Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom (1984) is on. Of course, it’s nowhere near as good as Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981). The thing that really turned me off, and that turns me off to this day, is the ‘banquet’ scene. From the beginning I envisioned George Lucas and Steven Spielberg rubbing their hands together like a couple of 13-year-old boys trying to come up with the grossest things these ‘weird-ass foreigners’ would eat. It’s offensive on two levels: The shear childishness of the gross-out festival, and the racist assumption that people of colour who live in different cultures eat gross things.
It was already pretty much down the tubes for me, but…
when Jack Nicholson aka Jack Torrance is shown to be typing ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY over and over again instead of working on his novel.
Okay, so there’s no vestige of the complex Jack who wants to be a literary giant and a good husband and father, and whose petulance makes sense in light of how he falls short of his own aspirations and all that shit, huh? Just this grinning evil goblin?
I like Reeves but he had no business being in that film (and, thankfully, he was only shown in a few short bits). Nevertheless, when he was there it was like a record skipping. Just completely pulled me out of the moment.
The anal sex joke scene at the end of The Kingsman.
Not a great movie but I was enjoying it. Then they tack on this juvenile dumb scene that doesn’t fit with anything else in the movie. It would be like having Star Wars end with Luke saying “well that was exciting, now I have to go take a dump.”
It was such a turn off that I purposely skipped the sequels.
Twice in the same movie - once in the banquet scene and a sort of foreshadowing scene where the villagers feed Indy and Willie and she is grossed out and refuses to eat it.
Except that in the earlier scene, Indy chides Willie for her narrow-minded reaction, while eating politely and respectfully himself. I think Spielberg was going for a “poor is good/rich is bad” theme in the comparison between the two meals, but got a bit carried away with the “bad”.
There’s another thread going about the 50th anniversary of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. On my DVD copy, at the end of the Castle Anthrax scene they tacked on some additional footage with Zoot’s twin sister Dingo blathering on about something, apparently just as an excuse to reuse the clip of the crowd of people yelling “Get on with it!” It pretty much stops the flow of the movie dead in its tracks. I can’t say it completely ruined the film, but it certainly didn’t make it any better.
The scene in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation where Clark gets locked in the attic while everyone else goes shopping. Having an overly sappy and sentimental scene in the middle of the movie just doesn’t work, or at least it isn’t to my taste. It doesn’t ruin the movie, which is still one of my favorites, but IMHO it is the movie’s only major mistake.
This is the movie that made it really clear to me that Americans doing Shakespeare in the same cast as experienced Brits is simply a mistake. Keanu was terrible in this role, Denzel + Robert Sean Leonard merely tolerable. Every scene where they appeared next to a Brit was painful.
I’d forgotten about him. I just went back and watched the scene with Dogberry and the watchmen, and came away with two thoughts: 1) he is a great physical actor, and really holds the camera; and 2) wtf was that accent. Kind of…Irish? But sometimes Scottish?
It’s not much of a joke. The princess promises the hero anal sex if he saves the world, he saves the world, and they have anal sex. What joke there is is that they actually “went there”.