Better Than It Sounds/Film A

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


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  • 101 Dalmatians: A couple sets out to rescue their 15 children from a fashion-obsessed woman. By the end of the film, they've adopted 84 more.
  • 12 Monkeys: John McClane acts almost as crazy as Benjamin Button. Monkeys don't really enter into it.
  • 12 Angry Men: A dozen guys sit in a room and argue for an hour and a half.
    • Alternatively: lack of consensus makes people stuck for hours and hours inside a room.
  • 1408: Cynical writer can't get out of his hotel room.
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey: Grey blocks change the course of human evolution, a computer goes nuts, and an astronaut sees lots of colored lights.
    • 2010: The Year We Make Contact: People go restart the computer to see what the hell happened. This causes brutal changes to the Solar System.
      • Or: The rectangles destroy a planet.
  • 2012: Estranged husband tries to bond with his kids, only to find out that he really picked a bad time to do so.
  • 24 Hour Party People: Socially inept news reader sets up record label where the top bands include a band who are accused of being Nazis and whose singer commits suicide, an anorexic man and a group of drug-addled lunatics, including their maracas-wielding dealer. Based on a true story.
  • 25th Hour: A man goes to jail.
  • 28 Days Later: Bicycle courier finds himself on the run from extremely ticked-off urbanites. He meets up with a woman keen on hacking people to death with a machete, a slightly mad taxi driver, and his quiet daughter, who take him on a road trip through the countryside. The four encounter a small group of soldiers living in a country mansion who intend to restart the human race. One of them wears a pink apron.
  • 300: Barely dressed soldiers from an incredibly toxic culture fight with "metro-sexual version of the Devil". (Sort of) based (indirectly) on what might be a true story.
  • 30 Days of Night : Some out-of-towners spend a month in an Alaskan town.
  • 50 First Dates: Remember Adam Sandler? Drew Barrymore doesn't.
    • And how we envy her.
  • (500) Days of Summer: A hopeless romantic falls for a quirky young woman who doesn't believe in true love. Hilarity/heartache ensue.
  • 8 Mile: White man successfully co-opts black culture to impress other whites.
  • 8½: A philandering Jerkass of a filmmaker tries to make a film while dealing with a midlife crisis and hallucinating elements from his past. Is not the kind of thing you go around making musicals for.
  • 9: Dolls take on a rogue Mook Maker.
    • Alternately, a "hero" is born...and proceeds to kill the first friendly person he meets. Before it's over, many others are dead, including the pope.
    • A naive but courageous doll saves a post-apocalyptic future by accidentally killing (almost) all his friends.

A

  • The Abominable Dr. Phibes: Burn victim who is supposed to be dead seeks vengeance on those responsible, sometimes via their children.
    • Or: Slowly-dying man comes up with overly elaborate deathtraps for enemies, but sometimes leaves a possible way out.
    • Or: Elusive Poetic Serial Killer takes inspiration from The Bible.
    • Dr. Phibes Rises Again: Semi-undead Vincent Price and Adventurer Archaeologist race to Egypt in order to achieve immortality. The archaeologist's crew keep dying in bizarre and overly-elaborate ways, and it ends with a song from The Wizard of Oz.
  • A Christmas Carol: Time-traveling ghosts teach a cheap old British guy to be less of an jerkass. Been filmed a million times.
  • Across the Universe: The Sixties happen to a group of young people who fall in love, take some drugs, have lots of sex, briefly hate each other, and then reunite as friends in the end. And they express these emotions by singing Beatles songs. One of the young people is a cute fella from Liverpool who does not have a visa, and thus does not legally exist in America; he tends to do the wrong thing with good intentions. Another young person gets drafted into the surrealist division of the US Army. Oh, and this is really a musical.
  • Adaptation: Screenwriter tries to turn a book into a screenplay, finds it impossible, so writes a screenplay about that.
  • The Adventures of Baron Munchausen: An old dude wants to die, but he's forced into finding his friends by a little girl.
  • The Adventures of Ford Fairlane: Chauvinist Fonz-wannabe foils convoluted music industry conspiracy while drinking flaming milkshakes and insulting Al Bundy about his early disco career. Also features Tone Loc occasionally throwing people from rooftops and Freddy Krueger doing the worst British accent in all history.
  • A.I.: Artificial Intelligence: Robot decides to Become a Real Boy, with the help of a teddy bear and sarcastic Fetish Fuel built to resemble Jude Law.
  • Air Force One The president and his crew have been kidnapped by terrorists. Is he a bad enough dude to save the day?
  • Airplane!!: Food poisoning leads Shell Shocked Senior to pilot a passenger jet.
  • Aladdin: Orphaned Street Urchin falls in love with Rebellious Princess, seduces her with the help of near-omnipotent comedian and a piece of fabric, and defeats the bad guy by trapping him into a device used for lighting.
    • The Return of Jafar: Big Bad comes back to try and take the kingdom. He is defeated by his own parrot.
    • Aladdin And The King of Thieves: The urchin and the princess are about to get married, when the wedding is crashed by the boy's father and his workmates.
  • Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland: Girl with sleep disorder accidentally takes a wrong turn while fleeing from reality. She then teams up with a neurotic butler, a midget warrior, a crazy cook, and a fashion-conscious contortionist to help an imprisoned pacifist, whose sister has strange taste in interior design.
  • Alien: A stomach cramp gets out of hand (or: inter-species rape).
    • Aliens: An entire colony has stomach cramps (or: inter-species gang rape). The only one who can help them was sleeping for years.
    • Alien³: A dog's stomach cramp gets out of hand.
    • Alien: Resurrection: Woman is brought back to life because of stomach cramps.
    • Alien vs. Predator: A lot of people get stomach cramps in the Arctic. Three Big Game Hunters have to clean up after them.
    • Alien vs. Predator: Requiem: Big Game Hunter gets stomach cramp, forcing his friends to stop in a small town.
      • They really need to stop forgetting to take the Pepto Bismol.
  • All Dogs Go to Heaven: A dog dies twice.
  • Alvin and the Chipmunks: A down-on-his-luck songwriter's fortune changes when he takes in a trio of singing rodent siblings, before a Jerkass record producer entices them into record label slavery.
  • Altered States: William Hurt combines sensory deprivation with Mexican mushrooms to experience his own genetic memory, and triggers a transformation into a primitive hominid and later a blob of primordial consciousness.
  • Amadeus: An old man is still obsessed with his rival, decades after killing him.
  • Amarcord: A young man fondly recalls his life in a port town in Fascist Italy, which includes scurrilous rumors about his neighbors, his dad getting threatened by the secret police, and a sexual encounter with an obese tobacconist.
  • Amelie: A spaced-out but shy waitress plays matchmaker with her friends, whilst an old man who can never leave his apartment tries to set her up with a weird guy who works in a porn shop.
    • Or: A woman runs around an over-idyllic fantasy Paris in a way that makes social anxiety look merely cute and misunderstood.
  • American Beauty: Dirty old man fantasizes about teenager, smokes pot, dies.
  • An American Carol: Before a rally he planned, a guy's understanding of his country gets altered by two historical figures and The Grim Reaper. He helps stop zombies from trashing a courthouse and helps two Defectors From Decadence save a concert. Anvils are dropped along the way.
  • American Psycho: '80s yuppie has serious mental issues.
  • An American Werewolf in London: Two tourists get attacked by a crazy dog. Hilarity/Horror ensues.
  • The Amityville Horror: A family moves into a Haunted House and instead of leaving immediately live there for twenty-eight days for some reason.
    • Amityville II: The Possession: A guy has sex with his sister and shoots everybody because a house told him to.
    • Amityville 3-D: Cynical writer moves into a haunted house to write books, must deal with a gateway to Hell. People somehow keep breaking into the house and die because of it. IN 3-D!
    • Amityville 4: An evil lamp kills people.
    • The Amityville Curse: A guy kills people in haunted house which is somehow back despite being destroyed in an earlier installment.
    • Amityville: It's About Time: An evil clock kills people.
    • Amityville: A New Generation: An evil mirror kills people.
    • Amityville Dollhouse: An evil dollhouse kills people.
    • The Amityville: Remake of the original. Suspiciously similar to The Shining in several regards.
  • Anastasia: Orphan girl travels with two con-men to visit her grandmother she doesn't remember.
  • Animal House: Jonny Quest aims to win over his rival's blonde trophy, but is ultimately beaten to the punch by a slovenly, mostly silent Polish-American. A future theme park tour guide tricks Quest into walking into a trap set by hateful neighbors. He and his zoologically affiliated brethren later wreak vengeance on these neighbors and others like them, with the help of thousands of small glass orbs and a carnivorous-looking Batmobile.
  • Another Earth: A science fiction movie that completely ignores its own genre in favor of the story of a girl who mopes miserably after she kills a family in a drunk driving accident.
  • Antz: A neurotic guy accidentally becomes a hero to the working class, discovers a utopia, and thwarts the plans of a Stupid Evil racist, when all he wanted was to get into the pants of a princess.
  • Apocalypse Now: A soldier enters the jungle to kill a superior. It's hard to know which of the two is crazier. Guest starring Morpheus and Han Solo.
  • Apollo 13: A scientific expedition is thwarted by a flying rock. Based on a True Story.
  • Are We There Yet??: Man drives woman's kids to Canada hoping to get into her pants.
  • Disney's The Aristocats: A children's comedy film about an heiress and her children being drugged and abandoned. They later meet a vagabond who hangs out with a jazz band composed of ethnic stereotypes.
  • Around The Bend: father and son reconcile while on a road trip to bury the grandfather with the son's son.
  • The Aristocrats: One hundred comedians tell the same deliberately unfunny joke. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Arsenic and Old Lace: Little old ladies do community service. One of their nephews disapproves and thinks that they should not be up and about. They have a family reunion.
  • The Artist: Guy loses his job because he refuses to talk, while a girl gets fame out of a pencil smudge.
  • The a Team: An old guy, young guy, crazy guy and black guy find out why they were kicked out of the military.
  • Atonement: Young woman sees something, misunderstands it, and spends rest of her life regretting it.
  • Attack the Block: British teenagers VS black alien gorilla.
  • Audition: A Japanese widower looks for love by finding an actress during a movie audition. The woman he chooses is a killer who uses piano wire to cut limbs off, and has a limbless, still living man tied up in a bag at home.
    • Or - Widowed, bogus casting director would like to meet hot babe for tediously prolonged courtship. Turn ons: acupuncture, neurotoxins, rubber-wear and body modification.
  • Austin Powers: A sex addict travels through time to keep his wimpy, awkward brother from destroying the world.
  • Avatar: Crippled Space Marine goes to another planet, becomes furry both literally and figuratively. The planet and most of the life on it are one gigantic brain that might also be God.
    • The main characters want to destroy some aliens' internet. The furries are enraged and there is massive Internet Backlash, complete with a literal Flame War.
    • Blue greenies become red-faced.
  • The Avengers: Overtly narcissistic guy, overtly pompous guy, overtly angry guy, overtly patriotic guy, overtly chilly guy and overtly troubled chick are forced to join together against the pompous guy's brother.
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