Yes, the unintelligently written intelligent character has been a major source, and sometimes the sole source, of entertainment in bad movies and books for me since I can remember. They not only establish words I frequently use myself as being “smarty words”, they also further boost my ego by often using them incorrectly and with a ridiculous amount of pretension.
Such as when Peter Griffith in Family Guy strutted around under the assumption he was a genius and described everything as “shallow and pedantic”. Hah!
Of course that was intentional, so it’s not a real example. But here’s one with the members of a study group at Harvard going about introducing themselves in Legally Blonde:
“I was first in my class at Princeton.”
“I have an IQ of a hundred and eighty-seven, and it’s been suggested that Stephen Hawking stole his ‘Brief History of Time’… from my fourth grade paper.”
And so on and so on.
Why would anyone need to steal anything from A Brief History of Time? It didn’t introduce anything new to Quantum Physics or any of the other subjects it touched upon, it just compiled a lot of different views, and theories, and information in a way that made it easy for the layman to read. Also, smart people don’t typically introduce themselves with their IQ.
I’m sure there’s some great quotes from The Core and Armageddon worth digging up to. What do you all have?
There are a couple of major lapses in The Hunt for Red October. The Americans and Soviets both describe the new submarine as a provocative, first strike weapon; but any ballistic missile sub can launch an attack, an undetectable sub only gains the ability to survive the first round and be a weapon of retaliation and deterence. Plus, the sonar operator on the Dallas figures out how to track it pretty quickly. All they have to do is take his recording, send a copy to all the other U.S. attack subs, and any advantage the Red October would have had is completely neutralized.
I can think of two unintelligent characters who were written quite cleverly; Bill & Ted. When they need to break into the police station, one of them suggests that when everything is over they steal his dad’s keys, travel back in time and hide them under a rock. They lift up the rock, and there are keys. And during the history report, after Ted (or Bill) has a revealing conversation with Sigmund Freud, Bill (or Ted) says, “I’m fine, I just have a mild Oedipal complex.”
All computer programmers in movies type over 175 WPM w/o looking at the keyboard and without using a mouse. If you’re exceptionally talented you can hack into a government encrypted database in 30 seconds using someone else’s laptop in a dance club with a gun to your head while getting a blowjob.
I saw a movie about a giant snake that lived in the Antarctic and terrorized a maximum security prison. It was a terrible movie. But basically the protagonist was a professor of biology (I think… anthro maybe?) and the government came to him and demanded that he assist… because he’d *written his doctoral thesis * on this particular prehistoric snake even though he admitted there was no evidence it existed.
What the hell kind of school did he graduate from that gave him credit on a goddamn doctoral thesis about a possibly existing snake for which there was no evidence? It’s almost as if the writers kind of sat around and wrote about what they thought it might be like to be intelligent.
But the biggest lapse of stupidity in that movie by people who should be smart enough to know better was when they lured Godzilla out of hiding by leaving out a big pile of dead fish. When Godzilla showed up, there was absolutely no plan on what to do next. The military would have had all sorts of contingencies – poison the fish, train a bunch of cannon on them, put TNT all around them – but instead they just stand there looking surprised their trap has worked.
In Mean Girls the main character demonstrates her math skills by explaining something simple so that it sounds complicated, and by performing not particularly impressive mental arithmetics.
Not to mention that you cannot actually measure IQs that high.
Oh, Lordy, what old science fiction movie had the professor whose doctorate was in Advanced Science? It reminded me of the Wizard of Oz who gave the Scarecrow a Doctorate of Thinkology.
That pretty well described Doctor Otto Octavius in Spiderman 2. I liked how his control system for his groundbreaking energy source required at least three equally-groundbreaking advances in three wholly unrelated fields.
Wasn’t he the same scientist who, because he saw some worms grow twice their normal size over the period of about 10 to 15 years, concluded that some native reptile could grow I-don’t-know how many orders of magnitude until it matched Godzilla’s size? In a period of about a year or so?
I don’t recall which crappy old horror movie it was, but insects are taking over the world. Scientist lady says, “There are many theories about what would happen if insects tried to take over the world, in none of the do humans fair well.”
I remember thinking, “Who the hell was it who came up with all those theories and why?”
Is Dan Brown just too dumb to know that there’s an entire academic field called SEMIOTICS???
Or does he think Milton Friedman was a professor of Moneyism, that Carl Sagan was a professor of Outer Spaceology, and Stephen Ambrose was a professor of Stuff That Happened a Long Time Ago?
When an intelligent but haughty person loses at chess they generally do it by making a move, then making a quip indicating they think they’re winning, their opponent then mates in one.
Fare. The human race may not fare well if the insects get too big for their britches. (Remember the word farewell.)
Because some woman told me it was good, I wasted a couple of hours of my life on a piece of shit book called The Bridges of Madison County. Several times in the book we’re told that the main male character is brilliant. Unfortunately, he never says anything more intelligent, insightful or profound than you’d get from a half-bright, half-drunken college sophomore. Bit of a letdown.
