re: Worst Movie Stereotypes?

"I think the decisions my fellow Southerners make in the voting booth makes us look like dumb-asses. We vote like stupid rednecks, so it's easy to pigeonhole us there," he says.

Or it could just be most script and screenwriters are lazy...

Fighting scenes where the one dude kicks the shite out of 12 guys when all they have to do is rush the dude at the same time. Boom, fight over.

Or when the group is able to do just this, but wait, the one dude explodes from the pile like in Commando.

When all it takes is one punch and someone is knocked out unconscious. Every time.

I think the problem with Southern stereotypes is that they (like most stereotypes) are very narrow in their view of what a Southerner is. The problem for filmmakers is that being Southern constitutes a lot of groups and social classes. For example, I am something like sixth generation Georgian. My mom's side of the family hails from North Georgia near Rome and Dalton. They talk slow and have some Appalachian tendencies and are what you could consider the less wealthy side of the family (though they still live comfortably by today's standards, they also tend to use cars, houses, sheds, tractors, etc. until they absolutely cannot be used anymore; they're more thrifty than poor). Meanwhile, my dad's side hails from Southwest Georgia near Columbus and tend to sound more like the Rhett Butlers and Savannah businessmen you see in movies like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Both sides are intelligent, but I think what throws people form outside the South is that they've attached that intelligence to traditions and ideals such as Religion and Heritage that causes them to shy away from the Progressiveness of the rest of the country.

ETA: This is a sentiment largely echoed in Deliverance, in which the film is less about the brutality of man on the river and more about a group of mountain people who are threatened by the growing city of Atlanta (and rightfully so, as their hills and mountains are about to be flooded to create a dam for the city). Most folks watch that movie and assume that "you hear banjos, you're in the wrong part of the South and you'd better get back to more civilized areas. But James Dickey's message in writing the novel of the movie was that we're fricking up nature, including the humans that coexist in that nature by allowing urban sprawl to consume everything.

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I love that movie, but I don't remember it portraying southerners in a positive light

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Do southerners have to be portrayed in a positive light? Especially in a film like O Brother Where Thou?

Every judge is a black woman and every minister/priest is either crooked or a molester.

All Asians know karate

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When the director is expecting me to buy Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist, sure.

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I loved it in 30 Rock when she talked about being nuclear psychiatrist in a James Bond movie.

Here's what bugs me (variant of the "jobless sailor"):

Protagonists rarely, if ever, have to worry about money.

"Well, I may be an artist who has never sold a painting, but before I was an artist, I was a corporate law partner pulling down 7 figures for ten years."

"All of this family drama is tearing me apart. Woe is me. I also happen to own land in Hawaii worth a billion dollars, and have never had to worry about money my entire life."

"I'm just a 30-year-old(insert menial--but respectable--job), and I live in a dump, and I drive a POS car, but I just happen to have $250,000 sitting around doing nothing that I can loan you so you can finance your dream."