Stuff I’m Tired of Seeing in Movies

Filed Under Movies

The cinematic medium is fluid. Certain conventions, characters and even genres come and go. Movies are very of-the-moment in their desperation to reach as broad an audience as possible. However, there’s some stuff I still see in movies, stuff that seemingly hasn’t been massaged out over the years, stuff that really needs to go. They’re creative crutches that filmmakers use to hold up their stories. These aren’t stylistic tics or narrative tropes that are critical to telling a good story. They’re just overused junk that needs to be kicked to the curb yesterday.

Title cards with quotes from philosophers, political leaders or other nefarious types at the start of the movie

I guess I’m supposed to be impressed that the filmmaker read Nietzsche. Well, I’m not. Dude sounds as boring as all get out. Quoting someone I think is boring is hardly the way to kick off your lunkheaded action picture. I’m also pretty sure that the movie is hardly going to add any new insight to whatever talking point is rattled off in the opening moments. Only “Kill Bill: Volume 1″ and “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare” use this dopey convention effectively because they do it ironically. Otherwise, it’s lame and pretentious.

Beginning the movie near the end of the story and then flashing back to sometime earlier

Flinging the audience right into the thick of the action because the screenwriter couldn’t think of a more interesting opening has been done to death. Even “Fight Club” falls into this trap. And you know what? I think it’s a stupid choice in that movie, too. This only works in a movie like “Pulp Fiction” because the entire narrative is fractured. Otherwise, there’s a 99% chance of the audience completely forgetting where we came in over the course of the film, thereby defeating the purpose of structuring the story this way.

Superimposed places and/or times over an establishing shot

Movies like “Star Wars” and “Back to the Future,” two films that journey to multiple planets or time periods, incidentally don’t bother telling the audience exactly where we are by slapping places and dates on the screen. We’re able to gather all of this information through the visual treatment and/or dialogue. So why in the hell do a bunch of movies feel the need to tell me exactly where we are, what time it is, whether or not it might rain and so on and so forth? I don’t care. But what if the movie is set in the future? Still don’t care. Movie set in the future should always be set in the future with no exact dates given. It keeps the movie from ultimately becoming — literally — dated.

Someone saying, “We’re not in Kansas anymore!”

Even Jim Cameron fell into this trap in “Avatar.” The 70-year-old meme for being transported to a faraway land needs to up and die. I vote that we throw a bucket of water on it. I honestly think that most modern movie-goers can’t find Kansas on a map to begin with, so as a point-of-reference, it’s meaningless.

Overt references to other movies

I blame the ’90s for this shit. Seemingly every movie released during that aggressively and annoyingly pop-culture saavy decade has characters who reference some arcane detail or bit of business in another movie. This was revolutionary…when Godard did it back in 1959. Now, who gives a dump? It’s lazy filmmaking to devote a portion of your film to someone else’s film. Chances are, the movie that’s doing the referencing isn’t half as good as the one it name-checks. Thanks for reminding me what I should’ve rented instead.

Nano-technology

What’s a nano anyway? I’m pretty sure it’s not another word for someone’s grandmother, although that would be an interesting WMD, a sweet old senior citizen. Anyway, I bet that if you did an informal poll of people in the average movie-going audience, you would get a bunch of blank looks if you asked them to define nano-technology. So…why is it the WMD du jour in action pictures? There’s always some nano-whatsis that threatens to destroy all life on earth. But since nano-technology remains a relatively esoteric science, and many Americans apparently don’t believe in science, it’s hard to find it all that scary. Now, a nuclear bomb is something everyone can be afraid of. Or a doomsday virus. Or universal health care. Nano-technology just sounds kind of stupid.

Eliminating all this flotsam from movies will guarantee that they’re automatically better than the would’ve been otherwise. What are you tired of seeing?

-Brad Lohan

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