I know Showgirls wasn’t terribly well-received, but I’m just a big sucker for glitzy choreography.
Excellent choice, a terrible movie starring Steve Guttenberg and rescued by Peter O’Toole. Actually Peter O’Toole would be my patron saint of this thread.
The Movie Supergirl was dreadful despite the beautiful Helen Slater as Supergirl but Peter O’Toole’s acting made it worth watching the movie. Creator is a great movie that I love, but it would have been a piece of silly fluff without him.
Jim
IIRC he was an EMT.
Shaving their heads?
Or, “I am Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, your senior Drill Instructor. From now on, you will speak only when spoken to, and the first and last words out of your filthy sewers will be Sir. Do you maggots understand?”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
I didn’t check but I’m pretty sure that’s the first line of the movie.
The Fifth Element. Milla Jovovich versus the Mangalores for what was, it turned out, a case chock full of nothing useful, with opera singing in the background.
At the very end of “Manhunter” there’s a really great fight scene where the detective, played by William Peterson, bursts through a wall-sized window and dukes it out with the serial killer, set to “Inna Gadda da Vida.” Very tasty.
And “Two Days In The Valley” is totally useless except for the great catfight between Teri Hatcher and Charlize Theron.
Ye gods, man. That’s the worst scene in the movie. Watching it in college I was so annoyed I yanked the VCR out of the wall and threw it out a 12th-story window.
Unfortunately I had forgotten that it was neither my VCR nor my window, and it landed on Carmine Raguso, mob scion. You really don’t want to hear what happened next.
And “Two Days In The Valley” is totally useless except for the great catfight between Teri Hatcher and Charlize Theron.
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The Robobcop Omnicorp commercials. I would buy all their products.
Swing Time is a terrible romantic comedy that I suspect wasn’t even funny in 1936. But it has the most sublime Kern/Fields soundtrack and amazing dance routines from Astaire & Rogers. The “Pick Yourself Up” song/dance segment is spine-tinglingly good. And I don’t even like musicals!
I’m pleasantly surprised to see that Time magazine included Swing Time in their All Time Top 100, and quite right too.
Then you must admit, it affected you quite powerfully. A powerful scene, eh? 
Got another one. In “Carlito’s Way” which I think is a pretty standard mobster melodrama, Carlito spots a beautiful woman practicing ballet in a basement dance studio with a group of other would-be ballerinas and is smitten with her – she obviously represents everything he wants to escape to when he leaves his mobster lifestyle.
Later, he goes to a strip club owned by one of his former gangster buddies, and he spots a famliliar dancer onstage with her back to him. She turns around and flings her arms wide, exposing her breasts (and her face) to him and the crowd, and he sees (of course) that it’s his ballerina.
Then he stands there looking disappointed as she continues to dance onstage. It’s a nice reiteration of the theme of the movie – Carlito reaches out for a ballerina, and naturally picks the one among them who is also a stripper, thus returning him to his old world.
A movie not well known in the U.S.: Almadovar’s Talk To Her. Overall, a so-so movie with a murky plot but ONE scene that is burned forever into your retinas.
One of the characters is a fan of silent movies and, 3 or 4 times during the course of the movie, there is a short clip from a (simulated) silent movie acting as an allegory for what’s going on in the main movie. One of these clips (featuring Paz Vega before she became known to American audiences) is of a young woman whose fiance becomes the Incredible Shrinking Man. She stands by him but, one night when he is about six inches tall, he finds himself longing for the sexuality he once knew…
My wife sat staring with her mouth wide open as I rolled on the floor laughing. If you had asked me before, I would have said that never, NEVER in the history of cinema had anyone thought to put that image on film.
Arena fits into the same category nicely.
Transformers: The Movie for the terrific voice acting- Orson Welles as Unicron, for chrissakes…
Mean Girls for Lindsay Lohan’s breasts. Did I just say that?
The Boondock Saints just for Willem Dafoe, whose without doubt is the epitome of the cliched “homosexual FBI investigator with a Starbucks addiction” character type.
The Cell, pretty much sucks when its in the real world, but the Dream schenes are incredably imaginative.
“You ain’t usin’ my DNA to make no Tubies!”
I’ll cheat a little, because there are two elements in Conan the Barbarian : the score and Max Von Sydow’s single scene. I so wanted him to be cast as Theoden. He’d already played the character.
And of course SW:TPM for the lightsaber duel.
Aw yeah. Actually, not even the entire duel: right after Kenobi gets through the shield, when he engages with Darth Maul, there’s about four seconds of truly furious swordplay, and then they disengage briefly. In those four seconds, you see everything a lightsaber battle should be: the parrying of weightless blades by warriors who psychically know what move their opponent is about to make. It is beautiful, it is glorious, it is everything I dreamed.
That four seconds is so awesome, it almost makes up for the rest of the movie. Almost. Doesn’t make up for the fart joke, though.
Oddly enough, I thought of Peter O’Toole in Supergirl as well. I’ll add Kevin Spacey in “Superman Returns” apart from his performance, there is nothing about that movie worth seeing a second time.
“Cold Mountain” The scenes with Natalie Portman – who it turns out can really act. Nothing else in that movie is worth the time it takes to sit through.
Twins is pretty excreble, but for some reason, I’m endeared by Danny DeVito’s character who, no matter what, can’t help being slime. There is a moment though in which he finds out he was an unintended consequence of the process, in essence the “garbage” that was left over after they formed the Ahnold character. It is a brilliant moment for him as an actor and a great bit of writing too.
Speaking of Danny DeVito, the movie Renaissance Man is pretty standard fare, however the private reciting the “St. Crispin’s day” Speech always gets me. It is a fantastic moment that, like a greatest hits CD I’d include on a “Best Movie Moments” DVD.
You must be joking. The airliner rescue sequence rocks; it’s simultaneously the best and worst thing about the movie.
What, no love for camel punching? 
(And, even better, it gets referenced in the sequel.
Paraphrased:
“Oh, hey, it’s that camel.”
“Huh, so it is. calls out Sorry, man.”
camel spits on Conan
CONAN SMASH! >(
:D)