Thank you, Mr. President.
The end of “The Last Samurai”:
where all the Japanese army bow down to the samurai ritual… come on!
There are some cases where you just have to roll your eyes at practically the whole damned movie. I don’t mean the Indiana Jones stuff – I’ve explained my position on that, and I know they’re supposed to be wild, escapist stuff.
I mean things like Battlefield Earth. More than enough has been written about it here on the Board and elsewhere. And you don’t have to dislike L. Ron and his religion to dislike this, either. It fails entirely on its own lack of merits.
Similarly, I hated Signs. I loved The Sixth Sense, felt betrayed by Unbreakable, but I really hated Signs with a passion. It was so dumb! I had to start a thread about it:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=130068&highlight=Signs+Gibson
Please read my own version of the aliens’ rationalization halfway through it.
Thanks for noticing. That was a combination of “I prefer to deny it’s existence” and “I refuse to believe it existed”. That’s what I get for attempting to post with a bad headache. I should save myself embarassment and not reread those posts, because sense I don’t make much of.
Do me a favor and don’t quote the confusing grammar in my first paragraph of that post either.
CalMeacham mentioned BFE already but I’ll still torture myself and mention one or two complete eye revolution momements. When the semi-cavemen learn to fly jets using a flight simulator that has been sitting around for 1,000 years. My wife, not a tech person at all, jumped up and started yelling about it being bullshit. Every time “man-animal” was spoken we both rolled are eyes. We will sometimes say it when we see someone who looks odd.
The part in Forrest Gump where he is under the tree talking to Jenny’s grave about some nonsense and everyone in the audience is supposed to weep. Oh my god. Horrid. Words fail. The end is near.
The end of Saving Private Ryan: “I tried to earn it.” I wanted to scream, “We GET it already, Steve!” but I was too busy trying to find my eyeballs because they had rolled right out of my head.
I think that was more of a single pigtail… 
My most eye-rolling moments from ATOC were…
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well, just about every scene involving C3PO. (“I’m quite beside myself”… “This is such a drag”…)
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Padme, in bosom-heaving leather outfit: “No. We can’t be in a relationship. We’d be forced to live a lie” (heaves bosom breathlessly) “I won’t give in to this!”
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and Anakin, when in the arena chained to a pole and faced with 3 hungry monsters being prodded forward, dares to utter the George Lucas catch-phrase: “I’ve got a baaaaad feeling about this.” (Well, thank YOU, Captain Obvious!)
Absolutely everyone in House of Sand and Fog and their cascade of idiotic, self-destructive behaviors and decisions.
Oh, and the not-at-all-obvious “symbolic” scene early on when Jennifer Connelly cuts her foot and gets her blood on some debris in front of the house.
Hee hee. Read the book, if you want the movie to come looking out a whole lot better. In the movie, Forrest comes across as a guy with a heart of gold, but in the book . . . the book’s just strange. Not that the it isn’t humorous in parts, but professional wrestling anyone? Forrest just seems more lost in the book and less able to make any decision on his own. Oh, and the Jenny sections of the book are completely and utterly different. As in a major plot point in the movie isn’t even in the book.
A Fish Called Wanda.
Several of the kinds of fish shown in the tank would have made breakfast out of some of the others.
Also, a tank of that many fish and no hood? The floor would be littered with sushi.
Along the same lines in the original Dr. Doolittle, when he talks to the goldfish, I’m sure they would have been screaming “It’s too f***ing crowded in here!”
The Matrix uh batteries? I was hoping for some sort of weird compassion from the machines along the lines of “we can’t kill our creators but we can’t trust you so you’ll stay here” that would have made them a whole lot more interesting and dynamic. 'Course I never saw the last one so that might be how it turns out for all I know.
Dark City so…why exactly is a single human as powerful as them with no training and after training he’s more powerful then the strongest of them? I also missed the intro the first time I watched it I loved it was so great not having a movie condescend to you…then I saw it again and had the intro lay out 90% of the plot. Man that pissed me off.
Signs Water and doorknobs defeats an alien race. I know the plot was more about humanity and faith but…water and doorknobs cries
Any slow moving zombie movies. I just don’t get the logistics of zombies. Sure morgues would be screwed for a day or two but there’s simply not enough viable corpses to really screw over mankind. There would be a day or two of WTF!?!?! then the living would wipe them out no problem. Not say they are not good movies just something I roll my eyes at.
Gladiator really do I have to say anything?
Actually, one could make the argument that compassion and not battery power is the reason, despite what Morpheus said. The Animatrix hints at it and so the does the fact the machines are cotinually pointing out that they tried to make the first matrix a paradise.
So why didn’t they? I mean, if the production crew ignorantly put incompatible fish in the same tank before filming the relevant scenes . . . then before long, they would’ve noticed some of the fish were missing . . . but they weren’t missing when the filming was done. Why not?
I also found it impossible to swallow one of the basic premises in Alien Nation. If the aliens are a carbon-based lifeform, capable of breathing the Earth’s atmosphere and eating food produced by Earth’s biosphere – then how can it be possible that their flesh dissolves in salt water, of all things?
Ah, but Dr. Schreber gave John Murdoch many lifetimes worth of memories and training on how to use his abilities. Also, it is implied that the aliens are a hive species and although they have many bodies, they may, in fact, be only one “individual”.
Blame the studio for that one – the director did not want that in
Yes but once again he’s nearly as powerful as them with no training.
And why would Dr. Schreber be able to implant memories that enabled him to be so great at using the machine better then the creatures that built and maintained it? I love that movie to death I just don’t buy those parts at all.
(I’m doing this from memory, so some of the details may be wrong, but please bear with me.)
In Mission: Impossible, Tom Cruise is riding on the outside of the French TGV train that runs at about 200 mph (eyebrows raise), and is being chased by a helicopter. The train goes into a tunnel, and the helicopter follows it into the tunnel!!! (Eyes roll.) Flying through the tunnel after the train, the helicopter continues the chase, bad guys shooting at Cruise. Still at 200 mph, Cruise jumps from the train to the helicopter (or a bad guy jumps from the copter to the train, I forget). (Eyes spin.) I think another train goes by in the opposite direction, and the chopper keeps on following. (Eyes explode.) Finally, there’s a crash, and in the wreckage of the helicopter the rotor stops an inch from Cruise’s nose, as if it had no mass or inertia. (Brain explodes.)
The whole scene is totally ludicrous, and there are others almost as bad in the film.
In Li’l Abner, the villainous General Bullmoose seeks to have Abner marry Appassionata von Climax, as part of Bullmoose’s scheme to acquire the Yokumberry tree. “Then, by community property, she owns half of everything he owns…” The Yokumberry tree bears berries that make a tonic that rejuvenates men physically, and Bullmoose wants the formula for himself ‘Because I need all the money in the world.’
I don’t know whether Bullmoose was the ignorant party or the movie’s writers were (Al Capp seems to have been far too savvy to commit this blunder), but first and foremost, Abner didn’t own the Yokumberry tree; Mammy and Pappy Yokum did. Besides, “community property” is property acquired during a marriage, not before. Too full of holes.
In Abbott and Costello’s last movie, “Dance with Me, Henry,” Lou and Bud take turns sleeping for an hour at a time. That’s the idea, at least; Abbott, however, resets the clock when it’s Lou’s turn to sleep so Lou’s “hour” is only a few minutes; Lou naively waits the whole hour when it’s Abbott’s turn. And neither one of them wears a writswatch; unless it was an inside room or it were cloudy outside, Lou could look out a window and see the movement of the moon or stars.
This one, believe it or not, I could buy. In the original film the aliens were, after all, genetically engineered slaves. I could easily see their never-seen masters building a monumental “Achilles heel” into their servant race to give them a major disadvantage and making them easier to control. On the other hand, building a creature that works without salt water in its body and dissolves on contact with it seems to be a major undertaking.
Many years ago, I was working on an archaeological dig with a bunch of university volunteers. A big part of our training was to regard artifacts as precious, to be careful in their handling, and especially to be respectful of human remains.
We lived in tents and worked on a site just north of Barrie, Ontario (a Huron village). One evening, we all trooped to a nearby town to see a movie. It was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We were the only people in the theatre.
The best part was when our brave archaeologist/adventurer found a secret crypt under a church. Needing a light, he grabs a human femur and wraps some rags about it - voila! Instant torch!
[I know, I know, it is a take on the adventure serials of the '30s. But it was very funny to see it in a theatre where *everyone in the theatre was an archaeologist in training*.]