I don’t know if ruin is the best term but I can think of two.
In Rocky 2, you will recall, Rocky has decided to retire but after the goading by Apollo he decides to fight once again despite Adrian’s firm stance against it.
When Mickey comes over to Rocky’s house to convince him to return, Rocky is at the front door and Adrian is on the staircase. Now Adrian is pregnant at the time which makes her stance that much stronger but to punctuate this, she’s standing with a blouse that has the word BABY and a down arrow on it that to me has always grossly overemphasized the point. Whenever I watch that scene, all I see is that stupid BABY shirt which takes away from the scene’s pathos.
Well maybe it’s just me.
Then in Seinfeld, there’s the episode with Poppy (who was a little sloppy) who Jerry espies coming out of the toilet and then not washing his hands. It’s a great, genuinely funny scene but next to the sink where Jerry is standing, there is a sign directing employees to WASH HANDS in big bold print which was obviously placed there for the dim bulbs watching who might not get the joke. For me, that distracter takes just a little bit of funny out of the scene.
I was watching Bridge on the River Kwai the other night, and for the first time in all the times I’ve seen the movie, I noticed in one shot that the Japanese Colonel (Saito) has an American pinup calendar on his wall. I’m sure they did it on purpose, since it’s featured prominently, and Saito points to the calendar to emphasize how quickly they need to complete the bridge. But I sat there for a minute wondering why they did that. I mean, sure , the guy likes scotch and English corned beef, so he isn’t a cultural purist. But a pinup calendar? Just didn’t seemed to fit with his persona.
At the end of * A Time To Kill * which is a movie I really enjoyed Carl Lee is hugging his daughter after the case is over. The camera shot is blow him and moves to a slightly different angle.
To show the American Flag flying over his shoulder.
I have nothing against patriotism, but I hate it when it’s so heavy-handed.
Forgive the bump, but I was bugged by Jurassic Park in this regard. After the final standoff, the T. Rex throws his head back and roars, which would have been okay if not for the banner that gently wafts down from the ceiling: “WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH”. Yes, we get it.
How about little touches that almost ruin the movie?
At the end of Scorcese’s “The Departed”, I switched my rating from two-thumbs-up to one-thumb-and-one-middle-finger when
the rat ran across the balcony railing.
For crying out loud, we GOT it! What, the 629 mentions of that in the rest of the movie, not to mention Nicholson’s, er, enthusiastic portrayal of the concept in an earlier scene, weren’t quite enough?
I’ll forgive a movie a good deal of hammering concepts home, since apparently a significant portion of modern audiences require it, but really, this was pounding the nail in tight and then giving it a whack with a railroad sledgehammer just for kicks…and it came this close to breaking the whole board in two.
This is going back a bit, but in The Umrellas of Cherbourg, one of the most beautiful and ethereal pictures ever made, Catherine Deneuve, has a scene where she is moping around her gorgeous apartment singing a wistful, romantic song. Half way through the song she lights-up a cigarette and for the rest of the song she has a butt sticking out of her mouth. Why?!
This is definitely one of those YMMV things, but I remember remarking to my girlfriend right after the movie that I thought that touch was awfully damned cool. I looked at that phrase, “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth,” as a way to connect people of my generation, who grew up playing with two-inch-tall single-color plastic dinosaurs, to the next generation of kids watching that movie, who went out and bought articulated and intricately designed dinosaurs with Battle Damage.TM
Spoilers follow for The Orphanage:
It’s certainly not the first movie to do it, but the very last scene with Laura’s husband visiting the memorial to her, their son, and the other children really destroyed the impact of the next-to-last scene, when Laura is telling a story to the children. During that next-to-last scene, I was thinking, “Please please please let the movie end here,” but, alas, it was not to be.