Spoiler tags are your friend…
Amen. However, I was so lucky in that halfway through the DVD, the disk was scratched or whatever. Maybe the hand of God came down and touched my DVD player so I would not be subjected to the rest of the movie.
I was actually embarrassed for the actors. It was easily the most horrible 45 minutes I’ve ever experienced.
Oh-- Bandits, with Bruce Willis & Billy-bob Thornton. A fun movie, and I enjoyed it-- up until the ridiculous ending:Kate collects a whopping reward. Leaving aside that rewards are usually for “information leading to the conviction of…”, the ploy to fake their deaths would hold up for how long, exactly? An ambulance explodes, vapourizing the bodies. Okay. Witnesses see the driver (or an EMT) leap out in flames and warn them away-- before he vanishes into the crowd. And, of course nobody will ever look into where the ambulance came from, (say, where did it come from?) and which hospital employees were killed. Right.Ain’t no rolleyes big enough.
Azure, exactly! I forgot to mention it, but that part pissed me off too. Signs was flawed on so many levels, it’s not even funny. I want my money back!! Err, actually, I want my date’s money back!
I just want my monkey back.
I can relate. It’s an odd question, to me, because things making sense is so fundamental to my enjoyment of it. If the dialogue is off, if the characters are developed poorly or act inconsistently, if the script is riddled with inconsistencies and improbabilities, what is left to enjoy? Special effects? Some bigshot actor or diva? A warm, fuzzy ending? Big deal. Those aren’t ever enough to carry or redeem a bad movie.
I have friends like yours, and to some degree my parents are like that, too. Movies, I think they think, are an experience, something you do for fun, like going to a concert or the park. You don’t go to learn or critique or analyze. You go to see things, to be made to feel things. There’s a bonding-experience vibe to the whole thing-- you go to the movies to spend time with loved ones. It gives you something to talk about, and later, reminisce about.
That’s fine, and I’m all for that, except if it means shutting my brain off. If I know that a movie is fudging its way through or outright butchering a point (especially one based on facts that I’m aware of), I can’t not notice it and be bugged by it. I mean, I know better. Am I supposed to pretend to be stupid? Does the movie think I’m stupid?
Once I get the impression the movie’s filmmakers don’t think much of their audience’s intelligence, I become distanced from the movie. It no longer is engrossing, and I care less about what happens to the characters and what happens in the end. I start thinking more about what I’m going to do after the movie’s done. The movie loses me.
And a movie should never have that effect on its viewers.
I’ve mentioned this before, even got into a few debates about it, but I’ll give it another whirl…
In the movie Pearl Harbor, where pilot Ben Affleck, based in a US Army Air Corps Airfield in Long Island NY, leaves for England, he and Kate Birkenstock (sp?) are having the typical paint-by-numbers teary farewell scene.
As our intrepid hero says goodbye, he turns around to board his… train.
A number have argued “well, why couldn’t he be taking the train to the airport/ship?”, to which my response is a simple “then why not just shoot the scene at the airport/dock?” Why leave your audience wondering how the hell he’s going to get that train to England?
Shallow fucking Hal.
Amen to
The Matrix.
The entire premise of the plot is bs. We’re computers who’ve invented fusion, but need human beings to help power the computers? BS. Im sure everytime that a H-bomb goes off its only because they’ve plugged a human being into it. BS. Maybe they could have somehow said that they need some sort of neural component of human beings to survive, that human beings had been integrated into the consciousness, or some star-trekish beleivable-because-I-dont-understand-it mumbo jumbo. Ala heisenburg compensators. That would have made for a more compelling storyline.
Moreover the philosophical points of the movie were hardly ground breaking. It didnt take me more than 5 seconds of thought to “get it.” Wow you mean that one day the internet and computers in general could create a second reality? Like video games? How original. You mean that everything around us could be a complete illusion? Im amazed.
I laughed my way through the trailer of The Core. I think its about as plausible of any tabloid’s armageddon scenario.
Armageddon was hilarious.
Romantic Comedys insult me by continuing to be produced. All praise Punch Drunk Love
Fight Club sort of. The dialogue was somewhat stupid. “Everyday I died, and everyday I was reborn”
In defence of Independence Day: maybe somehow they learned how to interface with alien computer systems with that fighter they had. Even so, that would be like understanding a navy hellicopter’s onboard flight computer then hacking into an aircraft carrier. Slightly more complicated, Id imagine. The aliens advanced systems would have been much more integrated. Nevertheless, if they had a reason to evolve such large scale weaponry, youd imagine that theyd develop computer security as well. Its a string of implausibilities, but maybe barely possible.
Gladiator was a great movie, but historically… blah.
The Patriot made me sick. To see how they just dismissed probably the single most pervasive problems in US history, race, bothered me to no end. Ugh… Then they had to have a black guy in the ranks. How rosey keen.
Not to mention that, every second of that movie was overwhelming drama. I wanted to say: we get it, bad crap keeps happening to you. Can I have a moment where Im not supposed to be overflowing with emotion, please?
The Patriot is disgusting for more reasons than those stated above. It also attributes a real-life Nazi atrocity to British troops in its simple-minded quest to demonize the redcoats. As far as I’m concerned, this is a particularly egregious betrayal of historical accuracy.
As for others, well, I automatically dismiss all Jerry Bruckheimer movies as too stupid to believe and all movies starring the “Larry, Darryl and Darryl” of romantic comedies, Julia Roberts (except Erin Brockovich), J-Lo (except Out of Sight), and Sandra Bullock (no exceptions). I was going to call them the Three Stooges of romantic comedies but then I realized that would be doing a disservice to Moe and the boys.
I also have to back up Legomancer and SolGrundy and say that Starship Troopers is much smarter than most people give it credit for. Its biggest failing is, perhaps, that the satire is too broad and aims for too many targets.
The Perfect Storm was a perfect mess.
The film boils down to a display of bad choices on the part of several different people and the injuries they suffer based on making that bad choice. There’s nothing heroic or interesting or heart-strings-tugging about people getting exactly what they bargained for.
Plus, if you take the numbers from the beginning of the movie (where the main boss guy is passing out checks) and apply them to the pounds of fish the guys have in the hold when they decide to ride through the storm, you’ll figure out that they are all risking thier lives for a ridiculously small sum, something less than $10,000.
One of the fanfics on the website suggested just that–that the human “batteries” were also handy for massive parallel processing and/or certain tasks for which human mental processing might be a little better than a computer. Just a thought.
I myself liked the film because it had great action sequences and at least tried to explain why people could fight in superhuman ways.
On another note, add Hollow Man to the list. The three most ridiculous things i can think of off-hand:
- When Kevin Bacon is injected with the invisibility serum, there are HUGE air bubbles in the syringe, and there’s even a sound effect of the bubble gurgling into the needle. In real life, he would have expired in screaming agony due to an air embolism, but not in Hollywood!
- The scene with the invisible boob-squeezing. Has to be seen to be believed, but really should not be seen.
- Oh yeah, and at the end:
The hero and heroine are fleeing up through an elevator shaft. There is a massive explosion, and the computer-generated flames stop about five feet below the hero, who breathes a sigh of relief and escapes to safety. Never mind that SUPERHEATED GASES would’ve burned him to a crisp! Only the flames can hurt you, you see?
Uggghhh…
I Am Sam
Sean Penn is going to lose his daughter now that she’s seven years old, because he has the mentality of a seven year old and she’ll be smarter than him.
Umm… how did he raise her when she was a baby? How many people would let a seven year old raise a baby???
Anderton stated a few times that he’s thought about how he would kill the murderer for year - thus making it a premeditated murder.
Maybe I missed it, but I haven’t seen anyone mention Waterworld. Even if the polar ice caps DID melt, most of the Earth’s land surface would still remain uncovered.
Aside from all the other stupid things in Independence Day, there’s the part where he places a Coke can on the spaceship (aligned so the word “Coke” is perfectly framed in the camera, by the way) and then a bullet is fired at it, which bounces off the ship’s forcefield. How did he get his HAND through the forcefield, then?
And the whole fact that these extremely advanced aliens would have a weapon that takes like a minute to arm, meanwhile exposing the most vulnerable part of the ship to attack just made me groan.
IIRC it was one of those forcefield deals where it’ll only block objects moving above a certain speed. But like Space Cowboys it’s not a movie I’m going to rent again to check :).
Space Cowboys was a good movie!
:: points and laughs at skateboarder87 ::
Defecates on Larry Mudd’s head
Aw, shucks, I’m only teasing. I had high hopes for Space Cowboys. I was expecting something like Dark Star, which I consider to be really “good” movie. You’re welcome to point and laugh at me for that one.
“Teach it about… …phenomenalism”
Freaking hilarious.