Shortcuts and Originality

Last night, while hacking up a lung (CURSES to you, damn pollen count), I watched this movie. Unfortunately, that was approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes of my life I cannot retrieve. Were I not so sick last night, I would have turned it off and read, but sickness kept me passively watching this train wreck of a film.

I could go into the many, many, MANY reasons why I hated it. (The lone exception being the always-brillian Don Cheadle.) Sure, I am going to believe Liv Tyler as the wise-beyond her years shrink . . . SURE, I'm going to buy that Charlie can ride a motorized SCOOTER all through Manhattan, whose streets were strangely devoid of insane cabbies. (Hello????) I won't go on . . . and on . . . though I COULD. What bugged me most, as a WRITER, was the fact that the movie "shortcut" any sort of character development.

How do I know they shortcut character development? Any movie in which a person SINGING a song subsitutes for any real dialogue. Don't believe me? Recall ANY movie in which we are to believe in the "happy family" coming back together after crisis . . . and instead we get an air guitar/karoke/singing scene (the unwatchable Stepmom comes to mind with Susan Sarandon and her children singing, in nightshirts, into brushes as fake microphones while laughing happily). So last night's movie had the insane Charlie listening to Bruce Springsteen and then in the KEY scene launching into a Who song from Quadrophenia, I believe.

But screenwriters aren't the only ones who use these little tricks. Books do it too. How many books do I have to sit through where the "heart of gold" in the otherwise-mean character is the "so nice to his offbeat granny" thread.

Now, I use grandparents in my books often. I do it because I loved mine and I like to have grandparents actually be three-dimensional persons in books (I loved writing about Nan in Diary of a Blues Goddess). But it can be overused.

The fine line, of course, is showing, not telling. Versus trotting out cliches.

So what shortcuts do you hate from film and books?