Cliches

Movies have their own notorious set of cliches, especially genres like the western ("Head 'em off at the pass!") and the horror movie (the sluttiest girl dying first, the virgin surviving). But what really bugs me is movies that use TV cliches!

One example is PRETTY WOMAN.  In the first scenes, when we see Julia Roberts working the streets in miniskirt and thigh boots, she's wearing a blond wig.  Later on, in the scene where we learn that she's really a "nice girl" underneath, the wig comes off and we see that her true hair is different.  TV shows will often use a change in appearance to mark a parallel change in character, or in this case mark a change in how we're expected to view the character. (That sort of thing makes it easier for inattentive people to follow what's happening.)

It shall come as no surprise that PRETTY WOMAN was directed by Garry Marshall, who started out making sitcoms like HAPPY DAYS and never really stopped.  Now there's a director who knows his cliches!  I'll bet that when he was starting out some old-timer sat him down and explained all the cliches to him. (Sort of like in the baseball movie BULL DURHAM, where Tim Robbins couldn't think of anything to tell an interviewer beyond "It was really OUT THERE!" so Kevin Costner taught him to say things like "I just want to be good for my team," and "I'm taking things one day at a time.")

Another example is in Spike Lee's THE MO' BETTER BLUES, which starts with Denzel Washington and his jazz band being unhappy because their manager (Lee) made a bad deal for them.  But we don't see Lee making the deal; he made it before the start of the movie and we only hear of the deal and see its consequences.  They sometimes do that on sitcoms because dramatizing someone making a bad deal is too complicated and it's easier to just have people say what happened. (This happened more than once with JJ on GOOD TIMES.)

While I'm at it, another TV cliche may happen when an episode ends with a breakup, a dramatically convenient way to end an episode.  The show's structure, however, may require the relationship to continue, but reconciliations are a lot harder to write than breakups.  So one solution is to wait an episode or two and simply show the two of them back together with no explanation.  In other words, they simply FORGET about the breakup.  I've seen this happen on shows as good as UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS and THE SOPRANOS!