I am astonished that no one has mentioned the budding “Dwarf on Elf” romance in one of the (several indistinguishable) Hobbit episodes. Tolkien had a real problem with women – let’s acknowledge that and take Middle Earth as he wrote it. That “romance” was so false to the whole Tolkien Universe that it kinda creeped me out.
Superman, 1978:
The Can You Read My Mind? sequence “performed” by Margot Kidder. Hit the FF button every time I watch this movie (and that’s a lot, because I do love this movie – except for that).
Good one. I had totally forgotten about it and how, even as a kid, I cringed. Thaaaanks for jarring my memory.,
Can you read my mind? Do you know what it is I’m thinking?
“Darn that CaptMurdock. Darn him all to heck” 
Your experience growing up as a Star Wars fan was very different than mine. I never thought there was the slightest implication than everyone could learn the force if they just tried hard enough. I always assumed that a very few people had the potential, and of people who had the potential, some had more than others.
(Granted, that may be partially back-projection from reading so many fantasy books in which that’s how potential-to-learn-magic works.)
Well, I’m not really talking about the in-universe rules of the movie, I’m talking about the cultural impact it had on society at large. I mean, if you accidentally knocked a ketchup bottle off the table but still managed to catch it in your hand as it was falling and someone else said, “Way to use the force,” you wouldn’t be like, “That doesn’t make sense because very few people have the potential to use the force,” right? You’d just get the joke that you used the force.
It certainly didn’t “completely ruin” an otherwise excellent movie, but the flying saucer bit in The Life Of Brian is a brick wall that stops the film in its tracks. Jarring, utterly unnecessary and out of place. Fortunately it’s a very brief sequence and the story quickly regains its momentum afterward.
I guess? I mean, I don’t see how on-screen Midichlorians make that joke either more or less funny/relevant/plausible/whatever.
But at this point I think we might just be in didn’t-see-it-the-same-way-at-all-land.
For a film that has scenes that stop the film dead, and are not brief, see Apocalypse Now Redux.
The original Apocalypse Now was a tense, taut, thriller that gains momentum until it ends. But the longgggg additional scenes in Redux (specifically, the dalliance with the Playmates and the time on the French plantation) just stop the momentum, and the film doesn’t regain momentum quickly.
I have it on DVD, and watched the whole thing, front-to-back, exactly once. Now, I just fast forward to the next chapter, until the film gets back to what it should be.
The name “Eggsy” is what kills the film for me. I fucking hate it - it’s an absolutely horrid nickname. Just makes me think of hard-boiled eggs, I don’t even like reading it. If there are actually people who are nicknamed Eggsy in the UK (and I pray that’s not the case) they should be legally obliged to not use it or have it used for them or the perpetrator will face incarceration. Not execution - I’m not the kind of monster that would make you shoot your own dog 
.
Also, I didn’t really care for the rest of the film as a whole. The anal sex punchline was incongruous, but not much worse than the rest. Except for “Eggsy” which was a million billion times worse.
See, I always thought this was the cleverest bit.
Brian’s life is a funhouse mirror of the life of the real Jesus. Born in a stable, has a following who believes he’s the Messiah, gets crucified by the Romans.
One big difference of course is that Jesus performed miracles. Acts which were simply beyond anything which people of the time could comprehend as possible. (And, for Jesus, if you believe, beyond anything we could comprehend as possible today). Brian obviously can’t do this.
But what did the Roman soldiers chasing him and anyone watching see Brian do? Fall from a great height and land miraculously on the ground perfectly safely. A miracle! Only the intervention of the Lord could explain Brian’s safe descent. (This is in fact the miracle Jesus refused to perform when tempted by Satan: “the angels will bear you up”.
However silly the aliens bit is, and it is very silly, it is actually a better explanation for Brian’s survival than “It was a miracle”. Aliens, if tehy exist, are physically real and act in accordance with the laws of physics in a way that, say, angels don’t.
So Brian gets his miracle without it being really a miracle, just vanishingly, ludicrously improbable - but more probable than anything the Gospels claim Jesus did.
I’ve known 3 people with the nickname Eggy here in the UK. 1 had the surname Chicken, the other 2 were famed for their eggy smelling farts.
But I don’t know anyone called Eggsy with the s.
Many years ago in college, I attended a lecture/Q&A session with Graham Chapman. He talked about that scene - when they made Life of Brian, he was in tax exile from the UK. The movie was almost entirely done in Tunisia, but the scenes in the spaceship were going to be filmed in London. Based on the laws and his situation at the time, he could only spend a single day in the UK, so he flew into London on an early morning flight, was driven straight to the studio, got into costume, spent the entire day being shaken around in the small spaceship, went straight back to the airport and caught a late night flight back to the USA.
ISTM Lucas felt for some reason he needed a “realistic” science-fiction explanation for Anakin to be easily detected as an extraordinary potential and selected to be groomed accordingly.
Some times you should let a mystical fantasy be a mystical fantasy.
THIS
I’ve never liked the From Here to Eternity parody scene in Airplane (the flashback when Ted and Elaine are making out on the beach). I always used to fast forward through the scene.
It’s a month python film. That’s like their whole deal. I mean it’s not, everything about that film was incredibly funny in a whole bunch of different ways. But the completely random non-sequiture is Monty Pythons signature, and this was it taken to its apogee. IMO it was great.
Yeah but for me that ship had sailed long before the mitochodrians appeared. The franchise had been ruined, for me, 12 times over by then. I would never again watch the original trilogy and think “wow, back story to this must be so awesome and dark and compelling. I wonder what it is?”
It’s also the set up for the best line in the movie. Brian experienced something authentically mind blowing rather than the bullshit, made up miracles everybody else in the film are getting excited about.
“You served my father in the Clone Wars.”
That sounds so cool. What are clone wars? Are the clones good, or evil? Or are the wars themselves clones?
Then we see the prequels, and…that’s it? That doesn’t even make sense!
It still makes me mad. I watched the original trilogy again last week, and that scene still bugs me. It’s like George Lucas went back in time and made the original worse.