Realism is a style choice, not a Commandment. And movies are stories, not real life. It just happens to be cheaper and easier than making everything up, so you see more of it. Audiences 'get it' faster than they do other styles. The Commandment is: Keep the Audience. When you stack straight reality up against pretty, it loses every time. It loses even faster if you stack it up against wasting screen time, and fastest of all against hiding the money. So:
Generic Scene #1 - Wet pavement in the dark in an urban setting. It simply does not rain that much, and no one in the shot carries an umbrella
Wet streets double the light sources in their reflections, putting visual detail in black emptiness cheaply. DoPs (the shooters who take the pix) love 'em. Generally not used if the BGs full of extras, because they animate the frame and get in the way of the water trucks, but look for your brollies there. You don't weigh down principals w/ unneeded props that get in their way. It's been a visual cliché since forever (See
Mad Magazine #1). So's lipstick. Both still look better than the alternative. Realism loses to style.
Generic Scene #2 - Parking spots right in front of Manhattan or similar office buildings that always seem available to the main characters to park in
. Only if they can't figure out how to start the scene somewhere better. Reality would be the 'shoe leather' of searching for a spot, then walking to the building. Everyone would rather start the scene twelve floors up already in the office, but they thought the story needed to show how they got there. Complainers should note the spaces are always double, so parallel parking in reverse is not required. And in Manhattan, where loading restrictions do clear building fronts, the gaffe is arriving by cab, and having the bill all settled before it stops. Better writing and directing usually gets these expensive, silly scenes cut, rather than shot. But if they must be, realistic boring detail loses to screentime zip.
Annoying Trait - No rearview mirrors in cars. It's done so that people in the back seats can be seen from the front, and so that shots from the rear do not capture the cameras behind - but god is it annoying
More annoying is paying some actor $25,000 an hour and looking at the footage and realizing there was a blank blob hovering over, or blocking her expensive face. And that you paid an entire expensive crew t watch it happen. Whether it was the mirror, or the wee mount stuck to the glass after the grips removed the mirror (and
everyone on set will try to protect the money and remove it), it will definitely anger the producer. When she's asked what to shoot, her answer is always "shoot the money". Realism loses again. Generally from the back seat you just tilt the mirror to show the headliner, or make use of it to show faces in front. In fact it's often replaced with an optically better or bigger mirror. If it's gone, it's more likely either someone lost it or forgot to put it back, or again, because it would be blocking the money shot out the windshield. Like the giant explosion that took a week to set up, and, to coin a phrase, 'If they were looking for that, we've wasted all this money. Lose the mirror'.
Like all clichés, these things are over-used because they are useful. Better creators know and avoid them, but they serve their storytelling purpose. Nobody buys twelve dollar tickets to watch reality.
But if you want clichéd scenes, unrealistic settings and actions, reality TV is your goldmine.
