5 cliché scenes most movies could do without

As a writer, I’m all about the story. That doesn’t change when I’m watching a movie.

Scenes from a good story, whether they’re written on a page or projected on a screen, should advance the plot. That’s not to diminish the importance of character development and context (background), but a good storyteller integrates these elements seamlessly in the structure of a story. He or she doesn’t interrupt the narrative for long detours into background and description.

Movies are filled with clichés. There’s the bomb that’s defused with one second left on the timer; the “dead” villain who comes back to life from out of nowhere to be dispatched one last time at the end; guns with infinite ammo; people who die suddenly of superficial wounds or find a way to keep fighting after they’ve been shot in the heart, disemboweled, and decapitated.

Not all clichés are filler, but some familiar filler scenes have been used so often they’ve become clichés.

Filler is anything that distracts from the narrative. In movies, such distractions have become more commonplace than ever. Most moviemakers, I suspect, include these “cheats” because they want to seem “edgy.” (Writers tend to put cigarettes in their characters’ mouths for the same reason.) They’re crutches. A good story can be plenty edgy without any of them.

Here are a few that make me want to walk out of a theater or, if I’m watching at home on video, hit the fast-forward button.

Nightclub scenes

I picked this movie to spend five minutes watching people dancing to loud music in a nightclub.

Not.

Can you say, “filler”? It’s hard to hear anybody in a nightclub, so it’s not a good place for dialogue. It you’re not a fan of loud music, flashing lights, and drunk/high characters, these scenes can be pretty tedious.

If a nightclub scene is integral to the plot, I’ve got no problem with it. You wouldn’t expect a movie called The Last Days of Disco to take place on a soccer field.

But filmmakers have fallen back on this cliché time and time again to pad out skimpy stories. They’re the equivalent of empty calories, allowing viewers to become voyeurs at parties where they can’t get hangovers and pick-up joints where they can’t get STDs (an increasing number of these nightclubs seen to double as strip joints in the movies).

Close cousin to the nightclub scene is the party at the teen’s home when his/her parents are out of town for the weekend. Yawn.

Musical interludes

Some movies are all about the music: Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocket Man, and Yesterday without the music of (respectively) Queen, Elton John, and the Beatles would be pointless.

Other movies are actually called musicals. In these movies, the music does regularly interrupt the plot in order for the characters to break into song. I’m not a big fan of musicals for this reason. I think they work better on the stage, where you know there are no second takes and it’s a lot easier to become wrapped up in how impressive the performances are.

Some movie musicals work: The Sound of Music and Beauty and the Beast come to mind. But so much of these movies are spent singing and dancing that, if the music’s no good, the movie’s likely to be lousy, too.

I’m not talking about musicals or movies like Bohemian Rhapsody, though. I’m referring to movies that insist on inserting popular music at every opportunity during “transitional” scenes where nothing important is really happening. A kid rides his bike to school. A character gets dressed for work. That sort of thing. Scenes that could easily have been left on the cutting-room floor.

There are two big problems with these scenes, other than the fact that they’re superfluous:

First, if you don’t like the music, you’re screwed. Background music is one thing, but the use of music you don’t like (for me, that would be something like “Who Let the Dogs Out” or “Waterfalls”) can leave a bad taste in your mouth that lasts the rest of the movie. If you buy a ticket to see Rocket Man, you know you’re going to hear Elton John music; if you buy a ticked for an action movie, it’s a crapshoot.

Second, whoever’s mixing these scenes tends to crank the volume up to 10 when the music comes on, then turn it down to a whisper for the dialogue. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve had to adjust the volume on my TV whenever I’m bombarded with a sudden burst of music. I watch a movie to relax, not to feel like I need to be constantly on guard against an unexpected aural assault.

Sex scenes

Somehow, the movies got along just fine for years without sex scenes, because the stories were good.

Some movies contain scenes in which two people are in bed together, and something actually happens (a rock flies through the window or a monster pops out from under the bed). But then there are those scenes where a couple is doing the beast with no backs just to titillate the audience — and/or fill a gap where the writers couldn’t come up with anything interesting to say.

This is not edgy. It’s lazy. It’s manipulative. And it’s annoying.

I don’t need to see two (or more) people moaning and gyrating, etc., to figure out what’s going on in the movie. There are plenty of other ways to show that two people are in a relationship, that they’ve broken up, or whatever. It’s like going to the bathroom: I don’t want to see someone sitting on the pot unless it’s Tywin Lannister and Tyrian’s shooting him dead with a crossbow. That was classic.

I’ll give you a personal example of why sex scenes are filler. When I was very young, my parents took me to a drive-in movie that included a scene where a couple was kissing. The scene concluded with the pair lying down — and disappearing below the bottom of the screen. I then asked one of those embarrassing questions kids ask before their parents are ready to explain such things: “Mommy, where’d they go?”

As a 3-year-old kid, I had no clue. But any adult who was watching the movie knew exactly what was going on. They didn’t need to see a couple of naked, sweaty bodies going at it to figure it out.

Car chases

Some car chases can be a lot of fun, but one way you know they’re expendable is that writers keep having to up the ante.

Audiences aren’t satisfied with the same old thing because the same old thing is boring. So, each new chase has to be wilder, more creative, and more outlandish than the last. Explosions and hairpin turns aren’t enough anymore. Big rigs have to be hanging halfway off a cliff, heroes need to cling to undercarriages and jump from one car to the next, and that’s the bare minimum.

The Fast and the Furious franchise has made the process of coming up with original and outlandish car chases art form. Audiences go to these movies specifically to see them. But one by-product of this is that chases in a lot of other movies — where they’re secondary elements, not the movie’s raison d’etre — look tedious by comparison. You know they’re filler. So, you head to the fridge or the concession stand and try to time your return for the point when they’ll be over.

Bar fights

A common crutch in action movies, they’re seldom essential to the plot. Most of the time, none of the main characters get killed, and nothing really happens to move the story forward. They’re included to provide an interlude (aka filler), just as musical numbers are used for the same purpose.

Bar scenes in general have become almost mandatory for science fiction films (and TV shows) set in a universe teeming with diverse races from countless star systems. And such scenes, predictably, often set the stage for fisticuffs. I blame the Star Wars cantina scene for the bars-in-space trend. At least that scene was important to the movie’s plot, as it introduced Luke to Han Solo and Chewbacca, but the same can’t be said for most bar-fight scenes.

The majority are just excuses to throw in some action and fill up some time. Want to know how you can tell they’re expendable?

Ask yourself how often you’ve seen one at the end of a movie. I personally can’t remember one. They’re never climactic or decisive. If you cut most of them, you probably wouldn’t know the difference.

Actually, that’s what all these scenes have in common.