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Down with "stealth transport"!

  • 27-10-2008 1:18pm
    #1
    johnny_ultimate
    Moderators, Category Moderators, Arts Moderators, Computer Games Moderators, Entertainment Moderators Posts: 30,019 CMod ✭✭✭✭


    This is getting ridiculous. Watched possible
    Ghost Town
    last night, and within the first five minutes it proved to contain the latest example of the old stealth bus.
    Not once, but twice!
    .

    What is stealth transport you ask? The phrase (which I first heard coined by Monkeyfudge here) refers to those moments in a lot of recent films where a character is unexpectedly hit by some sort of transport. One of the best known examples from Final Destination:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jt2f-Zpe80


    But it has started appearing in an absurd amount of movies and television, from Six Feet Under to No Country for Old Men. In most cases it turns out to be a bus, although can be any form of transport.

    It has at this point become almost painfully easy to predict (watch out for strange and somewhat unreal looking framing, and silences / timing that are slightly off). Why can't film-makers realise that while it may have been shocking the first time, it has now become tired. It also must count as the most unusual recurrent trend in modern cinema.

    Anyway, as a certain priest might have said: Down with this sort of thing!


Comments

  • #2
    Fysh
    Moderators, Arts Moderators, Regional Abroad Moderators Posts: 11,107 Mod ✭✭✭✭Fysh


    The Final Destination example is brilliantly stupid though, since not only is the bus barrelling along at a stupidly fast speed for an urban area, but the road that it drives along has been shown to be blocked off about 30 seconds beforehand! Ah, comedy gold...

    But yes, stealth cars/buses/etc are a bit of a crap way of pushing plot forward. At least in the likes of No Country For Old Men it was a notion that fit into the greater themes of the film, but even so...


  • #3
    Phototoxin
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,398 ✭✭✭Phototoxin


    Wasn't final destination a comedy?


  • #4
    Galvasean
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 30,746 ✭✭✭✭Galvasean


    I liked the one in Run Lola run, but good lord is it an overused trick these days.


  • #5
    L31mr0d
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 8,067 ✭✭✭L31mr0d


    best one has to be "meet joe black"

    most recently I've seen it happen in The Orphanage


  • #6
    bnt
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 13,077 ✭✭✭✭bnt


    I remember the movie (Practical Magic) in which Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman played witches with a curse on the women in their family: their husbands would always die young. Sandra's man runs in to one of those stealth vehicles, or vice versa.

    You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found. I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

    ―Oscar Wilde predicting Social Media, in The Picture of Dorian Gray



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  • #7
    johnny_ultimate
    Moderators, Category Moderators, Arts Moderators, Computer Games Moderators, Entertainment Moderators Posts: 30,019 CMod ✭✭✭✭johnny_ultimate


    With all those examples I think one of the easiest way the Government could have made money in the budget would have been to impose a stealth vehicle tax.

    ...
    ...
    Takes hat and leaves.


  • #8
    Dont be at yourself
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 10,592 ✭✭✭✭Dont be at yourself


    It also appears in Taken. It's becoming another movie cliche!


  • #9
    lostexpectation
    Closed Accounts Posts: 9,082 ✭✭✭lostexpectation


    johnny_ultimate wrote: »
    This is getting ridiculous. Watched possible
    Ghost Town
    last night, and within the first five minutes it proved to contain the latest example of the old stealth bus.
    Not once, but twice!
    .

    What is stealth transport you ask? The phrase (which I first heard coined by Monkeyfudge here) refers to those moments in a lot of recent films where a character is unexpectedly hit by some sort of transport. One of the best known examples from Final Destination:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jt2f-Zpe80

    that's cctv footage from the luas isn't it?


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