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You Look Like Sh*t: The Megacut

Mark Frauenfelder at 12:42 pm Mon, Nov 15, 2010

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This turns out to be a popular stock phrase in Hollywood: "You look like shit."

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

  • edfreeze

    Heard it again last night on “Boardwalk Empire”, had to laugh.

  • dcamsam

    What Anon said about Glenn Close. Overall, “you look like shit” seems to mean “you look slightly more pale and smudged than your normal gorgeous self.”

  • Anonymous

    Let’s get out of here!

  • Anonymous

    I think they use that phrase so much because so many people look like shit so often.

  • jfrancis

    WE GOT COMPANY!!!!

  • Gainclone

    This video made me feel like shit.

  • sloverlord

    Even more popular: NOOOOOOOOOoooooo

  • Alan

    Bruce Willis was in there a whole lot.

  • Gainclone

    This video made me feel like shit.

  • Maddy

    I’ll bet you can do a complimentary compilation from the 20-50s where they say — “You look like hell” …

    • maxoid

      “you look like hell” is more the language i would actually use, but i still find it tricky to find an appropriate moment for it. most of the time there’s no reason to point it out. kind of like saying “the phone’s ringing” when the phone is ringing; they know, you know, and you both probably know why.

      my favorite dialogue cliche is “and besides…”
      nobody ever says that. it feels fake to say.

  • Donald Petersen

    One they really should have retired about 50 years ago:

    “Is this some kind of joke?”

  • Anonymous

    Glenn Close actually looks gorgeous as she is being told “You look like shit”

  • knodi

    I’m getting too old for this shit

  • Anonymous

    My Personal Favorite Cliche is the exasperated, “What do you want from me?!”

  • ousterj

    Singer/Songwriter Loudon Wainwright III liked that old lines so much that he wrote a song.

    http://www.ousterhout.net/mp3/lwiii/Loudon_Wainwright_III-The_Shit_Song.mp3

  • nehpetsE

    My peeve is the “GLONKSH” sound cue every time light sources are turned on or off.
    Anyone know if there’s a trade name for it?

  • Li5y

    Hollywood has a twisted definition of “looking like shit”, a lot of these people look fine x)

    Also: Is it racist to say a black person looks like shit? Hahaha

  • Sagodjur

    “Geez, I feel like one of us should be saying… ‘I’m too old for this shit.’”

  • That Neil Guy

    Imagine how long the “Let’s get out of here!” compilation would be.

  • IronyElemental

    Hammered shit? Is this a handicraft or a sport of some kind?

  • shraga

    I bet most of these people aren’t here to make friends either.

  • penguinchris

    Pretty great – and not something you normally think of as a cliche, until it’s pointed out. I’m sure we’ll all be thinking of this every time we hear it in a movie in the future.

    This one I’m not really sure I understand – I thought of this one time when I heard it in a movie (not realizing at that point how often it’s used) – do people in real life actually say this?

    Obviously movie dialogue is only loosely based on anything real people ever say, but this in particular seems particularly unrealistic, even though it’s such a simple phrase.

    I bet it’s something people do actually say now, because they’ve heard it so many times in movies!

    One thing I wish people who do these kinds of videos would do is to make a list of all the clips and the years the movies were made so you can try to figure out how the cliches progressed. It’d be hard to find the first instance of something, but it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out what early use of it would have been widely seen and thus copied.

  • snarf

    Many well observed peeves in this thread. My personal favorite is the line “son of a bitch”. In almost every single action movie from the 80′s and 90′s, this phrase shows up.

  • MrJM

    I’m too old to look like shit.

  • Anonymous

    How about a similar video of all the time holloywood characters have sat at a computer and said ‘we’re in’?

  • Anonymous

    Are you crazy? It’s just crazy enough to work! Neither of those ever made any sense to me, but somehow all those b-grade actors kept saying it to each other as they tossed helplessly in the blissful senselessness of their b-grade plots…

  • Anonymous

    i think you’ll find the most overused phrase in cinema is
    ‘watch out!’

  • Anonymous

    Then…we wait.

  • Astragali

    So to be absolutely certain of not looking like shit, we should have a shave, take a shower and then go to sleep, right?

    • Mark Crummett

      That’s how I do it.