Garage Days is a 2002 Australian movie directed by Alex Proyas. It's about an unnamed garage band in Sydney and their conflicts as they work toward finding their big break. Each band member (and several secondary characters) get plot arcs as the movie builds toward its climax.
Garage Days uses the following tropes:
- Bondage Is Bad: Averted when Lucy and Tanya have sex. It turns out that being tied to the bed and given electric shocks during the act was his perfect 10.
- Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: Tanya's reaction when she discovers that Lucy accidentally gave them LSD: “I'm going to rip open your skull and piss in the cavity where your brain is supposed to be!”
- Egg Sitting: Joe takes care of a cantaloupe to demonstrate to Kate that he'd be a good father. It gets weird.
- Embarrassing First Name: Inverted with Lucy. He has a perfectly serviceable first name, Lucius, but goes by “Lucy” instead.
- Exact Words: Lucy won't sell the drugs he makes, because that would be pushing. He will, however, give concertgoers the drugs under the guise of “research”, and ask for “donations”.
- Fauxlosophic Narration: Occasionally. The film has the occasional “arty” sequence where it goes into slow-mo, the color palette shifts, and we're treated to a character's internal monologue.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: Joe, in a fairly mundane version of this trope. He wants a normal life with Kate and their baby, as opposed to the secrets, lies, and drama that surrounds his secret relationship with Angie.
- Indulgent Fantasy Segue: Freddy, frequently.
- The Killer Becomes the Killed: More precisely, “the guy who tied up and robbed the pharmacist becomes a pharmacist and gets tied up and robbed.”
- Lampshaded Double Entendre: Lucy, regarding pool: “It's such a sexual game. Balls, stick...”Tanya: “Choice of holes?”
- Lousy Lovers Are Losers: When Freddy and Tanya have sex at the beginning it's a pretty spectacular failure; he was daydreaming about being a rockstar the whole time and didn't notice she wasn't enjoying herself. When he gets offended when she picks up her vibrator afterward, Tanya retorts, "Pay attention and maybe you'll learn something."
- Masturbation Means Sexual Frustration: After Freddy is unable to satisfy Tanya because he was too caught up in a rockstar daydream during sex, she unapologetically reaches over for her vibrator, much to his distress.Freddy: Oh, for Christ's sake!
Tanya: Pay attention! You might learn something. - Mistaken for Cheating: Arguably the Most Triumphant Example. Freddy thinks Joe is cheating on Kate. Kate thinks that Joe is cheating on her. Joe thinks he's cheating on Kate. Joe isn't cheating, he's mentally ill. Angie, to whom Freddy overheard Joe talking, is a hallucination.
- Mushroom Samba: Lucy. He instigates the two "fun with drugs" sequences, and his subplot begins when he homebrews drugs in a search for the “perfect 10”, his expression for the ultimate high.
- The Reveal: Two big ones.
- Joe is mentally ill. Much of what we've seen of his private life, including the girl with whom he was cheating on Kate, have been his hallucinations.
- The band sucks.
- Sanity Slippage: Joe's subplot revolves around his deteriorating mental health. Because the viewers often experience his delusions as he does, it's not immediately obvious that he's insane. See Mistaken for Cheating above.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: The band sucks. Upon getting their big break, they get completely rejected by the crowd. As far as the band itself is concerned, nothing they did throughout the movie mattered.
- Shaped Like Itself: “Sexual frustration can be... frustrating.”
- Trailers Always Spoil: A major plot twist is given away on the poster.
