Yeah it’s not a plot hole. It’s a twist. We THOUGHT it was a flashback… but it turns out that the modern scenes are just bookends.
I don’t know. The camera pushes in close to the old man’s face as we begin the hear the sounds of the ocean. That camera technique says “flashback” all over it. And then at the end Matt Damon’s face morphes into that of the old man. This further underscores the fact that we are being let in on the Damon’s character’s memories.
Plothole or plot-twist…either way, it’s very sloppy filmmaking.
Actually, I thought the best bit in that very flawed movie was Tom Hanks on his luggage-raft, tending to Meg Ryan, putting, playing a ukelele, and praying to the moon.
I liked the laser scene in Resident Evil. The rest of the movie? Eh. They needed more zombies and more “you have the green key; you need the red key.”
There was this very strange Harvey Keital/ Gerard Depardieu mob movie called Crime Spree that was HORRENDOUS but it had a very good opening scene (stealing and accidentally setting a painting on fire). There was also a pretty good scene of five French guys in a greasy-spoon diner in Chicago: “I’ll just have a glass of the house wine, please.”
I agree, it was brilliant, <Zoidberg>such acting, such emotion, todays actors could learn a thing or two from this</Zoidberg>
i’ve heard the Directors Cut (Edited by Cecil Himself) is even better 
(sorry, couldn’t resist…)
Everyone who thinks Joe Versus the Volcano isn’t a great movie should watch it again.
Anyway, my contribution to the thread – the Montage of the guy’s trip to Europe in the otherwise excerable Rules of Attraction. Everything about that movie sucked, made me angry, or (most often) both, but that scene – one third booze, one third, and one third legitimate awe at the wonder around you was the most accurate description of a college kid in Europe as I’ve ever seen.
–Cliffy
Along Came Polly was watchable thanks to all of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s scenes (especially his cries while playing basketball- “Old school!”- and his impromptu solo during a Jesus Christ Superstar rehearsal).
That’s the point. We’re supposed to think that it’s Capt. Miller visiting Pvt. Ryan’s grave but turns out it’s really the opposite.
Ha, haaa—I know that movie!
Nope, the old man is clearly wearing an AIRBORNE lapel pin. When it goes to the men in the landing craft, you should know you are not looking at a paratrooper.
You left out the best part: the guy playing the demon is doing a straight-up Billy Bob Thornton Slingblade impression throughout the entire movie. I was waiting the whole time for him to demand “Your soul… and some fried 'taters.”
I don’t know if I’d call it great, but it has enough really good scenes that it must add up to something. There’s also the scene where he’s buying the luggage, and the bit during the ceremony on the island where the natives hit the gongs, literally. How can people not love a movie with Abe Vigoda as a Jewish/Polynesian tribal chieftain with a headdress made of orange soda cans?
But, the opening is utterly brilliant, and may be the best part.
In Robocop 2, when the main drug dealer is captured, his sidekick (who’s probably about 10 years old) takes over his operation. When the mayor is holding a telethon to try to save the bankrupt city, the kid offers a deal to give him money in exchange for protection. There’s a great scene where they meet in a warehouse to make the arrangements; the mayor is cowardly and amoral, and the 10-year-old has all the trappings and clout of a major drug lord.
There’s so many. Adult anime are full of them. For example, in the otherwise subpar adult anime “Fragile Heart,” about an female sex 'droid, there are tiny bits that seem to be intimations of mortality – in one scene, she gazes at a cityscape and wishes she could go to school like actual college girls (as opposed to android college girls). In another she walks down the street past a vendor selling replacement hands and heads for androids like her. And at the very end she’s dumped in a warehouse. The camera pans across the warehouse and we see a group of discarded android bodies just like hers, now naked, battered, and piled into a heap, their powered-down features blank.
What’s really striking is all these poetic touches in an anime that’s otherwise a mindless excuse for sex scenes – I mean, immediately following the pan across the warehouse we see the protagonist having explicit sex with a gorilla, a gorilla that does not appear in, or is referenced to, anywhere else in the movie. It’s like they had this poetic ending all set up and then though, “Naaaaaah, does’t feel right, let’s throw in a gratuitous gorilla sex scene.” This is more typical of the anime as a whole. (Now there may be some Shinto or Buddhist belief that I don’t know about involving sex with gorillas in the afterlife that I don’t know about which would make the scene make sense. But I doubt it, because that kind of stuff gets around. Frex, I’ll bet that the only thing most Americans know about Islamic afterlife is the 72 virgins that violent assholes get when they die.)
So, um, there.
Whoops!
should be “one third booze, one third chicks, and one third legitimate awe…”
–Cliffy
Speaking of 2nd rate anime…anyone else ever see Amazing Nurse Nanako? Basically softcore T&A and softcore Mad Science. (And not enough of the latter, if you ask me.)
[spoiler]
Anyway, there’s a scene in the final episode where one of the main characters, a Mad Scientist who’s until then given little sign of being anything but a cold, somewhat sadistic hardass, has a dream sequence/near-death experience where he sees the “ghost” of a dead friend…a young woman he’d known as a boy, and who the series’ heroine had been cloned from, years before.
And the good doctor’s fascade just starts crumbling. The original girl’s death had shattered him, sent him on the scientific quest to save her, to bring her back. And harsh attitude towards the cloned girl now looks to be from his realization that, even if she’s made from the plans and the “parts” of the original, she was never going to be the first girl—he couldn’t save her. She was never coming back.
In the end, all he can do is give the “ghost” a spontanious hug as the dream fades to black—the only physical act of tenderness we ever see the poor man make. Not a big “Rhett and Scarlett” kiss, even though he may have been in love with her, just a simple hug. And then it’s over. All over.[/spoiler]
It’s just…sad. Poignant, really, I guess.
Another adult anime example: “Private Psycho Nurse.” The title is totally misleading: the main character is a psychotherapist, but she’s not in private practice, she works for the Japanese Dept. of Education, she’s not a nurse, and she doesn’t deal primarily with psychotics.
She travels from assignment to assignment in an attack helicopter armed with two 50mm cannons, for no particular reason. Her method of psychoanalysis involves inducing a hypnotic trance by removing her top and twirling her two enormous breasts, then insinuating herself into the breast-hypnotized person’s mind.
It’s pretty clearly shallow humor at best, mindless twaddle at worst.
The shrink’s first assignment in the anime is to help a college student who is whoring herself (she’s from a rich family and doesn’t need the money at all). The assignment is made more difficult because the student hates large-breasted women, a hatred that has lead her to do things like go to department stores and rip up bras for the well-endowed.
Now comes the strangely good part: El shrinko finally does get inside whorestudent’s head, and there’s a long sequence in which they discover that whorestudent’s mother died when she was very young, and shortly thereafter her father grew distant and uncommunicative, and whorestudent thought it was because her father blamed her for her mother’s death (it was, in fact, just grief). Her whoring was an attempt to punish herself for her mother’s death and to get the love and affection from middle-aged father figures that she didn’t get from Dad, and her hatred of large-breasted women was because she blamed her mother for the loss of Dad’s affection, and also for being dead.
Psycho Nurse is able to guide whorestudent to some buried memories where both her parents express their love and affection for her as a child, and as a result whorestudent gives up whoring.
It sounds pretty pat when you lay it all out like that, but remember, this is part of a story about a large-breasted shrink who hypnotizes patients by twirling her hooters at them, and who travels around the school districts in an attack helicopter.
I’d have to say Flowers in the Attic. A woman’s husband dies, and she moves her kids over to her mother’s Victorian mansion. The kids are forced to stay in the attic, and the movie is mainly about…kids who stay in the attic.
Louise Fletcher plays the evil grandmother, but she doesn’t really have that many lines. She apparently was willing to take any part and signed up for this turkey, but she made the most of it. When she first meets the kids, she’s really stern and tells them, “God is watching you!” and gets all rightwing fundie on their ass. When one of the kids starts complaining, she tells him “Stop whining, child!” You’d think the rest of the movie have the evil grandmother torturing the kids and them turning the tables on her and escaping at the end, but noooooo. The rest of the movie was kids staying in the attic.
Come on! You’ve got NURSE RATCHET for Og’s sake! SHOW COPIOUS MENTAL ANGUISH!!
There was an early Tom Hanks movie called “Volunteers” (I may be the only person to remember this). The memorable scene in the otherwise forgettable film: Obnoxious preppy guy [Hank] being forced to listen to eager Peace Corps volunteers singing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore”. His reaction was hilarious.
Josie and the Pussycats is on my Short list of godawful movies, but I still love the idea of Carson Daly as a stone-cold hitman.
You remembered that and not his waking up in Thailand (that first step is a doozy) or John Candy’s split personality?
How can you not like Josie and the Pussycats?
Oh, yeah, my shrink uses the same technique.
–Cliffy