CURRENT MOVIE CLICHES

Well, Fallout Las Vegas starts with you (the protagonist) getting shot in the head after a monologue, so we can eat our cake and have it too, so long as you can abide a deus ex machina after being shot (e.g., the hidden book or the flask taking the bullet or the cliche of the reveal that our hero was wearing a vest). If we want more plausibility, we can show the painful rehabilitation of a Hank Schrader after his brush with the twins.

Or we can find out that the hero wasn't the hero and the story goes on without him. Someone else carries the torch to the finish line. Or the hero can be left to live, because the plan has either succeeded (Ozymandias monologuing post-victory in Watchmen) or failed (Tina Turner releases the raggedy man Max after her loss, because killing him doesn't matter anymore).

Or we can just do the monologue as a "time-out" (e.g., that scene in HEAT where the goodie and baddie just have a cup of coffee in the middle of the film).

The cliche can't go away entirely. At least, the problem that drives it can't. A fundamental problem with writing: We have to get our hero into danger; we have to get our hero back out of danger. We also want emotional release (basically, we're all Karens who want to rant at the manager before getting refund) and we need exposition (What the hell is going on? What is the master plan?). The monologue offers a nice way to tie-off all these needs. The villain goes on a little too long and our hero escapes. But yes, we all wind up feeling like Scott in Austin Powers from time-to-time.

In every action movie before the final confrontation: "Let's do this!"

Every small child in an American movie wants pancakes for breakfast. WTH! Who even has time for making pancakes first thing in the morning? A bowl of cornflakes is what we got as kids.

The morning breakfast in films is symbolic of family status. The rich kids have parents who have the time to prepare a breakfast of pancakes and fresh-squeezed orange juice before driving them to school and dropping them off with their lunch money tucked safely in their pockets. For trailer trash kids, it's coco puffs or froot loops in too-little milk, just before they are shoved out the door to dash for the school bus, carrying rumpled brown paper bags with peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches.

I figure every culture has food stereotypes to denote class. When I was posted to a tech company in Abingdon for six months (December through May 92), I expected we'd have tea time with mini cakes about 3 or 4 p.m. Nope. Coffee was as much in evidence as tea. No cakes. No biscuits. (I learned quickly not to ask for cookies.) Hard-working young ones, mostly out of college. No one calling anyone sir or madam.

Brutally cold in Connecticut today. Is it August yet?

Is not saying goodbye at the end of phone calls still a thing in movies today?

One that always kills me, and it seems to happen invariably, is that whenever someone needs to apply a bandage to a wound, they tear the bandage/shirt/cloth in half first.

More a timeless cliché than a current cliché: cranberry sauce drama in Thanksgiving Day storylines.