Cliches I'll never be sick of

- The Gentle Giant (especially if the GG is later pushed to the point of violence, which I think is a pretty standard narrative for the character). I'm a small guy, but I know some very big people, and the way they have to try to control their bigness (to not hurt other people by accident, to appear less threatening, to fit places) is really interesting to me. I read somewhere (possibly Esquire) that somebody asked Yao Ming what it was like to be 7'6" (aaaagh) and he said that everything seemed dirty, because he could see into places that were too high to clean. Poor Yao Ming.
Delicious examples: The Iron Giant, City of Lost Children.

- Rag-Tag Team of Misfits Barrelling Across the Galaxy (where "galaxy" can mean the Wild West, or an unnamed city pulsing with corruption, or whatever; some lawless place). There's nothing I don't love about this concept. I love "chosen families," and the ensemble of misfits often sidesteps the blandness you can sometimes get when you have a Hero Protagonist with some wacky friends. If everyone's kind of a weird lameass, they're all much more fun, I think.
Delicious examples: Ocean's 11, The Usual Suspects, Firefly. Butch and Sundance are almost weird enough in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to qualify, even though there's only two of them.

- The Law-Enforcement Dude Going Rogue. Regrettably almost always a dude (though not in Criminal Minds, because it does awesome things with gender roles, including having the Damsel in Distress be this guy). I love stories about very skilled people, and I love watching crimefighting techniques get twisted for shadowy purposes. This usually involves a lot of improvisation and ingenuity, because the Rogue has no backup, and using everyday objects and concepts in new brilliant ways. It's a cool way to have the spy thriller world interact with our recognizable one.
Delicious examples: The Bourne movies. You can't beat a guy facing a knife-wielding opponent with a rolled-up magazine, you just can't. There's nothing more awesome. Also Spy Game, even though it kind of sucks otherwise: CIA Robert Redford on his last day at the agency tripping up his dickish younger colleagues with old-school machinations.

- You Must Solve These Puzzles. It's hard for me to walk away from any narrative once it's going, but You Must Solve These Puzzles pretty much ensures I will stick around, no matter how bad the source material. I read The Da Vinci Code to the bitter, warty end because they had not yet solved the puzzles.
Delicious examples: The Da Vinci Code, ergh. Also Seven. And a stupid new movie called 12 Rounds [of puzzles] that I suspect I will see.

- We Gotta Make This Fit into This. Also known as: any montage about thinking. I love montages, but the ones that visually demonstrate the development of thought are extra-interesting, because I struggle with how to dynamically portray someone's thought process on stage. Film has a major advantage over theater here, because cutting and close-ups and other techniques (like A Beautiful Mind making stuff light up) can draw audience focus to small pieces of a scene, but in theater you're mostly stuck with the whole picture the whole time. If I figure out a solution to this enduring problem, you'll be the first to know. Then I will make my millions.
Delicious examples: Apollo 13 (from which the title comes), A Beautiful Mind, Pollock, The Prestige.

Oh, beloved cliches, I try to reinvent you in my work, but I'm just hoping to find excuses to write The Tired Thief Aiming for One Last Score Versus the Grizzled Cop Who'll Stop at Nothing. That's great literature, right?

Cliches I'm sick of

There are a lot of cliches I'm very fond of, but that's going to be another post. These cliches are my pet-peevy ones. I've tried not to include too much stuff that's based on stereotype or is outright offensive, because "sick of" doesn't really do it justice, but I've included a couple that show up so often that they're cliches in addition to being ignorant and stupid. When I can think of some, I've listed some media that sidestep this phenomenon, and some that fail at it.

- Troubled female character with a history of sexual abuse/assault. What, you can't think of anything else that might be bothering your female character? Similarly, plot cliche: strong female character is captured by the enemy -- part of her torture/fear for her safety is sexual assault or the threat thereof. Happens too much to female characters, never to male characters.
Notably avoided: Criminal Minds, Red Dragon (it's my weirdo opinion that a male character's stabbing is set up to be similar to rape, and you can't talk me out of it). Firefly almost succeeds. Freaks and Geeks, and other shows with predominantly teen casts. Oz subverted this by creating an environment where essentially all the female characters had power over the majority of the male ones, since the former worked in the prison and the latter were incarcerated there. Though the show still has sexual violence against women, there's more against men, perpetrated by both sexes.
Surprisingly not-at-all avoided: Deadwood.

- Characters only dating people of their same race. Not really a cliche, just a stupid thing that shows up all the time, but god is it stupid. This was also a notable theme of the posters advertising prom dresses that my high school was routinely papered with.
Notably avoided: House, The Wire, Criminal Minds (also, bonus points for having mixed-race characters played by mixed-race actors), The West Wing.
Surprisingly not-at-all avoided: If I'm not mistaken, Queer as Folk (at least with the main characters). The show had characters of various genders, classes, sexualities, and abilities, but not so much racial diversity.

- The misanthropic genius (especially the misanthropic secretly tormented genius). I think House was the last character I actually liked who did this, but my patience with him is in little scraps all over my desk. It's such a lazy character template and one of the most frequently used on network TV, after "sad sad pretty boy." Fringe also had one of these, and he made me want to put out my eyes. Nice (or "nice") geniuses are way more interesting. Or geniuses with more than two dimensions, even.
Notably avoided: Criminal Minds has a deceptively sweet genius; if you count Willow, which you probably can, so does Buffy. The West Wing has a handful of characters who can be considered geniuses, some crankier than others, but I can't think of any whose primary character trait is that they're dickholes. Even if Bartlett insists on obnoxiously quizzing people on Latin.
Surprisingly not-at-all avoided: I wrote one of these, but the play hasn't seen the light of day yet. I are hypocrite.

- Geeky stand-in for the writer. Or, really, any stand-in for the writer. You're not so special I'm watching this to learn about you. Abundant in House and all of Joss Whedon's work except maybe Toy Story.
Notably avoided: Liz Lemon on 30 Rock walks the line pretty nimbly between being Tina Fey's self-parody and her own person. Freaks and Geeks relied heavily on the writers' experiences but used them to build believable characters.
Not-at-all avoided: Juno, even though I liked it. Diablo Cody talks exactly like that. It works for Juno, but it's awful in United States of Tara.

- Trash-talking black man, esp. "the super crazy one on the team"/Sassy black woman, esp. "the sassy best friend." They're going in the same category because they seem to both say "here's how a white writer is going to take Traits that All Black People Have but make them friendly!" -- which: blech.
Notably avoided: Most shows where there are more than two major black characters, because then they get to be people. Firefly is worth its own mention because it fails at race in other sparkly ways, but it sidestepped this particular turd.

There are so many other wonderful ones, like "two characters with obvious chemistry who will never get together because they're the same sex," "good girl with no personality," and "OMG SLUT," but this is a long post already (and I wish I had more examples). Maybe I'll do more of these in the future. Next post, though, will be the ones I can't get enough of. Preview: most of them can be filed under "goes in a heist movie."

Stop telling me about yourself

So I’ve been meaning to write about Criminal Minds, which I recently began watching totally legally. I love it. It’s about FBI profilers and it’s just a really good, solid procedural. I love procedurals because I love shows about a) cops b) criminals c) shooting d) thinking, but often they fail at a) race b) gender c) criminal justice policy d) writing, and that makes it really hard to enjoy them. (Notable exception: The Wire, but I am not exactly a revolutionary for saying that The Wire is phenomenal.)

Criminal Minds is especially wonderful to me right now because I recently had to stop watching House, which I liked when it wasn’t being As the House Turns and really couldn’t stand when it turned into Thirteen ‘n’ House Adventures. That is to say: it stopped being about thinking, and the writing quality went way down, especially in terms of character. New characters were brought in, and only one of them was “explored,” which unfortunately meant that we weren’t allowed to discover much about her – we had to be told, several times, how mysterious she was, how tortured, how special.

Criminal Minds is similar to House in that they’re both procedurals, but it succeeds magnificently where House fails: in developing characters calmly and organically. The show is set almost entirely at the characters’ workplace – the FBI building in Quantico, and wherever they need to go to save the day. Characters pretty much only go home (or on vacation) to be yanked away; we know almost nothing about them beyond what we need to watch them solve cases. As a consequence, I am desperate for information about them – every fact is a joy. And now that I’m at the beginning of the second season, I know very little about some characters I’ve been watching for 25 episodes.

This isn’t to say that they don’t have personalities and characteristics – the acting is great, and there’s a lot of talking – but their backstories aren’t clear. And writers love backstory. Usually they love to tell you about it as soon as humanly possible, and in explicit detail. Criminal Minds mostly eschews those all-too-common monologues about Tragic Things That Happened to Me When I Was a Child, instead featuring people who don’t talk much to each other about their experiences, much less reveal things to the audience. (Recently I watched an episode where they had to Investigate One of Their Own, and someone said “Okay, what do we know about X?” Someone else said “…actually, I don’t really know anything about X.”) Then you get layers of secret-keeping comparable to some of the tensest parts of The West Wing in its heyday.

In my limited acting experience (and the reading I've done about acting), one of the most interesting things an actor can do is walk onstage with a secret. It doesn't need to be alluded to, revealed, or illustrated -- the fact of a secret lights an actor from within. We watch that actor. We don't know why, but we want to know what they're hiding. Meryl Streep does this, I believe, and she's one of the most fascinating actors currently living. A play or TV show where the writer keeps a secret operates in a similar way: there's a quiet extra dimension to the dialogue, and (because I think an actor should know the background of his or her character when the writer does, for god's sake) hopefully to the acting.