Hi, friends!
I watched the Jungle Cruise movie this weekend. Split it over 2 mornings on the treadmill. Which like I guess tells you how good it was that on the first viewing I was like *stops an hour in* with no real give a shit feeling.
It wasn’t bad, I think it just needed some better script editing to make the plot move better. There was this big to-do about the brother being gay and the Rock’s character not caring, which was sweet, but then there was a later scene which was basically all double entendres about gay sex which felt not in the same tone as the rest of the movie.
It did however have one of my least favorite tropes in movies – “generic WW1 or WW2 villains in movies where all sorts of villains would work” – basically it’s like oh American audiences are stupid, and German is shorthand for villain if we set the movie/show anytime between 1910 and 1950. Especially annoying because we act like OMG Nazis are bad! (objectively true) while ignoring all the ideas that the Third Reich got from American treatment of BIPOC and other minorities, as well as the eugenics research happening here.
And I’m not giving away the plot when I say the bad guys could have been something else and all they’d have to do was get a regular boat instead of taking a U-boat up the Amazon.
There’s a handful of tropes I truly dislike, some of which are annoyingly common.
- Hot person made “average” or “ugly” but just needing a makeover or just taking off their glasses to be Hottie McHots again
- Male character with female love interest young enough to be his daughter. I wouldn’t be bothered by this if the invesrse were common casting, but it’s not. If you’ve never watched the Amy Schumer skit “Last Fuckable Day” about women aging in Hollywood, it’s hilarious. “You know how Sally Field was Tom Hanks’ love interest in Punch Line and then, like, 20 minutes later, she was his mom in Forrest Gump …”
- Scifi plot (or even contemporary plot with some technology) where there is just some convuluted event needed to stop ONE THING to cause the bad people’s ship to go kablammo or plots to fail. Like there would be no redundancy processes to prevent a catastrophic failure from 1 fucking thing when you’re in space or the future or whatever? I work in a IT team for a sales operation and while our shit breaks fairly regularly, there’s a huge difference between *oh shit we can’t immediately provision these orders* and *welp catastrophic failure, we’re done* because even we have a fuckton of redundancy/DR built in.
- Fight scenes that make zero sense when you consider basic physics. Like I can overlook a lot when there’s superheros, etc, involved, but sometimes it’s fucking ridiculous. I’m looking at you, Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, with the random space horse cavalry attack on top of flying vessels and nobody thought “oh, let’s turn these ships upside down for a second so everyone falls off”
What are some tropes in movies or shows that annoy the fuck out of you? Bonus points if you provide examples.
Fight scenes that make zero sense
thats almost all of them
im a boxer….people do not get up from the beatings they get onscreen
One of the things I really liked about the Netflix Daredevil, and the Atomic Blonde movie, is that they showed the characters being completely exhausted during/after a fight.
But, yeah, the completely ignoring brain trauma in so many action movies is kinda disturbing. Get knocked out as often as some of those characters, and you’d be wearing velcro shoes…
The flip side is hands and fingers are awfully delicate and it doesn’t take much for the guy doing the punching to spend the next weeks with a broken finger or bone or three.
Have you seen the buddy cop movie The Other Guys? One of my favorite scenes is when the bomb goes off –
“How do they walk away in movies without flinching when it’s behind them?!! I call bullshit on that!”
“I need an MRI!”
That was a great movie but the jump off the building was the best!
I can’t stand Will Ferrell, so I missed that movie. (also, I’m really reluctant to watch anything with Wahlberg now that I’ve heard about his racist past…)
But, to bring up another Charlize Theron action movie…
That was one of the things I especially liked about Mad Max: Fury Road, is that after explosions, the sound often dulled out for a few seconds or so, with a kinda “ringy” background, which felt a lot more immersive to me, than the typical third-person, hearing-damange-immune sound effect standard.
I just watched this vid, and had to share it:
I call bullshit on that premise, too. Right from the get-go I was like that’s some bullshit.
I worked at Ulta like 9 years ago and there were already issues with organized crime rings and theft. This ain’t new.
All the gentrifying tech bros around here can’t stop talking about that on reddit.
At least, they can’t when they aren’t defending landlords, bootlicking, talking shit about BLM, or proposing concentration camps for unhoused people. I haven’t signed into reddit for months, and I’m better off for it…
Another point that I thought was mentioned at the time, which iirc was also a favorite kvetch & scapegoat of the corporate sorts…
Wasn’t a bill passed last year or so, in the SF/Oakland area, that demanded a living wage for workers at big-corporate places like Walgreens?
And hadn’t Walgreens “threatened to close stores” if that bill was passed by local folks?
I MAY be mis-remembering… but I thought that the living-wage pay rates were also a background/threatened factor in “why these *particular* stores magically needed to close asap!!!!”(according to the corporate folks who don’t like to admit their shitty true reasons)…
Looks like I was wrong on when the vote happened–it was a few years back–it was the press around the review & rate change *this* past summer that had caught my eye!
https://sfgov.org/olse/minimum-wage-ordinance-mwo
I’m not sure on the exact dates, cities, etc., but in the recent past, a lot of SF Bay Area cities have been passing laws with city minimum wage in the ~$15ish range, and I think CA state also upped their minimum wage, although not quite to that amount.
And, that’s just not enough, especially for SF Bay Area housing…
funny thing I remember a while back, is that WalMart actually supports raising the minimum wage – they won’t pay any more then they legally have to (and they’ll still steal some of that…), but they realize that a bunch of poor people being slightly less poor translates directly to a lot of them spending more money at WalMart.
Stopped clocks being right twice a day, etc…
Stopped clock is DEFINITELY the right adage to use!😉🙃
And I remembered this morning where those stories were happening–it was the grocery stores, and in LA–not by you!
They were “threatening” to close Food-4-Less & iirc some… Ralph’s(?) stores if the hazard pay mandates stood.
It was being covered *here* by my Union–because they’ve been trying to get MN legislators (or Grocers) to reinstate hazard pay for us workers, *and* have been trying to get Grocery, Meatpacking, and Janitorial/Custodial staffers who were all deemed “Essential Workers” during the shutdown into the pay-out group for the Covid-Relief bonuses that the Federal Government sent out to the various states “to distribute *however*”
Republican Legislators want those under to be “Big Checks” that only go to folks like Nurses…
And, as you might guess, the D-sode legislators want that pool to be broadened out to include *ALL* of us whowere deemed essential… which reduces the payments from $1200+ down to the $200-400 range, but which would help SO many more of us.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-03-10/ralphs-food-4-less-locations-close-los-angeles-hazard-pay
In any horror movie where people go TOWARDS the noise/ghost/murderer. Especially if they’ve just summoned demons or been cursed by some ancient relic. And i realize the movie would be pretty short if they didn’t do that thing, but every time it’s like, “oh ffs, nice knowing you.”
Nothing drives me crazier than plots that are driven by character A leaving Character B in the dark for no good reason, so that Character B goes off and does something stupid that could have been averted if A and B had just talked.
Common excuses are “you don’t need to understand, you just need to follow orders” or maybe “this thing is too complicated to explain” but it turns out to be clear to the audience after 30 seconds.
It happens to Poe in The Last Jedi at least once. He defies orders because nobody thought a short ten second explanation would matter.
TV Tropes has the pun name “Poor Communication Kills” for this.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/PoorCommunicationKills/LiveActionFilms
I call it “a typical workday”
tvtropes is an entertaining rabbithole to loose an afternoon in…
I completely agree that it’s an annoying trope when they could just explain something in a few seconds, but I also think Poe in the Last Jedi is a horrible example here. He just had to listen to the women in charge and not do dumbass things that get people killed. I don’t know why he feels he deserves to know the details of the plan that Laura Dern’s character has. Like could she have told him? Sure. Should he have have understood thata he’s not entitled to every detail out there? Also yes.
In non-superhero movies, how do you walk away from multiple gunshot wounds? Scary movie is such a great movie because they spoof the whole stupidity of the genre. Flying Kung fu moves piss me off too, I couldn’t watch Crouching Tiger w/ all that crap. Give me some semi-realistic Bruce Lee or fun Jackie Chan.
Right? It’s not just a flesh wound you can keep fighting because you’re the Black Knight and going to gnaw someone’s knees off.
Starship Troopers.
1 Outrunning a nuclear fireball (Denise Richards would do the same in the James Bond Film: The World Is Not Enough). Uh okay?
2 Denise Richards taking a bug claw shredding her shoulder and then turning around firing a fully auto heavy caliber assault rifle instead of dying from blood loss or screaming in agony
Still more believable than that character being a nuclear physicist
1 Stupid people who make bad decisions who survive. I know life is random/unfair, but it always blew me away how stupid a lot of heroes are.
For a while I wanted to hate Sean of the Dead because of the really stupid shit Nick Frost’s character did that made me want to kill him and feed his remains to the zombies. That changed of course, but I’ve endured this in real life (not zombies) so it wasn’t as funny as it was meant to be.
2 Movie fights that go on an agonizing long time. There is a reason why boxing rounds are only 3 minutes long because even highly conditioned athletes can only take so much before passing out from exhaustion. The only fight scene that made sense to me was the brawl between John Cusack’s character and an assassin played by the movie’s fight coordinator in Grosse Point Blank.
Hell, even something simple like Wii Boxing was tiring.
3 Person with serious psychological personality disorder treated as a normal human being with friends. I’d want to punch Sheldon Cooper after a while. Considering the amount of crap his character has done in that series, the real life Sheldon would have zero friends and be treated as a pariah at work.
100% agree about Grosse Pointe Blank! That’s such an under-appreciated movie.
Also yes, with the personality disorder point. I’ve had some folks in my grad program who were “oh I have asperger’s, I don’t understand emotions” and were just assholes. I was always like you don’t need to understand emotions to know certain behaviors are rude or unacceptable.
…pretty sure you’re talking about benny urquidez…sometimes called benny the jet…if you search for him + jackie chan there’s a decent chance you’ll find a clip of a fight from (iirc?) a film called meals on wheels that is sort of famous?
Long fights are one of my peeves. In my youth I used to play judo. Three minutes is a goddamn ETERNITY. And I was in good shape at the time. I took second place in my state once.
The “taking no damage in a fight” thing is equally stupid, but it’s already been pointed out that most movie fights would cause severe injuries on both sides.
And that’s another thing: There’s a HUGE difference between amateurs and professionals. I played someone on the Olympic team once (I’m using professional in the “this is my career” sense, not that he got paid). He beat my ass so fast I barely saw it happen.
Does anyone here watch Grey’s? Spoilers ahead…
There was a new love interest introduced pre pandemic. He’s a bald Irish doctor (I’ll get back to the bald distinction in a second). Grey was in a coma for most of the pandemic season so their romance became less of a sexy banter and more of a pining caretaker till death do us part type deal. Then this season comes along and they live in a fictional post pandemic world (they disclaim that at the end of each episode). And that Irish duder has been cast aside because “his teenage kid didn’t like that he is dating”. Now Grey is off frolicking with a rando from who remembers what season ago but who has great hair. He is basically a lesser Derek Shepard. And I don’t know if this is true but I feel like maybe the writers chose to exit the Irish guy because he is bald and not testing as high with those sample people who watch while clicking buttons or turn a hate it/love it dial… what are they called again?…the focus group. It’s either his lack of hair or his accent that may be throwing the stupid focus group off. I’m aware that I’m too invested in the show. This season is garbage and the one guy with charisma is being benched and I think I will stop watching now…after 18 years of loyalty.
Apologies for my random rant.
Carry on.
I don’t watch the show, but he’s a good-looking man based on the googles. I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers.
Maybe it’s the accent since a lot of audiences are still obsessed with Outlander and the Irish accent doesn’t sound correct to them?
…I think the one that gets me the most often is things characters say/do that may make sense to the audience but wouldn’t to the character
…like, if something happens in a scene they aren’t in & then they seem to magically know about it moments later despite nobody having time to tell them even off-screen…or when someone happily blows up a car or two out of a convoy that’s transporting someone/something they very much want to keep intact…or…actually this could be a really long list so I’m going to stop there
Late addition, because I feel like this is something I tend to harp on too much…
handguns and rifles are completely different classes of weapons. Granted, I’m beginning to think that even a lot of the “gun community” folk don’t understand this concept, so I can’t really expect randos and Hollywood to understand it, and then there is the exception with action movie protagonists typically having abnormal, if not superhuman abilities and skills…
It’s been a while since I’ve handled a firearm, and although I imagine I could get better with a serious commitment to training, using a handgun, I could hot a paper target about human sized at 30ft more often than not. Not great. Using a rifle, on the other hand, I could pick which eye I want to put a round through at 30 yards. I could fairly reliably hit a human-sized target at about 500 yards. And that’s just accuracy. Rifles are so much more powerful and damaging than handguns. handgun ammunition is typically subsonic, rifle ammunition, with exceptions for really low-powered stuff like .22 (which can still kill a moose) tends to be supersonic – if someone is shooting at you with a rifle, you’ll hear a whipcrack-like noise as the round passes near you, shortly followed by the “pop” of the rifle firing the round. (I was never in combat, but I know this sound because during range qualifications, half of us were under/behind great big earth berms, manipulating the targets) I don’t think I can really explain the damage difference aside from recommending someone to look up some shooting slow-motion vids on youtube with ballistic gelatin. I can’t rightly encourage people to do that, because there is a lot of hateful trash that comes up with those search terms. In my attempts to sum it up, hand gun ammunition puts a round into a block of gell, probably about like you’d expect. Rifle ammunition, on the other hand, often punches clear through the gel, and has the added effect of ballooning the wound cavity (honestly, I’m not sure if this is due to “shockwaves” of the projectile hitting the target, or something about the velocity of the projectile ‘carrying” in air or whatever, but regardless of the mechanics, it causes a much more traumatic wound. And then there is the penetration issue. It doesn’t take a whole lot to stop a hand gun round, and when people talk about “bullet proof vests”, they are usually talking about protection from handgun rounds. And without steel or ceramic plates, are unlikely to provide much protection from a rifle round.
I know I’ve completely omitted specifics about caliber and weapon, but that’s not the point here, it’s that rifles completely and utterly outclass handguns. more power, more penetration, more accuracy, longer range, more damage, etc. They are straight-up better across the board. The main reason for handguns, that I am aware of, is that they are less inconvenient to carry and easier to conceal, for those times where one may feel like they have concerns about being unarmed, but aren’t too concerned…
sorry, that got way longer than I intended it to be… I’ve got some feelings about all these “gun culture” fuckwits failing to have the most basic safety practices or even respect for the weapons they claim to love so much…
Wind River is one of the few movies that comes to mind that keeps things more realistic, and as a bonus, early in the movie, the main character enforces firearm safety with his kid in regards to a bb gun. (another thing I’m prone to harp on about, too many people are way too lax about basic firearm safety…)
Wind River shootout scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7GkWwaIR9Y
tl;dr: a whole bunch of people pull handguns on each other, and it’s a fucking shit show, and then someone with a rifle way the fuck off screen starts one-shotting people.