Could a mod please kindly fix the coding error in the post above. Thank you very much.
**Maid in Manhattan – BARF **
Thanks, Sofa King, good to have some backup on this one. My wife dragged me to this steaming turd of a film last week. I have to add something else that really troubled me about the movie. I won’t exclusively use the spoiler tag, since I’m only discussing something which occurs in the movie trailer (and probably in the plot summary on IMDB). Anyway:
The premise is that a hotel maid, J-Lo, tries on a snooty guest’s designer clothes and is seen by the hero, who, of course, falls in love. Ignoring the fact J-Lo would be gorgeous and utterly “noticeable” in a burlap sack, let alone a maid uniform, the rest of the film insults us by trying to turn this incident into an example of lower class rebellion. (“We’re people too, us hourly wage workers! Don’t I deserve better? Mr. Rich Hero wouldn’t have noticed me if I hadn’t had a Dolce suit on!”)
Here’s what bugs me: all of us stay in hotels. We’re not all rich, and not all the hotels we stay at are ritzy. But whether you’re rich or not, is anyone else bothered by the fact that a maid who rifles through a hotel guest’s belongings and tries on her clothes is presented as a hero? Oh yeah, there’s so much that is empowering and heroic about job irresponsibility, dishonesty, and theft when it lets you bang the Rich Hero! Oh, so the rich guest whose clothes are in question is an annoying person–hey, that makes it okay, right?! Grrr… Oh, and:
J-Lo’s character is applying for a management position, because she wants to “be something better.” We hear about this BEFORE she goes rifling through the guest’s clothes. Hey, I know the best way to get promoted in a service job: screw with the customers! Yeah, that’s it! If I’m lucky, I might get fired, and then get re-hired and promoted after I bag the hero! Yeah!
BTW, Sofa King, I didn’t get any action after the movie either. Two losses in one night. :smack:
I rather liked it, but its plot does hinge on a paradox:
If Anderton hadn’t seen the preview of himself at the scene of the crime, he wouldn’t have been at the scene of the crime. So there wouldn’t have been a preview for him to see.
Kind of like the “who wrote Johnny B Goode?” paradox in Back to the Future.
My 3rd favorite movie is Falling Down, and i watched it for the 4th time a couple nights ago.
It still holds its standing with me, but it seriously bashes its point over the viewer’s head time and time again. However, that WORKS for me because the situations are extremely believeable, the absurdity is with them all happening at once.
and with D-FENS being able to kill EVERYONE he’s put into a compromising position with
Face/Off. The idea that face transplants would be possible is the least unlikely thing about it. Every character’s behavior and motivation is completely contrary to what any normal human being would do.
Only two movies have actually made me angry that I wasted my time: Face/Off and First Knight. To quote Roger Ebert, I hated, hated, hated those movies.
No, it’s clearly a broad satire, and it’s clearly done on purpose. All the campy propaganda reports make that obvious. And for what it’s worth, I think it works 100%. But I don’t think for a second I’m appreciating some subtle nuance of the movie that the filmmakers didn’t intend. As reluctant as I am to defend Paul Verhoeven, at least he does seem to get satire (with Robocop and Starship Troopers).
IIRC, there was footprints though, wasn’t there?
And I am not about to rent it again either to find out for sure 
Josie and the Pussycats
“Oh, all those Starbucks, AOL, GE, MTV, Pepsi, Microsoft, GAP, Target, Sony, FedEx, NFL, Levi’s, Pringles, Versace, Crown Royal, Safeway, HP, United Airlines, People Magazine and Tylenol logos plastered all over every scene throughout the entire movie? Those are supposed to show how horrible corporate sponsorship is! Really!”
Puh-lease. I really did feel insulted by that shit.
Thank you, thank you. I hated Face/Off so much, it’s one of two movies that made me just walk out of the theater.
Totally agree. I just saw this piece of utter tripe last night, actually. Someone needs to mention some of the specific insults to the intelligence of a five-year-old that this movie committed:
The entire might of every nation’s military industrial complex couldn’t come up with a fireproof suit or any kind of fireproof vehicle or weapon?
The dragons are supposed to be so incredibly hard to kill (the early voice-over says that we even tried nuking them), and yet the hero takes one out with a giant spear? Yeah, yeah, I know, the point was that they breed fast. So with the entire civilization of the entire world at stake, we couldn’t build a whole bunch of those giant spears?
During the twenty years of collapse, our hero is the only one who thought to take a look at the dragon’s biology?
During those same twenty years, no one ever thought to go to the place where the dragons first showed up, and kill the really big one?
Not to even mention: where did they get the gas for the helicopter?
Not that I expected much more from the movie, but I at least expected to be rewarded for my willing suspension of disbelief by a lot of spectacular battles with cool CG dragons. But what do we get?
A lot of talking, then a big dragon zooms by. Then a lot more talking, then a dragon fries some people and crops. Then a lot more talking, and some senseless in-fighting, then a boring chase where everything is hidden by the clouds (oo, there’s a half-second glimpse of the dragon). Then a lot more talking. Then a brief glimpse of a sky filled with dragons, then more talking, then the really big dragon flies around not frying people, then gets shot and killed by a little tiny explosive arrow in the mouth. Oh yeah, I can see why the US military was helpless against that.
Moulin Rouge.
Definitely in the top five of the worst movies I’ve EVER SEEN, if it’s not number one. I had heard so much wonderful crap about this movie, and I liked Romeo and Juliet quite a bit, I just hate Nicole Kidman so I had put off seeing it for years. Finally, a friend forced me to watch it under the premise that it was THE BEST MOVIE SHE’D EVER SEEN IN HER WHOLE LIFE.
I had to seriously rethink our friendship after seeing this steaming piece of shit.
The craptacular remakes of old songs that passed for the “soundtrack” were the most offensive thing I’ve ever been put through in my entire life, the acting was atrocious, the singing was godawful, and the plot…plot? I don’t seem to remember any plot, just a lot of dancing and bad music and feeling a light breeze that was probably generated from Kurt Cobain spinning like a top in his grave at what those soulless motherfuckers did to Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Luckily, I was half-drunk by the end of it, and with any luck and a little therapy I’ll have forgotten all about it in the next year or so.
Stigmata
Never mind that the movie asked me to believe that you can catch stigmata from a rosary.
Early on in the film, a bit of the Aramaic text that Our Heroine has miraculously written (supposedly it is a bit of Scripture the Church suppressed a couple of millenia ago and has been lost ever since, and is only now being miraculously revealed) is translated “cleave a piece of wood, and I am there”.
Huh? That’s from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, which was written in the second century AD.
So, I spent the whole rest of the movie screaming at the TV screen because this woman is going through all this pain and suffering and almost bleeding to death over
A book you can pick up at freaking Barnes and Noble
anything produced by Bruckheimer
Oh god. I COMPLETELY agree about A.I. and Maid in Manhatten. Jeeez, both of which I saw IN theatres–good lord, at least 4+ hours and 12+ dollars wasted irreparably.
Here’s one that I might get blasted for though. Shrek.
I despise this movie with an ungodly passion–NOT funny, NOT witty, NOT smart, NOT even stupidly amusing. Plus, ugly. Just ugly.
It seems to me that there’s an even more egregious problem:
[spoiler]It was made clear near the beginning that if the murder was not premeditated, but was rather a crime of passion, the precogs would only be able to give a short notice (an hour or less?) And yet they gave, what, 36 hours notice of Anderton’s crime? But it clearly wasn’t premeditated, it wasn’t until he got to the hotel room and discovered that this was the guy that killed his son that he thought of killing him; up to then, he was determined not to kill the guy.
Not to even mention that they never followed up on him taking off the bandages too soon. He still had, what, 6 hours left? Why didn’t he go blind?
Even worse, if he had planned all along to use his own eye to get into the precog room, why bother with getting the new eyes and face? As soon as he scanned his original eye to get the door open, they’d know it was him. Did he somehow think that they’d see the only other guy in the room and ignore him because he didn’t look like Anderton?
Finally, wouldn’t you think that the police, as soon as Anderton became wanted, would have turned off his access to their building? We can do that today with key cards, but they can’t do it in the future with retinal scans?
Ok, one more: Yes, the whole thing falls apart if the old guy had had even the tiniest of brains: He didn’t have to kill the mother, did he? Why couldn’t he have just kidnapped her and put one of those brain-numbing thingies on her for the rest of her life?
[/spoiler]
I can’t believe no one has yet mentioned the biggest groaner in one of the most popular movies of recent years:
Independence Day. We just whipped up a handy computer virus that knocked out the alien’s computers. Now, were the aliens running Linux, or Win2k, or MacOS, or . . .
I completely forgot about that. I spent the last five mintutes of the movie thinking “Ok, just like his last two movies there’s going to be a twist. Let’s see what he does that makes the whole thing actually work… WHAT? CREDITS???”
anything produced by Bruckheimer (aaargh)
sorry about the repost…
It needed to be said twice anyway ;).