h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Why do rabid dogs always wag their tails happily when attacking their victim???

Another thing about candles (although not sure if this has been mentioned). There can be a howling gale yet all the hero needs to do is put is hand about 10cm from the candle flame and it will stop flickering. It will never EVER go out UNLESS it is a horror film and the hero is by himself with an axe murderer etc. behind him in which case it will blow out and any matches the hero tries to strike will break in half

Light, be it candle, torch or indoor, ONLY (always) fail when the hero is in dire straits.
(Trouble, not the group!)

...and when a couple get it together for the first time, one will wake next morning, reach across to the other side of the bed and find the person gone. If it's the woman that's gone, she'll be making him breakfast. If it's the guy who's gone, it's because he's a bastard who's scared of committment. But whoever it is, when did you ever reach out for somebody that hadn't woken you up when they got up?
(Okay, maybe I'm a light sleeper...)

Then there's the one where a woman wakes up after a heavy night, and suddenly her eyes go wide open and she screams. The camera then moves back to reveal that she's in bed with a right minger.

Pardon me - a right minger? And this is... ?

Anyway, I still really REALLY love when the other person in the bed is wounded or - more often - dead. The person waking up then discovers, jumps out of bed cradling the blanket in a way to cover anything rendering the movie too adult, screams and leaves the room - often racing to the street / hallway / neigbour and yell and scream in stead of calling 911 or trying to see if the person is REALLY dead.

A 'right minger' is someone who is not very good-looking, a dog, if you will.

From the phrase 'that's really minging' to mean 'that stinks' in either sense. To be pronounced to rhyme with 'bringing'. In the above example, the woman has woken up in bed with a stinker, rather than someone who literally smells bad.

Of course, there is another cliche that builds upon the waking up/bug-eyed/screaming routine in which you know that she will eventually fall in love with him by the last scene, because he's a really good chap who's much better for her than the handsome guy she's with at the moment who has already revealed himself to us as a complete bastard, but who she unnacountably can't see in his true colours until at least three quarters of the way through the film.

Anyway, I still pity American cops.
When choosing this carreer, it is obvious that you enter a life where you may or may not become married, but it is for certain that she will leave you after a long and dirty divorce, after which you wind up in a very complicated mobster (or something) situation starting with your partner being killed by representatives of said mobster (or something) gang.
At least things then turn for the better as you'll wind up with this gorgeous chick who is willing to make out on the first night, even if this happen to be in a hideout behind a dumpster and her mother, brother and puppy dog just got blasted away by representatives of said mobster (or something) gang.
And at the end, all the bad guys are killed and nobody files any charges because of your somewhat atypical usage of the term "throwing the book at the gangster" and other very violent and fatal methods. And the beforementioned woman stays with you, at the very least until after the end-text passing the screen...
(Makes you wonder how long after THAT - if she falls in love with you after a complete family slaughter and during hunt, shootouts and worse while you smell from sweat and blood (other peoples, most of it) then how is she gonna cope with everyday life?)

And they have to pend every night in a car complaining about it with their equally reticent partner eating Donuts and drinking coffee from strofoam cups. Poor mites no wonder they are being divored all the time they are never home.

Hey, you guys were really motoring there! You must love these sleazy films!

Love 2 Hate!

You?

You never see the 's face, only the back of his head.

'Nonnie

Yeah, or what about people twirling a pen etc. in one hand while typing on a computer with the other, a la Goldeneye. Have you ever tried this?! i';jj gry iyt rdhyuf niw. I just attemted to write, I'll try it right now reasonably quickly with one hand, while looking at the screen.

Yeah, but when you do something a lot you tend to get pretty proficient at it, so I would imagine that one-handed typing would be similar... I know that when I first started (with two fingers each hand and a thumb) I got pretty fast (and even somewhat accurate)... Had a devil of a time training my hands to settle into the home keys because I was actually faster the other way and it was easier for me to cheat.

'Nonnie

It's always easier to cheat - that's why Hollywood does it all the time!

BTW - I am an English teacher and I have copied a lot of the stuff from this thread and made a collection of text with it. My pupils loved it, we had great fun thinking out other clich'es and - even worse - most of them learned some English phrases too!

But I guess that also compiles of cheating...

(BTW: How often do you see Windows-based programs on movie-computers? No? In spite of the fact that Microsoft - ruler of Mankind - has taken over most of the global machines...)

That's quite a scary thought - that I might be in some (very) small way responsible for the way that a person speaks English.

If you want them to learn some seriously weird English phrases, check out the British English thread on the 'Ask h2g2' forum.

To save you a few minutes, the above-mentioned thread is here: http://www.h2g2.com/F19585?thread=46483

Thanks for the hint. I've only read the start of the thread so far, but it looks promising.
If you'd like some explanations of idioms, try http://www.shu.ac.uk/web-admin/phrases/search.html for an interesting one. I use it to colour my own language - in particular the written one.

BTW - Don't you just HATE when people in movies only have to spend 8.2 seconds to search and find precisely what they are looking for on the Internet?

Not only that, but what they're looking for is right at the top of the list. AND there is nothing on the page that isn't relevant to what they want.


And when they print it off, the page comes out immediately.

Ahh, come on guys, it's just the movies...

KC, I'm so glad you and the kids are having fun with all this stuff. I tried to think of a way it could be used in a game - something like "Whose Line is it Anyway?", but entirely failed to do so.

You could probably do something with the companion thread, Cliche Film Quotes as well.