Yeah. At the end (of the extended edition), they pan over to a plaque that says “Mt. Everest”. No doubt they thought they were being clever, but what it really meant is that they didn’t think things through very carefully at all.
(And if Everest were dry land, then the peak of K2 would likely also be land. No telling if would also propitiously have become a tropical garden, preserving enough ecological diversity to support our heroes.)
I haven’t noticed many gun advocates holding up the movie Signs to justify their position. Frankly I think that’s wise of them.
Me, I think Signs was an excellent argument for increased professionalism in the news media during times of crisis. For example, it actually takes less time, in addition to conveying more important information, to just say “Water kills the aliens,” instead of observing obliquely that “a Middle Eastern town has discovered a primitive way to kill the aliens.” Look, this situation is not a good time for a teaser announcement, okay? Yes, ordinarily you would first want to hook the listener’s attention to build interest in a story, but in this case the planet has already been invaded, so it’s a safe bet that audience interest is already as high as it’s likely to get. Show some social responsibility, for crying out loud! It isn’t all about ratings, Clear Channel.
Good call on The Game. I know Penn & Douglas are extremely rich, but just how much would it cost to do all the chicanery displayed in the movie? Renting entire highrise floors and staffing them with 100 employees? But I did kinda like the dark creepiness of it though.
I haven’t seen the movie and don’t care to, but a guy was killed in real life by some people who ordered him to commit a bunch of crimes in an impossible amount of time (and he failed). Sounds kind of similar?
What’s wrong with a bus?
Priceguy - Do you really want to argue on the side of three Jerry Bruckheimer movies making sense?
Given the option of taking a plane home and seeing your family as soon as possible on the day of your release, or taking the bus and having to wait an extra 6 hours to three days (I don’t remember how far he was traveling), which would you choose?
I think we can all probably agree that if we’re picking nits over whether a character would more likely travel by bus or airplane, we’ve left the realm of “blatantly stupid.”
The bus? Do you know what sort of crazy and dangerous people you can run into on the bus?
What if a maniac plants a bomb on the bus? And if the bus slows down below 50 mph, the bus blows up? What do you do then, hotshot? What DO you do?
You just know that if he took the bus, it wouldn’t be able to go slower than 50 MPH without exploding…
And on review, Lemur866 beat me to it while I was getting coffee. :smack:
My problem with Gone in 60 Seconds wasn’t the silly request for 50 exotic cars, and that almost all 50 were parked right in front of their houses that night (I guess people who drive exotic cars are stay at homes- fine), but the fact that a dozen or so people would risk their freedom and lives to help out Cage and his brother- kinda like on every episode of The Fugitive 
Touche
Movies? No. Premises? Yes.
I don’t even think Penn’s character is rich. The financial side of it is completely ridiculous, I agree. The movie appealed to me anyway, though.
Indecent Proposal.
“I’ll give you a million dollars for one night with your wife”.
“A million dollars? I know she’s pretty and all, but wouldnt you rather save $999,900 and just pick any one of the HUNDREDS of hookers parading around here in Vegas? I’m sure if you look closely, you’ll find one that fairly resembles my wife. But hey, it’s your nickel. Honey, how would you like to make five hundred thousand dollars?”
“Wont that put a strain on our marraige?”
“We’ll get over it”.
That’s quite an impressive finder’s fee he’s angling for there.
Haven’t seen it. But considering what was happening in the real world in 1943, the premise probably looked a lot more reasonable then. Certainly it seemed worth some lip service.
Somehow, I entirely missed the subsequent portions of this post …
There are only two movies for which I actually regret paying admission.
The first was Event Horizon.
I was lulled in by the first act, set aboard the high-gee rescue vessel, thinking it might actually be a good hard-SF film, like Aliens. But then, it started sucking. Like the hard vacuum of space. Not only did the premise turn out to be the stuff of juvenile horror comics, but the acting and characterization but the poor acting and veneer-thin characterization compounded the suckage.
By the time one astronaut, well aware of supernatural dangers aboard ship, is lured into the engine room of the possessed ship by a vision of someone thirty astronomical units away, I was ready to walk out.
The second was The Shape of Things starring Rachel Weisz, who also starred in the London stage version. Perhaps as a play, it may have worked. But I can’t believe Ms Weisz’ acting was any better on stage. And again, part of the premise depends on the main characters behaving the way they did, i.e., stupid and unrealistic.
When Weisz’ character starts making lifestyle decisions for the male lead, such as informing him who his friends should be and what kind of clothes to wear, or food to eat, and suggesting plastic surgery, any reasonable person’s reaction would be “I’m gonna dump this controlling bitch.” And in the final scene, where she humiliates him so completely and devastatingly, the reaction one expects would be assisted by a baseball bat.
My wife and I actually DID walk out on that one, and complained to the manager of the theater. He reassured us that it would “get better,” so we went back to our seats. It never did.
(At least he gave us free passes afterwards, and we used them to see Frida, which was awesome.)
That sort of thing is hardly unique to Event Horizon, though. The Smithee Awards even have an entire category devoted to this principle:* “Acting Appropriately Stupid.” *
One of the all-time best examples of this phenomenon that I can recall is from another SF/horror film, Planet of the Vampires (directed by Mario Bava, whose name also sometimes appears on better movies). Two astronauts are exploring an unfamiliar vessel, and encounter a control panel with a big, shiny, glowing, candy-like button. Despite having absolutely no clue as to its function, the first astronaut immediately presses it, presumably to find out what it does! It turns out that what the button does is to deliver a massively painful electric shock to whoever presses it (why? Malfunction? Anti-idiot device? I have no idea). That isn’t even the stupidest part, though. Second astronaut observes this entire exchange, then goes over and presses the button himself! I should digress to point out that Planet of the Vampires was evidently not intended as comedy.
From what little I can recall, **Event Horizon ** struck me as a pretty stupid movie, but not outstandingly so as crap SF goes. I thought the premise itself, while somewhat goofy and not terribly original, was not the problem so much as the lazy scripting and execution. The movie seemed to me like it actually could have been a fairly decent SF/horror offering; it had the bare bones of a good setup, mildly interesting set design, and several actors who have been known to turn in decent performances upon occasion. It seemed to me that at some point, for whatever reason, the filmmakers just gave up. The actors also just seemed to be going through the motions, not even able to muster the enthusiasm to make a decent, watchable B-movie. I got the sense that they must have already decided the film was going to be a dog, and were simply waiting for their checks to clear. I wasn’t disappointed in **Event Horizon ** because it was an overwhelmingly bad movie, but because it was forgettably bad when it seemed like it could have just as easily been serviceably entertaining.
One of the things that did amuse me about the film was the design of the ship itself. Granted, the likelihood that the ship and crew would be literally sucked into Hell probably wasn’t a scenario the engineers ever considered. On the other hand, I’d have thought that the one ship able to bring its crew back safely from such a journey would be a vehicle shaped like a giant crucifix. Evidently not, though. Hell must be run by Lutherans.
I saw the poster and ads for Event Horizon[ and knew exactly what it was going to be, and I was right. Bad horror masquerading as science fiction. Seen it too many times, the work of directors and screenwriters who think they’re more clever than they are.