Hollywood Trends: Which Ones Annoy You The Most?

[Mitch Henessey]

Hollywood is filled with a good amount of noticeable trends. Sometimes, these trends can please moviegoers and fans, but most of the time, these certain trends just develop into huge money making strategies. As long as moviegoers are willing to spend their money, Hollywood will keep rehashing the same ideas over and over again. Luring as many people as possible into movie theaters is always the #1 goal for any Hollywood production, because achieving successful box office numbers is crucial for big time Hollywood studios (Paramount, Warner Bros., DreamWorks, Universal, etc.).

Most people ignore Hollywood trends, and moviegoers will spend their money regardless, but out of all the Hollywood trends, which ones annoy you the most? I'll make a short list of the most common ones:

Theatrical Re-Releases (The Lion King, Beauty & The Beast, Star Wars, Titanic, etc.)

Remakes

Reboots

3D

The constant barrage of flashy, senseless, and predictable blockbusters

I'm sure I left out some stuff on this list, but feel free to add your own suggestions.

I'll start with two trends that annoy me the most:

The Copycat Syndrome

Hollywood loves to copycat certain filmmaking styles and stories, and the "let's just copy them!" mentality always drives me nuts. Hollywood will go overboard with the copycat syndrome most of the time, because the particular style other studios choose to copy are usually popular with a good amount of moviegoers, and of course, popularity equals more money. Two major mainstream Snow White films will be released this year (Mirror, Mirror and Snow White & The Huntsman), and a successful run at the box office for both of these films is almost guaranteed, because Snow White is one of the more recognizable and popular fairy tales.

Copycatting in Hollywood isn't anything new, but when it comes to found-footage films, everything can get way out of hand. In 1999, The Blair Witch Project became an unexpected smash hit at theaters. The Blair Witch Project was made for a mere $60,000, but this film was able to pull in a whopping $248,639,099 with its worldwide gross. Fast forward eight years later, and Paranormal Activity explodes on to the scene. It only cost $15,000 to make this film, but Paranormal Activity pulled in an amazing $193,355,800 at the box office. Since then, Paranormal Activity has become the most popular horror franchise today, and this film series has developed a nice sized fanbase.

The horror genre has been flooded with found-footage style films over the years, and Hollywood has become obsessed with the "realistic" craze. Cloverfield and Apollo 18 managed to rake in a good amount of money (especially Cloverfield), and the mainstream found-footage trend will continue this year, when Project X and Chronicle hit theaters.

Copycatting in the found-footage genre annoys me, because most of these films are low budget pieces of shit, with shitty production values, and the realism factor never does anything for me.

Lazy, Predictable, and Formulaic Films

For me, this type of criticism usually applies to romantic comedies in Hollywood. In 2011, Midnight In Paris was the ONLY true unique romantic comedy I saw. This was a great film, but as far as romantic comedies in Hollywood go, everything always has that "Yeah, I've seen that before" feeling. I'll use What's Your Number? (2011) as a recent example. The trailer for this film really didn't give away anything, but I could already predict the ending and the motions the film would go through, after I watched the trailer. This entire film just went through the motions the entire time, and I could see everything coming from a mile away:

The beginning:

Ally (Anna Faris) wants to find the perfect man. But she runs into a carefree playboy (Chris Evans). They eventually become close friends. Hmmm, I wonder where this relationship could go?

The Middle:

Ally's quests to find the perfect man don't go so smoothly. She gets too close to Chris Evans' character, but she pushes him away, because he doesn't fit the profile of the "perfect man."

The End:

Ally realizes what she really wants out of life (true happiness), and she kicks Mr. Right to the curb. She chases after Evans, she gives a big speech, and they go with the happily ever after stuff at the very end.

This wasn't a horrible film, and I do have a soft spot for Anna Faris, so I didn't trash this one. Still, What's Your Number? is as predictable as predictable can be. This film is average at best, and soooo many other Hollywood romantic comedies fit this same profile. It's annoying, because most of these films just go through the motions. Someone always gives a big speech at the end (usually one of the main characters), the writing always feels so lazy, because you can see everything coming, and the lame swerves never fool me.

Originality isn't something you see a lot of in Hollywood, and if they find a formula that continues to make a lot of money, and draw moviegoers into theaters on a consistent basis, they will stick to it. Predictable and formulaic films usually don't reach the level of high quality, and most of the time, big name actors and actresses, or good casts save these films from becoming big pieces of shit. Sandra Bullock saved The Proposal, John Travolta made From Paris With Love watchable, and I'm sure Mark Wahlberg will be the main attraction in Contraband. Also, Kate Beckinsale should be able to pull her weight as usual, and Giovanni Ribisi does look great in the trailer. Still, Contraband will probably wind up on the long list of predictable and formulaic action/thrillers, and the "I need to do one last job" storyline has been done to death.

Well, those are my top choices.

What are your picks for most annoying Hollywood trends?

 

[Mustang Sally]

I've got two that have dramatically decreased the amount of enjoyment I get from watching movies. Both involving filming techniques that have evolved in the past 15 years or so.

--Filming action scenes in almost total darkness. Why in bloody hell so many modern filmmakers are using this technique baffles me. While you're watching the plot develop, they usually have the damn lights on, but as soon as the action scene begins, whether a fight, car chase, attack from zombies....or whatever, the lights go out and you have to freakin' guess what's happening on the screen. To these moron directors, apparently the greatest thing the viewer can be watching is a totally black screen for seconds at a time. After that, you see flashes of light that appear in the darkness which apparently represent the characters moving around. There are times, after an action scene has ended, that I honestly have no idea what just happened and I have to watch the subsequent scenes to try and discern it. This is art?

--The next point is connected to the first one: the act of filming an action scene by pulling the cameras so close to the actors that you can only make out the body parts they'll allow you to see.....a shoulder, then a foot, then a knee, then the wall...... and film the frames in such rapid succession that you can't get your mind around any one thing; instead, you're trying to figure out what the hell you just watched. In the past, I remember Bruce Lee fight scenes in which you could see full body shots of both fighters; you could track their moves and gauge the ebb and flow of the action. Now, you see blurs moving around the screen and don't know who won until the fight ends and one of them is left lying....... but you're not sure exactly how he got there.

Am I the only one bothered by this stuff? I understand that producers and directors want to keep us guessing but I always presumed that had to do with plotlines........ not with making sure the viewer has to be visually deprived of knowing how matters got from Point A to Point B.

 

[Dowdsy McDowds]

I've got two that have dramatically decreased the amount of enjoyment I get from watching movies. Both involving filming techniques that have evolved in the past 15 years or so.

--Filming action scenes in almost total darkness. Why in bloody hell so many modern filmmakers are using this technique baffles me. While you're watching the plot develop, they usually have the damn lights on, but as soon as the action scene begins, whether a fight, car chase, attack from zombies....or whatever, the lights go out and you have to freakin' guess what's happening on the screen. To these moron directors, apparently the greatest thing the viewer can be watching is a totally black screen for seconds at a time. After that, you see flashes of light that appear in the darkness which apparently represent the characters moving around. There are times, after an action scene has ended, that I honestly have no idea what just happened and I have to watch the subsequent scenes to try and discern it. This is art?

--The next point is connected to the first one: the act of filming an action scene by pulling the cameras so close to the actors that you can only make out the body parts they'll allow you to see.....a shoulder, then a foot, then a knee, then the wall...... and film the frames in such rapid succession that you can't get your mind around any one thing; instead, you're trying to figure out what the hell you just watched. In the past, I remember Bruce Lee fight scenes in which you could see full body shots of both fighters; you could track their moves and gauge the ebb and flow of the action. Now, you see blurs moving around the screen and don't know who won until the fight ends and one of them is left lying....... but you're not sure exactly how he got there.

Am I the only one bothered by this stuff? I understand that producers and directors want to keep us guessing but I always presumed that had to do with plotlines........ not with making sure the viewer has to be visually deprived of knowing how matters got from Point A to Point B.

This is one of my more recent annoyances and I think it is in part due to the "realistic" trend of film-making that is going around at the moment, with a heavy emphasis on hand-held "gritty" (a phrase I FUCKING loathe by the way) action. I haven't seen it, but apparently Green Zone was pretty shocking for it.
I'm not completely against hand-held films, far from it. I just wish there were action scenes with better direction and staging, so they don't need to just make it seem like Steven Seagal is pummeling Russian Goon X and a camera operator is trapped in the middle. (Can you imagine being that camera operator? Gads)

Remakes/Reboots are by far my biggest annoyance at the moment. There have been some threads that have discussed the merits as well as the downsides of them so I wont launch into a big tirade or anything, but on a personal level, my reaction to hearing a film is being remade or rebooted is usually along the lines of "Oh for fu..." rather than "Oh good!"
This Spiderman reboot for instance. What the hell? What was so bad with the Tobey Maguire effort? I'm not a massive fan of the series but the first one was a good franchise starter. As I think about this more, is it maybe more of a case of the 3rd one being so poor that they had to start again?
"Had to."

 

[Mitch Henessey]

I've got two that have dramatically decreased the amount of enjoyment I get from watching movies. Both involving filming techniques that have evolved in the past 15 years or so.

--Filming action scenes in almost total darkness. Why in bloody hell so many modern filmmakers are using this technique baffles me. While you're watching the plot develop, they usually have the damn lights on, but as soon as the action scene begins, whether a fight, car chase, attack from zombies....or whatever, the lights go out and you have to freakin' guess what's happening on the screen. To these moron directors, apparently the greatest thing the viewer can be watching is a totally black screen for seconds at a time. After that, you see flashes of light that appear in the darkness which apparently represent the characters moving around. There are times, after an action scene has ended, that I honestly have no idea what just happened and I have to watch the subsequent scenes to try and discern it. This is art?

--The next point is connected to the first one: the act of filming an action scene by pulling the cameras so close to the actors that you can only make out the body parts they'll allow you to see.....a shoulder, then a foot, then a knee, then the wall...... and film the frames in such rapid succession that you can't get your mind around any one thing; instead, you're trying to figure out what the hell you just watched. In the past, I remember Bruce Lee fight scenes in which you could see full body shots of both fighters; you could track their moves and gauge the ebb and flow of the action. Now, you see blurs moving around the screen and don't know who won until the fight ends and one of them is left lying....... but you're not sure exactly how he got there.

Am I the only one bothered by this stuff? I understand that producers and directors want to keep us guessing but I always presumed that had to do with plotlines........ not with making sure the viewer has to be visually deprived of knowing how matters got from Point A to Point B.

Shooting action scenes in the dark can be an annoying filming technique, because as you said, it's easy to get lost during the aftermath of one of these scenes. You'll have no clue what happened in the previous scene, this technique can confuse the audience sometimes, and the audience shouldn't have to imagine the motions and actions for characters in a fight scene. Recently I watched I Am Number Four. This film features a good amount of fight scenes, but one particular scene really annoyed me a lot. Number Four (the main hero) was trying to fight off the Mogadorians (the evil aliens) in a basement, and the entire scene was SO dark. Flashes of bright colored lights. This is all I could see. I couldn't see any sort of movements from the characters, and this scene wasn't unique at all. I won't think about creativity, when I remember this scene. I'll just think about some poor lighting issues.

This is one of my more recent annoyances and I think it is in part due to the "realistic" trend of film-making that is going around at the moment, with a heavy emphasis on hand-held "gritty" (a phrase I FUCKING loathe by the way) action. I haven't seen it, but apparently Green Zone was pretty shocking for it.
I'm not completely against hand-held films, far from it. I just wish there were action scenes with better direction and staging, so they don't need to just make it seem like Steven Seagal is pummeling Russian Goon X and a camera operator is trapped in the middle. (Can you imagine being that camera operator? Gads)

Remakes/Reboots are by far my biggest annoyance at the moment. There have been some threads that have discussed the merits as well as the downsides of them so I wont launch into a big tirade or anything, but on a personal level, my reaction to hearing a film is being remade or rebooted is usually along the lines of "Oh for fu..." rather than "Oh good!"
This Spiderman reboot for instance. What the hell? What was so bad with the Tobey Maguire effort? I'm not a massive fan of the series but the first one was a good franchise starter. As I think about this more, is it maybe more of a case of the 3rd one being so poor that they had to start again?
"Had to."

They kept rewriting the script over and over again for Spider-man 4, and Sam Raimi wasn't happy with the final product. Eventually, Raimi pulled out to focus on other projects, and Sony pulled the trigger on a reboot. This article gives a more detailed explanation of the whole situation:

http://filmonic.com/more-on-that-spider-man-reboot-2012

So Spider-Man 4 was supposed to happen, but they ran into a bunch of problems, and Sony finally went ahead with the plans to reboot. Personally, I hated Spider-Man 3, and I thought that film was one gigantic piece of shit. But the third installment of this series did rake in $890,871,626 at the box office, and the support of the fanbase for Spidey 4 would've been there, so they could've made another film. Things just didn't work out.

As far as the reboot goes, I'm not looking forward to it at all. I'll try to give Andrew Garfield a chance, and I do like Emma Stone, but like so many other reboots, this one feels unnecessary. But it's Spider-Man, people will flock to see this film, and the reboot will make a ton of money at the box office. A huge box office profit for this film is a surefire guarantee, so in the end, Sony will be happy.

 

[The 1-2-3 Killam]

The other day I watched Mr. Popper's Penguins, immediately followed by Bruce Almighty. The former was "meh" but the later is seen as a "classic" by many. It hit me that the outline for both movies is EXACTLY the same. Jim Carey's life is going great, some big promotion goes wrong, his character spirals down but some absurd thing happens to bring him back up. In the end he chooses selfishness and said promotion over the absurd thing and loses his family because of it. Morality wins in the end though, and he trades away riches for his family, and ends up getting both. Seriously...exact same plot, different details. One movie just got way more popular than the other because it was geared towards a slightly older demographic.

It got me thinking: how many movies have exactly the same plot, repackaged with different actors and story details? How many times have we paid for the same movie, just because they continue to pool the wool over our eyes?

Turns out I didn't even have to find another actor to figure out that it happens more than I'd like. Yes Man? Same movie. Fun With Dick and Jane? Same movie. Liar Liar? Same movie...done better. Most Adam Sandler movies are "booked" the same way. In fact, when you break them down to their simplest elements, it's hard to find a movie that's NOT following this completely over-done outline.

This all comes down to the same thing plaguing every major entertainment industry: laziness. People are writing books, recording albums, producing movies, and yes...booking professional wrestling using the same old tired stories. I understand that it's all a money-making venture, and there would be no wrestling, film, music, or literary industry without a huge market and the desire to make large amounts of money...but I'm sick of seeing 50 movies in a year and having 43 of them be crap. It makes me question why people do their jobs? Who wakes up and says "I want to be a film writer so I can make lots of money!" There has got to be an easier way to make money than bastardizing art...

 

[Dowdsy McDowds]

They kept rewriting the script over and over again for Spider-man 4, and Sam Raimi wasn't happy with the final product. Eventually, Raimi pulled out to focus on other projects, and Sony pulled the trigger on a reboot. This article gives a more detailed explanation of the whole situation:

http://filmonic.com/more-on-that-spider-man-reboot-2012

So Spider-Man 4 was supposed to happen, but they ran into a bunch of problems, and Sony finally went ahead with the plans to reboot. Personally, I hated Spider-Man 3, and I thought that film was one gigantic piece of shit. But the third installment of this series did rake in $890,871,626 at the box office, and the support of the fanbase for Spidey 4 would've been there, so they could've made another film. Things just didn't work out.

As far as the reboot goes, I'm not looking forward to it at all. I'll try to give Andrew Garfield a chance, and I do like Emma Stone, but like so many other reboots, this one feels unnecessary. But it's Spider-Man, people will flock to see this film, and the reboot will make a ton of money at the box office. A huge box office profit for this film is a surefire guarantee, so in the end, Sony will be happy.

You're right Mitch. Essentially, even critically panned films can be juggernauts at the box-office, and that is arguably the key thing the studios will look at when it comes to following up a film or extending its franchise.
Amazing Spiderman will make money for sure, my beef with the reboot is that Spiderman came out in 2002 and had sequels in 04 and 07 yet a decade after the first and only 5 years after the last, Sony have decided to go back to the start again. Any number of years that would be deemed "acceptable" for a reboot to be green-lit would no doubt still be debated, but 10 years does not seem enough to me.

This all comes down to the same thing plaguing every major entertainment industry: laziness. People are writing books, recording albums, producing movies, and yes...booking professional wrestling using the same old tired stories. I understand that it's all a money-making venture, and there would be no wrestling, film, music, or literary industry without a huge market and the desire to make large amounts of money...but I'm sick of seeing 50 movies in a year and having 43 of them be crap. It makes me question why people do their jobs? Who wakes up and says "I want to be a film writer so I can make lots of money!" There has got to be an easier way to make money than bastardizing art...

I agree in part to your sentiments here. While I wish at times there was more diversity in any number of scenes, be they film, music, fashion or literature, as we are in the midst of a terrible financial climate, companies are going to go with what sells now more than ever.

Free-running/parkour was, and to a degree still is, an underground type of activity. When it burst onto the scene, it was fresh, breath-taking and totally different from what had come before. The French film District 13 was essentially a feature-length lesson on how to bring out the best of it on the big screen. Then it popped up in Casino Royale. Then the Bourne films. Then generic action-adventure A, B, C etc until it was just another part of the formula.

A few days ago here in the UK, our Prime Minister David Cameron visited the historic Pinewood Studios around the time he released a statement saying that UK films that were awarded fund from the Lottery fund were going to be the more "commercial" variety than arthouse/independent.
It fucking sucks that up and coming film-makers are going to be restricted with what kind of film they are going to make along with the pressure on them to deliver a film that will make a good return at the domestic and international box-offices. Yes it's a pressure industry, but there are some directors out there that have gone their own way and been huge influences on younger generations; see, Terence Malick.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jan/11/cameron-speech-funding-box-office
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jan/12/uk-film-makers-david-cameron?newsfeed=true

 

[perfectbluefan]

Right now it's the habit of remaking everything, even films that just got made a few years ago.