House of Eratosthenes

1. A man and a woman getting in an argument about whether she’s coming with him or not.
2. A decent-hearted guy committing crimes with a great excuse for committing them, like for example his daughter is being held captive by some super-duper bad guy who wants him to commit the crimes.
3. A Doofus Dad smacking himself in the forehead at the end of the movie and confessing that he’s been working too much, or that he hasn’t spent enough time with his kids, or breaks his promises too often, or expects too much out of his kids.
4. Any scene with “Matrix” style slow-mo.
5. Any scene with John Woo pigeons.
6. Any movie ending in which the momma and the daughter live happily-ever-after when her daddy dies at the end.
7. The “Juno Effect,” in which some fresh-faced smartass pixie girl spews out nonsensical, clumsy, awkward, but oh-so-original cliches that, in real life, she would be asked to repeat a second time assuming anyone had the slightest bit of interest in what she was saying.
8. Supernatural movies in which someone opens a medicine cabinet, with a mirror on the door, as if we don’t know what’s coming.
9. Vampire movies that spend odious amounts of time exploring the emotional angst of the vampires.
10. Slasher movies in which someone wanders through the dark murmuring “Is that you? It’s not funny anymore!”
11. This is really huge for me: Once you’ve defined that a character is brave, or intelligent, or charming, or angst-ridden, or a badass — I don’t ever again want to see time spent defining that the character is brave, intelligent, charming, angst-ridden or badass. Build your story, please!
12. If two guys are going to be screwing the same woman, or simply getting into a fight over her, I don’t want them to have the same haircut, body build or skull shape. There’s no reason for it. If one’s clean cut, the other one can look like a gorilla. If one’s 6’2″, the other one can be 5’8″. If one’s got a runner’s body physique, the other can look like the Michelin Man. I can’t follow the story if I can’t tell these guys apart.
13. Get rid of this “clean break” in which Mister Sexy can drive or fly any vehicle, civilian or military, ever invented; he knows all the martial arts moves; he can operate gadgets that peek into windows and unlock safes. But when the time comes to crack a password in computer software, he “offloads” this to some geeky overweight guy with poor skin hygiene in a lab somewhere who overdoses all day long on doughnut holes and energy drinks. Let’s face it, cracking a safe has a lot more to do with cracking a password than with a flying-scissor-kick.
14. “Masculine” stars whose faces have been selected, shaved, made-up, and tweezed to appear non-threatening to twelve-year-old girls.
15. The “Nicholas Cage Effect” in which the same character finds, and figures out, each and every single clue while everybody else watches.
16. Helicopter performs some daring rescue that benefits the good guys…because it’s being flown by a bad guy…who is being held at gunpoint by another good guy. Stop this insanity. Stop it now. Stop it for good.
17. Plucky sidekicks. I don’t understand how or why this ever got started.
18. “Han Solo Ewok” effect. There are adorable muppet-like creatures straight out of Jim Henson’s shop. There are badass, hard-drinking pirates who spend all their spare time in wretched hives of scum and villainy. These two should never come in contact with each other no matter what.
19. The “Humans Are Bastards” trope.
20. The worn-out, threadbare “La Femme Nikita” plotline in which some badass is “recruited” to work for a super-secret government agency in atonement for some kind of crime that I’m supposed to think was somehow undeserving of the punishment that was handed down but is now being suspended.
21. The President of the United States getting in a fist fight with a terrorist, or piloting a jet fighter.
22. Really hot women figuring out where a ghost came from, throughout an entire movie, remaining fully clothed.
23. 1) Man and woman in a committed relationship 2) Woman sleeps with another guy 3) Something else happens 4) Man ends up apologizing to slutty woman and begging her forgiveness. I don’t care what happens in #3, it’s all bullshit. We’re not buying. Stop it.
24. The “Fried Green Tomatoes Effect” in which the wife decides they’re going to adopt a child…or raise a puppy…or knock down a wall…or sell their house and move to the country…and the husband says “oh, okay, alright.”
25. The momma laying a guilt trip on the daddy because junior’s heart was broken that he didn’t show up to the big soccer game, or was late to it.
26. A young girl or woman who has been killing people, receiving her come-uppins at the end by way of some moment of social awkwardness and/or humiliation. Humiliation is not on the same level as homicide, sorry. I don’t want to see anymore of this.
27. Smartass kids foiling an alien invasion or solving a murder case, while their parents are completely absent and/or clueless about everything that’s going on.
28. Husbands cheating on wives, who are gorgeous enough to model lingerie and achieve supermodel-goddess stature doing so, with mistresses who are relatively homely and ordinary-looking. Maybe that’s reflective of what happens in real life, I don’t care. It makes it really hard to follow what’s going on in the movie.
29. “Crouching Tiger Hidden Warrior Princess” wire work. And, while we’re at it, the Quantum-of-Delerium-Tremens shaky-camera gimmick. Who likes this?
30. Southern accents being used as a dramatic manifestation of ignorance, pig-headedness or arrogance. I have no further patience for this. I can’t speak for the experience of everyone who happens to live in Hollywood, but the southerners I’ve met have been pretty nice.

Update 12/20/09:
Holy crap has this post ever hit a nerve. Welcome to The Other McCain readers, and thanks Smitty again for the link. Welcome also to fans of Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. Misha, you are da bomb. Just because we don’t comment over there much doesn’t mean we don’t read you and love ya all to pieces.

Readers are being directly questioned for their additions to this list, and some of the offerings are more than adequate for consideration. We especially loved Comment #2.

I could do without every GI or ex-GI being a ticking time bomb. As the Emperor said, if we were really that way you would already be dead.

I hate where the GIs go rogue and the kindly Professor is the only calm one. The EXACT FUCKING REVERSE OF REAL LIFE!

I will stop with that!

Yeah well, I kinda wish you didn’t.

It’s a funny thing about creativity. People get into the business of providing it, and the first thing they want to do is skimp on it. It’s a weak corollary trying to connect software applications development to Hollyweird…but I think it works, and if it does work, then I’ve seen more than my share of this.

It’s sad watching people throw everything away to chase off after a livelihood, and then betray that livelihood. People, generally, sacrifice an awful lot to stay un-creative.

Update 12/22/09: The thread under Misha’s linky-love just grows and grows, 63 comments now, do check ’em out. New ideas I get from this are as follows:

31. Just in general, lack of respect for guns and what they are. Someone offered up the issue with silencers on revolvers. Another one mentioned 99 bullets coming out of a 9-shot with no reloading.
32. Lack of respect for what guns do. Depiction of gun owners as being wild-eyed, crazed zealots who don’t bathe. Lack of respect for how a gun changes the dynamics of a situation. Laws-of-physics regarding guns. Hiding behind a car door to make oneself practically invulnerable to antagonistic gunfire, particularly large-caliber gunfire.
33. This one I’ve been bitching about for a long time, I can’t believe I forgot to add it. Impact to the face…culminating in any injury that falls short of what this impact would leave behind in real life. It is very hard to give someone a whack in the face, during a real fight, that doesn’t leave permanent damage. If someone absorbs a kick from a steel-toed boot to the nose, and then another, and then another, and kinda shakes his head back & forth to get his bearings back so he can get ready to throw the next punch, I’m offended. No, a trickle of blood is not what I have in mind here. Yes, Rocky Balboa gets an exemption from this rule for dramatic purposes.
34. The opposite of #33. Good guy’s prison cell is being guarded by a mook, so he sneaks up behind the mook and gives him — a KARATE CHOP BETWEEN THE SHOULDER BLADES! Mook instantly collapses and starts snoozing. This is intolerable. Crowbar to the face makes a guy slightly startled, karate chop gets him a six-hour nap. Wise up.
35. Lack of motive for the bad guy. Zorg from The Fifth Element, I’m looking at you. Also, mega-industrialists from Captain Planet cartoons because dumping toxic sludge into rivers does not make you an overnight zillionaire all by itself. Motivation doesn’t have to be a complex thing. In the original Star Wars movie it was a single line: “Fear will keep the local systems in line.” But you have to have it. Just making the guy 45 years old or more, dressing him in a nice suit with a silk tie late at night, thus giving me a signal he’s a “businessman” — will not suffice. Make him bad. Have him do bad stuff. Explain what he is trying to do. Noah Cross. Old Man Potter. Wicked Witch of the West. Jerry Lundegaard. Khan Noonien Singh. Virgil Sollozzo. Every single James Bond villain, and for that matter, every single villain from Monk. Make ’em like that. Not hard. Capiche?

With full recognition this question will make me look dumb at worst and out of touch at best:

“26. A young girl or woman who has been killing people, receiving her come-uppins at the end by way of some moment of social awkwardness and/or humiliation. Humiliation is not on the same level as homicide, sorry. I don’t want to see anymore of this.”

What the heck movie had this as a main plot element?
- Stephen J. | 12/21/2009 @ 08:29
If you have the time, you would appreciate this take down of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/12/17/watch-this-70-minute-video-review-of-star-wars-the-phantom-menace/

Sound effects that have no physically possibly way of happening… When a knife or sword is pulled out to be shown on screen, you hear the *clink* of steal scraping steal.. It can be pulled out of a silk pillow and you will still hear the *ka-clink*. (Misery is first movie that comes to mind with this offense. Kathy Bates pulls out the hunting knife of a stack of towels or something and you hear the *ka-clink*)
- Dave C | 12/21/2009 @ 09:58
Jawbreaker and Cruel Intentions are the two that immediately come to mind…although perhaps the latter isn’t a fair criticism since that character didn’t actually kill anyone, and her punishment through ostracism was an event lifted from the recurring classic tale, which in turn is straight out of the novel if I remember right. I also dimly recall something involving a swimming pool…the murdering bitch fell in a swimming pool with everyone looking on, and the cute guy she was trying to impress shook his head disdainfully at her. I don’t remember the name of it, but it really offended me a lot. Her punishment is she got wet, ruined her makeup, and the cute guy thinks badly of her.

If one chooses to become truly upset and obsessed, it is a repeating trope that’s out there if you go on a mission looking for it. She killed people but got embarrassed at the end so all’s right with the world — that’ll show her.
- mkfreeberg | 12/21/2009 @ 10:08
Welcome Dave C. By sheer coincidence, I was watching it as you were entering your comment. It’s in my stack, it definitely made the cut.

Of course it’s been in my project queue for awhile to make a montage of “New Trilogy” people sitting around a conference table, stroking their chins thoughtfully. Mace Windu is clearly the worst offender. Old Trilogy never even got close to this, apart from the Imperial officer getting choked by Vader. The formulae involving Joseph Campbell’s Hero, plots, characters, turning points, et al are all good but I think with science fiction it generally boils down to one thing: The overall quality is inversely proportional to one plus the number of scenes with a conference table in it.
- mkfreeberg | 12/21/2009 @ 10:18
In all fairness, Jawbreaker is pretty obviously an absurdist satire on high school, like Heathers, where we’re not expected to see the Popular Person’s death as particularly tragic or give it the same emotional weight as a “realistic” murder mystery. (Though such stories often try to have their cake and eat it too, by creating characters who are ridiculously exaggerated satiric types and then trying to make us invest emotionally in them anyway — I gave up on the TV show Glee because it did this.)

Given the rarity of this particular image, maybe a more widely applicable formulation might be: “So-called ‘black comedies’ which trivialize things like murder and overemphasize trivial things like ego or reputation.”
- Stephen J. | 12/21/2009 @ 13:21
You mentioned Cruel Intentions..

That brought up one of the most annoying parts about it. Basically what you said about.

but they acted as if they were gods among men, so to speak. Where the main guy can follow the girl into the woman’s locker room then tell off the gym coach that ‘He’s seen it all before’ and she listens to him. And he leaves without a reprimand. The main characters are all cool and aloof but everyone else around them are rubes and idiots.

‘Bring It On’ was guilty of that too..

to go off on a tangent. That there are no parents at all or barely even mentioned in the movie.

It’s the teenagers as grown ups..
- Dave C | 12/21/2009 @ 15:04
“Inspiring” sports-themed movies where the gruff, tough-talking coach comes along, takes charge of a group of good-for-nothing bunch of juvenile delinquents, endures a bunch of abuse and resistance from the community (who apparently are all obsessed with the local high school sports teams), makes a bunch of demands on them, beats the hell out of them with boot-camp style training, and ends up putting together a team with perfect cohesiveness which then wins the Whatever Championship….and has an epilogue of how all the teammates went on to wonderful successful lives after their involvement with whatever sport. It’s been done, and done again, and done some more. Move on.

More “documentaries” directed by Michael Moore.

Romantic comedies (or anything, really) starring George Clooney, Susan Sarandon, or Sean Penn.

More stupid “National Lampoon” movies about horny college guys scoring with gorgeous fraternity girls, with an “unrated” DVD version to follow the R-rated theatrical release.

Movies of any kind where soldiers, clergy, doctors, or police officers are greedy, self-interested, hypocritical SOB’s on the take, but where hookers have a heart of gold.

Mob movies about double-crossing and someone having someone else “whacked.” It’s been done. Move on.

Any more “American Pie” movies, or installments of any series in which the entire plot revolves around some group of young men trying to get laid.

Any more “Friday the 13th” sequels in which “Jason” comes back to life for the 12,734th time and kills even more unsuspecting victims.

Movies where some high-ranking military officer is involved in some rogue operation or shh-big-secret coverup, and some intrepid reporter or whomever blows the lid off it.

Preachy save-the-environment movies disguised as action films.

Pretty much anything starring Will Ferrel as the protagonist.

Alien-invasion movies in which the invaders are defeated by something fairly common and ordinary – water, everyday illnesses, computer viruses, etc. Something which the aliens would have seen coming if they’d bothered to recon our planet prior to attacking.

Alien-invasion movies where initial contact is made at some point in the past (does EVERY film of this type have to start off with the mysterious Roswell event in 1947?)…then the aliens return sixty years later when Earth has finally developed the technology to defend itself

Revisionist historical dramas set during the time of the Greek or Roman empires.
- cylarz | 12/22/2009 @ 03:06
A few more:

Ben Stiller movies in which he plays an ordinary, average-Joe kind of guy….who keeps stumbling into unfortunate situations of someone else’s making, which he has to figure his way out of. I mean, it’s been a great run (Meet the Parents 1&2, There’s Something About Mary, Along Came Polly, Duplex, Night at the Museum 1&2), and I generally enjoy his acting, but the guy’s starting to become a little typecast. Doesn’t that bother him?

Horror/slasher movies in which the protagonist has to choose which innocent victim to save from the antagonist’s brutal slaughter method.

Parody movies of the police/crime drama theme.
- cylarz | 12/22/2009 @ 03:16
Movies that start off funny and are marketed as madcap comedies, but gradually become more and more serious/preachy/dramatic/sad as the film progresses. (Mrs Doubtfire, Click, Pleasantville, The Family Stone, I’m looking at you). This has been a movie pet-peeve of mine for years.
- cylarz | 12/22/2009 @ 04:01
Spoiled, sheltered rich girl is engaged to rich, well-connected, politically powerful young man, whom she doesn’t really love but is being pressured to marry…who during the film meets downtown, poor-but-smart streetwise hero and falls in love with him. Beaten. To. Death.

Any movie with female heroes, in which 90-100% of the men in the film are villains/bigots/abusers/general SOB’s.

Plucky reporter is stonewalled, threatened, and otherwise thrown for a few curves, but eventually blows the lid off of secret evil conspiracy plot by big evil polluting corporation.

Chick flick dramas where some woman is slowly dying, and people are yelling and screaming at each other as they cope with the emotional toll.

Horror films where the perpetrator is a child, or something else cute and innocent-looking, and nobody believes the one person who is “onto” the villain’s scheme to murder people or whatever.

Westerns featuring the notorious “quick-draw showdown at high noon” type sequence in the main street of the Wild-West frontier town. From what I understand, this is pure Hollywood fantasy. (Didn’t happen.)

World-War II films where the protagonist is depressed about the “world blowing itself all to hell” and what’s the point of it all…

World War II films about the Eastern Front that show Nazi atrocities, yet let the Soviets off the hook for the atrocities *they* committed.

Submarine-themed movies where the sub takes all kinds of damage but miraculously doesn’t sink or become inoperable to the point where it must surface.

Movies of any genre where the bad guy’s space station/fortress of doom/whatever takes slight damage from weapons fire, then begins to chain-reaction self destruct, allowing the hero & heroine (and pretty much no one else) to escape just in the nick of time before it explodes completely.

Movies based on a video game, especially if made years AFTER the game was released.
- cylarz | 12/22/2009 @ 04:27
Any more action movies featuring a badass, walking, with “Bad to the Bone” by George T and the Destroyers. Terminator 2 is the only film allowed to do this, ever.

Any comedy containing any reference to the dancing-in-the-underwear scene from “Risky Business” accompanied by the song “Old Time Rock n Roll” by Bob Seagar.

Sorry for the multiple posts guys…I guess I’m on a roll here.
- cylarz | 12/22/2009 @ 04:45
Remembered one more..

and even though I liked Firefly and Serenity, Joss Whedon is probably the biggest offender of this meme.

The 100 pound girl in a fist fight with a 220 pound guy. And she kicked his ass with no shot to the ‘nads either.

My sister in law wanted to try to judo flip me and I outweigh her by a good 125 pounds.. And she could not do it.
- Dave C | 12/24/2009 @ 07:47
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- House of Eratosthenes | 12/28/2009 @ 06:11
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- House of Eratosthenes | 03/12/2010 @ 06:28
[…] children, or showers us with yet more good-guys-kinda-bad or bad-guys-kinda-good…or contains any of the other things I don’t want to see in movies ever again…it gets shuttered up tight deep in a warehouse somewhere, forgotten, before it makes a single […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 03/29/2010 @ 07:27
I love the way you write and your vocabulary is exemplary.
However, I must correct one thing.
You use the term “come-uppins” in your movie peeves and that is incorrect.
The proper word is “comeuppance” and means;
‘A punishment or fate that someone deserves.’
I’m sure this is the meaning you had in mind but “come-uppins” is nonsensical.

Cheers.
- bammit | 10/09/2013 @ 06:20
And another thing…add this one as a corollary to #34;

#34a. Whenever someone is stabbed once in the midsection with a knife of any size, they die within seconds. This does not reflect reality. It takes a long tome to die from stab wounds, unless the knife is long and severs the aorta. Then it takes minutes…not seconds. Stop that!
- bammit | 03/31/2014 @ 13:27

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What I Don’t Want to See in MoviesSaturday, December 19th, 2009

What I Don’t Want to See in Movies
Saturday, December 19th, 2009