Movie Cliches

[Dagstead Bumwood]

I wanted to discuss some of the clichés that I spot from time to time that just drive me up the wall. Perhaps you have one or two that drive you crazy as well?

Here are just a few that are top of mind.

1) Entering the home through the front door.. Even if a character has a garage, they still park the car in the driveway and enter through their front door. In the movies, rarely does a character pull the car into the garage and come into their house through the garage entry into the kitchen or mudroom, like in reality. Nope, they're all coming through the front door. More dramatic, I guess.

2) Fear of the Interstate Highway system. One of the worst offenses. Any time a character or characters take a long car trip, they insist on driving the whole way via back roads. More opportunities to run into quirky characters, I guess, but not realistic at all. Being in Ohio, if you told me I needed to be in Denver, I'd hop onto I-70 and head west, easy peasy. If I were in a movie, though, in the next scene you'd see me driving down a hilly, one-lane road in Indiana.

3) 6:00 AM looks like mid-day. Where I live, it's dark at six in the morning. Always. Oh, there may some faint light coming up at that point, but in movies, six in the morning always looks like two in the afternoon. Now, if a movie were set in Alaska, I could buy it. But, it's always set in the lower 48. Is it like that in California? That might explain it.

So, those are but a few. I thought of three more while I was writing this, but I want to see if anyone has their own.

[underpants]

1. Everyone buys a baguette on every shopping trip

You can drive a good 100-200 yards without looking at the road.

The streets are always always wet.

[Ohio Dem]

11. And said baguette is in a paper bag. nt

[Skittles]

2. turn on TV, perfect picture pops up immediately

yes indeed

[Dagstead Bumwood]

3. Made me think of the radio cliche.

Anytime a radio is switched on it is always at the precise beginning of a song or it's just in time to hear the song being introduced.

[Skittles]

7. yup

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

4. When a character is being chased and gets away in a car,

they always have their keys immediately at hand and the car starts right away.

When they are going somewhere in a car and need to be there right away, they can always find a nearby parking space and never have to feed a parking meter.

In older movies, at least, when women are running away from the bad guy they always fall down.

People are almost never naked in bed; when they get up, even after having sex, they are wearing underwear.

Nobody ever has to go to the bathroom.

[Dagstead Bumwood]

5. Credit to whomever invented the term years ago

but this made me think of the L-shaped sheet. Men are always shown lying in bed bare-chested and women are always covered.

And, on a related note, why is it that the morning after they spent the night screwing, they're always full of modestly and leap out of bed draped in the sheet?

[Doc_Technical]

32. John Travolta used the bathroom, to his regret,

in "Pulp Fiction"

[Karadeniz]

6. Until recently, the black guy always got killed. My husband and I... if a group with one black man

Walked into a dangerous situation... We'd say, Well, he's gonna die. And sure enough, the AA would die before anyone. It was so racist, but for years and years, movies promulgated the idea that the black man was expendable. We didn't like that a bit, but I don't know if that's changed because we don't watch many movies anymore.

[underpants]

13. The blonde floozy is always right there too

Blonde chick/black guy. Always 1&2.

[Karadeniz]

20. I forgot about that!

[Doc_Technical]

31. The Black Guy getting taken out

was mentioned in the movie "Canadian Bacon"

[captain queeg]

8. They cock their guns repeatedly, or rack their pump shotguns over and over without firing

[rsdsharp]

17. They can't fire.

By repeated racking the weapon they’ve ejected all the ammunition.

[captain queeg]

19. Exactly. I keep expecting to hear a shotgun round hit the floor

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

9. When the bad guy captures the hero and explains his plot to him in great detail

instead of just killing him, which is what would really happen.

[Aristus]

10. Any time a sharp blade appears, there's a *shink!* sound of the blade being

drawn from a scabbard. Even if the blade is not moving, and there's no scabbard in sight.

Simply pointing a gun will cause a cocking sound. Lets the opposing character know you mean business.

Inside a tank, any tank, even the famously cramped Russian T-55, there's enough room to throw a fancy masquerade ball.

Units of soldiers, no matter how long they have been assigned together or how close knit they are, always talk in crisp, formal, professional military lingo, just as if they were still in Basic Training.

Trainees in Movie-Basic have weekends off from training, and go into town wearing civilian clothes. IRL, Basic Training is a full immersion deal; no time off; no civilian clothes, until after graduation.

[underpants]

14. "Fury" does this but it's a great tank movie

I was a scout not a tanker but that movie really got the relationships on a vehicle correctly.

The rest of the Army stuff is also correct. Oh and the new guy in uniform who may be shipping out any day now always gets a girl because.... yeah

[Aristus]

15. As a tanker, I love tank movies, of course.

But “Fury” isn’t one of my favorites. It’s just too ugly a film to really enjoy the aspects of tank warfare it depicts.

War is ugly, of course. And tank movies don’t have to be beautiful to look at. But “Fury” lacked some of the special qualities that make tank movies watchable.

One thing the film got right is the constant bickering that goes on between crew members. That was true to form.

[Ohio Dem]

12. You, and maybe others here, would like the website

https://tvtropes.org/

And no, I don't any affiliation with that site. Hell, I am not even a member. But I like it.

[Aristus]

16. I often spend hours on TVTropes.

Especially after I finish a series binge. I get caught up on the tropes.

[Ohio Dem]

21. Yeah, it's addictive. nt

[Dagstead Bumwood]

22. Thought of another one: the bustling downtown.

Any time a character returns to the small town they grew up, that town always has a thriving downtown. There are shops aplenty, and they are all busy with customers. And, there has to be a diner. A diner with metal stools where the entire town turns out on a weekday to have lunch.

In reality, the downtown is dead, all the store windows are empty and closed years before, and the only place to buy food is the WalMart SuperCenter out by the interstate.

[hunter]

27. Our downtown was dead, but it came back.

Covid has taken some of that away, but downtown has become a cool place to live.

Our old downtown office buildings and upstairs retail spaces are being converted to apartments, some reserved for low and fixed income people.

My adult children, who now live in big cities, don't recognize the place they grew up in, when downtown was a place you really didn't want to be after dark unless you were looking for a recessed doorway to sleep in, a fight, hookers, or drugs.

[bif]

23. When someone hangs up the phone, they immediately get a dial tone.

[Dagstead Bumwood]

25. And, no one ever says goodbye, unless it's for dramatic effect.

You hang up on people like that in real life, they're going to call you back and ask if you were raised by wolves.

[intrepidity]

33. This one bugs me the most, and is most frequent

I don't understand it, at all. Why? Does anybody anywhere ever do that IRL?

This would be one of those clues that would signal to me that I'm in a dream if I ever encountered it.

Totally unrealistic and totally ubiquitous!

[nuxvomica]

35. First of all, movies actually should behave like shared dreams, not real life

That's why Hollywood is called "The Dream Factory." Secondly, this is never done in fiction so why should it be in movies? I remember reading a sample of a novel by an amateur writer in which he includes an entire phone conversation, including all the usual pleasantries. I told him to cut most of it because a reader is going to lose interest. Art is a distillation of life, with all the boring parts cut out.

[bif]

24. When a woman vomits, she's pregnant.

[Dagstead Bumwood]

26. Everyone is thin

unless they're meant to represent rural or middle-Americans.

[hunter]

28. In the movies cars represent some kind of freedom.

You can drive away from your problems.

It's been my personal experience that running works much better.

Always wear shoes you can run in.

[Mike 03]

29. 2 Detective/cop movie cliches

The burnt-out and disillusioned detective who is about to retire, or it could even be his last day, suddenly lands his most dangerous and horrifying murder case ever. At the film's conclusion, he has a crisis of conscience and decides not to retire, because the world needs him.

The happily-retired but legendary detective (or profiler, or FBI/CIA Agent) is summoned back out of retirement to solve a case or crisis of some kind that the rest of the bureau just can't solve on their own.

[Dagstead Bumwood]

30. NYC.

Most movies seem to be set in NYC. If an alien saw our movies they'd assume 300M people lived there. Most of the rest are set in LA, Chicago, or DC. Occasionally they throw Boston a bone. But, there are too many movies confined to too few cities.

If I were King of the Movies, I'd decree that no movie could be set in a place that was within 150 miles of an ocean or a Great Lake. Then I'd watch the screenwriters heads explode

[Xavier Breath]

34. Just saw another: the action movie non-cleanup ending.

So, the hero of the movie has just saved the day. He thanks anyone that helped him save the day, tells his boss or the nearest authority figure to kiss his ass, then is reunited with him woman. All around him lie the ruins of whatever building/plane/ship he found it necessary to destroy in order to rid the world of the bad guys.

And then....he just walks away. No team surrounds him and peppers him with questions. No debrief that lasts for days. No army of insurance investigators wanting to crawl into each of his orifices. Nope, he's gonna have sex with his woman off-screen and leave to anyone else to pick up the pieces.