Don't go in there 5: Bland land

All main characters in the vast variety of movies are incredibly bland 18-40 year old white Americans, none of whom come close to being as old or young as they're supposed to be. All of them seem to have jobs they dislike, but care about in some vague way. They never really grow, they just pile up a few lessons. If they're men, they care about sports, if they're women they care about their horrible love lives, bu they tend to have no interests or personalities beyond the most average the writers could think of. There's a good reason for this. The audience is supposed to identify with them. But none of these people even resemble an actual human being anymore. Sometimes it feels like their whole lives revolve around learning how to be a real person from the collection of more realistic oddballs who surround them.

Don't go in there 4: Ghost in the Machine

You wouldn't think that a place like Hollywood, considering how much technology they need to make a blockbuster, would have such a luddite perspective on these things. But apparently, every type of new technology is going to kill, maim or embarrass you. You can't even make a phone call without them tracking you, except when you're the killer, then you can't be tracked, because of string of nonsense that doesn't even resemble real life problem. Technology can do whatever you want it to do in the movies, and apparently the public want it to make their lives incredibly dangerous and absurd. Or embarrassing. The number of films where a relationship blossoms online belies real world figures, but it does indicate that writers know how to recycle the plot from Cyrano de Bergerac. Here's a great NPR story about the guy who makes the flash graphics for fake hollywood computers.

Don't go in there 3: Magical Ethnicities

As a stereotype, it's not as bad as it could be. It's still horribly annoying, that most one-dimensional ethnic characters end up teaching trite life lessons to white two-dimensional protagonists. The reasoning is as follows: White people aren't spiritual enough, all their logic and common sense gets in the way, why can't they just have faith in the plot, like more primitive people, who believe the writer will fix everything for the happy end, even if it doesn't make sense. This is supposed to be a progressive message. Blind faith is the proper response to a crisis of conscience and any kind of ethnicity lives and breathes this idea because of years of white oppression. Though slavery is hardly dignified for the oppressors, it doesn't automatically turn the slaves and their descendants into morally pure people.

Don't go in there 2: Amor vincit omnia

This clip, from the only feature length romantic comedy parody I know of, illustrates the problem with most of these movies. Most of the behaviour associated with love in the movies are the kind of things that should get you arrested. All kinds of crazy stalker behaviour is fine, people spontaneous and quirky to the point of madness, unbelievably precious and cute and totally unrealistic relationships where no one has any flaws and there's nothing keeping two people apart except some convoluted misunderstanding. Even more horrible, because I'm the target market, are the films where some nebbishy, straight-laced loser learns to love life because he falls in love with a crazy girl. You never seem to call those back in real life, usually because you want to see other, less crazy people. It's a testament to the skill and charisma of most of these actors that you generally feel sympathetic to their plans to ruin a perfectly good existing relationship so they can have a perfectly twee happy ending with the object of their affection.

Don't go in there!

For my second theme week: Most annoying movie character behaviors. Everyone hates the idiots in horror movies that randomly end up killed or raped after ignoring a barrage of obvious signs that they probably shouldn't. It's the worst kind of cliché, but the plot demands everyone behave like a complete idiot. This also extends to nobody believing in the killer except for one person, the incompetent police force and the almost archetypical way everyone that has sex is instantly murdered. Of course it's been spoofed extensively, but that doesn't seem to stop anyone from clinging to it, as the standard horror format. Even the classier version, driven insane by knowledge of a conspiracy/underlying secret of the universe/family drama is becoming kind of grating. The last horror movie I saw, Drag me to Hell, was a great return to the kind of plot we deserve, horror morality tales. It still has random disbelief and naivité, but at least there's a great, realistic motivation.