NOTES

Compilation © copyright 1995-97 by Giancarlo Cairella.

Please see standard disclaimer for more legal info. Please forgive any spelling error. English is not my first language :-)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT & THANKS

I received many congratulations for the List. Once again, I wish to thank you all. I'd really like to be able to answer everybody personally, but between work and leisure I receive more than a hundred e-mail messages per day and I can barely keep up with reading them all. Rest assured your input is always appreciated.

Any other places you've read about the Movie Cliches List? If you've read about her anywhere else, please let me know!

SUGGESTED READING/VIEWING MATERIAL

The funniest book (and the only one, as far as I know) on the subject of movie cliches is "Ebert's Little Movie Glossary - a compendium of movie cliches, stereotypes, obligatory scenes, hackneyed formulas, shopworn conventions and outdated archetypes" by Roger Ebert (ISBN 0-8362-8071-7).
The book has appeared after this list was started in November 1994. I used to highlight this fact in previous versions of the list because I didn't want people to think that I had ripped off Roger Ebert's idea. Apparently that disclaimer could be misinterpreted the other way around, like I was suggesting that Roger Ebert had taken the idea for his book from this list). I didn't mean this of course and I want to make clear that both were independent efforts.
Roger Ebert himself has e-mailed the following to me:

Dear Giancarlo,

A friend has sent me a long list of your movie cliches, which I much enjoyed, especially the detailed analysis of battle and violent action.

Thanks, too, for mentioning my little book. One tiny footnote: The book grew out of a "Glossary of Movie Terms" which ran for several years in the back of my other book, "Roger Ebert's Video Companion," and before that it was a newspaper article in the Chicago Sun-Times, 10 years ago. I say this only because I do not want the impression to get around that I ripping anyone else.

Of course, in a way, all these lists go back to the "Scenes We'd Like to See" feature in Mad magazine.

Cheers,
RE

There are also a few movies that deliberately make fun of movie cliches: some examples are John Mc Tiernan's "Last Action Hero", most of the Zucker-Abrahms-Zucker films ("Airplane", "The Naked Gun" series, "Hot Shots" parts 1 & 2, "Top Secret"), "National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1". And Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" manages to subvert quite a few movie conventions, too.
If you know of any other films/books/stuff, let me know!

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