Someone on IMDB’s message boards had posted a topic about “Annoying Film Effects”. Here are a few that come to mind:
Diffuse Glow -or- “I Can’t See Shit Cuz My Retinas Are Burning With All This Intense White Light Everywhere” - See any Spielberg from “A.I.” onwards. Though I felt it worked for “A.I.” I hated his constant reliance on it thereafter.
16mm “war cam” -or- “Crappy Home Video of Guys Running Around Chaotically” - “Saving Private Ryan” used this effectively, but then Spielberg and others have come to rely on it too heavily as a mechanism for heightening the sense of chaos.
Ramping -or- “Crouching Tiger, Flinging Hairdo” - Though I’m guilty of having used it myself, ramping, or accelerating/decelerating the frame rate in a shot consisting of external motion or camera motion has become tiresome. The most egregious use of this is in car chases at the peak of a jump (which always seems to take place in roughly the same vicinity of downhill-sloping streets in San Fransisco), and shampoo commercials where the camera slows down as the woman flings her hair to the side, and speeds up again at the end of the follow-through… but you’ve also seen it in numerous martial arts films where not only hair, but also long robes, other textiles, and such, are flung around with frame rates speeding up and slowing down. I can often excuse it in many highly-stylized martial arts films because it’s not taken too seriously, and often the actors in these set pieces are quite skilled martial artists… so they could make the shot look good with or without the effect, but it flows poetically with it.
Motion-control ramping (aka “Bullet Time”) - A variation on ramping that uses many still cameras triggered in a series to make it appear as though an images is being frozen or slowed down and rotated, it borrows some of its inspiration from the “suspended action” frame stretches used in Anime (primarily to save money on animation, where a shot could be held on a single frame a-la Speed Racer, to convey an impending action or reaction that’s about to burst forth)… While it was cool for about five minutes, those five minutes ended in 1997 with the release of “The Matrix.”
The Time-Lapse of Guilt - Time lapse photography to show the passage of time, phases or, in the case of the director of “Koyannisqatsi”, “Powaqaatsi” and all those other tribalist cliche-fests that attempt, insipidly, to provoke the viewer’s guilt (as opposed to critical thought) at the inanity of our routines and mass-production existence … It’s time cinematographers and editors think of new techniques to show the passage of time, or cycles, or of the mundane aspects of life.
Thumping Faces of Doom - This is a cheap effect used mostly in theatrical trailers, to artificially inflate tension… it goes something like this: Cut into close-up one shot of someone’s facial expression with accompanying THUD sound, fade to black, cut into another close-up one shot with another THUD, fade to black… repeat…. if possible, include shrieking violins that increase in pitch to the last second.
Fast Shaky Head - a trick popularized by “edgy” music video directors (e.g. Tarsem Singh) in horror movies where the camera, either static or tracking, shows one guy looking at some corpse, specter or other intentionally-creepy looking person… the head shakes around rapidly to beat us in the face with the message that “SOMETHING HERE IS UNNATURAL!” Often accompanied by “Chick with Blank Face”, “Mouth Apparatus Guy” or “Girls Suspended in Metal and Wire Thingie That Rotates.”
Flying Fists of Deja Vu - Often used in Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal movies… Because they’re basically mediocre martial artists, their skill (or lack thereof) is falsely inflated by shooting coverage of the same punch and then editing it together in a fashion that makes it look as though the punch is occurring three times in rapid succession. Often, the third cut will be in slow-motion to milk the moment. This didn’t last very long in anything above B-move cinema… but it’s worth an honorable mention. This technique is also used in porn videos… or so I’ve heard.
The Thousand Yard Stare - This term wasn’t coined by me… but it refers to one of many techniques that Spielberg cribbed and bastardized from his mentor and idol, Francois Truffaut. It refers to the tendency to show someone, usually a man, in a contemplative or paralyzed stare at something off screen. We’re signaled, loudly, to understand he’s thinking REAAAAALLY hard or he’s petrified of large CG dinosaurs coming this way.
