Tuesday 23 April 2019

Movie and TV Clichés in Quotes 3


Euralille. Dystopian, dreadful, inhospitable. A great backdrop for films about shady business, surveillance states, the general breakdown of democracy and transparency. (Martin Lampprecht)

It's not an origin story unless you are bitten by something radioactive or fall into a vat of something.
(@Palle_Hoffstein)

Why do the plots of cash-in Hollywood prequels to children's literary classics always involve a messianic prophecy? (@AlexPaknadel)

According to Hollywood, all criminal leaders are into classical music, valuable paintings and various other highbrow art forms. (@N8Heddleston)

All intelligent villains have utterly bourgeois tastes and do stuff like wear suits inside and eat Cornish hen with Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major playing softly in the background.
(@foolinthelotus)

For my taste, Season 2 of Star Trek Discovery is far better than 1 so far, but it's still too much Therapy 101, artificially ratcheted jeopardy and/or plot-convenient arbitrary miracles. (Athena Andreadis)

Those shabby genteel boarding houses where one of the female Paying Guests lives in that grey zone that may or may not be sex work. (Matthew Sweet)

There are two kinds of office in post-war British cinema. The one with an establishing shot of a brutalist tower, possibly in Crawley; the other behind a chain link fence, where slow robberies take place in rooms full of box files and the young Nanette Newman may do typing. (Matthew Sweet)

Quite a lot of quizzical-glance-acting in this. (@VictorianLondon on The Man Who Invented Christmas)

Massive explosion goes off behind the hero as he (always a he) walks towards the camera. He never flinches. (@andytrapdoor)

[Peter Cushing is] the one in all those British horror films, standing between Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. His dialogue usually runs along the lines of, "But good heavens, man! The person you saw has been dead for more than two centuries!" (Roger Ebert)

A meandering subplot of a TV show’s fifth season. (Sandra Newman)

All the characters are mysterious oddballs, escaping their pasts.

Was the secret a “covert government biological weapons facility? An evil corporation?” Fortitude drifted into madness in the previous season. (Hugo Rifkind in the Times on Fortitude)

I love in films like 300 where the main guy will say something like “Get some sleep, for tomorrow we battle to death”, and everyone just goes into deep sleep, in some wet grass, fully clothed. (Rob Temple)

The kind of snowfall that, in a Ridley Scott film, signals a large battle is about to occur. (@maximpetergriff)

We need a word for a scene in a movie where they introduce a character who was clearly a major part of the first draft and whose part either got written or edited out as time went on, but they still left that scene in to make it past 90 minutes. (@HouseofGlib)

Why is "driving like a maniac without noticing" so often used as code for "charmingly carefree"? (@dimwittedly)

Hackers all say “I’m in!” After twenty seconds of random typing. (Dean Hamilton @Tyburn__Tree)

Someone is watching exactly the right bit of expositionary news, then turns off the TV as soon as someone comes into the room, but it's OK because the exposition had just finished. (@adamcreen)

You can tell it’s serious, they’re all speaking in acronyms.

The protagonist is an underdog hero chosen by a prophecy who no-one likes in the beginning but come to respect in the end. (Via youtube)

More often than not, performances shaped for the purpose of winning golden statues are fake and dreadful. (Strandmag.com. It's well-known that you'll get an Oscar if you play a disabled person or a nun.)

If you're running from bad guys in a hospital, you must knock over a huge tray of noisy metal instruments. (@rdbrewer4. Which the staff have carelessly left unattended to go unsterile...)

To show a calamity (or approaching alien spacecraft) is real, a plate must fall off a table. (@RonD1954)

If a mute character is introduced, they are going to speak during or after the climax. (@Tweeter_Zero)

An old Chinese greengrocer is always a martial-art master. (@PtitRun)

When someone says, "This isn't what it looks like", it’s exactly what it looks like. (@chasethekid)

Running from pay phone to pay phone with the ransom money. (@Prevalezco)

All Italians are Sicilians.
(IL)

Actresses in drawing-room comedies were invariably seen arranging wire-stemmed roses while they awaited their fiancés. (Cecil Beaton, The Glass of Fashion)

If a girl is very physically clumsy, she'll stumble upon true love. (@nictate)

As long as a TV show or movie doesn’t explicitly diagnose a character with autism, they can get away with the cruellest depiction of it possible, making the character an object of mockery or a beast of burden. (@untitleduser. Someone else points out that The Dog in the Night-time and The Bridge don't use the words “autism” or “Asperger’s”, so that nobody can say “Hang on, we aren’t like that!”)

A favorite film trope of mine is any character cutting and dyeing their hair in a gas station restroom then walking out looking amazing. (@ReelQuinn)

I love the way people think they are invisible if they crouch down a bit #Salamander. (@kostmayer)

#Salamander When visiting a baddie at home they will always be ready to greet you, immaculately dressed. (@Shifnal_TF)

In the film of
Angels and Demons, Renowned Symbologist Robert Langdon consults a document in the Vatican Archives and, when it turns out to be relevant, rips out the page and takes it with him. (@philistella. In Salamander, Gerardi is looking through a notebook full of phone numbers (evidence), notices his wife’s, rips out the page. Why don’t they just take a picture on their phone?)

Is there a name for the quirky male non-cop teams with straightlaced female cop to solve crimes that are nearly always murder subgenre yet? (@WordMercenary)

It's never good when TV detectives involve their children and say goodbye in a lingering way. (@mattprescott)

One of the most hilarious and creepy aspects of Hallmark flicks is how the filthy rich character never puts their hand into their own pocket to save whatever-needs-saving. They organise an auction or bake sale or fundraiser so poor people can give their money. (@sturdyAlex)

BREAKFAST
Least accurate part of TV reality: breakfast. TV characters regularly sit down to unfeasibly overproduced brekkies. Toast racks = primary indicator.
(@woollensocks)

The most ridiculous TV trope is friends getting together for breakfast before work.
(@missmayn)

Also any family show where they sit down in a sunlit kitchen for breakfast before school & work.
(@brendanca)

 ...and they’d pour a full sized glass of orange juice, take one drink from it, then leave.
(@Laurenm4)

(Or they rush out of the house chomping the toast. Or else they have a long conversation leaning one elbow on the table and holding a piece of bitten toast near their mouth.)

The 6 Types of People That Say “You Guys Are Gonna Wanna Take a Look at This” in Movies
The scientist seeing something unusual on a computer screen.
An officer at a crime scene who’s not a main character who found some big evidence and then the scene cuts.
The guy who comes in when all hope was lost to show everyone the whole town pitched in and did something amazing.
Guy on boat looking at the oncoming storm.
Lowly underling whose deep digging led him to a discovery the President needs to know about .
Loose cannon cop finds a big lead.
(@ryguyguyry)

You forgot “side character that didn’t seem like he had much potential but ended up saving everyone in the movie with some small piece of information”. Or like “Guys... hey guys... uh guys... hello? Guys? GUYS!!!” Trying to get a word into the conversation when they KNOW they have valuable info but no one will listen. (@laneboywrx)


The three (3) types of British crime shows:
Title is a surname, makes you sad.
Title is a place name, makes you sad.

“Gosh isn’t murder positively beastly, oh well mustn’t let it ruin the village’s Paintings of Fences and Sheep competition, it’s the 50th anniversary after all.”
(@emkawo)

A Decent Interval, Simon Brett
Pointing a camera at members of the public and waiting for them to make fools of themselves.

Acting: a subject that attracted a great deal of vacuous pretension and bullshit.

“The shots of you will be intercut with the odd castle ruin, stained glass window, faded document, out-of-focus sparkling water, sunlight through ferns.” Says the director of “A half-hour TV programme padded out to an hour which would have worked better on the radio.”

The best parts, of course, involve gibbering. There’s nothing actors like better than being deformed and gibbering on stage. ‘I want to be deformed and gibber!’ they cry.

It was based on the view that anyone can become a star. All of the contestants – girls in their late teens identically over-made-up with heavily mascaraed false eyelashes and unnaturally white teeth – said how big a part of their life StarHunt had become, how they were ‘really going to go for it’, how much support they were getting from their families (cut to simpering parents in the studio audience), how nervous they were, and how much they respected their fellow contestants and the judges.

He forgot to add “journey”, and pretending that the experience is about self-discovery, not winning lots of money.

PHOTOGRAPHY
Look photo editors you really need to stop illustrating articles about immunization with giant needles piercing skin thank you. (@AstroKatie)

If you could choose one photo to represent "machine learning", what would it be? I'm sick of pulsing brains of 1s and 0s or people standing around a chalk board. (@hmason)

More here, and links to the rest.

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