Hm. Let's see...
Bombastic patriotism: okay, jeeze, I get it, the movie's set in America and you guys have a troubled history and a fuckton of heroes and lots of reasons to be proud and all - but please, mister Emmerich, could you please give it a rest? Same to you, Michael. I'm sure even the most engrossed and disconnected Modern Warfare player out there would agree with me in saying that we've heard all about the badass nature of the American army one too many times.
We get it, you're a global superpower and I'm a little Canadian seagull shit in your gigantic windshield. Now stop stroking your dick, Hollywood, and give us *reasons* as to why we should care. You know, like The Hurt Locker did - and incredibly well at that.
Slasher flicks: yes. Not just a few tropes from that genre, but the entire fucking thing as a whole. The last good slasher I saw was The Rise of Leslie Vernon, and it worked because it actually operated as a deconstruction of all those tropes. Other than that, you have to look to the classics of the genre to have even the slightest sense of actual tension. The first two Nightmare on Elm Street flicks, for instance, or the first two Friday the 13th, and the first Halloween. Those are great references. Everything else? The more things progress, the more the series all devolve into self-parodies of self-parodies. They've all jumped the shark so many times the shark gave up and swam towards greener pastures.
So this covers everything in that one genre. The Final Girl cliché, the part where the slasher acts as a sort of avenging angel targeting kids acting "sinfully" - which makes me think Hollywood has a conservative boner in some areas - the part where they split up, the whole "walking through a threshold backwards so I don't see the lurking menace behind me" schtick, and the general impression that those movies are just there so we get to see annoying asshats get offed as graphically as possible.
In short, I'm extremely not surprised to hear that Doug Bradley finally gave up on Pinhead. He gave a pass for the Hellraiser remake project, and I think this is a pretty smart move on his part.
Hackers in movies: I honestly didn't know hacking meant you slid through glass skyscrapers rendered in bad mid-nineties CGI while typing furiously away on an IBM ThinkPad you'd tricked out with decals and Anarchy signs. Or, failing that, that pressing the Escape key never fails to fix everything. Thanks for teaching me all that, Nineties!
Granted, I understand that actual hacking would make for a pretty boring sight and experience to translate in the movies. It means calling up your target and lurking around their directories in boring old Unix or DOS prompts, and it's a lot more like being in a dark room with your blindfolds on than being this uberleet cyberwarfare specialist who can nuke the FBI from countries away and who manages to look stylish while doing so. It means a lot of trial and error, and it usually involve tedious processes.
So unless hacking eventually becomes so steeped in the cultural spectrum that it becomes acceptable and common to make a sitcom out of it, I guess we'll never see realistic depictions of hacking on the silver screen. I did appreciate the fact that the Matrix movies did use proper syntax and commands in places, however. Still, the notion that Trinity can type *that* fast is more than a little ridiculous.
The Internet in movies: Live Free or Die Hard fails both on the above level and in this one. The idea is that the 'net is where the hep twentysomething cats are all hanging, and that if you're not somewhere in that range, you're hopelessly out of touch with the world. This fosters the idea that the Everyman-type character will never touch a keyboard because "that hacker shit is for sissies", along with the usual "kids, these days..." stereotype.
I call it the Riverdale Paradox, personally. Y'know, how all the teens in Riverdale are continuously *into* things, while the adults are doomed to be forever *out*? The worst offenders being the school's faculty, where the principal goes out of his way to use fifty-dollar words 'cause he's old. Egads, Great Gadfrey, balderdash, poppycock and whatnot. It's stupid.
Hollywood, when will you realize that you do the same thing for every single generation? Before us, you slammed the Baby-Boomers for liking Rock and Roll. Does that mean you'll make us pass for grumpy old curmudgeons in forty years, when the new crop of twentysomethings is going to be knee-deep in virtual reality?
Gamers in movies: please, Hollywood. For the love of God, if you're going to show us a gamer, show us one that isn't a hyperkinetic man-child. Better still, show us a gamer that actually *plays a fucking game*, instead of randomly button-mashing and then crying out "Woot! High score!" or some shit.
Game development in movies: see above. Dev kits are not consoles, and the actual dev process is done on *computers*, Hollywood. Nobody can install some sort of SDK on a commercial console and expect to mash away in order to create something. Game development requires multiple skills across multiple areas that all need to converge *just right* so the finished product feels coherent.
