< Mundane Made Awesome

Mundane Made Awesome/Film

  • In Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Robert De Niro manages to make life as an air-conditioning repairman look like the most Badass career imaginable. It Makes Sense in Context.
  • The Social Network has one of the most exciting sequences involving computer programming in a movie. There are scenes of a sexy college party spliced in.
  • No Country for Old Men averts this trope. There is a distinct lack of background music (the entire movie features only 16 minutes of music altogether, and some of that is from the end credits), yet even the most mundane tasks in the movie are intense and terrifying.
  • American Psycho and business cards. Extreme close-ups, slow motion reveals, tense narration - the main character even breaks down mentally and starts sweating and shaking when someone has a better business card than him. This is quite intentional, as the main character, as the title implies, is nuts.
    • The hilarious results of Luis Carruther, present to watch the first business card battle, getting his own gold business card just to be a part of the group (and whose card is also revealed in slow-motion and overblown dramatic effect). The result? A straight-faced Patrick puts on a pair of gloves and follows him into the bathroom to strangle him. It doesn't exactly go as planned.
    • Justified as part of the dramatic purpose of the work was to illustrate the hyper-competitive, narcissistic, facile, materialist nature of the 1980s, particularly among the business class.
      • And that, according to the DVD commentary, it's meant to have sexual overtones, like girls comparing breasts in the locker room.
  • Secondhand Lions features a sleepwalking, nightshirt-clad Robert Duvall swordfighting with a toilet plunger, accompanied by clanging sound effects and an epic orchestral score. Its silliness is outweighed by just how awesome it is.
  • Angel Heart: Robert De Niro, as Louis Cypher, eats a hard-boiled egg. Then again, he's just compared that egg to the human soul.
  • All of Michael Bay's Armageddon, of which critics complain it looks like a giant trailer.
  • The Batman films, including The Dark Knight Saga, are notorious for this. Apparently Batman putting on his clothes is worthy of dramatic camera angles and epic Danny Elfman/Elliot Goldenthal/Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard music. To wit:
  • Bowfinger does it with the arrival of FedEx. The reason is that it represents success for struggling bottom-feeding movie producer Bowfinger: every day the FedEx truck goes by, delivering scripts to working producers. Seeing the courier walking to his door is a validating moment of huge importance.
  • Parodied in the beginning of Bruce Almighty, using slo-mo as well as "cheesy inspirational music" to celebrate the creation of the world's biggest cookie. Later on, Bruce turns looking at a bowl of soup into an awesome moment. He splits it like the Red Sea. (Note: tomato soup.)
  • A scene near the climax of Bullitt (a film which notably featured one of the most legitimately awesome car chases in the history of cinema, shot in a fashion that would seem almost minimalist by today's action movie standards) revolves around EXTREME DOCUMENT PRINTING.
    • Hey, they had a fax machine! How cool is that??!!
      • At some point, every last bit of technology now used on an everyday basis and taken for granted was top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art technology at one point. As Technology Marches On, we often conveniently forget just how exciting something like a fax machine could be in 1968. You know, when The White Album was a new release. We'll likely think that way about i Phones in a decade's time.
  • In Dungeons and Dragons, Jeremy Irons' acting was two notches above everyone else—and his eyebrows' acting was five notches over him. Those eyebrows deserve an award of some kind. He wasn't used to having so much green-screening done, and felt the need to compensate for the then-absent dragons, magic, and other factors by making everything as Damn Awesome as he could make it.
  • Elektra suffers intensely from this. At one point, Elektra, moving into a house, unpacks her toiletries to the accompaniment of the kind of disjointed editing and tense, thumping background music that usually accompanies things like billion-dollar heists and the assembly of homemade death-traps.
    • Apparently, Elektra was supposed to have a genuine Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, the relevance of which is mainly on the cutting room floor, so the odd "unpacking of the toiletries" scene would have been a plot point of some sort.
  • The commercial for "Brawndo" energy drink from the film Idiocracy has an over-enthusiastic announcer who shouts every other set of words. It's got electrolytes!
    • It also made riding a pony awesome.
      • And driving ice cream trucks full of angry bees through petting zoos to become popular.
  • The opening of The Ipcress File has the main character getting up, getting dressed, making and eating breakfast, all to the accompaniment of one of the most haunting movie themes ever composed. However, this is deliberate and emphasizes the unglamorous take on spies found throughout the movie.
    • It also establishes Harry Palmer as a forward-looking man of his time, as Britain comes out of post-war austerity. A man who grinds his own beans to make real coffee is something unusual. Later, he seduces a woman by cooking an omelette.
    • Hey, a man who can cook is sexy!
  • In one scene just before the climax of Iron Man, Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane turns the act of taking a sip of whiskey into a long, intense, incredibly menacing event. As one reviewer put it, "he drinks the shit out of a glass of Scotch."
  • A notable scene in Inglourious Basterds shows the character Shoshanna in slow detail with a prominent soundtrack as she goes through the task of...putting on makeup. Granted, it was probably meant to be ironic.
    • She was putting on her war paint before going out to face Adolf Hitler. Still counts as this trope, though.
    • Christoph Waltz drank the shit out of a glass of milk and made strudel seem dangerous.
  • The 2005 King Kong has Jack Driscoll typing the letters to spell out "Skull Island" onto his typewriter with odd camera effects.
    • Similar method is employed in Lighthouse when the main character is typing the main villain's name on her typewriter.
  • 300 used slow motion, camera effects and a voice-over to add AQ (Awesome Quotient) to many scenes. Not all of them worked out. Or did they?
  • In a parody of The Right Stuff (the commentary track shows the producers were amused by the fact that people kept thinking it was spoofing Armageddon instead), the various monsters of Monsters, Inc. walking on to the factory floor. Done with slow motion, dramatic music, and a strong backlight as they heroically...begin their typical day at work. The fake outtake from the end credits take it even further, having a character trip and start a chain reaction of the monsters falling, all without stopping the slow motion and music.
  • The Wizard (film) loves to play mundane things as godlike artifacts. For example, the Power Glove is made to look like some high tech cybernetic enhancement, which is about the opposite of what it really was. Ironically, that scene shows just how "bad" it is, with the footage of Rad Racer being a mediocre at best performance (so much for his Informed Ability). And SUPER! MARIO! BROTHERS! THREEEEEEEE! (Then again, that game is pretty awesome.)
    • The truant officer's equal parts mystified/horrified cry of "WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!" as the kids escape his clutches by boarding an elevator.
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie calls out This Island Earth for doing this at one point. Having shown the characters close up images of his devastated homeworld on the viewscreen, the alien character orders "Normal view" and we are treated to a static ten-second shot of our characters looking at a viewscreen now simply showing a planet, while the orchestra gives it the full dramatic PAH PAH PAAAAAAH!! PAH PAH PAAAAAAAA!! treatment.
    • Mike, Tom and Crow: "Nor-mal view! NOR-mal view! NOR-MAL view! NOOOR-MAAAL VIIIEEEW!!!"
      • There is an eerie similarity between this melody and the opening to Antonio Lotti's Crucifixus.
    • A recurring joke in Mystery Science Theater 3000 was to punctuate scenes like this with comments along these line:

(A teenager starts drink a coke as if he were in some kind of soft drink commercial)
Tom Servo: (As the teenager) I'm gonna drink the hell out of this coke!

      • Mike: Does this tepid little scene really warrant DUHNN!!! DUHNN-DUH-DUHNN!!!?
  • Mocked in Shaun of the Dead. It takes the "tooling up" segments of horror movies (specifically the Evil Dead films), and makes them things like getting ready for work. XTREME TOILET FLUSH!
    • Also heavily used in the director's later parody/homage of cop movies, Hot Fuzz. The concept is taken and beaten into the ground, with dramatic paperwork (with Dual-Wielding pens akimbo, dramatic murder-via-baked-beans, dramatic hitting-somebody-over-the-head-with-a-peace-lily, dramatic travelling-across-England, dramatic putting-change-on-a-counter, etc. It's somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

Petrol station assistant: Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?
Angel: No...this is something I have to do myself.

    • Hitting a giant with a potted plant isn't just dramatic—it's off the fuckin' chain!
      • It was probably more about the Bond One-Liner and the irony of beating someone down with a peace lily.
  • In the first two Star Trek films, turning on the Enterprise's exterior floodlights (especially the one lighting up the registry number), is given an EPIC treatment.
    • Crosses the line into Scenery Porn. But they had to fill the time up with something.
    • Arguably this was a case of Knowing Your Audience, considering that in many theaters the registry number reveal was applauded (not ironically, either). That whole scene was a love letter to the fans, who were only ever given sparse looks at the Enterprise during the series and loved the darn ship about as much as the characters taking their time inspecting it did.
    • Also arguably Stock Footage, since most, if not all, of the lighting sequence in Khan is recycled from TMP.
    • The second movie also subverts the grandeur of the fist movie's "tour" scene, with Kirk barely glancing at the Enterprise during the approach.
  • Star Trek: Insurrection combines this with Conservation of Ninjitsu. After the bad guys send down a bunch of small, flying robot drones that shoot darts, the heroes' encounter with dozens of them is treated like a standard mid-movie action scene. Their later battle against just five drones is given a far more epic treatment, including a Spaghetti Western style staredown with the drones before they draw their weapons.
  • Riff Trax, the spiritual sequel to Mystery Science Theater 3000, has used the joke in a similar manner:

Woman: I am so taking the stairs.
Bridget Nelson: So taking the stairs, I'm gonna take the hell out of those stairs!

  • Rocky turned running up the stairs into a cultural phenomenon!
    • Pretty sure that was intended to appeal to people who, as part of training for some sport or other, have run stairs. It's harder than it looks. Also, it happens at the end of the Training Montage, which always gets the slow-motion/dramatic music treatment.
    • Living in Philadelphia it's not that uncommon to see somebody actually run up the 72 steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (where it was shot). Sure, they might just be in a hurry or exercising, but not when they turn around at the top with a jump, maybe shadowbox, and generally pump their fists in the air, Rocky style.
  • Wanted has some of this—though it's hard to see mundane acts in that movie (Wesley and Fox's kiss probably counts).
  • Casino Royale had some very dramatic music playing during James Bond's drive from the airport to his hotel. The clincher was that he was driving in a Ford Mondeo, which is a far cry from 007's usual Cool Car.
    • Dr. No and From Russia with Love, being the first two Bond movies (not counting the original, unofficial "Casino Royale 1967"), use the Bond theme at every situation possible, even simple ones such as Bond's airplane arriving and 007 driving to the beach.
      • But to be fair, at the time international travel and beach holidays weren't as common place as they are today.
  • "We want... [dramatic chord] A SHRUBBERY!!"
  • Stardust has an odd habit of putting very dramatic music and sweeping wide shots in scenes of everyone travelling. Okay, fair enough when it's a flying pirate ship. Not so much when it's just people walking. It's Scenery Porn music.
  • For 3 men standing around in a graveyard and doing nothing for five whole minutes, the final triello between the three protagonists of The Good the Bad And The Ugly is made awesome thanks to dramatic camera angles and awesome music. It is pretty awesome.
    • Three men eying each other carefully, waiting to kill the other two, not wanting to make the first move because the other two will focus on him. What do you mean it's not Awesome?
    • Also, a man running in a graveyard turns into an epic scene thanks to "The Ecstasy of Gold".
  • Tommy - Pinball: the new religion! Pete Townshend wanted to keep the Rock Opera from getting too "pretentious". He also wanted the concept to appeal to the president of his label, who he knew liked pinball. Townshend also wanted an element that was "slightly sleazy" and teenage. Keith Moon also suggested to place Tommy's "miracle cure" following in a British holiday camp. The goofy, sing-along quality of the theme for "Tommy's Holiday Camp".
  • The documentary The Nation State introduces all of the guest professors in the film by doing a black-and-white, slow-motion close-up as the professor turns his head toward the camera, with (in some cases) dramatic music playing in the background. An anthropology class bursts into laughter.
  • Stephen Chow plays with this in many films such as God of Cookery, Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, dramatizing in slow motion and special effect hyperbole cooking, eating, and playing soccer, among other more mundane activities, which even manage to inspire sudden musical numbers to break out.
  • Dhoom 2 invokes this trope all the time. One of the most Egregious examples also involves Product Placement. As Jai Dixit theorizes about the antagonist, we see Mr. A in his Supervillain Lair. One of his inventions is a bracelet that can pull anything magnetic towards him. So naturally... he pulls a can of Coca-Cola towards him, and drinks it as the movie's theme song plays. never mind that Coca-Cola cans are made of aluminum.
  • Kevin Costner, aka The Postman, awesomely delivers mail. Behold!
  • Part of the humor of Blades of Glory is how seriously the protagonists take such a "sissy" sport.
  • The Stinger of Monsters vs. Aliens features the most epic coffee request ever.
    • Also, Doctor Cockroach's PHD... IN DANCE!!! That one is justified, though, given the results.
  • Documentaries about apocalypse in 2012 get into this. In one, the narrator is talking about the possibility of Earth's magnetic field shifting, causing technological breakdowns, spontaneous earthquakes, and other horrendous effects. Said narrator says all of this in suitably dramatic fashion...which is somewhat undermined by his giving exactly the same emphasis when he points out that "Your compass will not point in the same direction any more."
  • If WarGames is anything to go by, library research is incredibly cool and exciting.
  • The climactic rugby match in Invictus ends with—the Springboks already being in the lead—the referee running out the clock, complete with slow-motion extreme close-ups of his watch as the seconds tick by with dramatic slamming sounds.
  • Up in the Air features epic "packing your bags".
    • Not intended to be epic, it's intended to show how quickly Ryan can do it.
  • Scotland, PA has a scene where Mac breaks up a food fight by kicking the two guys out of the restaurant. It happens in dramatic slo-mo, with an epic, orchestral score playing over it. Afterward, the entire restaurant applauds him.
  • The climactic scene of Amadeus features the highly dramatic activity of ... taking down music dictation. ("G sharp?" "Of course.")
  • This is reversed, in a way, in Snatch in which Brick Top very calmly (or, as calmly as Brick Top can muster) explains why he feeds people to pigs, whilst sipping a cup of tea. However, when he stands up and asks, "Do you know what 'nemesis' means?" everybody shits their pants to the tune of some pretty dark score.
    • The movie makes Cousin Avi's airplane flights to and from England seem more exciting than the fight scenes, with close-ups, quick cuts, and loud music. Drinking a shot has never looked so epic.
  • Some mundane scenes in Dario Argento's Phenomena are coupled with sudden blasts of heavy metal music or the film's theme song.
  • The destruction of the Piscatory Ring shakes the Pillars of Heaven as the movie version of Angels & Demons shows it. Then again, what isn't epic in Vatican City?
  • The typing of Schindler's List. Justified as this is Schindler's last hurrah, and every name that goes on the list is one more Jew that doesn't have to die.
  • The entire opening sequence of Toy Story 3.
  • Office Space: the sequence in which the three protagonists infect the company's computer with a virus: slow motion, hip-hop music, and a sound effect of a gunshot as one of them clicks a mouse to activate the virus. The same devices are used when the photocopier/fax machine meets its ultimate fate, although in that case it starts to cross over into mildly disturbing territory.
  • Any time the "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" theme from Kill Bill by Tomoyasu Hotei is played in a film to accompany a sequence (see: Michael Bay's Transformers for an example. Although, given the first use of the theme was in a Quentin Tarantino film, it's entirely possible he was consciously invoking this trope.
  • In Free Willy, after noticing a leak in the tank, a guard menacingly eats a piece of popcorn while a Dramatic Sting plays.
  • Saturday Night Fever: Only Tony Manero (and the actor playing him, John Travolta) could make walking down the streets of Brooklyn with a paint can in one hand (and two slices of pizza in the other during a brief period), swaggering to and fro as he checks out women and the scenery, seem like an epic moment of pure, distilled awesome. The soundtrack helps.
  • Speaking of Travolta, in Battlefield Earth he seems to realize that blowing the leg off a stationary, placid cow isn't the mind-blowing feat of marksmanship he'd hoped it'd be, so he starts trick shooting. Now, instead of watching a dreadlocked, 9 foot tall John Travolta shoot a cow, we are watching a dreadlocked, 9 foot tall John Travolta shooting a cow while pirouetting like a ballerina.
  • An "unintentional" version occurs in This Is Spinal Tap during the "Stonehenge" sequence. The set for a song about Stonehenge is constructed exactly as specified on a sketch (drawn by someone who got the symbols for feet and inches mixed up), resulting in a Stonehenge set that's a foot and a half tall instead of the intended 18 feet. It's brought in behind the lead singer during the song, so he doesn't realize this until after he's already been describing the awesome mystic power and majesty of Stonehenge for some time.
  • In the German movie Schtonk! (the one about the faked Hitler diaries), the journalist when he reads the first entry. (He's a big fan of Adolf Hitler; the magazine in question in Real Life was rather on the left side, but for some strange reason still employed him.) What the (remember, fake) entry is about? "Hitler" writing how he suffers from too much gas, and Eva Braun saying he has halitosis.
  • When trying out Toothless' new tail How to Train Your Dragon uses epic music and a touch of Jittercam to make a simple turn awesome.
  • At one point in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, while he is preparing for the face-off against Jason Schwartzman's Gideon Graves, the last and most powerful of the Evil Exes, Michael Cera's Scott Pilgrim ties his sneakers.
    • This particular brand of parody is a trademark of director Edgar Wright, whose other films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are mentioned on this page, as well as his TV series Spaced. EVERYTHING in an Edgar Wright film is EPIC. Hot Fuzz is mentioned further up the page, but still, following a traditionally cool gunfight with the resulting paperwork endeared the film to real cops, and with Dual-Wielding pens, crash zooms and whip pans, it's Michael Bay paperwork.
    • You could argue that the main idea behind Spaced is the parodying of this trope.
  • Lampshaded in High Anxiety. At the beginning of the film, Mr. Brooks' character walks through an airport accompanied by strident orchestral music. When he finally reaches the exit, he proclaims, "What a dramatic airport!"
  • The opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey will make you want to give planet Earth a standing ovation.
    • This applies to nearly every other long sequence in the movie, especially being that with the monkeys in the first act.
  • In Pulp Fiction, Jules manages to turn the act of taking a bite out of someone's burger and then drinking ALL of his Sprite into one of the most intimidating things ever.
  • In Kung Fu Panda, Po's training is completed by Po and Shifu having an epic kung fu fight...over a dumpling.
  • Arguably, the Vanity Plates of many film companies count as this. All that epic fanfare and sometimes epic visuals to send the audience a very clear message: "YOU ARE ABOUT TO WATCH A MOVIE!"
    • The THX logo takes it even further. "SAID MOVIE HAS DIGITALLY MASTERED AUDIO!!"
    • Universal: "ALSO, AMERICA!"
  • Climbing up to Pride Rock in The Lion King
  • As if sealing the deal on his Crazy Awesome credentials, Kato makes opening bottles epic.
  • Inception: Never has a van falling off a bridge been so epic
  • The 90s Chow Yun-fat movie God of Gamblers is widely regarded as the Trope Codifier for a good reason. Look on, ye lesser mortals, as Chow Yun Fat WALKS INTO A ROOM!
  • The Room has a particularly noticeable example. When Mark shaves his beard, they zoom in directly on his face and play dramatic music...for no good reason. Since the entire movie consists of loosely strung together BLAM moments, what do we expect?
  • Slasher Film Sledgehammer features an obscene amount of slow-motion and freeze frame for such mundane things as a couple walking across a field and a girl plugging something into a wall socket.
  • Death Proof: You have never before seen a man eat nachos relentlessly.
  • Back to The Future: "Lou, give me a milk!" (slams a nickel onto the counter) "CHOCOLATE!"
    • He grabs the glass without looking, takes one epic swig of it, and slams the glass right back down on the counter! This is probably the first, and hopefully the last, time you will ever see the term "epic swig."
  • The Tree of Life spends the whole movie in this mode. Especially prominent when immense music and frantic camera angles accompany scene after scene of kids running in a yard, kids sleeping in bed, kids snuggling with their mother, over and over and over again.
  • In Dark of the Moon, Simmons walks across a room, picks up a passport, and puts on a jacket. Pretty mundane stuff, except for the epic music and crazy angle/focus of the scene making it look like a spy movie.
  • UHF does this in a commercial for the fake film Conan the Librarian. A man asks Conan where he can find a book on Astronomy. Conan responds by lifting him up by the collar so that the man is inches from his face, and says in a menacing voice "Don't you know the Dewey Decimal System!?"
  • Kate Beckinsale's character in Van Helsing is introduced in slow motion with epic music as she...stands up and turns around. That's it. True, it segues into an action sequence, but since she's a Faux Action Girl anyway, the impact is lost.
  • AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!
  • Indian action movie Singham: the love-child of this trope and Serial Escalation.
  • The Fellowship of the Ring has truly awesome footage of - nine guys walking.
  • The climactic scene of The Natural goes bananas with this.
  • The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. The battle is won...the newborns are defeated. Now tremble as Jane...WALKS THROUGH THE FOREST.
  • Showgirls lets us watch as Nomi Malone ketchups the fuck out of a plate of fries.
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