After insipid subject matter, complete avoidance of emotional truth, ignorance of film history and the effects of representation, I think the redundant and derivative film language of most films is what truly gets my goat.
Cliches are not without their power and use, but it’s not a bad rule of thumb to try to avoid them at all costs. The great things about them is that cliches are easy to learn — and then hopefully easy to avoid.
It would be great to have a a check list. If I managed a film viewing community I would hand out badges to everyone that spotted and marked a cliche in a movie. I would love to see the list of what films and filmmakers traffic most widely in them.
But I guy can’t have everything he wants, and I have to say I am pretty content in what I have in this regards anyway. Film fans world wide have taken control of their culture and have made a hilarious collection of short films parading the cliches in all their glory. I have featured a few of these when they came my way inthe past. But now FilmmakerIQ have done us all a tremendous service and collected MANY of them on one page.
If you ask me these should be playing in constant rotation in the lobbies of film schools the world over. We are so connected to each other now, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t police ourselves from such fatal flaws.
Suffice it to say that I was so impressed with FilmmakerIQ’s post, that I couldn’t restrict myself to a simple tweet.
