Irksome Predictabilities in Hollywood Films

                ( or what assault the senses & insult the intelligence )

                         

                                       Love affair with the john

Scenes in Hollywood movies that has someone pressing their face down ( hugging or embracing ) the toilet bowl/seat in a melodramatic act of puking ( from despair, shock, alcohol intoxication, or plain hangover, whatever! ) irritate me. Do people actually do that in real life - hang their faces over the defecating bowl or lay their heads on the toilet seat inhaling the molecules from the john,for hours?  I could at least commiserate if they're the hopeless, woebegone losers and slops who get to do these yucky scenes, but these are characterizations of normal, sensible people who are just dealing with some ordinary problems. And they make love to their toilet bowls?! 

                             Serendipity

Equally sickening are the 'in-the-nick-of-time" scenarios.  Something comes up just as the gun is about to be fired at Mr. Leading Man. Or Mr. Leading Man appears from nowhere just as Leading-Lady-in-Distress ( or their little girl ) is about to be thrown to the crocodiles. Even bombs never get detonated 2 or 3 minutes before they go off; it's always a split second phenomenon credited to the acuity of Mr. Leading Man or Ms. Leading Lady, no less.  

                   Facing one's demons in the cellar

Just as inane are those scenes of some scared character who's shaking with fear because she senses there's a madkiller stalking her and it's probably inhabiting her basement right now; but she goes to the basement anyway, alone and weaponless in the dead of night, and more often than not, amid sudden ( weather being predictably unpredictable! ) punctuations of thunder and lightning. Can't she just lock herself in her bedroom and stay put, or maybe hide under her bed, or better yet dart catlike to the back door and run?! Run! Run!

                  One more chance

And why does the villain or the goon - who has finally cornered Mr. Leading Man after countless attempts to annihilate him - always have to deliver a discourse ( such as explain why Mr. Leading Man's extermination is necessary ) before he kills, or orders his hatchet man to finish him off? We know, we know that this is to just give Mr. Leading Man a chance to wrestle the gun away from the goon, but how tediously idiotic! True, we don't want to see a dead leading man, but since these movies are not supposed to be from Junior Classics or The Grimm Brothers' comic books, we don't expect fairy tales either.

                                       No way, Jose !

Nauseous, too, is the perpetually played out scene where the leading man slips or falls down a ledge - or an overhang or something - in a fight scene with the villain(s).  You see, the chase to the rooftop for this final encounter is mandatory.  If it's not the rooftop, it is some other precarious spot : a mountaintop, a tower, a chopper or a plane in flight. Anyway, lucky for the leading men, they always manage to get a safe grasp of the ledge's edge, despite the fall's impact. So the bad guy does everything to unhitch the good guy's weakening hold : kicks his face, tramps on his hands and toes, pokes him with a pole ( the guns at this point, had already been kicked out of their way in the preceding scuffle), but no way, Jose.  The good guy holds on, and by a stroke of the director's genius, which we already are familiar with, we are once again treated to a standardized milk-and-water fare : the bad guy plunges to his death. Advancing sound of siren. Police arrives. The end. Doubtless.

         Hey, why don't I sit on the director's chair and get the flak too?   

                                                                       Kaput!