Okay, clarity, yes I mean the Nicolas Cage version. I wasn't aware that it was a remake.

And, I could forgive a character deep in thought being startled by a sudden noise, it's the 5-10 seconds that they stare at the phone like it's some mysterious alien object that annoys me. It's like their thought process goes something like "Weird! This phone is making noise, as if to tell me someone is trying to talk to me! Spooky!"

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

"A long time ago, yet somehow in the future"

The original has Edward Woodward, christopher lee and Britt Ekland

it is, like the remake deeply rubbish but for some reason has reached a cult status \nd you have to pretend it's a classic or people get upset. It's the same with 'Get carter'

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

I ask because I can't remember ever seeing it. Moons only ever seem to appear at night in films, in contrast to real life. I don't think this has to do with difficulty of filming it (it shouldn't be difficult to fake, the same way they probably fake the moon at night). But they don't seem to know that the Moon is visible during the day.

Oh good Lord! The original Wickerman, to steal someone elses discription, "Sucks so much, light bends around it." It was a sixties British Hammer-films style drivel. One of the big "thrills" was suppose to be Britt Ekland's B-cup boobies being exposed. Sorry I was alive when it was new and remember the TV commercials and the "controversy" (!) The sixties, you had to have been there to really understand it.

Flamethrowers that are really blowtorchs

The non-existance of radiant heat. That one is in every volcano movie ever made. Ever count how many times Pierce Brosnan should have been flashed into live steam in that movie of his?

That ridiculus exhaust plume in the movie Firefox when the bird was taxi-ing. (Help Gillian!) The Batmobile had a more convincing plume! It was like, "Let's spend millions on effects! Except for that scene!" *I* could work up a better effect with a big bowl of chili and Bic lighter.

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

First, Don, you mean "ridiculous"! But "taxiing," wrong though it looks, is right.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I guess ultimately everything: adventures, romances, etc., is recycled all the way back to things like Greek mythology and theatre, and even earlier. Does the fact that something has been done before make it cliche? (that's an honest question and I don't have a neat answer)

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Thanks Gillian, I must be channeling ancient Greek movie reviewers

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

I don't know, Starbuck spent something on the order of days to get the Cylon raider to fly, and it took a long time for her and Tyrol to figure everything else out (if they did).

No, I disagree with this.

I was under no pressure to think The Wicker Man was a classic. It just so happened that it had a powerful effect on me when I first saw it - and also when I saw it again many years later. (And that had nothing to do with Britt Ekland's assets. Well, hardly anything. )

And it doesn't bother me that you and BigDon didn't like it. Nothing works for everybody, and you're entitled to your own opinions.

No prob Paul, I don't mind agreeing to disagree. As my Grandfather used to tell me, "If everybody liked spaghetti, that's all we'ed ever eat"

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

Goes back even further, to 1969. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064691/

David.

Well, that's one.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

And that's all I'm saying.

(Though, now that I think about it, DS9's captured Jem'Hadar ship could be another. It could also count as the same instance if you consider the writing staff instead of the show.)

Sounds like he was a wise man.

As it happens, I don't like pasta, but I love visiting Italy. So my choice of food is restricted when I'm in Florence, Venice or Rome.

Another cliche that irritates me - when film or TV makers assume that doing a spoof is automatically going to be funny. For instance, a teenaged boy suddenly launches into a narration based on Raymond Chandler's "mean streets" because he's nervous about asking a girl out on a date.

Obviously, spoofs can be very funny - but they can also make you say, "Yes, I can see what you're doing, now move on."

Sort-of tying the two together, I recently saw the wonderful Simpsons episode where the three bullies are carrying lit torches and are about to set fire to a giant wicker model of Lisa Simpson. Then one of them notices that Lisa herself is present. He says, "Oh no, the real Lisa has turned up. That's every ephigist's nightmare."

I can remember when a bunch of farmers, irate over the government's apparent anit-agriculture policies, burned Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson in Effigy.

Effigy is a small town just outside Springfield, Illinois.

Don't recall who the new Secretary was.

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A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

I guess it depends on how often something is used. When a plot-point is used in a couple of places, no-one minds. When it's used too often, then it becomes a cliché.

Of course, how often is too often is highly subjective.

One thing I think that really annoys people is when the cliché is just bad. Bad as in unrealistic, contrived, or violating natural laws.

If a plot-point not too unreasonable, and if particular writers use it as a springboard to go somewhere original and unexpected, I'd imagine no-one really minds, no matter how many times it's been used before.

Romeo and Juliet, IMHO, is the single-most recycled plot line in plot line history. Of course, I'd venture a wager that it was a cliché plot when it was penned aswell, but that's the point we always seem to stop at when tracing literacy roots in such cases.

But in many of those type of cases, it's not necessarily copycatting famous plots (it can be, and those tend to be the boring, derivative works we all hate), but I think the real reason you see so many instances of the same plots is really due to how closely the plots fit human nature. Love, for instance, is irrational. It is not unheard of to fall in love with someone who's family clashes with your family (and thus the "in-law" jokes were born). Exaggerate the feud to the point of a literal war between the two clans (good stories are always exaggerated caricatures of real life), and you have Romeo and Juliet.

Many a great story has been written based on this premise. What makes a cliché a cliché, IMHO, is when the writer(s) instead of looking at the "why" just says, "Hey, this Willy Shakespeare guy seems popular. Let's make Romeo an inner-city thug, and Juliet the daughter of the local KKK chapter, and have them still speak in Shakespearian, and not change any of the dialog. That'll be awsome!".

And as we all know, there's a huge difference between a Xerox-style copy, and an homage.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

"A long time ago, yet somehow in the future"

Or how about robots?

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random youtube observation #83:
Nana Mouskouri without glasses is like peanut butter without jelly, like yin without yang, spic without span...

Hey, I was there and I still can't understand it.

But, Gillian, that's the British spelling (...ou...). In American, it's "ridiculos."

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov