MovieChat Forums > General Discussion > Cheesiest movie cliche?

Cheesiest movie cliche?


I'll start.

Being hung up on, hearing the long tone that tells you that they've hung up, yet the actor says "hello?" as if it could be a mistake that they're hearing that tone and the other person is still on the call.

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Divorcing couple rekindling their love after they survive all the elements of a disaster/action film.

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Yup that's a cheesy character arch.

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In USA Southern people are the worst racists on the planet and North is not
Ugly men being better person than handsome man

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> In USA Southern people are the worst racists on the planet and North is not

Seconded.

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Lol, the northern cities are full of the worst racists in the country, maybe the world.

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"The world's worst bigots are East Coast liberals." -- Lyndon Johnson, author of the Great Society, driving force behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 36th President of the United States

I've lived and worked in Bubba-land and in Washington DC. Gotta agree with LBJ on that one.

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We can add west coast liberals to that too.

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Villain has captured hero and is about to kill him. Hero says, "as long as I can't escape and am going to die anyway, how about telling me where you hid your Doomsday Device." Villain says, "why sure, I'll tell you everything!" And does. Hero then escapes and uses this knowledge to defeat the villain.

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James Bond has gotten away with this one a few times...

'Do you expect me to talk?'

'No Mr. Bond, I expect you to escape and eventually ruin my scheme and kill me'

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The French stick bread poking out of the grocery bag. Very common in the 80's and 90's.

The secondary female character actually being better looking that the star/supposed hottie.

Instead of the good guy just shooting the bad guy, he throws his gun away so they can have a fist fight etc where the good guy nearly gets killed just before prevailing.

When the good guy can let the bad guy fall to his death but instead pulls him up only so the bad guy can either get away or try and kill good guy.

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Disarming a bomb with 1 second left on the timer.

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One that works most of the time.

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James Bond did it wih 7 seconds to spare! 😎

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We all do this with the microwave😀

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SJW related cliches which have become common. Like historically incorrect races in time periods and places where they just didn't exist. Women in roles they were unlikely to have held.

Oh yes and everyone is gay or bi.

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I wouldn’t call it cheesy, deceitful springs to mind.

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SJW related cliches which have become common. Like historically incorrect races in time periods and places where they just didn't exist. Women in roles they were unlikely to have held.

Oh yes and everyone is gay or bi.

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Yeah like blacks in period set England.

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> SJW related cliches which have become common. [...] Women in roles they were unlikely to have held.

If by "roles" you mean jobs, positions of authority, et cetera I probably agree. I'd have to think it over. I'm sure as hell not a fan of SJW, and when stuff like this is done for SJW reasons it's obvious, largely because they're so heavy-handed about it.

But if by roles you mean the nature of a woman's relationship to a man, e.g., a wife who is a husband's confidante, sounding board for his ideas, and so on, I think that's sometimes just necessary. The attitudes of men toward women were so different in the very old days that an honest depiction would make a story repugnant or unintentionally hilarious to modern audiences.

Remember Excalibur (1981)? The part where Arthur's daddy, Uther, sprouted antlers for the duke's wife Igraine, so he got Merlin to make him look like the duke so he could bang her? He did so, and Arthur was conceived. When Uther's men killed the duke in combat Uther became king and took her as his wife.

What the movie didn't tell you was this. In the original story, Le Morte d'Arthur, written in the 15th century, Igraine figured out that the liaison with the "duke" had happened *after* the real duke's death. So who or what was it that had its way with her? Unknown. Later, now Uther's wife, she realized she was pregnant. Gotta tell him. So she did, honestly -- some Thing had done the job on her and a baby was on the way.

Uther's response: "Oh yeah, that was me. Couldn't wait for the wedding, so I got Merlin to do a spell. Pretty cool, huh?"

What would any modern woman's response be? "You used me like that? With a frat boy prank? And didn't bother to tell me after?" Outrage! But no ... in the story Igraine was overjoyed! Turns out she was married to the father of her child, so -- no problem!

In the 15th century Thomas Malory wrote that with a perfectly straight face. But I guess that's the way things were back then. I don't think you could sell that to an audience today, though.

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I get that women would have been great support to men in many ways, especially in say the Wild West and I get that they would have been very capable. But in modern films women are more like men, whereas in the old Westerns for example, women could make a hell of a stew, darn your socks and shoot some Injuns when needed.

Some realistically tough women in the old Film Noirs too.

One show I liked at the start was Vikings, but then they started giving us an army of Shield Maidens all these slim women kicking huge men's arse's in hand to hand combat.

I love the film Excalibur, in the film Morgana knows straight away it isn't her father so perhaps that changed it up a little. Although, I think Ingraine must have thought it odd that her husband would abandon the battlefield for a bit of nookie as well.

It probably wouldn't go down well with a younger audience, not to mention the director was directing his daughters sex scene!

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> in modern films women are more like men, whereas in the old Westerns for example, women could make a hell of a stew, darn your socks and shoot some Injuns when needed.

Yeah, I don't care for the modern rendition of the Superwoman who can do it all ... not just talking about Westerns there ... but also I don't like the cliche some older Westerns use, the good hearted woman who can out-drink, out-shoot, out-fight, and out-cuss any man. Both make women to essentially be identical to men except for certain anatomical variations.

One of my undergrad profs was into feminist theory. She had some interesting insights into "hidden power" that women have had. Cultures where the men seem to have all the status and such, but where women in fact controlled quite a bit. For example, the men might be the ones to have careers and generate income, but the housewives controlled how the income was spent, invested, etc. Fiction made with that perspective might be interesting. Marketable? I don't know. I'm sure the lefties would find some excuse to be offended, and Hollywood would be afraid of offending them. And how that approach might be applied to the old West, I don't know; I'm afraid I didn't take enough history classes in school.

> I think Ingraine must have thought it odd that her husband would abandon the battlefield for a bit of nookie

I thought that was a little weird too.

> not to mention the director was directing his daughters sex scene!

I thought that was *very* weird!

While we're talking about Excalibur and cliches, here's another. If there was a real Arthur (even if that wasn't his actual name), he lived around 500 AD. Depictions in Excalibur and many other movies show he and his knights using armor, weapons, etc which weren't invented until several hundred years later. Kind of like showing Columbus arriving in the New World in diesel powered vessels with GPS navigation.

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Skinny, shapeless women in action roles with posh English accents.

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