Certain elements in cinema tend to occur in clusters.  I’m talking about groups of tropes that stick together and recur in different films with only minor alterations.  Stereotypical characters, repetitive martial arts attack patterns, overwraught exclamations and pithy wisecracks.  The big, quiet, intimidating guy who turns out to be clever/nice in the end, the post-slash pauses in sword duels, the phrase “time is the one thing we don’t have.”  You know the stuff.

I’d blame it on lazy movie-writers or audiences overly permissive of rehashed stories, but I think I’ve come to accept that cultural iconography draws strength from both creativity and predictability. Call it the tension between the familiar/comfortable and the foreign/intriguing, if you must; the end result is that we’re stuck with a big chunk of the same movie tropes for a while to come.

Somewhere out there, a film student is reading this. You can hear the rotation of ocular orbs wearing grooves in his/her skull from here.  Ah well.

So, here’s a new thought experiment for movie producers and film junkies.  Think about how to collapse groups of ideas into single pseudo-absurd entities.

For example, take two movie staples that tend to occur together in action flicks — explosions and wiseacre remarks.  What happens when you  jam ‘em into one thing?

A snarksplosion.  Smart-ass bombs.  A billowing cloud of flame and debris overlaid by a booming, sarcastic, and perfectly timed quote from the likes of J. McClane or P.B. Parker.

I’m going to channel the hypothetical reaction of millions of preteen 1980s lads everywhere.   “Awwwwesome.”