Movie Clichés

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Welcome to the human race...
For your consideration.

Also, romantic comedies (or even comedies in general) where the main couple break up around halfway through the movie or towards the end of the second act.
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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0



Sorry Harmonica.......I got to stay here.
a few of my pet peeves

The Miracle Escape the hero is trapped in a concrete alley with no exit, but when the bad guys hop out of their car to look, he's "suddenly" ......gone.

The Summon-All-Your-Strength-Punch where the weak hero finally gets mad, curls his fist into an extra tight ball and takes out larger tougher guy.

Invincible Mode where the hero gets beaten severely and ends up with only a few aesthetic-looking facial abrasions.

Gun In the Air -- The hero holds gun pointing straight up with two hands before turning a corner etc. You shooting birds?

Slow-mo Explosion Escape TNT velocity = 25,000 fps: Humans jumping: 10 fps, do the math

The Dream Guy -- Fictional romantic character, after weathering out bad relationships etc. the heroine finally and accidentally meets the archetype handsome, together guy. He'll wear flannel, carve wooden tables, be rich but not have a job and own her dream house in the country. (until she finds out he has a husband )
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In the Beginning...
I hate torture scenes in movies because they're all the same.
  1. The bad guy paces around the restrained good guy, spouting a bunch of smug "bad guy" stuff as he casually fiddles with [insert torture weapon here].
  2. Good guy resists all threats and makes glib remarks, usually humorous.
  3. Bad guy tortures him a little bit with device, reiterates threats.
  4. Rinse, repeat.
  5. Finally, good guy is either saved in the nick of time by out-of-nowhere friend, or bad guy gives up and leaves (after which, good guy overcomes his restraints and escapes).

Boooooring.



A system of cells interlinked
Sounds like season 1-8 of 24.
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A system of cells interlinked
I was watching X-files recently and laughing at all the tense situations these characters get into which could easily be solved with a cell phone today. Sometimes Mulder pulls out some massive cell phone, but the don't seem to have them in most episodes. You could get away with that concept back then. This of course leads to the cliche used today that everyone that now has a cell phone in a movie definitely forgets to charge it before getting stalked by a madman in an old factory. The phone just never works when needed these days...

Actually, that isn't a cliche at all - my phone never works when i need it.



I haven't read all of this thread, so probably I'm repeating some of these obvious cliches.

-- Ducking bullets. The hero (and sometimes the villain) sneaks a peek out a window or around a corner or over a boulder, someone shoots at him, and he ducks back out of the way. Even worse is when someone is spraying the room with bullets, the hero dives over a table in slow motion, firing guns with each hand, takes out the bad guys but never gets a scratch by leaping bullets in a single bound. Another version of this is the hero is occupied doing something while the bad guy in his hiding place draws a bead on him with a telescopic rifle, fires, and misses the good guy with the first shot, losing the element of surprise!

-- Car crashes. Back when I was working the police beat, I ran lots and lots of car wrecks, usually involving fatalties (no one runs fender-benders). In all those years, I never once saw a car catch fire from impact. But in the movies, all they have to do is run off the road into a ditch and the car explodes into flame!

-- The worse cliche of all is the group of folks in some remote, spookey location--an old house, an abandoned motel, a spaceship--and they know there's a monster/madman/serial killer/wild natives around somewhere. Someone says, "Our only hope is for everybody to stick together for mutual protection--nobody is to leave this room." Which is the clue for one of the expendable cast members to leave the main group in the very next scene because he needs to take a shower, she wants to wash her hair, he's hunting his good-luck charm or recovering stolen money, or she's got to find her pet cat who has wandered away. They go out into the dark and almost immediately get zapped, and whoever follows them to bring them back either gets killed too or barely makes it back alive.

-- One that always gave me a laugh was when the Mummy, as played by Boris Karloff, would be chasing a victim who runs screaming into the night while Karloff follows slowly behind with his step-drag-step-drag pace. The victim looks like a marathon runner, yet the Mummy with its one step by one step locomotion not only catches up with the victim but sometimes has gotten ahead and is waiting there in the dark when the fleeing victim finally stops to catch his breath. Same thing with Frankenstein's monster and his stiff-legged gait. All I can figure is that when fleeing slow-moving monsters, victims always run in a big circle and "catch up" with the monster who is just waiting for them to come running back to where they started.

-- Any time in a movie when the hero turns to a companion and says, "I'm going after the bad guy and will try to stall him while you run and get help", you immediately know that the companion won't really go for help or make the telephone call that he promised because he's really one of the bad guys too.



A cliche I hate:

The heroic rescue/villainous destruction by stealth helicopter. It wouldn't be heroic or villainous if you could hear them coming before they're 20 yards away, just around the corner of this building or behind that line of trees. (Behind Enemy Lines, Lethal Weapon)

A cliche I like: Fantasy geographies. I think it's reasonable not to expect every movie that takes place in New York to accurately depict the layout of the subways or the streets of San Fransisco, and in fact it's usually pretty fun to see just how many liberties most movies take with geography when you're familiar with the places being depicted. Like the car chase seen in Transformers 2 that takes us from the Princeton campus to a burned out wear-house district in Brooklyn (?) to rural Canada (?) all in about 15 minutes.

Or Cary Grant's evening drive from Manhattan to a clifftop coastal road in California (?). I would also like to know by which bay that train took him North by Northwest. Or who built that house on top of Mount Rushmore?

A related cliche that I enjoy is the one where down-and-out artist-types have amazing, spacious apartments in Manhattan. There's a good joke about this in Two Girls and a Guy.