After the beep

Recently, while aimlessly flipping channels, I stumbled onto the movie Killshot. It was shot in and around the Toronto area and I know a couple of actors who had smaller roles in it so I thought I'd watch it for a bit. Okay, so basically there are two killers who are trying to, er...kill people. There's a scene where killer one, Mickey Rourke (the deadly but respectful one) and killer two, Joesph Gordon-Levitt (the young pyschotic one), have Diane Lane held captive while they wait for her husband to come home so they can kill them both. While they're waiting the phone rings and everyone freezes thinking it might be the husband but no one answers so it goes to the answering machine. But whoever is calling doesn't leave a message and the suspense continues.

I HATE this. Who has answering machines anymore? I know of one person, ONE, who still has an answering machine, everyone else has voicemail. But the other characters and the audience can't hear voicemail messages so, in movieland, everyone has answering machines. This is lazy writing. Unless you're writing a movie set in my mum's house think of something else. The answering machine is dead.