Hmm. I took it more as some cellular element such mitochondria - of which I assumed it was a play on. Obviously just a way to introduce a measure of forciness. I am sure they could have done it a better way.
I think by that stage there wasn’t a lot that was going to save Star Wars for me.
I never took it in quite that way. Most of the guests are eating the food, they’re perfectly happy, and no one is suffering any ill effects from it. Willie’s reaction to it is just a reflection of the culture that she (and you and I) grew up in. There’s nothing objectively gross about it, just different.
There were so many plot holes that the ending didn’t strike me as particularly bad.
The point is my imagination of two 13-year-old boys in a ‘what’s the grossest thing they could eat’ contest. It’s just dumb. ‘Ew! Eyeball soup!’ (Yes, I know that eyeballs are considered a delicacy; but roasted in the head, not floating in a soup.)
Just noting that it’s been the better part of 20 years since the SMDB found anal intercourse of passing interest as a topic.
“The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex, and picnics.”
― Christopher Hitchens
(For the record, I’d welcome lobster in drawn butter, on occasion.)
Warm-water spiny lobster. Cold-water Maine lobster, I can take or leave.
Okay, but that still says more about the immaturity of the boys rather being insulting to the people or culture the banquet.
I couldn’t disagree more strongly about them understanding Tolkien. I know I’m in the vast minority on this point, but I think almost everything in those terrible films showed that they had complete contempt for the source material. The skateboarding elf was an obvious example, but there are many other things that went far deeper than one stupid scene. Making Gimli comic relief, Gandalf abandoning Frodo when he knows the Black Riders are close, making Faramir’s character a near duplicate of Boromir, the Prancing Pony being foreign and frightening rather than homey and welcoming, Gandalf smacking Denethor with his staff so that he can issue his own orders, the cartoonish magic duel between Gandalf and Saruman instead of the nuanced and revealing conversation at that point in the book, Pippin lighting the beacons on his own initiative, Frodo rejecting Sam and sending him away (in the middle of Mordor!), well, I’m sure there are many more, but I’ve only seen the trilogy once. I’ve tried to rewatch it a few times, but I get so infuriated that I can never tolerate more than a few minutes. It’s so sad that with the budget and talent they had, they chose to simplify, dumb down, and remove all the depth of the book at almost every point.
Neither of these scenes “ruined” the film, but they were pretty bad in an otherwise good movie.
The Smokey and the Bandit love scene complete with that cheesy song “They call him the Bandit…” As a kid, I was like, “Get back to the car chases!”
And to a lesser extent, the final scene in Blazing Saddles, which just never did anything for me.
There is a cultural aspect that goes beyond space-slug-style nit picking. Midi-chlorians took a giant shit on a shared cultural experience of millions of people. People loved the idea of the force. It was on tee-shirts and bumper stickers and kids playing Star Wars in their backyards. Every kid knew what the force was, every kid knew it could be used by anyone. And then Lucas took that beloved shared experience and retconed it pretty much just for the sake of some exposition.
To add to that: the France- and UK-bound trains go in different tunnels (there are three, two for trains and one for emergencies). There is a moment when Hunt narrowly avoids an oncoming train, which would be impossible in real life.
Maybe it’s just me but in Blazing Saddles Lili Von Shtupp’s musical number goes on for 5 full minutes and isn’t funny. It’s the thing I always skip on a rewatch.
Wasn’t it necessary to establish context for Clark’s determination/obsession with crafting a good Christmas? I don’t think the last line of the movie hits the same without that context.
At that: the scene where Han Solo eventually shoots Greedo.
Takes me right out of the movie.
And, after “fixing” so many scenes that didn’t really need it, he managed to not fix the one shot in the original Star Wars that always bothered me. It’s a very brief shot of Vader’s TIE fighter and his two wingman just taking off from the Death Star during the final battle, and the way they move, it’s painfully obvious that they’re just three models all stuck to the same support, which is then moved around. It’s completely unlike every other shot in the battle, and always stick out to me. This shot right here:
For the record, I’d welcome sex with drawn butter, on occasion.
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I think the scene where Clark and Ellen are in bed the evening after bringing home their first tree does that. Ellen tells Clark that maybe the grandparents should stay at a hotel to avoid making a big deal of Christmas like he has on all kinds of other occasions. Clark says “when have I ever done that”. Ellen proceeds to list all kinds of events (birthdays, graduations, funerals*, anniversaries, etc.) that Clark makes a big deal out of.
I think it was intended as a kind of “palate cleanser” scene, to take a break from the comedy that had been going on pretty much non-stop since the first scene of the movie, when Clark was antagonizing the rednecks on the road with him. The thing is, at least IMHO, the movie would have done just fine with not taking a break from the funny stuff.
*. I can just imagine what happened after the Griswold’s visit to Wally World, stopping on the way back home for Aunt Edna’s funeral, 
I am with you on all these points. Never watched the second and third movies and what clips I saw just annoyed me.
Such cliched, formulaic fluff with little of the subtly or nuance of the books. Not that Tolkien was particularly subtle, laboured metaphors and all. But the movies kept resorting to hammering us over the head with conflict between characters that just was not in the books.
The fellowship has some great scenes, and certain things are going to change with adaption to film, but they messed with a lot of the material in ways that lost it for me.
The Hobbit movies from what I managed to suffer through were another level of atrocious.
I completely agree. I read ‘The Shining’ at 14, my first Stephen King novel, and absolutely loved it. So when the movie came out when I was 16-17 I was excited to see it in the theater. I had read Carrie and seen the movie by then- great adaptation. I had seen ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and enjoyed it; I had seen Jack Nicholson in other movies and liked him as an actor. So I fully expected ‘The Shining’ movie to be an outta the park home run.
…and was bitterly disappointed. By the numerous story line changes in general, but yeah, especially by how one-dimensional the Jack Torrance character had become. In the book he was a nuanced character, struggling with recovering from alcoholism, trying to rebuild his life (I believe I read somewhere that the character was in part an analogue for King himself, who had his own addiction issues). Nicholson played him as a cartoonish Halloween ghoul.