Film cliches you want to fuck off

[holyzombiejesus]

I know so little about cars, if I had to identify one I would only be able to say "it was a red car". A woman at work asked me to go and help her buy a car once (despite me never having even a provisional driving licence or any interest in cars whatsoever) and it was excruciating. All I could do was kick the tyres and frown. Anyway...

[Small Man Big Horse]

Teachers/lecturers in American films have no concept of what time it is. Rather than bringing the class to a close towards the end of the hour, they are always waffling away with their lesson and suddenly get interrupted by the bell, at which point they instantly stop teaching and all the pupils instantly pack up and fuck off.

My maths teacher used to be terrible for this. But then it was a rare event when he taught us something we needed to know rather than waffling on about some pet hate of his.

[Dex Sawash]

I think it's an American convention of using the year the model was released, rather than the year of the actual car, so it's more equivalent to saying 'MK2 Golf'.

Still improbable people would know which version of every car like.

I don't think any american car models went completely unchanged for the new year until maybe the late 1980s. I am quite accurate in IDing year/make/model of most postwar cars. Too old to always remember why exactly that car is a 67 Cougar and absolutely not a 68 Cougar. *





* Bad example, 68 has side marker lamps on front fenders 67 doesn't

[mothman]

I saw a fantastic old car yesterday. Wish I knew what it was. Very large, presumably American, but with a very low squat windscreen. It looked a bit like a 1950s version of a Range Rover Evoque...

[Blumf]

I saw a fantastic old car yesterday. Wish I knew what it was. Very large, presumably American, but with a very low squat windscreen. It looked a bit like a 1950s version of a Range Rover Evoque...

For that description, I'd guess a 1960s era car. Could be loads of them, from all over the world, but for a UK market model I'll guess a Ford Zephyr Mk. IV:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Zephyr#Mark_IV

But a US market car would be just as likely, see a few of them about.

[kalowski]

Yeah I thought it maybe something like that but it's still ridiculous, especially when the car is 45 years old and the onlooker is 18. It's like a teenager here all of a sudden spotting an Austin Maestro from half a mile away.

I would be useless, like Chief Wiggum: "Suspect is driving a...car"

[thecuriousorange]

It's a chestnut that goes beyond feature films, but I just saw a trailer with a character ordering a long list of unhealthy junk food, ending the request with "... and a Diet Coke."

[Ferris]

I would be useless, like Chief Wiggum: "Suspect is driving a...car"

"Suspect is driving a maroon 1936 Stutz Bearcat..."

*zooom*

"...hmm, that was really more of a burgundy"

[mothman]

For that description, I'd guess a 1960s era car. Could be loads of them, from all over the world, but for a UK market model I'll guess a Ford Zephyr Mk. IV:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Zephyr#Mark_IV

But a US market car would be just as likely, see a few of them about.

Nope, that's not it. Trying to remember where I've seen one before. Only thing that occurs to me - you know the flying police cars in The Fifth Element? A bit like that.

[Dex Sawash]

Citroen DS going backwards

[St_Eddie]

Citroen DS going backwards

SD neortiC?

[Red Lantern]

Literal cliffhangers. Supporting your entire body weight like this is practically impossible*



* unless you're a replicant.

The Doctor did this as well in The Woman Who Fell To Earth, so maybe it's OK if you're not human.

[St_Eddie]

The Doctor did this as well in The Woman Who Fell To Earth, so maybe it's OK if you're not human.

*wipes synthetic sweat from brow*

Phew.

[mothman]

Because gravity is famously speciesist. Birds, insects, Gallifreyans? No problems with them flying. But gravity hates elephants, so...

[St_Eddie]

But gravity hates elephants, so...

Everyone hates elephants.  Bloody elephants, giving it all that.

[greenman]

Literal cliffhangers. Supporting your entire body weight like this is practically impossible*



* unless you're a replicant.

The Doctor did this as well in The Woman Who Fell To Earth, so maybe it's OK if you're not human.

Although Blade Runner is actually a good example of this being shown a bit more realistically, when Deckard is hanging ontop the edge he's not able to pull himself up.

[kalowski]

Literal cliffhangers. Supporting your entire body weight like this is practically impossible*



* unless you're a replicant.

The Doctor did this as well in The Woman Who Fell To Earth, so maybe it's OK if you're not human.

God, yes. Fall off a cliff, grab onto an overhang. Probably the top 1% of free climbers can do that. No one else.

[thecuriousorange]

.     

[paruses]

Saw Greta on a whim yesterday and it's chock full of cliches. I don't want to spoiler anything so will be vague but there's seasoned professionals who should know better, people outside windows then not outside windows, tracking shots and over the shoulder shots with reveals that are really fucking obvious, and super-resilient antagonists. I could go on but feel I've said too much already.

In fact, I'm going to white out most of the above just to be considerate.

[Attila]

Please do - I've never questioned the frankly communist setup of free school bus rides nor the endless routes they must take to travel very short distances.

.

Veteran, too, of insanely long busrides to travel 7 or 8 miles if you went directly (caught the schoolbus around 630 in the morning, arrived at school just before 9am). However, in Catholic or private school, where I was incarcerated, the bus service is not free -- I think when I was stuck doing it (1979-1982), my mom was paying about $200 a year for a bus service that hit up four or five of the Catholic schools in the diocese.

Mine wasn't the longest -- when I got on at the designated stop, there were already a half dozen kids from lower downstate who'd been collected around 6am.

Riding that bus was such a faff (between the long ride and the shithead bullies that all got on at one of the schools in the afternoons), that I used to envy the kids in that sequence from Dirt Harry when Andrew Robinson's character hijacks the bus and kidnaps the kids.

[Attila]

Checks are only useful now for sending money to school to pay for stuff there like paper as they constantly hit you up for a few dollars for something, presumably a shell game to pay for the busses. If you give cash to the children to take to school they would just buy drugs off the bus drivers.

I took a check to the banque just yesterday.

Fun bus fact, when I was in HS the bus drivers were other HS students. That practice ended in late 80s I think.

Can confirm about high school kid drivers: my ex drove a schoolbus for high school kids when he was a high school kid (mid-1970s Mississippi). I've not been in the US for about 7 or 8 years now, but it was a thing to have retirees driving busses -- you'd read about traffic accidents featuring busses and they'd give the drivers ages in the 70-80 range! Yikes.

Checkbooks -- it still bugs me when I have to deal with a business in the US and they want me to send them a check, and they are baffled when I explain that 1. I don't have a checking account here in the UK and 2. getting a check from them in US dollars is a colossal pain in the ass; just direct deposit it in my bank account (an issue that's come up with several book publishers based out in the US).

ETA car talk & identification: my dad and both brothers had/have a Rainman-esque ability to identify make and models of US-made cars as well up to a certain year. My dad couldn't remember when my birthday was, but he could sit there watching an episode of Starsky and Hutch and identify every car in every shot. Probably helped that all three were mechanics (my non tosser brother still is) and religiously read every car magazine on the market. When my dad died in 2010, my mother discovered that his subscriptions to stuff like Car and Driver and Popular Mechanics and about 15 other like magazines were still good clear into the 2030s. (Yes, they were all cancelled and money returned).

Apologies for all of the interjections -- this is a fun thread to read while putting off exam marking.

[lipsink]

In high school movies when someone closes their locker door and another person's face appears behind it.

[Icehaven]

Veteran, too, of insanely long busrides to travel 7 or 8 miles if you went directly (caught the schoolbus around 630 in the morning, arrived at school just before 9am)...
Mine wasn't the longest -- when I got on at the designated stop, there were already a half dozen kids from lower downstate who'd been collected around 6am.

Blimey. That was why I thought in my original post that it couldn't possibly be the case that every kid was picked up directly from their house as always happens in films, but turns out (in some places anyway) that it is. And presumably it's the same going home too, so that's 5-6 hours a day on a bus. That's as long as the school day.

[thecuriousorange]

In high school movies when someone closes their locker and another person's face appears behind the locker door.

The mirror on the door above the bathroom sink reveals nothing behind the character. They open the little cabinet door its on, close it and.... there's nothing behind them. You think "Phew, for a second i thought"A DIFFERENT BIG JUMP SCARE THEN HAPPENS.

Doing it that way is no less hacky.

[Attila]

Blimey. That was why I thought in my original post that it couldn't possibly be the case that every kid was picked up directly from their house as always happens in films, but turns out (in some places anyway) that it is. And presumably it's the same going home too, so that's 5-6 hours a day on a bus. That's as long as the school day.

The joy of living at the arse-end of a rural route. :(  One reason I was finally allowed to carpool in the 12th grade was that our first period class that year started at 830 rather than 9, and I would have missed half the class every morning if I'd been on that bus. Car-pooling had its own issues, but at least I didn't have to worry about food fights or some dickwit trying to cut off my arse-length hair every afternoon >:(

There was one fun day, though, when the driver decided to go to the farthest-out kids' stop first one afternoon -- zooming down the interstate and then the route to their drop-off point took about 20  minutes! The driver did it mainly because of a group of loud mouths who were the last on and first off (so for them, it was never more than a 15-20 minute ride); the farm kids down at the bottom were pretty quiet and sucked it up. We'd all just do homework and stuff.

But yeah...got out of school at 1430 or so, and walked in the house around 1630 or 1700, depending on traffic.

When I was in public school, like Dex, the bus was free (for me this was between 1971 and 1975). When we went into housing developments, kids met the bus at designated stops. I was still part of the rural route along this one, long stretch of road, so we got picked up individually. The principal at that school guaranteed that no busroute took the longest kid more than half an hour-45 minutes. I think I was one of the first ones picked up, so got to enjoy the long loop in the morning, and the reverse in the afternoon -- the school was, at most, a five minute drive from the house (in winter, you could just about see the building through the winter trees). We didn't walk because it was a situation with no proper pavements and a horrendously dangerous intersection that the principal did not want 5 to 10 year olds walking on their own (exception: some hoots'n' holler kids who came down the lane that connected the back end of the school to their homes up behind the school property.)

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

On the subject of American school buses in films, there's often the awkward meff who continues to catch the bus despite being above the legal driving age of 13 or whatever it is over there, to the bemusement and sometimes ridicule of the younger kids on the bus. Think Napoleon Dynamite or Forrest Gump.

American school car parks must be massive btw. Like Tesco big.

Actually, come to think of it, ANYONE who catches the bus in American films is usually portrayed as a bit weird, or a bit poor, aren't they? Unless it's a Greyhound, which seems to be socially acceptable. Why don't they get the train instead? I wouldn't fancy sitting on a bus for a few days.

[Dex Sawash]

My lower grade school was Kindergarten through 8th grade. An 8th grader got his license and he drove a Corvette to school (16th birthday  present). He had failed a few grades.

[Bazooka]

On the subject of American school buses in films, there's often the awkward meff who continues to catch the bus despite being above the legal driving age of 13 or whatever it is over there, to the bemusement and sometimes ridicule of the younger kids on the bus. Think Napoleon Dynamite or Forrest Gump.

American school car parks must be massive btw. Like Tesco big.

Actually, come to think of it, ANYONE who catches the bus in American films is usually portrayed as a bit weird, or a bit poor, aren't they? Unless it's a Greyhound, which seems to be socially acceptable. Why don't they get the train instead? I wouldn't fancy sitting on a bus for a few days.

Doesn't the US have the largest rail network in the world, buts its pretty much freight containers than travel across it, commuting isn't as big outside cities like New York.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Since around the 40's/50's America has been tactically engineered so that cars and roads are the only way to get about, good for American manufacturers and lenders, you see.

[Tapiocahead]

Traffic jams where every single fucker is peeping their horn.