[Hourglass]

[Syera]

But it's so worth reading!

[Hourglass]

..There is no way I'm reading all of that.

[Syera]

Cliches in and of themselves aren't bad. The problem is when people use a cliche instead of using their brains.

I feel this bears posting. This list was written by Sytel of the Bob and George forums and posted in another thread about cliches... and I do love this list.

Sytel's List of Things Unlikely to Happen in Movies

There will be an arranged marriage, and both parties will be OK with it (not necessarily enthusiastic, but OK) and treat it as the normal and accepted way things are done.

The hero will be a woman in some place/time/culture where women are routinely considered as delicate or less important than men, and while she will do whatever heroic things the plot requires of her, she will not question the patriarchial attitudes of her culture, because obviously the culture wouldn't stay that way if people routinely disagreed with it.

Warlike, barbaric aliens will land on Earth and be awed and enlightened by humanity's relatively peaceful culture.

Sentient robots will spontaneously proclaim themselves inferior to humans, and proceed to exterminate themselves.

Sentient robots will spontaneously proclaim themselves superior to squirrels, and proceed to exterminate squirrels. They will not form any opinions on humanity as a whole.

A bomb will feature neither a red wire nor a blinking timer display.

A legend of a mysterious creature wandering the back hills at night will turn out to be just that: a legend.

Outsiders go to a small town to investigate a legend of a mysterious creature that the locals claim to have seen sometimes. After a month of investigation, they know a lot more about small-town life, but they haven't seen the creature, since even people who have lived in the area their whole lives have only seen it once or twice, so what are the chances of a couple of outsiders seeing it in just a month?

A cute animal appears, and may even have a major role in the plot, but it is never placed in jeopardy or otherwise used to manipulate viewers' emotions.

Someone has an esoteric hobby or field of study (like birdwatching), and while this helps to define the character, it's never a major plot point that helps the character figure out a way out of a jam or something.

A large corporation will be portrayed as, at least, morally neutral. (This was sort of done in Tron -- one of the higher-ups at the corporation was Evil, and wrote an Evil program, but the corporation itself wasn't Evil and most of the good guys worked for it or aspired to.)

The "crackpot" who claims that the world is round won't be laughed at any harder than the one who claims that the world is a celestial dung beetle.

In a historical film, a character will make some grand, sweeping, visionary speech (or sarcastic joke) about "why, someday they might..." His prediction will be 100% wrong.

The hero will try to distract the villain by saying "Hey, look out behind you!" The villain will realize that this is a trick and not look. He will be right, and the hero will be disappointed and try another trick.

A Little League/junior sports movie will focus on the strong, well-trained team from the school on the rich side of town. They will be portrayed as sympathetic characters with their own problems and lives.

The heroine will have a special bond with wild animals-- which will be demonstrated by the fact that *she* does what *they* want/need at the time.

When a building/city/country gets blown up, there will be massive collective shock, a national (or worldwide) day of mourning, sappy songs sung at benefit concerts, and the whole nine yards for a long time afterwards.

A wealthy villain operating out of South America will turn out to have no connections whatsoever to drugs.

Similarly, someone will go to Spain and there will be not a single reference to bullfighting.

Or the movie will be set at least partially in (20th-century) France, and the Eiffel Tower will never show up in the background.

Someone will transcend physical form and become a godlike being of pure energy, at one with the cosmos, etc., and stick around to help out his still-mortal friends (or just spend time with them.)

Someone in the Old West will get tired of the lawlessness, Indian raids, isolation, etc. and go to someplace more civilized such as Europe. The movie will follow this character.

A movie having anything to do with Australia will make absolutely no mention of the phrase "down under", either in the movie itself or in promotional materials.

A very dainty, foppish, effeminate man will be shown to be 100% heterosexual beyond a doubt. And get all the girls, because girls love the effeminate look. (Why do you think bishounen are so popular?)

A robot will feel that it has an entirely satisfactory understanding of all human emotions, especially love, and will not be particularly interested in further investigation of the subject.

One of the main characters will be a black guy. A soft-spoken intellectual from a rich family. While quite intelligent and knowledgeable on esoteric topics, he will be physically inept and have no idea of the harsher realities of life, due to his sheltered existence. Also, he will be a skinny geek.

-A cute little child is profoundly stupid. If this is due to true retardation or a learning disability, this disability does not give the child any special insight or ability to make people realize what's important in life. (Actually, this one *does* occasionally happen-- in movies where all the characters are kids.)

-The treasure-seeker heroes have to hand over the treasure they found to its rightful owners, or the owners of the land it was found on.

-The movie stars a scientist who is not at the top of his/her field.

-Some children have to go on an adventure through the wilderness with some rare and exotic animal. At no point are they threatened by poachers.

-The hero and his destined One True Love meet, and immediately develop a friendship and respect for one another which eventually deepens into love. They don't insult or argue with each other any more than the hero insults or argues with his other close friends.

-At the start of the movie, the hero is breaking up with his wife. By the end of the movie, he's *still* breaking up with her.

-A middle-aged, unattractive lesbian couple show up as secondary characters. They don't have anything against men, but are quite turned off at the possibility of letting one get anywhere near them during sex. And they remain that way for the duration of the movie.

-Someone whose first language is something like French, Spanish or Japanese speaks some English, and slips back into his mother tongue for difficult words like "astrophysics", but doesn't have a problem remembering to say basic things like "sir", "yes", "hello", "good", etc. in English.

-Someone gets superpowers and decides to use them to Fight Crime. So he joins the local police department or neighbourhood patrol or something. Under his real name. And wears their standard uniform.

-In an American Civil War movie, the heroes all fight loyally and enthusiastically for the Union, free slaves, and are portrayed as having the moral high ground.

-In an American Revolution movie, the heroes all fight loyally and enthusiastically for the Crown, help loyalists to safety, and are portrayed as having the moral high ground.

-In any sort of movie set in the past, the hero has most or all of the prejudices and beliefs common to his time and culture, and retains them throughout the movie.

-Cloning produces a normal baby which, when it eventually grows up, will prove to have a very different personality from the original (different childhoods and life experiences, that sort of thing) and quite possibly a different appearance (hairstyle, freckles, scars, deformities caused by funny chemicals in the womb...)

-Society is destroyed in some cataclysm (plague, nuclear war, everything just goes bzzt, or whatever), and the survivors immediately start working on rebuilding it to the best of their abilities, because the other option is wearing furs and poking people with spears. Since they all lived in a modern society until recently, they succeed. In the meantime, they do not suddenly decide to regress to medieval or savage cultural values.

-The heroine's parents decide that she should marry so-and-so. She violently protests and threatens to run away from home. The parents quickly apologize and cancel the marriage arrangements.

-The mysterious and powerful advisor goes out and does whatever he wants done himself, instead of getting the much weaker hero to do it and occasionally popping in to help him.

-The Devil offers to buy someone's soul. Said someone flatly refuses.

-Someone learns an important lesson about life from a perceptive child, adventure, animal, eccentric, angel, etc. Unfortunately, it's the *wrong* lesson, and the character's life is badly messed up because of it.

-A detective, policeman, or similar is pulled off the case he's working on. He goes to take a much-needed vacation while the rest of the department solves the case. When he returns, he has a much clearer perspective on his involvement with his work.

-Dolphins appear, and they are primarily concerned with eating fish and swimming around in the ocean. They might glance curiously at humans from time to time, but not get closer than that.

-(even rarer) Ditto for sharks.

-A car is subjected to violent treatment (such as falling off a cliff and crashing into a lamppost), and is totaled, but does not explode.

-A timed disaster, especially a bomb with a timer, is averted with about 15 minutes to spare.

-Some momentuous metaphysical change takes place, with no visual effects whatsoever.

-Someone is born mutated, and the mutation is something like a difference in skin color, hair color, facial structure, etc. The main effect of this is that the mutant's father thinks that his wife has been cheating on him.

-Something causes large numbers of humans to be born with mutant superpowers. It has the same effect on the other lifeforms in the vicinity, resulting in frogs with X-ray vision and trees with seventeen eyes. Sometimes it causes redundant powers, like a bird that can fly or a chameleon that can change its color at will.

-Energy beings, incredibly advanced aliens, and the like will be shown as having their own culture with its own quirks. Just because they're superior doesn't mean they aren't people.

-Some bodiless entity will try to possess the first human it sees, then awkwardly realize it has no idea what it's doing.


And now some ornithological peeves.

-A bald eagle will give an actual bald eagle call, a series of sharp chirps, and not the "Keeee-yeeeerr!" of the red-tailed hawk.

-Red-tailed hawk calls, in fact, will be used solely to indicate that there's a red-tailed hawk around, and will not be applied randomly to other species of birds that look like they *should* sound like that.

-Birdsongs will fit the geography and ecology of the location. No Black-Capped Chickadees in Louisiana, no cardinals in the Far North, no kookaburras *anywhere* except Australia.

-A fictitious rare species of bird will not be a "lesser spotted" anything.

-A parrot will show up which does *not* speak.

-Roadrunners, wild turkeys, etc. will be seen in flight, or will at least remember that it is an option.

-An archaeopteryx will appear, and have a major role, in a dinosaur movie. (Please?)

-Birds will not release copious loose feathers when startled.

-Cartoon birds later than the Cretaceous period will not have teeth.

-Male, female and immature plumages will not get mixed up.

-Someone who answers in the affirmative to "fancy a shag?" will end up with a rather ugly European cormorant.


Concerning robots:

-A robot will have a half-decent voice emulator and won't sound obviously mechanical.

-A robot will malfunction, and people will say that the robot should really be shut down and examined to find the cause of the problem. The robot will agree that this would be wise.

-Robots will have self-preservation objectives that can *always* be overriden by conflicting instructions from their operators, so they won't want to avoid an order that would result in their destruction.

-In fact, robots won't even *have* self-preservation drives beyond what's necessary to keep the robot from running itself off a cliff.

-A robot to do the work of, say, a tractor will look like a tractor, not a human or a metal bull.

-Robots will be programmed with the sort of mind required for their intended job, not with simulated human minds.

-Robots, like any other machines, will have fairly short lifespans unless meticulously maintained and sparingly used. They will definitely not still be operative after 100+ years in an outdoors environment with no maintenance.

-Robots will recognize that people are all individuals, and refrain from passing judgment upon "humans" as a whole.

-Robots will not be made of bulletproof titanium, or armed with lasers, unless their intended function required such features.

-Robots will be shown as stupider than humans in most regards. (Hey, good AI is hard to program!)

-A movie about robots will get all the way through without even a passing reference to Asimov's "laws", and will feature robots programmed with a different set of core operating principles.


And the number one thing that will never happen in a robot movie:

-Someone who has actually had experience programming AI for commercial applications will be involved with writing the robot character.


Those are reposted from a thread on another forum. Some similar entries that other people posted that I thought were good:

* A car chase, due to the skill of both sides, causes no damage, directly or indirectly, to any external parties whatsoever.

* An unhawt character from an American teenager film will have a relationship, which isn't somehow meant to be a joke.

* A hawt man and hawt woman will be, and remain, just friends, limiting their relationship to a mutual respect for each other.

* A fight in the presence of fragile, valuable items will not lead to total destruction of the aforementioned objects.

*If someone dies "but the body was never found", it won't matter. They're dead.

* Someone will listen to the scientist/researcher/etc who says that a disaster is coming BEFORE the disaster actually happens.

*A person transported back in time will conform to the standards of that time, rather than try to change it. Example: A wise-cracking -but basically decent- guy sent back to the renaissance won't go around handing out modern technology right and left, or messing with someone's arranged marriage.

A person can be good to kids, and still be irredeemably evil.

* The Renegade Asshole Scientist with Predictions of Doom turns out to be as big a crackpot as his superiors thought he was (I'm looking right at you, Jeff Goldblum!).

* The mega-corporation fesses up to it's blunders and tries to fix things before things go really bad.

* The cheating big shot jock gets caught cheating immediately and the good guy wins by default.

The main female character will wear a corset or laced bodice and not bitch about it, any more than modern characters bitch about wearing shoes. (coughPiratesoftheCaribbeancough)

The attractive young woman will not dump her nice but boring fiance for a more exciting guy she's just met. Similarly, she will not leave her fiance standing at the altar to be with another guy *cough worst scene in Spider-man 2 cough*.

Sentient robots will be built with obviously non-humanoid bodies for purposes of functionality and/or ease of construction/programming.

Sentient robots in the far future are neither an underclass nor an overclass, but are widely accepted as simply a different kind of intelligent life, much like most spacefaring aliens.

A person gets superpowers somehow and instead of either going off to fight crime, becoming an archcriminal, or attempting to ignore them completely, he starts using them in a professional capacity - telepaths working as psychiatrists, for example, or the super-strong person getting a job as a construction worker.

* The police immediately investigate reports from the shaken but otherwise plainly sober teenager, rather than locking him up.

* An evil AI evolves out of control, runs out of disk space, and suffers a Blue Screen of Death.

* Bank robbers successfully rob a bank in a city setting without turning on each other.

* A group of switchblade-wielding punks at a high school are arrested the first time they threaten someone in the parking lot.

* An attractive male and female protagonist, thrown together by a bizarre turn of events, hate each other throughout the film and eventually fight each other to the death.

* The antagonists turn out to have been secretly funded by an evil, multi-national family-owned business.

* Aliens blatantly superior to humans will neither fear humans, nor what they have the potential to become.

* The main villain will reveal a terrible secret that will turn out to be totally false.

* A robot will have a failsafe, override or master-reset which can be used in the extremely likely event of a robot going haywire.

* A movie with hackers in it depicts them as unattractive, obtuse, and socially inept rather than hip, oversexed club-goers. Similarly, programming is depicted as resembling typing, as opposed to making pretty, high-res shapes connect in a certain way.

* Someone wounded in a computer simulation is entirely unhurt in real life. Even if they do believe it's real.

* A benevolent corporation is sued by a ruthless group of people who injured themselves by blatantly misusing a product.

* Humans invade an alien world for completely imperialistic reasons. This is clear from the start of the movie, not a twist ending.

* Heist movie: At the end of the movie, when the hero is alone with the only remaining villain, and the villain gives the typical, "You're piss-poor, your job sucks, you have no future, why don't we split the money?" speeches, the hero accepts. The movie cuts away to them relaxing on a tropical beach together, clearly good friends, and laughing over a newspaper headline which indicates they successfully faked their own deaths.

- The villian has rules to follow and tries hard not to break them.

The detective hero who's relative is murdered and gets pulled off the case, realises it's standard procedure and his colleagues are just as professional as he is and trusts their investigative skills NOT do his own investigation.

When the hero cop catches the big evil mastermind and beats the hell out of him during the arrest, he's brought up on disciplinary charges for excessive use of force.

--If it's fuzzy, cute and innocent, it stays fuzzy, cute and innocent. It doesn't have a monstrous adult form/curse/other nasty secret.

--Scientists create some kind of critter that's docile, friendly, and harmless.

* In a professional sport showdown, the bad guy plays by the rules, and wins because he's better than the good guy, as opposed to cheating. He then does not go on to kill or paralyse the good guy with an illegal move.

A martial arts master/cop/detective/former FBI/insert asskicking job here's family is killed. He goes into therapy and lets the cops handle it.

* 80's Movie: The rich bastard character decides that destroying the youth center (or closing the ski lodge, or whatever acquisition-based means of annoying the poor) is too important to wager on the outcome of some form of competition with.

* Sci-Fi: It occurs to someone that making robots that could conceivably overthrow mankind might be a bad idea. As a failsafe, the robots only have an 8-hour battery life (in addition to the usual programming to keep them docile).



Sytel's brilliant. Harsh, but brilliant.

[Meesh]