I know this has been done but I would like an updated list. It has to be a serious movie (no Harry Potter). But something they put in to make a point or for dramatic effect . And it has to piss you off for them to think you’re that stupid!!!
example:
Steven Segal’s Fire Below : He has the gun on a guy that is covered with gasoline and standing in a pool of gas leaking from a gas pump he ran over. Stevie lights a flare and throws it at him. The guy jumps and catches it before it hits the ground/gas. then Stevie shoots the lit end off the flare leaving only the stalk in the guys hand. then before the lit end hits the ground , he shoots it again, distinguishing it so that it harmlessly falls into the gasoline. this is suppose to show how good a shot he is and scare the bad guy into telling his boss.
but it pissed me off and I turned off the movie. Felt dirty, went and took a shower.
aahh… have i missed something? it was some time ago when i saw it, but… i´m still under impression that “fire below” was not a serious film? nor segal a serious actor for that matter.
i mean, why would anybody bother searching actionfilm about supermacho übermensch for plot or whatever holes? if to watch it at all, then for fireworks, right? and maybe i´m mistaken, but aren´t those films produced by people who think the same way? or was it promoted as an artistic film?
I recently saw “Random Harvest” for the first time, and was expecting a first-class tearjerker. I mean, Ronald Colman? Greer Garson? HAD to be good. As the movie unreeled, however, I couldn’t help but notice [spoilers ahead]:
• Amnesiac Ronald escapes from a mental institute and nearly kills one of Greer’s best friends; but 30 seconds after meeting him, she abandons her home and life to run away with him?
• Ronald sells ONE FREELANCE ARTICLE to a newspaper, and on that, he and Greer rent a huge cottage? Feh.
• Ronald gets bonked on the head and forgets all about Greer and their baby, and gets engaged to Susan Peters. Susan soon says, “Well, you’re the only man I will ever love—but I have the feeling there may once have been someone else in your past, so I’m going to break off our engagement. Bye-eee!” Right.
• Years later, Greer tracks down Ronald and gets a job as his secretary, never telling him they used to be married, BECAUSE IT MIGHT UPSET HIM. Ronald is going, “Oh, if ONLY someone would tell me what I did and who I met during those blank years!” and Greer just sits there like a lox.
I am amazed Carol Burnett never did a parody of this movie. And don’t even get me STARTED on "An Affair to Remember . . . "
Super cool ship travels through a black hole and vanishes. Ship mysteriously comes back, unmanned. New crew goes to check it out. Turns out everybody on board went insane and died violently. As the new crew is investigating, they start going dying too.
Wow, suspense! On the edge of my seat! Ooh, we’re about to find out what happened to it…it went…it went to… HUH?! To hell? WTF? What a stupid ass waste of a movie. This blows. I wonder if Seinfeld is on…
Thank you, thank you. This brilliant dramatic interpretation of my reaction while watching that incredible waste of good acting talent known as Event Horizon was brilliantly conceived, brilliantly written, brilliantly performed by me. The movie, on the other hand, was not quite so brilliant as my dramatization, which is really sad. It started out as a great science fiction movie, and turned into a cheap-ass stereotype monster movie ("hey, our crew is dying, being killed off one by one by some mysterious thing! You guys go that way, I’ll go into this dark corridor by myself. Maybe I won’t get killed as soon as we’re separa-gaaackkkkkk!!!
OK, Screech . . . Though it’s been a long time since I laffed my way through THAT one (I mean the Cary Grant/Deborah Kerr version). My main complaint is that Cary and Deborah meet and fall madly and love and there will never be anyone else for each other . . . But Deb stands up Cary and refuses to tell him she was crippled BECAUSE IT MIGHT UPSET HIM.
Then, you’ve got Cary becoming an awful, Leroy Neiman-esque “painter.” Did you SEE the godawful canvases he’s supposed to have done?! I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they really were Neimans. When Cary finally finds out Deb is crippled and she sees one of his paintings, she gushes, “Oh darling—if you can paint, I can walk!” To which I cracked to my viewing companion, “If he can paint, I can FLY!”
The last 10 minutes of the otherwise very well-executed Heat starring Robert DeNiro, Al Pachino, Val Kilmer and Ashley Judd. Everything is building up to a climax and then…every single character does exactly the one thing that character would never do. Suddenly, these extremely intelligent characters turn stupid. It ruined a great movie.
BTW - since when can any Steven Segall movie be considered “serious?”
As I recall, her refusal to tell him wasn’t just based on not wanting to upset him. Rather, it was something to the effect of not wanting to “burden him by making him feel obliged to spend his life with a cripple”.
I think there was potentially some interesting psychological nuance to the whole thing: Was Deb wallowing in self-pity to the extent that she couldn’t conceive of someone still loving her – or could she not bear the thought of being rejected by Cary because of her affliction, so she preemptively dumps him, thus at least leaving her with the memory of him as her true love? Did she really still think he was a cad deep down, and was she somehow angry with herself for falling for him?
But all this potential melodramatic angst is stillborn. Deb explains the situation, and her not-wanting-to-burden-him reasoning, to her companion in the cab on the way home, and is so casual about it that you’d think she was discussing which hat she had decided to wear to the show. When Cary shows up at her apartment, she doesn’t seem wracked with inner turmoil, she just seems annoyed with him for not leaving.
I can only assume that both actors and director were just “phoning the whole thing in” rather than really considering the potential depth of the situation. I think superficial performances were the rule back in those days, and actors less frequently reached deep into their characters’ psyches. Of course, there are shortcomings to the more modern approach as well…
I talk about stupid things in a Van Damme esque point of view. More movies with him in it have absolutely the dumbest things in the world. One of the worlds worst happened in Hard Target.
Guy on motorcycle misses The Damme and sits there, gun empty. Van Damme has a 45 levelled at him
Does he shoot him? NO
He kicks a GASOLINE CAN toward the guy THEN shoots it, causing it to explode and blowing said guy out of wall.
Does the can have enough vapors to explode?
Does the can actually contain gas instead of, water, coca cola, piss?
Is there any real need to just plug the dork and take his motorcycle?
Makes me wish Woo went back and did HK movies. Makes me also wish coke brain Damme goes back to wherever he is from and become a short order cook.
“Scent Of A Woman” was great until they ran it through the Happy Ending Machine. Suddenly, all of Pacino’s and O’Donnell’s problems are solved in a few minutes, the bad kids are justly rebuked, and Pacino meets his dream woman on his way out the door. Spare me. I was hoping for a semi-realist ending up until then, but once I saw how it was turning out I felt cheated. The only thing they missed was for Al to yell out, “Hoooah! I can see!” as the words “the end” appeared on the screen.
Granted, a Steven Segal movie is not art but I like watching them to see him kick some boob in the crotch. Don’t know why but I can watch that all day long. And every since Billy Jack and Cain got to fat to kick he is my only escape. But I do have certain standards and somebody doing something stupid is ok. I see that in real life all day long. Hell I do that every once in a while. But the possibility that the writer/director thinks I am that dumb is what pisses me off.
I dont think Affair to Remember fits this category. If you go to that level then you have to rationalize Veritigo (she dies her hair and comes back to him because she fell in love while she was acting and now he kills hers (accidently I know)) whoa is that contrived. but it worked.
I was right with you, Umbriel, till you said, "I think superficial performances were the rule back in those days, and actors less frequently reached deep into their characters’ psyches. "
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go lie down for awhile with a lilac-soaked handkerchief on my forehead . . .
Eve! I can’t believe you’ve never seen Carol Burnett’s classic “Rancid Harvest”. It’s the only reason I ever watched “Random Harvest” (well, that and Greer Garson). According to this episode guide, Rancid Harvest was first shown on the Carol Burnett show in 1973, and of course featured Carol in the Greer Garson role.
Omigod, Spoiler, I KNEW that movie was just BEGGING for a Carol Burnett treatment! I would kill to see that. I remember “Torchy Song” and “A Swiped Life” and “The Doily Sisters” and “Mildred Fierce,” but somehow “Rancid Harvest” seems to have slipped below my radar . . .
By the way, why the heck wasn’t Lyle Waggoner at the Carol Burnett reunion the other night?
For me, it had to be the ending of Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy. For the most part, I loved the movie! Kevin Smith’s trademark snappy dialogue, great treatment of a man dealing with his partner’s change in sexuality, loved the acting… overall, what a great movie!
SPOILER
But Holden’s decision about ‘all three of us have to sleep together to make things right’… that just made no sense whatsoever! The first time I saw Chasing Amy, that scene made me yelp, “Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?” (Which was probably not appreciated by the people sitting near me in the theater, but I digress.)
Maybe it was supposed to be a sign of Holden’s deterioration, that he thought such a wild scheme would be a good idea. But even taking that into account, I still can’t imagine anyone ever reaching that particular conclusion. I know Kevin Smith needed a reason for Holden and Alyssa to break up, but come on, he could have come up with something better than that. Sheesh.
Can I nominate Tomb Raider? Halfway through, it suddenly becomes blatantly obvious to everyone that Angelina Jolie could save the world and go home early if she simply smashes a rock into little itty-bitty pieces.
But she doesn’t, and we’re all dragged in for another 45+ minutes of doofy characterization, lame acting, Cuisinart action-sequence-editing, and not nearly enough bouncing boobies to make up for all those deficiencies. I swear, I was ready to yell at the screen for her sheer boenheaded “thinking”.
I have trouble with movies where the “Innocent Man on the Run” kidnaps a woman – who then immiediatly falls in love with him.
The most notable example is Three Days of the Condor, where Robert Redford kidnaps Faye Duneway from a shop, drags her at gunpoint to her home, ties her up, eats her food and uses her home, then he makes some comments about how ‘lonely’ her photographs of dead trees are and she suddenly can see the true, sensitive soul inside. Feh. Stockholm Syndrome my arse.
The movie, on the other hand, was not quite so brilliant as my dramatization, which is really sad. It started out as a great science fiction movie, and turned into a cheap-ass stereotype monster movie ("hey, our crew is dying, being killed off one by one by some mysterious thing! You guys go that way, I’ll go into this dark corridor by myself. Maybe I won’t get killed as soon as we’re separa-gaaackkkkkk!!!