I just hate it when characters get pummeled and battered, fall out of buildings or get into dog pile car accidents they come out alive and well with less injuries than they realistically should have. Knowing that the main characters are "immortal" takes some of the excitement out of it. Generally movies tend to spare women and children as well.

I hate the opening credits. They take so dam long, are distracting if they occur during the action, and pointless if they delay the story beginning. They're nothing more than principal players feeding their own egos.

A big star appears in the opening credits.
The movie has a faceless villain.
You have not seen said star 1.5 hours into movie.
****, the big star is the villain.

this.

filmmakers probably do this because it's easier for them. It's easier to just do a bunch of close-ups and fast cuts of punches/kicks/gunshots/screeching tyres/explosions etc instead of choreographing a big action sequence which is realistic.

related to this, I hate unrealistic fight scenes. Like if one guy is standing over a guy who's on his knees and he's punching him in the face, the guy on his knees is just taking the blows where irl he would be covering his face with both hands/arms

Well, not a movie, but that stupid sitcom, Roseanne, used to have NOTHING but insanely sarcastic replies to everything. Like, if people were really that witty and sarcastic, they'd be writing for rotten sitcoms, not wandering around wasting that talent during family discussions.

Whenever someone or something is shown falling from a high altitude, the effect of gravity is always largely exaggerated.

In other words you can tell that the speed things fall at in movies is way faster than how it would occur irl.

There are a lot of examples but the only one I can think of right now is Goonies when the rocks fall to the water near the

I believe there are Actors and Director Guild rules about this. Wasn't George Lucas fined by the Guild or SAG for not puting the Credits in early enough in Star Wars?... And then resigned from the Guild and this caused Speilberg to back out of a later film.

----------- Search says

OPENING CREDITS
The order of credits is determined by guild rules -- SAG, the DGA, WGA and other unions. the list that follows is for opening credits.

The order in which credits are billed generally follows their importance to the film, just not linearly. First is usually the motion picture company, followed by the producer, then the 'a film by' credit. Then we see the Title followed by the cast. from there we reverse gears on the whole "order of importance" guideline and work backwards to the director...




if the writer and director are the same person, or the director was also a producer, hold his earlier credit and pair it with the more prestigious one (in this case "director"). so you would place "Written and Directed by" or "Produced and Directed by" or "Edited and Directed by" where the Director's credit goes. if your Dp was also your editor, you'd have "Editor and Director of Photography..." falling in the position where the DP credit goes. et cetera.

Gas Stations....."The car drives over the gas pumps and flames and gas shoot up into the air." This doesn't happen.

The pump in usually in the box that just got crushed. And if the pump is in the tank, the power comes from the box that just got crushed..... plus there are several safety systems to make sure this could not happen.

Almost as bad as the car that go over the cliff and explodes before landing.

regarding credits.... although i haven't confirmed this -- there are the "ways" that stars are introduced at the beginning of a film. sometimes their names are just listed, then something squirrelly will show up like:

Wil Ferrell
Colin Firth
Mike Myers
and Pierce Bronson
Floyd McDouche
with Dexter McFly
special appearance by Connie Island

etc...

I suppose that has something to do with the way the individual stars had their contracts written up?

When characters drink from or use a cup that obviously has no corresponding weight/liquid in it. Very few actors seem to be able to act their way around that, even the very best. Seeing it 10,000 times over a lifetime, you'd think directors would just fill the damn cups so the actors wouldn't be tempted to use cups in ways that are obviously glaringly phony.

You know what I mean: they move or gesture with the cup, or hold it at a slant, in a way that would spill anything inside it. They also move so fast with a cup that the liquid would slosh up and hit them in the face. Sometimes they even take these prim, phony, often very quick and soundless sips of air from the cup, way too fast to be dealing with any liquid, much less a hot liquid. It all lets you know that "here's acting now ... uh oh, and it's bad acting too."

That was evident in that 4th Indy movie when they were lugging around that giant crystal skull. That thing would weight what.... 20 pounds plus?

And they were carrying it like it was an empty milk carton.

I can't stand when the sense of time and space is incorrect. Example, the Back to the Future lightning sequence. We see the DeLorean zooming up on the spot it has to hit...at 88 MPH it's going to hit it in about 3 seconds, but it takes much longer and Doc has plenty of time to make sure everything goes smoothly. Happens all the time in movies with cars, things falling, etc.

This is one of my biggest. I love omnipotent characters like Jason Bourne and have no problem suspending disbelief for them, but why can't things be written logically with luck kept to a minimum (the Bourne movies are actually not that big an offender in this case)? Taken was very bad with this, not as much with specific action sequences as with his investigation in general.

The old Aeon Flux cartoons sort of addressed this. In the first short series, Aeon is completely omnipotent, and what eventually happens is pretty humorous. A later short called "War" (this is all available on MTV.com - http://www.mtv.com/shows/aeon_flux/series.jhtml - "Pilot" is the one I previously referred to) also addresses action movie hero cliches in a fascinating way.

Similarly, the chased characters in thrillers need to behave more rationally. The ole' "running up the stairs rather than out the door" cliche, knocking the killer to the ground and then relaxing, etc. I want to see the terrorized family start brutally beating the guy to death after they finally get him down.

In the Seinfeld parking garage episode, Kramer has to carry an air conditioner box around the whole time - part of the humor of them being lost and miserable in the garage. Michael Richards actually made them keep an air conditioner in the box rather than doing it empty, for just this reason.

That's David Mamet...every movie he writes is like that (see my 'quotes' thread). It's meant to be stilted and noir-ish...not meant to be how people really talk.

Also, try pouring gas on the ground and then tossing a lit cig into it (every villain's favorite way to start the good guy on fire). Cigs don't burn hot enough to flash gas...it will just go out.

I used to wonder why shootouts in HK John Woo movies from the 90s felt so much more realistic than most American shootout counterparts despite the endless bullet cheat and invincibility of the main character.

and then I figured it out.

A shootout feels a lot more realistic when you have the gun firing and the bullet hitting its target in the same frame. Good shootouts give the viewer a spacial awareness of the surroundings, bad shootouts cut back and forth between closeups of the gun firing and random sparks/blood squibs where the bullet supposedly lands.

Honestly, there is no need for gimicks such as bullet view. Just have lot of guns firing and bullets hitting in the same frame, preferably strung up together in a long non slow mo tracking shot.

Not Movie related but still...

Law & Order:Criminal Intent - How the **** does Vincent D'Onofrios character know everything about everything? Granted I love the show etc, but for gods sake he cant know everything from diving equipment to blood coagulation drugs. For once have him not have any idea on SOMETHING, ANYTHING please...

Isn't it the same way with Peterson's character on CSI?

Yeah, they swing luggage around like it weights all of five pounds, too.

That reminds me of another one -- where they're in a warehouse or supermarket or whatever, and a bunch of boxes come tumbling down on them, and it's apparent they're empty because the actors react precisely as they would if the boxes were empty. Even the sound effect is often of an empty cardboard box just glancing lightly of someone's body.

If in reality you got hit with even a single small box, you'd hear the noise of it laying the smack down on you, and you'd be unlikely not to have a startled expression and/or look of pain in your eyes.

The one that I constantly notice is errors with the way people use guns, especially auto-loaders. You constantly see cops (or others who should be well-trained with firearms) pull out their gun and rack the slide when they are "ready for action". The problem is that most auto-loaders are meant to be carried with a round in the chamber (there's no easy way to get that bullet out of the chamber when you holster the gun again), so this would just serve to eject a unfired bullet from the gun for no particular reason.

Another nitty thing is that you'll often see 1911-style pistols will the hammer down. A traditional 1911 is single-action only, so leaving the hammer down would require manually cocking it before firing (and again it's really difficult to get it into a state where there's a round in the chamber but the hammer is down). I've also noticed scenes where someone fires their auto-loader, but in the next shot the hammer is down again. I know there are DAO guns that work like this, but afaik, the vast majority of them will leave the hammer cocked after the first shot so that you can fire again quickly.

Finally, there is this ubiquitous "hammer-cocking" sound they play whenever someone pulls out a gun, but usually the person isn't doing anything that would make that sound (especially with a glock-style gun that has no exposed hammer).

This is really nit-picky, but: I hate it when director's cut from a tracking shot to a static shot then back to the same tracking shot.

This usually happens during a climactic monologue, when the main character recites everything he has learned over the course of the movie. They slowly push in on his face for dramatic effect, but then they cut away to the person listening to him and it's static. When they cut back to the main character, it's still tracking. Both shots either need to be tracking or static -- not mixed. It breaks up the flow.

I usually see this in bad movies where it's clear the director has no vision for the finished product.

This. Do my jeans have the name of the workers on them?

Also, I hate it when I start watching a movie and Sandra Bullock is one of the actors.

That one has always bugged me a lot. I have come to realize that it corresponds with Aristotle's idea that one of the key things drama must have is spectacle -- in one way or another, people tend to want to see heightened reality and what they don't see elsewhere. So if you saw a family with a middle class income living in an apartment, you'd be disappointed, but if you saw them living in a swell home, you'd like it better and tend to relate to the same guy more. If you saw the average guy with an average looking wife, it might hit too close to home or just be less interesting, in some sort of fashion, to look at than if you saw Mr. Average was with Ms. Superhottie.

This seems to be even more pronounced in TV. I think it reaches new heights in teen comedies and dramas on TV, which are heavy on goofy looking young dudes, who are often spazzes to boot, but also surround them with innumerable hotties who will give them the time of day or even enthusiastically choose them over all the competition.

I guess it depends what you want your show to do -- appeal to the senses and how people feel about themselves, or show something more realistic that may lose you viewers. Generally it's all about getting more viewers.

This is mostly true. However, you can ignite gas(actually the vapor) with a cig, but it has to be very hot and the vapor to air % has to be perfect. Possible, just not easy.

Also the chance of injury from gas in a open space is very low even if it does ignite....however, confine it and you have a very dangerous substance. I have seen a 50 pound manhole cover blown through the side of a steel clad building on vapor only(there was no sign of liquid and the tank had be open to the air for two days).

I used to fix gas station and bulk fuel plant equipment.

cigarettes not being inhaled

cars not being locked

and +1 on empty cups