Just wait till they remake famous romance movies by changing the straight characters sexual orientation to gay in the remake. Imagine The Bridges of Madison County with two gay men playing the Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep roles.
There is a principle in editing that's basically time editing, where you jump ahead a few seconds in time just to tell the story a little faster and pick up the pace. I don't mind that when it's done well. Usually, they'll show a guy pick up a set of binoculars, bring them up to his face, then we see the cliche two black outlines: But then they cut back to his face, he'll turn to the left a few feet, then we cut back and see something else. That works. Where it gets stupid is when the viewpoint is 10 times closer than it could possibly be with that size of lens. Good or bad, these are accepted cliches that everybody will buy into. One thing nobody has brought up with yet is that it's very hard to do realistic RAIN in movies. I can always tell when they're using a rain machine, and it generally looks too even and too precise compared to actual rain in the real world. It's very expensive and time-consuming to hook up enough rain machines to take care of (say) three city blocks in a shot for a TV show. Superimposed rain never works. They're getting better at doing it right. I'll also again give credit to the crew on Ray Donovan, which consistently does the best fake car-driving shots I've ever seen in my life, for features or TV shows. They do a brilliant job on that stuff. I would totally, 100% buy those shots as being in a moving car, but I know they're all green screen. The best VFX work is sometimes the stuff nobody even notices.
Don't know how familiar you may be with the Redford film, Three Days of the Condor, (1975), but near the opening of the film, Condor goes out to pick up lunch while it's raining, and this is also when the-hit takes place. To my untrained eye, both scenes of Condor going out to lunch and the start of the-hit scene in front of the building, are convincing that it is raining, although not a downpour. It was very important to the film that it was raining, since that is why Condor goes out the back way undetected, and the hit men have guns hidden under their rain ponchos, and creatively they use tight shots on reflections in puddles on the street, and then pan up to the action. Typically then, would they wait to shoot the outdoor scenes on a cloudy day, hose down the street and other areas with water, and then use a rain machine on mid range and closeups?
Handguns generally make very little noise unless the trigger is pulled. They don't rattle when you touch them, pick them up, or point them. Yet in every movie and tv show, the hero's pistol makes as much noise a rattlesnake when he's trying to sneak up on the bad guy. Handguns without an exposed hammer (Glocks) don't make "cocking" noises either. Also, you can't continually pull the trigger on a semi-auto handgun once it's empty. When the last bullet is fired, the slide stays locked back disabling the trigger. Guns are also expensive. I love watching a tv cop just throw his $1200 pistol down on the concrete just because he ran out of ammo.
Yes. Particularly in pre-digital times (before 1997 or so), they'd just have 20 rain trucks up and down the street with the spigots just out of camera range, and then they'd turn them on just before the cameras rolled. When it's done right, it's convincing to a point. The crew had to use rain machines on Lost every week because every exterior shot in Hawaii inevitably turned into at least a drizzle, and if the drizzle went away by the time they moved the cameras to shoot the other side of the shot, the water pipes would have to provide the illusion. So often in shows like that, half the rain was real and half was special effects. They had no choice. Mother nature rarely wants to cooperate when it comes to sunlight coming and going. My favorite on Lost was when there would be zero rain on one side, but they knew it was coming in, so they'd throw in a line for that actor where they'd remark, "hey, rain's coming in," and then from the other angles you'd see the drizzle start coming down. So they'd just work the weather into the dialogue and keep going.
People from foreign countries speaking english to each other. Especially noticeable when they talk about secret things while in the presence of an American.
Just thought of another telephone error. When a person makes a call and they get disconnected, the person on the other end hangs up, etc. they start repeatedly poking at the receiver hook, CLICKCLICKCLICKCLICKCLICKCLICK, as if that would magically re-connect the line. Dumb.
I sometimes burst out laughing on some shows, because I can plainly see they're losing the light and trying to make believe it isn't really 6:30PM. The sad reality is that no amount of artificial light can compensate for night. Have you ever been hit with a chair? It's amazing how many chairs fall apart when somebody gets hit with one, and the reality is that it would crush that person, break their backs, and otherwise cause damage to the point that they wouldn't get back up.
I agree that most fight scene choreography is pretty unrealistic, but it's better than it was in the 50s and 60s. I've been watching a lot of private eye shows from that period and the fight scenes are really phony. The hero hits the bad guy who goes flying, and then the hero waits for the guy to get up and do the same to him. It's as if there has been an agreement that everyone gets a free shot until someone can't get up. Absolutely no effort is made to block or evade a punch. And the hero gets up, even if clobbered with a baseball bat. And there's never anything ore than perhaps a drop of blood on the corner of the mouth. Even as a kid I wondered how Mannix could get knocked unconscious every week and never show signs of brain damage. I also noticed that you could also tell if an injured soldier was going to die on Combat! because there was always blood coming out of the corner of his mouth (indicating the poor soul has sustained sever internal trauma).
I sometimes feel horribly manipulated by these 'history channel' type re-creations. INSPIRED BY would alleviate my fastidiousness
I've been re-watching The Avengers mega-set. The fighting is atrocious. It's like the dialog and plot scriptwriters were on tea-break
In a movie set in the present day, a protagonist is "real," "honest," and "without guile" if he drives a restored muscle car from the '60s. Conversely, a character driving a convertible Porsche 911 is shallow, spoiled, and selfish.
Films that take place pre-1950 featuring female nudity- I am always amused when you can clearly see bikini tan lines.
People firing powerful handguns one-handed and/or with no recoil. I wonder how many people may have broken their nose or chipped a tooth when firing such guns because they weren't ready for the force of the recoil. For ex (ignore clickbait title):
Someone is sitting at the computer, and whatever information is displayed can be seen on their face. I've never seen a projection monitor.
