Things you're tired of seeing in movies

[Riceball]

With the advent of CGI special effects taking over and effectively making it so that a Director today can basically do whatever shot or effect they want in a film.. Gone are the days of those unique creative solutions in filmmaking that only ever arose from the inability of a director to do whatever they originally wanted in the first place.
Iconic images in film like the three yellow barrels in JAWS, which add so much unbelievable tension to that movie just acting as a mere representation of the shark rather than showing the actual shark itself all the time, only ever happened because the damn robotic shark hardly ever worked..
Those imaginative solutions that actually often ended up making the film infinitely better in the end because of the need to overcome the limitations in what was possible, that has largely been lost forever
That little bit of Movie Magic is dead

I'd disagree because, despite what a lot of people seem to thing, CG effects take a lot more than a simple click of the mouse. It takes many, many man hours to produce good CG effect with lots of steps involved. Because of that, some directors will find and use those creative solutions because what they're wanting to do would take too long and thus cost too much to do; not much different from the days of practical effects.

If Jaws didn't originally come out back in the '70s and came out today, it's entirely conceivable that the director, be it Spielberg or someone else, may have gone with the same approach if they couldn't afford to hire a top notch effects studio to make the shark. Because, in order to make a photoreal giant shark will require top notch modelers to model the shark, talented animators to make it move, highly detailed and realistic texturing to make it look real, then you need a team of people to light the scene and composite it into the scene either in actual water or CG water. All of that takes time, esp. the compositing and rendering and time is money.

 

[p51]

That is why I always liked the original Thing movie with James Arness as the monster. Most of the terror in that movie was in the viewers own mind.

Yeah, maybe I don't recall it correctly I think I remember at one point but things go slow in one scene then BAM, the monster is right there!
How about John Frankenheimer's movie "Prophecy"? It's a clumsy horror movie that fast forward comes in really handy, and you don't see much of the (poorly built) monster, but it really builds tension, maybe for the reason Jaws doesn't show the shark much.
I don't even like horror movies much but that movie always creeped me out for how the tension just keeps building...

 

[p51]

Maybe I wrote this before, but when someone has an explosion going off next to them and they get knocked loopy for the obligatory 6 seconds (which is nonsense as in real life it takes much longer to recover your marbles than that), there's dead silence, goes to a high pitched tone, then over the next less than 10 seconds, the hearing comes back.
It had an impact the first couple of times I ever saw/heard it in a movie, but now it's just a trope.
It's also not how it works in real life. I've had a lot of things go boom around me and it just doesn't work like that.

 

[mattycsi]

We just started watching Handmaid's Tale, first season, fine, second season has some gratuitous shaky cam. I thought it had been universally agreed to knock that sh.. off!

I only mention this again as I havent noticed it so bad recently.

 

[jarroth]

Two people getting kidnapped. They get injected with something and pass out. Next scene one wakes up, few seconds later the other one.

 

[p51]

Someone can go looking for someone in the middle of a city, with no prior plans to meet anywhere and no cell phones and no matter how big the city, they'll find them.
Or tracing their phone or signal, they find the bad guys within seconds.
It never really works like that.

 

[Riceball]

Someone can go looking for someone in the middle of a city, with no prior plans to meet anywhere and no cell phones and no matter how big the city, they'll find them.
Or tracing their phone or signal, they find the bad guys within seconds.
It never really works like that.

On a similar note, a bad guy calls in and the police, or whoever the good guys are, have call tracing hardware and start tracing the call but the caller almost always hangs up before they can get a trace. And in those rare cases they manage to trace the call the caller is not there, they've either left earlier with no trace or the only thing that's left is the phone.

 

[Cephus]

On a similar note, a bad guy calls in and the police, or whoever the good guys are, have call tracing hardware and start tracing the call but the caller almost always hangs up before they can get a trace. And in those rare cases they manage to trace the call the caller is not there, they've either left earlier with no trace or the only thing that's left is the phone.

Or the only thing that's left is some elaborate contraption attached to a public phone that nobody has touched or complained about or tried to use.

 

[p51]

How about when someone drops "F" bombs and nobody reacts in public to the language?
A character is talking like a Tarantino production of "Good fellas" and not one 'normal' person sneers at the constant stream of obscene language, or a Mom complains that her kids are hearing this in a normal place for them to be?

Or the only thing that's left is some elaborate contraption attached to a public phone that nobody has touched or complained about or tried to use.

Yeah, even as a kid, I never understood why there was never someone else on the phone by the time the good guys got there from their trace, when it's a public phone in a big city.

 

[mattycsi]

How about when someone drops "F" bombs and nobody reacts in public to the language?
A character is talking like a Tarantino production of "Good fellas" and not one 'normal' person sneers at the constant stream of obscene language, or a Mom complains that her kids are hearing this in a normal place for them to be?
Yeah, even as a kid, I never understood why there was never someone else on the phone by the time the good guys got there from their trace, when it's a public phone in a big city.

Are people still offended by that these days? I swear for punctuation, I tone it down here, coz this is a fancy place!

 

[Strikerkc]

Are people still offended by that these days? I swear for punctuation, I tone it down here, coz this is a fancy place!

I mean, if I stood up at the food court in a mall and shouted "****-DAMN-IT!", I'd get some laughs, I'd be able to spot a few folks shaking their heads, a couple others turned around looking at me confused/accusingly.

In film/TV, I assume the reason we don't get larger reactions from the general public is a matter of continuity. If you're gonna possibly do 17 takes of of folks sitting around in a restaurant cussing, its easier to just have your extras "not react", rather than try to get them to react the same way, at the same time, every time. less likely that you'll cut your takes together, and get the same guy in the background leaning over to cover his son's ears every time you cut to one camera view, cause the background actor changed when he reacted on the different takes.

 

[p51]

Are people still offended by that these days? I swear for punctuation, I tone it down here, coz this is a fancy place!

Go to where there are families around in public and start dropping F-bombs anyone can hear. You're going to get, at the very least, a lot of glares from the moms.

 

[The Brahma Bull]

Mostly in series more than in movies. One person smokes, some of his fellows find out about it and react like it's a major crime. Don't know if it's like that in the US but this is so far off...

 

[Strikerkc]

Mostly in series more than in movies. One person smokes, some of his fellows find out about it and react like it's a major crime. Don't know if it's like that in the US but this is so far off...

Us non-smokers here in the states are pricks. Most of us understand that if we go somewhere that smoking is likely to happen, we're not going to flip out, but we're not going to be happy about folks actually smoking either.

And if you have a decent size group of friends that aren't smokers, and a smoker finds their way into the gang, then acts like they get to sit around with us, even outside, and smoke? We will gut them like a fish.

 

[Sluis Van Shipyards]

How about when someone drops "F" bombs and nobody reacts in public to the language?
A character is talking like a Tarantino production of "Good fellas" and not one 'normal' person sneers at the constant stream of obscene language, or a Mom complains that her kids are hearing this in a normal place for them to be?

Nobody cares these days it seems. I heard some adult in Krogers talking on the phone saying "I just have to find where the f*cking peas are now." I'm 42, but I remember when you were in public you used some decorum and you talked like that around your friends. To me it just means you haven't mastered English and that's as smart as you ever got.

 

[AJTaliesen]

Swear words still exist, but they evolved. F-word and S-word are only considered swear words now as a matter of tradition, but they've been being phased out for years and slowly becoming the new "golly"

There are new 'unspeakable' words to take their place. Try shouting the N-word in that food court. You're going to get more than glares.

 

[mattycsi]

To me it just means you haven't mastered English and that's as smart as you ever got.

 

[p51]

Re-boots a year or two later.
I just read there's another Ghostbusters re-make coming next year.
This will get to be like Spiderman and the Fantastic Four, where they'll re-start it every 2-3 years!

 

[Strikerkc]

Re-boots a year or two later.
I just read there's another Ghostbusters re-make coming next year.
This will get to be like Spiderman and the Fantastic Four, where they'll re-start it every 2-3 years!

So, to be fair, the ghost busters movie is an actual sequel to 1 & 2. And Sony kept trying to reboot spider-man because their attempts kept failing (relatively speaking), and they wanted to keep the license.

But I do feel your pain. I still don't understand why the "girl with the dragon tattoo" movies got completely re-filmed with an English speaking cast, when the originals had only come out 2 years earlier. I guess I really underestimate the willingness of folks to watch a movie with sub titles or dubs.

 

[Zombie_61]

Mostly in series more than in movies. One person smokes, some of his fellows find out about it and react like it's a major crime. Don't know if it's like that in the US but this is so far off...

I can't speak about the entire U.S., but in California there has been an ongoing push to ban smoking in pretty much all public places for several years now, and the most vehement of non-smokers can really work themselves into a frenzy over their dislike of smoking and cigarettes. I've had red-faced strangers yell angrily at me while I was smoking in a designated smoking area because they apparently felt the need to vent their feelings at that moment and I was a convenient target; it seemed to really bother one guy that I didn't return his anger and/or yell back, but merely stood silently smoking (careful to blow my exhaled smoke away from him) while he ranted. That being said, after 30 years of smoking I haven't had a cigarette in the last six months.