Reply #77: I have a list a mile long.

[JackDragna]

1. Children in movies designed for adults. They're always wise beyond their years, emotionally stable and infallible in a way none of the adults are. I generally turn off movies for adults that give any major screen time to kids. You can sure the director is going to idolize the kids as much as possible.

2. Overblown special effects. This is one of the things, as much as I like the movie, I blame "Star Wars" for injecting into American cinema. People think because the technology exists, one should always use the most state-of-the-art effects as much as possible. Take the newer Star Wars movies, for example. Most of the aliens were CGI and seemed about as real as military intelligence. In the first three films, the aliens may have looked like puppets at times, but they had a real sense of physicality to them.

3. Fart/poo/piss jokes. We've seen a million variations on this, Hollywood. It's just not goddam funny anymore. I don't know if you feel like you owe the Wayans brothers a lifetime of A-budget movies, but it's just goddam dumb.

4. Obvious product placement. I'm not at the movies to watch a commercial. "Talladega Nights" must be like a giant wet dream for any company with the cash to put adverts in the movie: after all, it's about a sport where there's adverts all over the place!

5. Movies that don't know when to end. Nobody can write an ending to a movie anymore. The writers assume we care about every detail of the main character's lives after the conflict is resolved. We don't. It adds nothing to the movie thematically. It's nice the hero and the girl he saves end up living in a house with a white picket fence, but I could really give a tit whether they're going to be bringing potato salad to their kid's Boy Scout meeting eight years later. Nobody cares.