10 Movie Cliches Everybody Hates

7. The "Ugly" Girl (Who Totally Isn't)

The "ugly ducking" is a laughably old-hat cliche that still persists in Hollywood, for some reason.

Typically it involves a conventionally attractive actor - typically a woman - being cast in the role of a bland, unattractive or even "ugly" character, owing to Hollywood's impossibly high, distorted standard of beauty compared to the realities of day-to-day life.

This is a most common trope in the rom-com genre, where the nerdy or "plain" girl gets a quick makeover and turns into a stunner.

She's All That is probably the most memorable instance from the last 20 years, as was so brilliantly sent-up in the criminally underrated spoof Not Another Teen Movie.

More recently, Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One flirted with the trope by revealing that Sam aka Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) has a port wine birthmark on her face, as though this completely diminishes her otherwise striking facial features.

You can argue that this is intended to reflect Sam's insecurity more than anything, but Spielberg doesn't adequately convey this to the audience. As a result, it's all a bit laughable.

The widespread mockery of the trope has at least made it less apparent in cinema today, though Hollywood's general barometer for attractiveness is still way off the mark.