Stupid movie cliches and impossibilities

[bawjaws]

anybody having a nightmare suddenly sits bolt upright in bed when it ends

[Aitken Bonar]

Originally Posted by jangler3

One of the stupidest things I saw in a movie was when, On Noah's Ark (made for TV) The scene where all the animals are walking into the Ark, They actually had lobsters going onto the boat... Maybe they were dinner.....why not? get some extra food along the way, since they are walking right up to you.

Never in any movie about Noah's Ark do you see the Loch Ness Monster and her better half. A big miss, I'da thunk.

[karlafong]

How about the action hero who is always able to outrun the exploding fireball or, at worst, is just thrown out of harm's way by the force of the explosion.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by karlafong

How about the action hero who is always able to outrun the exploding fireball or, at worst, is just thrown out of harm's way by the force of the explosion.

Cars which crash or are ditched always burst into spectacular flames. This is mercifully a rare occurrence in the real world, though alas crashes are common. I often drive up and down the M1 or the A1, Britain's main arterial roads between London and all points north. Its far from unusual to pass crashed vehicles. Sometimes you see one and you just know that the occupants must be dead. But hardly ever do you pass one and its burned out: burned out vehicles were usually deliberately torched.

[squigg58]

Still on the car theme ...

Older films where cars would lose their hubcaps going round every corner. Some cars must have lost eight or nine in one chase!

The rather tired "two cars trying to bump each other off the road" scene. You just KNOW that one of them is suddenly going to be launched into a spectacular barrel roll!

The two-car chase (usually on a freeway) where the baddie's car draws alongside the hero's car ... so the hero accelerates ... the baddie catches up ... so the hero accelerates ahead again. Why didn't the plonker just have his foot to the floor all the time?

The one where the gun-toting baddie draws alongside the hero ... then waits. This gives our hero the time to see the gun and either duck (yeah, right!) accelerate (see above) or suddenly brake.

The "jumping over things" scene. I particularly love the slo-mo shots where it's blindingly obvious that the car is going to land right on it's nose then ... cut to inside the car where the driver experiences a mild bump ... and it's off down the road again! Of course, as "scoundrel" points out, if the same car is later pushed down a hill, it explodes in a ball of flame!

[bawjaws]

Kind of like "the Dukes of Hazzard" where the General Lee every week would do a spectacular jump over some river or something, and you would see it land, the front suspension would collapse and the car would bend at the A piller, and you would think -well thats wrecked it, but no, in the next shot it's like brand new. It would have bothered me more but I was only watching it for Daisy in her shorts

[blondifan]

Originally Posted by edward126

There is one thing that really makes me laugh. It's not really any cliches or a storyline impossibility. It's just that if you have spent $40-50-60 million on a huge blockbusting film, why are there still scenes left in after all the editing etc like:-
The gun's in his lefthand (camera cuts away comes back) now it's in his righthand (camera cuts away comes back) now it's back to his lefthand.
The cigar that lasts for ever with the ash getting longer or shorther as the camera cuts away and comes back.
The never ending glass of water that someone is drinking....

...I don't understand haow some editors can still be in work.

I recently found on Youtube, this clip of mistakes from 'Jurassic Park', by non other than Spielburg.
This is just Part 1, (of 3), from the first film alone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ0Lnyt4m84

Funny how we accept all these analogies as being part of "what makes a movie", even funnier that we tend to overlook the majority of these mistakes.
Admitedly I haven't watched all three clips.
http://www.bigwaste.com/library/jurassicflubs/

Originally Posted by squigg58

Still on the car theme ...

On the same theme how about the movie "Speed'. A city transit bus suddenly leaps into the air and jumps a free-way overpass!:>)

[brianwp]

Originally Posted by blondifan

I recently found on Youtube, this clip of mistakes from 'Jurassic Park', by non other than Spielburg.
This is just Part 1, (of 3), from the first film alone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ0Lnyt4m84

Funny how we accept all these analogies as being part of "what makes a movie", even funnier that we tend to overlook the majority of these mistakes.
Admitedly I haven't watched all three clips.
http://www.bigwaste.com/library/jurassicflubs/

Blondifan, that's a good idea! Maybe you should start a thread on movie mistakes. I can think of a few, offhand. I'd steal the idea, but you thought of it first!

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by blondifan

I recently found on Youtube, this clip of mistakes from 'Jurassic Park', by non other than Spielburg.
This is just Part 1, (of 3), from the first film alone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ0Lnyt4m84

Funny how we accept all these analogies as being part of "what makes a movie", even funnier that we tend to overlook the majority of these mistakes.
Admitedly I haven't watched all three clips.
http://www.bigwaste.com/library/jurassicflubs/

Funny you should mention this. I was recently re-watching Alfred Hitchcock's second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much and had the following reactions:

Its nothing like as good as I remembered from watching it as a teenager. James Stewart and Doris Day are both good in it but they are let down by most of the support cast. That's a shame: Doris in particular should have been better served because this is a rare and very good straight dramatic performance, her one song (Que Sera Sera) is integral to the plot, and the rest of the film lets her down quite badly. Its not a bad film (far from it) but it just doesn't match up to Hitchcock's best work at all.

The plot seems really preposterous in 2009, in a society sadly much more familiar with kidnapping and political assassination. No-one in their right minds would handle the kidnapping of their son personally without police assistance today.

The actual directing is very poor by Hitchcock's standards. The real flaw is how he allows the film to drag on in a fairly desultory manner for over half an hour before anything interesting happens. But there are a number of surprising errors in continuity and craftsmanship. For example I noticed the shadow of the boom microphone in Doris's hotel bedroom emotional breakdown scene, but here is a link to imdb where a host of other petty mistakes is cited.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049470/goofs

In an interview, Hitchcock explained that he did a much better job of The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1954 than he did in his first version in 1932. As he puts it: ''The first film was the work of a gifted amateur. The second film was the work of a professional''.

Hmm.