I'm a movie lover, but I'm not indiscriminate. Here follows a list of common movie occurrences that compel me to return to nineteenth-century novels or force me to bury my head under the blankets.
1. Cute puppies, especially when the boy and the girl kiss for the first time, and the director, unfazed by cliche or rank sentimentality, cuts to the pooch's just darling head-tilt. Even worse when the doggie covers his cute eyes with his cute paw. Aaargh.
2. Child actors, with rare exceptions. Some few gifted children know how to be natural, but most just make me cringe.
3. Gratuitous killing of "redskins," especially when aestheticized. How gracefully, when shot by the cavalry marksmen, do the Comanches plummet from the face of the cliff or tumble down the scree. In Western after Western, they take huge losses — presenting themselves as targets while they ride crazily around the circled wagons — a strategy that is cinematic but nonsensical. And also: all the retrogressive, antediluvian blackface and yellowface stereotypes that make us gasp with horror at our racist forebears.
4. Those far too frequent scenes, where the guy, pursued either by the police or the husband, goes out the 16th story window of his hotel and works his way across a narrow ledge to another window (always unlocked). Such scenes give me the willies.
5. Car chases. Boring, boring, boring. I've discussed this in the past.
6. Montage dating scenes: boy and girl meet cute. After the mandatory misunderstanding, they reconcile, and then we see five seconds of them sitting in a restaurant, smiling; next they're rowing in a boat in the park; then they're on a ferry, or at a picnic etc. etc. From this we are supposed to deduce that they're in love. Predictable cut to the predictable soft-focus bedroom. Romance, which ought to be thrilling, becomes, through repetition and want of originality, almost as boring as a car chase.
7. Funny drunks. They're not funny. Alcoholism is a destructive disease.
8. The scene in which the stoic hero has taken a bullet in the shoulder and it's going to be extracted by an amateur. No anesthetics. "Here, bite on this." Even worse, if possible, when it's not a bullet but an arrow.
9. Background music that dictates the emotions we are supposed to feel. Worse still, the background noise that is currently so fashionable. Not music, just a loud drone, which sometimes drowns out the dialogue.
10. Zachary Scott
Also, movies adapted from cartoons: Batman, Superman, etc. Horror films, designed to scare the pants off you. I can't bear to watch them (I've never recovered from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein [1948]). Action films, especially ones in which a retired CIA agent or detective or whatever is called back to duty for one last assignment. And finally, anything with zombies, cyborgs, extraterrestrials, robots, demonic children who vomit blood, or tentacles.
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