Movie Cliches We Love and Hate

[Sketchywallflowr]

- Perfect characters who can do no wrong. They are strong enough always, smart enough always, and lucky enough always. And even when they mess up, their faults are endearing and make them a stronger person. Jason Bourne makes me crazy. ne man cannot outsmart an entire organization for three years. Eventually, one of those random bullets would have hit and killed him.
...Although for some reason, I don't mind James Bond being so perfect. Maybe because he's an original and Jason Bourne (even has the same initials!) is a copy.

- Also, no matter what European country we're filming, if it's American actors they have a British accent. Example: Ever After. They were in freakin France!!!!!

[Prettydragoon]

- All Germans are evil. WWII was a while ago, peeps. Same goes for Russians.

[/img]
EUROPEANS!

But iss it really cliche if is truth? I know I vanted to grow up to be Natasha Fatale vhen I vas little.

[Kisai]

Although it does have it's up side! One movie cliche that always amuses me is that Australia is probably the safest western country in the world if there's some sort of alien invasion. They never get here. Even in ID4 (with the US-centric "international" counter attack) the aliens only got as far as Sydney Harbour before crashing. Sydney would have been their first target in Australia so they clearly didn't get around to us until too late.

- Joel Fagin

Or Canada, which is like never mentioned in American movies except for movies that have been filmed here, there are passing references just from the scenery.

Take X-men, X-files, Dark Angel, The L-word, Mutant-X, Stargate and stuff like that, hmm 3 of those are fox..., anyways, Canada always winds up being a side reference, but when something happens, the power of the all mighty border gaurd seems to stop them. This was actually quite funny with Dark Angel, because one of the sub plots is that 'Eyes Only' funds people to escape to Canada, and apparently the 'EMP' blast that set the stage for the show, had no effect on Canada, though for some reason Canada has a draft... I remember watching Outbreak, and their projection model stopped at the canadian border too... Also things like nuclear war totally miss canada, even though it's directly between it and russia, etc, etc...

Canada has more impact on the real world today than it's given credit for, but movies seem to center around either NYC(Filmed in Toronto), or LA (filmed in Vancouver BC) , and really I wonder how these movies manage to appeal to people who don't live in those cities let alone people who don't live in the country. I think part of the reason people in Vancouver and Toronto watch movies filmed in their cities is to see how many references they can spot. New Zealand (LOTR) and Australia(The Matrix) are also outsource points. Honestly I'm surprised that so few movies ACTUALLY take place in the countries they are filmed in.

[Yeahduff]

- Also, no matter what European country we're filming, if it's American actors they have a British accent. Example: Ever After. They were in freakin France!!!!!

Tim Roth as Vincent Van Gogh.

[Berg]

Take X-men, X-files, Dark Angel, The L-word, Mutant-X, Stargate and stuff like that, hmm 3 of those are fox...

Well, for what it's worth; one of the main characters on Stargate Atlantis is Canadian.

[Toxic]

Kids are always smarter than adults.

Attractive young women are smarter than everyone else.

Example: In Transformers the hot, 22-year-old Department of Defense intern is smarter than everyone else who works there.

[Lei]

I know! I want a smart, ugly, fat chick to save the world, dammit!

I thought of another cliché I actually like... When one villain teams up with the hero to take on another villain who's the greater of the two evils. Makes me warm and fuzzy like.

[Doll]

Any romantic comedy which feels the need to end with a mad dash to the airport/ church makes my brain switch off...

[McDuffies]

I suspect mcduffies is referring to a George Clooney flick from a few years back called Fail-Safe. If so, it was not a remake of DS, but a remake of.. Fail-Safe, a 1964 movie that suffered the momumental misfortune of coming out at the same time as DS and covering the same basic idea, only in a resolutely non-comedic way. I've never seen Clooney's version, but the original FS, while not in the same league as DS, is a solid effort and worth seeing if you get the chance. Pretty grim, though.

That might be it, but similarity to the plot is huge. It's not like it's covering the same basic idea, it's like if it's based on the same book or something.
I've heard once of a non-violent remake of "Clockwork orange". I've never heard of it again so I suspect it was never realised, but the whole idea was mind-boggling.

WARNING SPOILERZ

Abuh? I've seen two endings, and neither of them are paticularly gory. In one, he goes back to the first time he meets the girl, and tells her that he'll kill her, to drive her away and give her a happier life. In the other, he goes back to moments before he was born, and strangles himself in the womb.

I like how the first ending implies that the two of them weren't meant to be together, and the second one implies that Evan was never even meant to exist.

The second one sounds gory enough.
Anyways I haven't seen any, I've just heard of those endings, from people who haven't seen it personally either, so I wasn't sure if it wasn't just an urban legend. They all sounded dreadfully forced and sensationalistic, unlike the one I've seen (your first one).

Yeah the entire movie was about changing past events, but 'I felt cheated' by those endings because they implied that I just sat through the movie only to have the movie never taken place. It's the concept of effectively undo'ing the movie that makes me feel cheated, because if the movie never happened, why am I watching it? So to speak.

The alternate takes of the theatre ending had evan speak or follow the girl instead of simply walking by her. Neither of those endings are any better. What I would have preferred, is the last act bringing him back to the 'present', or the 'teen years' and going 'do you remember what happened when we were kids...' and then fading out there and leaving the question to the audience of what happens, instead of simply closing it off and making all the events of the movie never happen. (Since Evan never remembered anything from the 'blackouts', the girl could either say yes, and not forgive him, or say no and they could hit it off or continue and part ways.)

I suppose the purpose of the movie was to explore 'what if I had done this instead', but all the same, I didn't like the ending. When other movies 'reset' the world at the end, (it was all a dream, went back and time and undid it...) I feel cheated to. I want to see a movie have a conclusion, not be given a 'haha you never watched this movie' ending.

***spoilers - though I guess everyone who wanted to see it has seen it by now***
I think that that's not the purpose of the movie. You get a clue right away, the film is called "Butterfly effect". What is a butterfly effect - the postulate of Chaos theory that order in nature lies in sensitive balance with connections that are so complicated and unpredictable that they sometimes make no sence to us. This is just what happens in the film, whenever he changes one thing, the whole order changes with consequences he can't predict. I think that the film is exploring this scientific theory instead of simple philosophicall "what if" that so many films have done by now.
That's why I think that the ending is the best one they could have come up: he's driven by selfish reasons (he wants to get the girl) but every shift he makes in order to achieve this selfish goal, makes negative consequences on the other side. Therefore, he reaches the only logical conclusion: that he can't make things perfect because the universe simply doesn't function that way. So he has a choice: pursue the selfish goal further, or give up on it and hope that that'll be enough to level things on the other end. That he chooses the second, turns him into a hero, which works dramatically because it places a point of personal relevation of main character at the end.
I think that the ending you described wouldn't work because it would steer the film wrong way. It's not a drama about particular humans that's the point of the film, many things in film are actually intentionally simplified because they are just background for the scientific theme. To make such ending would mean to almost change the entire genre of the film in it's second halftime. Plus it would lack the punch that current ending gives to a point it's trying to deliver.
I don't like the ending in which he doesn't walk by her but follow her, etc. It seems like it's forcing a happy ending on us, as if it's wrong to sometimes, just once in a while, there's a film that doesn't end with "and they got married and lived happily ever after."

What I've seen is perfect. He gives up on her. Then, many years later, he meets sees in the crowd and passes by her. By that point he may have even forgotten a bit about her, and when on with his life.
But as he passes by her, he turns around and looks at her. But he doesn't do anything, perhaps he's afraid of tampering with the same thing once again, but then perhaps he just came to a conclusion that they aren't meant to be together. Or he's given up. So he moves on.
As he moves, on, she turns back and looks at him. We know that in that continuity she doesn't know him and he couldn't be familiar to her. But it seems like something supernatural is calling her to turn her head. Remember, this is a film about butterfly effect, about invisible strings. There could be a chance that one tiny leftover string made her turn her head.
And there are those strings at work again. If he looked at her longer, or she looked at him earlier, their eyes might've met. Something might've turned out. But it didn't happen, and that's a chaos theory. Some of us call it destiny, others call it coincidence, depending on what they believe, but all those believes can be called the same name - the butterfly effect.
And that last sequence, with it's point, is a simple poetry in a cinematic form.

(although basically, the film isn't undoing of events, because these events still happened to the main character, and he knows of them, it's just that the others didn't know.
But if you don't cound that, then you could say that the entire film is a series of undoings, and if you don't like that, then the film was all wrong from the beginning for you).
***end spoilers***

- How the underdog is always a hopeless nerd/geek/dork with no friends in love with the hot chick who's dating the football player. Some nerds have friends. I'm a total geek, and I hang out with, and date other geeks. We have nerd communities.

For the record, I actually like to watch those films with geeks getting hottest chicks and geeks vs. jocks stuff and all. I don't think they're very good films, but I like watching them.
But yeah, they all do show an extreme ignorance of both nerd and jock societies, although often in so caricatiral form that you can't get any of it serious anyway.
Actually I do hate when one such film has "serious", "dramatic" or "romantic" segments near the end. I rather like when the whole resolution comes in a rude and stupidly-funny fashion like the rest of the film.

Attractive young women are smarter than everyone else.

And anyone who is atrociously stupid is actually very smart, but an unconventional type of smart so people don't understand him - "Legal blonde" told me so.

[Joel Fagin]

Hackers. I hate the hacker cliches. Being able to break into systems in ten minutes and crack the password in two. Having watched Wargams again recently, I was impressed by how accurately the hacking was portrayed. It took days and a lot of research to hack into the computer.

As an aside... Golden Rule of Hacker Movies: Do not mention hardware specs, ever. In five years, they'll be embarrassing.

- Joel Fagin

[TheSuburbanLetdown]

That's why the movie "Hackers" is funny. It's been a while since I've seen it, but I seem to remember the characters flipping out over 200 mhz processors or something like that.

[McDuffies]

Was there also a graphic representation of hacking as flying through hallways?

[Sincerely]

No, no "Hackers" was funny because they were already dated when the movie came out. They also mentioned that, that computer had a 28.8k modem and I remember having a 56k modem at the time.

[NakedElf]

Kids are always smarter than adults.

Basically the 'precocious kid who always says clever/cute things' problem.
I suspect this is because the people writing movies have A. very little experience with real kids and B. real kids are kind of stupid and boring. (Unless they're yours. Then they're fascinating geniuses.)

[Kisai]

Also: There was a remake of Dr. Strangelove? Good God.

I suspect mcduffies is referring to a George Clooney flick from a few years back called Fail-Safe. If so, it was not a remake of DS, but a remake of.. Fail-Safe, a 1964 movie that suffered the momumental misfortune of coming out at the same time as DS and covering the same basic idea, only in a resolutely non-comedic way. I've never seen Clooney's version, but the original FS, while not in the same league as DS, is a solid effort and worth seeing if you get the chance. Pretty grim, though.

And anyone with an interest in film cliches needs to check out tvtropes.org.

I encourage everyone to go either add their webcomic or flesh out their webcomic section...

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... n.Webcomic

Maybe we can then link to such pages whenever someone asks 'what genre has been overdone in webcomics...'

[[geoduck]]

I suspect mcduffies is referring to a George Clooney flick from a few years back called Fail-Safe. If so, it was not a remake of DS, but a remake of.. Fail-Safe, a 1964 movie that suffered the momumental misfortune of coming out at the same time as DS and covering the same basic idea, only in a resolutely non-comedic way.

That might be it, but similarity to the plot is huge. It's not like it's covering the same basic idea, it's like if it's based on the same book or something.

You're sort of right, and I should have made that clearer. The two movies were based on two different novels, DS = "Red Alert" by Peter Bryant, FS = "Fail Safe" by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. (The original RA, like both incarnations of FS, reads absolutely straight. Kubrick added all the satirical elements when making his film.)

But.

Burdick and Wheeler penned their tome several years after Bryant's, and yes, the plot similarities were noticed by Bryant and Bryant's lawyers. The FS authors were sued, and settled out of court. I gather this happened after the FS movie was already in production, so it went ahead, although Kubrick forced the studio to delay its release. Trailling haplessly in DS's wake, FS didn't do well financially, and if it wasn't for George Clooney, today would be mostly forgotten. Which was a shame; as I said before, it's an excellent no-frills drama, and worth seeing.

[McDuffies]

Burdick and Wheeler penned their tome several years after Bryant's, and yes, the plot similarities were noticed by Bryant and Bryant's lawyers. The FS authors were sued, and settled out of court. I gather this happened after the FS movie was already in production, so it went ahead, although Kubrick forced the studio to delay its release. Trailling haplessly in DS's wake, FS didn't do well financially, and if it wasn't for George Clooney, today would be mostly forgotten. Which was a shame; as I said before, it's an excellent no-frills drama, and worth seeing.

Yeah, it's Sidney Lummet, right? In my opinion, always reliable, but never outstanding. But frankly, Doctor Strangelove being one of a kind masterpiece, a film with similar topic would be under it's shade even if it was made ten years later.

I encourage everyone to go either add their webcomic or flesh out their webcomic section...

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... n.Webcomic

Maybe we can then link to such pages whenever someone asks 'what genre has been overdone in webcomics...'

Dude, who did Tangent have to screw to get listed there?

[Yeahduff]

It's been at least a decade since I've seen a trailer that actually makes me wanna see the movie. They're abyssmal.

The last trailer that made me wanna see the movie was "Trainspotting". As one of a few that don't go for retelling you the entire freaking film, alltogether with the ending.

And that was about ten years ago. Hard to go wrong with Iggy Pop.

I've only seen the first hour of Butterfly Effect, but I didn't like how long it took to set everything up and how the characters felt so hollow. But I guess if you leave in the middle of a mindfuck, your mind won't be sufficiently fucked.

[Dr Legostar]

my father brings this up from time to time, and i've started to agree, with a number of movies and t.v. shows you get this climactic ending, for example star wars episode II, where two really powerful people fight. why exactly it breaks down to them fighting with swords or hitting each other i can't figure out. You'd think with yoda and count dooku, two characters really powerful in the force, why they need to pull out the lightsabers. oh.. it looks cool, yeah, sure, but all that power and they fight with glow sticks?

[Rkolter]

I didn't see this mentioned after a quick browse, but my pet movie peeve is STEAM.

Steam. It's fricking everywhere. The world must run on it! It's in all the pipes! Hit any pipe, you'll get STEAM! Even abandoned buildings seem to have hefty reserves of highly compressed steam just sitting waiting for a pipe to burst, or wafting from pipes burst years ago.

It's even on starships! I'm convinced that's what powers them now.

Steeeeeeeam. Jeez.