Movies made to help "Show us what they've learned"

Cafe Society
1

I was watching Rats last night on Fox. Terribly shitty movie, but absolutley enjoyable. There’s a scene where a rat gets in the protagonists car, she finds herself trapped in it due to a van parking too close, fights this puppet rat, kicks it out of the car, reverses, looks at the rat, the rat bears it’s teath at her in a menacing way, and then she drives over it. One of the greatest sequences in a Fox film ever! Oh, and all the while, this other rat is in the rafters watching her.

Anyway, it seems to me the movie was solely developed because one day some guy saw a fucking PBS special on rats and figured “Hey, this is cool stuff, I need to share it with everyone! But…how do I make it interesting?”

And so, he/she wrote a script. One where a city is being ravaged by rats, but luckily there’s a hero there to fill us in on all sorts of useful information, like “1 in 4 unexplained wire fires is caused by a rat chewing on something it shouldn’t be chewing on,” or “Rats can swim, just like us. They can even hold their breadth,” and “Rats can build up an immunity to poisons in just two generations. That’s six months.”

So, what other movies out there have you seen that just seem to be nothing more than a screenwriter trying to show off their knew found intelligence?

My next best example is Doom Generation, in which I’m sure Greg Araki just learned the joys of the word “fuck” and “bung hole” and needed to show everyone just how fun it is to say it.

2

Them!, while a fine horror film, stops the action in the middle to become a classroom presentation on the behavior of ants. Literally – Edmund Gwenn sets up a movie projector and we watch ants to his narration.

3

A lot of those 1950’s and 60’s scifi movies had that tendancy to stop in the middle for the smart guy to talk about whatever the subject was. No guarentees it was accurate (hey, they’re B-movie scriptwriters, not Cecil Adams) but it was a common scene.

4

You mean like in Amazing Colossal Man when filmmaker Bert I. Gordon has his scientist character describe the human heart as a single cell.

For a great parody of this, see Joe Dante’s Matinee. It takes place in the early 60’s, and includes John Goodman as a William-Castle-type movie mogul presenting his latest horror/sci-fi flick, “Mant!” about a guy who crosses himself with an ant. The dialogue of the movie-within-the-movie features some howlingly funny bits, like the scientist saying that something “accelerated, or ‘sped up.’”

Re the OP, I interpreted it to mean “what has been learned emotionally,” and I thought of Richard Pryor’s Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling.

Or perhaps, alternatively, Bryan Brown wanted to demonstrate his skills at giving a Full Body Massage.