know is the planet's name. Fly there, enter THE bar of the planet, and you'll find your fugitive. These stories pretent to scale up their universes, they only switch labels. Relative distances and magnitudes stay the same, defeating the point.
5) The gorgeous woman's introduction.
Zoom on the feet (after arrival in the room, or exiting the car), travel upwards, remember or not that there's supposed to be a face on the top of all that, who cares, you made your point. It's the male gaze if males were imbeciles. It's fitting for parodies or cartoons, but when you play it straight, you look like a Luc Besson production.
6) "Dynamic" editing.
No, cutting to a different angle every half a second doesn't make your film more fun or dynamic or cool. It makes it look epileptic. And artificial. And insecure. Like a 50 years old director trying to appeal to the 90s MTV youth with a 1998 sequel to your 1993 blockbuster comedy. No, not thinking of anyone in particular, in case Jean-Marie Poiré asks.
7) Also : toddler-like designs.
We humans are programmed to feel all softened and protective in front of our specie's offsprings, which we recognize by the proportionally bigger, rounder heads and big eyes. So, want to move people with your creature's design ? Simply engineer them accordingly to these stimuli, and, presto, you have your popular Wall-E or Mogwai tamagochis. Insta-heartmelt. No need for artists, just technicians and a sheet of psychosocial recipe. Except it makes me feel my arm is twisted to feel for these products, and it sends me in full butlerian jihad mode.
7b) Loosely related : thinking machines. Robots with souls. Oddly, it's one trope when I can't easily life my suspension of disbelief. Again, butlerian jihad waargh. I'm a blade runner at heart. A robot that spouts a line of code about not feeling a robot is still a robot. I break it for trying to blur the line and hijack human empathy.
7c) Loosely related : Clumsy sci-fi/fantasy social metaphors. About "race". Oh I get it, you want to make a point about how we are all humans and racism is bad and we should accept each others as being part of one great human unity beyond the cultures and genders and orientations and colors and other phenotypes that arbitrarily split our perception of indivisible belonging ? Right. Then don't do it through different species, idiots ! The point is precisely that we aren't different elf-like goblin-like martian-like types of creatures with predetermined traits and "racially" encoded cognitive abilities. Accepting that we are the same as some (or some other) human minority is not the same as accepting that toasters are like us. Gaah.
8) Also I already mentioned my irritation at romanticized serial killers. No, killing at random, without personal motives, is not a prowess (of course it does make the investigation more complicated than murders with rational stakes), and it's not a form of superior intelligence (failing to feel for others is : being dumb, cognitively limited). Also, just look, for real, at some genuine forensic books and profiling studies on serial killers. They are just nauseating, lame, stupid creeps. It takes a studio executive to try to depict them as sexy evil geniuses. I mean, FFS. Also gaah.
*deep breaths*
*other deep breaths*
Aaaaanyway. I'm not the only one with cinema pet peeves am I ?
...
...
Yes I am.
Last edited by Flicker; 08-08-21 at 01:25 PM.