15 Things Hollywood Needs to Stop Doing
Everyone knows and accepts that there are certain cliches in movie-making that are ingrained into the industry, but there are many that not only serve no real purpose, but have now begun to actually detract from the quality of movies in general. The following 15 things, whether they’re methods of filming, props used on set, or behaviors written into characters, have all outlived their usefulness and welcome — by a long shot.
Bad Phone Etiquette
What is it with movie-directors and phone-calls? If the people involved in film-making behaved in reality as the characters in their movies do, then they’d hang up on every person who calls them. It’s beyond ridiculous to imagine a world where everybody answers the phone with “what” and hangs up without so much as closing grunt. Even more perturbing than the outlandishly rude hang-ups are the callers who begin talking as soon as the line’s been picked up. Who does that? Do you call somebody, then start speaking before they ever say so much as a “hello?” A bit of social realism wouldn’t hurt, writing in two extra words can’t be that difficult.
Never Finishing Food
For some odd reason, directors always feel the need to have the main character shun food. Usually, they’re handed a full plate of mouth-watering breakfast by a woman in slinky pajamas. They say something like “oh this looks great” and then say some lines that have to do with whatever the main plot points are for the following scene, and then they give a kiss goodbye and leave. First of all, people need to eat. Hollywood seems to forget that real human beings wouldn’t pass up a perfect breakfast unless they were in a serious rush to get out, and even then, would at the very least stuff a couple of fork-fulls in their mouths before taking off. If you’re not going to have your character eat, then keep food out of the movie entirely.
Needlessly Wet Streets
What used to be a clever filming trick to get better night-shots has turned into a cheap gimmick that’s just impossible for viewers not to notice. Unless there’s a storm, there’s just no reason to have the streets soaking wet. It’s just sad that directors still do this, and usually it’s such a half-assed effort that they don’t even bother to get the sidewalks or parked cars just as wet, making the disparity even more conspicuous. Audiences respect realism, so stop pretending they don’t know you hosed down the street before the shoot.
Ridiculous Explosions
The 80′s are over and done with, so there’s no reason why we should still be watching the most ridiculous pyrotechnics imaginable every time something goes boom. Explosions, contrary to Hollywood’s belief, aren’t enormous slow-motion seas of flame that sound like rushing water. They’re faster than the blink of an eye and usually have very little fire involved at all, and movies should start trying to up their game a bit in the realism department. On that note, people can’t outrun an explosion. They can’t stand and watch something begin to explode before their very eyes, and then turn around and run to make their escape by leaping. Not even heroic protagonists.
Casting the Ethnically Incorrect
OK, we live in a politically correct society where we’re all the same color and creed and so on and so forth. We get it already, but seriously? The Prince of Persia ought to at least look Persian, shouldn’t he? It’s already bad enough that we’ve come to accept the complete disregard for proper english accents when dealing with movies set in different parts of the world, but it’s just getting beyond ridiculous these days. It’s not the 70′s anymore, so it’s not OK to pass off a guy who is clearly one ethnicity as something he isn’t. Not only does it make the entire story a bit incomplete (was the character adopted and displaced several thousand miles?), but it’s probably more than a tad insulting to some people.
Empty Cups
If there’s one thing in all of film that is aggravating to points beyond human endurance, it’s actors swinging obviously empty cups around claiming that they’re full of hot fresh coffee. Just how difficult is it to put some water in a cup? Do these people not make millions of dollars doing what they do? Is it not their job to create an illusion believable enough to entertain an audience? The moment a cup shows up on scene that’s laughably empty when the character’s supposedly drinking from it, the entire experience is ruined. It’s really that simple.
Improper Gun Use
For some odd reason, Hollywood has perpetuated the belief that when a handgun is picked up or handled in any way that it sounds like it’s going to fall apart at any moment. Just because a gun can be taken apart, that doesn’t mean that it’s loosely put together. Any gun that sounds the way they do in movies is beyond unsafe to use. Also, telling an actor to hold a handgun sideways because it “looks cool” should be grounds for expulsion from the entire industry.
Sound in Space
It’s hard to imagine people walking around today thinking there is sound in space, just like it is in our atmosphere. Apparently all the Hollywood directors think so, and not enough of their underlings have the guts to tell them how woefully ignorant they are. It was OK back in the 70′s and even the 80′s, but today it’s just pathetic — but they still do it. To make matters worse, there are some movies and even TV shows that portray space as a silent vacuum, which it is, but even with these intrepid realists out there we see movie after movie releasing with space portrayed as a very noisy place. It’s not acceptable anymore, so Hollywood should leave the hokey sci-fi to the classics where it belongs.
Weakened Exclamations
It’s no secret that the MPAA’s rating system is utter garbage, but the language used in real-life situations is so far beyond anything like the language used in movies now that it’s literally no longer funny. If somebody gets shot, or accidentally mutilates their thumb with a hammer or a car door, they’re not going to yell anything as tame as a simple “damn it” — they’re going to blurt out some of the most profane expletives they know. When a wife catches her husband cheating, or vice versa, the formerly happy couple probably isn’t going to pull any punches in the ensuing word-battle, either. While what’s allowed on film has gotten a bit better over the years, it’s still nowhere close to reality, and as long as penny-pinching studios want to push their movies to wider audiences (meaning younger audiences), they’re going to keep ruining movie dialogues with unrealistic Disneyfication.
Computers = Magic
It’s been 15 years since Hackers dazzled audiences with its over-the-top cyberpunk shenanigans, but even in the world we live in today, where nearly everybody has at least one computer on hand at any given moment, Hollywood still treats them like they’re magical windows to some sort of mythical virtual world. For some reason, nobody uses the mouse when operating a computer on film. They click frantically at the keyboard to accomplish anything — and they can accomplish anything — and any computer, network, website or even car can be “hacked” by any 16 year old kid with a Facebook account. Because that’s how computers work right?.
Time Distortion
Any time there’s a countdown, like a bomb timer (you have 10 seconds to live, etc etc) in a movie, time seems to slow down and stretch seconds into minutes — without even getting to slow-motion. Take the above clip from The Fast and the Furious for example: They’re supposed to be racing a quarter-mile, 10-second race. Somehow, they manage to make that 10-second race take 2 minutes and 10 seconds to complete, traveling an estimated 5 miles. The vast majority of the race wasn’t in slow-motion, either. This sort of garbage in movies really needs to stop, since even the most technically inept viewer can tell time.
If You Can’t Make it Good, Make it 3D
The newest wave of 3D that’s hit Hollywood may actually be the tipping point, when the industry finally implodes due to the heaping amounts of ignorance, greed and hubris that have been piling on for the last century. Unfortunately, it’s more likely that they’ll keep churning out awful movies in 3D for as long as the attention-deficit masses continue to pay the outrageous ticket-prices to see them. The kids growing up today won’t know that the 3D movies they’re watching are some of the worst garbage ever filmed, because those films are all they know.
High School Dress Code
How many movies are going to keep getting released featuring completely outlandish high school wardrobes? It was funny for the first couple of decades, but anybody with a younger sibling today knows that you simply can’t get away with that kind of nonsense in school anymore. Dress codes are serious business — serious as a sexual harassment lawsuit — and the fact that movie studios keep pumping out the trollop-fests that all high school movies have become shows how out of touch Hollywood’s become. Teens may wear some pretty bad stuff these days on their own time, but when it comes to school hours that kind of thing doesn’t fly unless they want to get suspended and sent home to change.
Superhuman Stupidity
The 60′s cliche of the overwhelmingly simple-minded damsel in distress is more played out than a soccer-mom’s Justin Bieber collection, but that doesn’t stop Hollywood from consistently shoving unrealistically stupid characters down out throats every time we walk into a theater. There’s no excuse for how badly-written these characters are, either. It’s gotten so bad that we’re starting to wonder if the writers themselves are actually smarter than a jar of mayonnaise, or if they’re being forced to write in characters of such monumental stupidity that even the most vapid airhead in the audience thinks she’s intelligent by comparison.
Women
It’s now 2010, so it’s about time we started moving away from the hopelessly one-dimensional female characters of the past and begin to take women in general a bit more seriously when writing for and casting their characters. The amount of horribly bad actresses in Hollywood is nothing short of astounding, and yet talentless bimbos continue to get work in movie after movie on the merit of their plastic surgeon’s excellent work — instead of how well the women can act. On the writing side of things, female characters need to become complete characters, not an extreme of either superficial stupidity or untouchably sexy superheroine. These aren’t difficult ideas to grasp, so why aren’t the major studios getting them?
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