When they do so in a romantic comedy it's a giveaway that the screenwriter was too lazy and unimaginative to give their characters any hobbies that they don't have themselves.
He was a great romantic, who created supremely unromantic characters, like the gloriously unimaginative Pat Partington, whose sole comment after a first visit to Amsterdam was, "I should think it's a shocking place for catarrh".
Colin Colvert of the Star Tribune felt "Singer's sensitivity to [the discrimination themes] made the first two X-Men films surprisingly resonant and soulful for comic-based summer extravaganzas... Singer is adept at juggling large casts of three-dimensional characters, Ratner makes shallow, unimaginative bang-ups".
Henry Kelly of The Digital Fix comments that "The character models are quite basic and unimaginative - Jeremy has typically harsh features and the female characters are given skimpy outfits to show off their stereotyped fantasy physiques".
Her title character, Maria, miserable at her unimaginative boarding school, where she is constantly humiliated, runs away to her great-uncle, the warden of an Oxford college.
One sign that the movie, directed by Greg Berlanti from a screenplay by Ian Deitchman and Kristin Rusk Robinson, has its unimaginative head on straight is that its lead characters actually have jobs that the film explores in some depth.
Only Spark could so slyly, so hilariously, bend her form so as to have, on one page, her main character criticise her author for being too unimaginative to describe a hospital, then to follow it a page later with a full and unnecessary description of a hospital.
But worse, it's unimaginative, which is odd as the rest of the main characters break out of their tropes delightfully.
Her characters, introduced for the sake of example, are called by no such unimaginative titles as Mrs. A., or Miss Z., or Mr. X.; they are Mrs. Worldly, Mr. Bachelor, the Gildings, Mrs. Oldname, Mrs. Neighbor, Mrs. Stranger, Mrs. Kindhart, and Mr. and Mrs. Nono Better.
We know that Blair's characterization has been uneven at best this year, but between her childish tantrum at Dan, her awkward capitulation to her mother and the petulant blackmailing of Nelly Yuki, it's rare to see a character who has been so thoroughly cannibalized just to suit the unimaginative whims of one episode's incomprehensible plotting.
