If there was one thing that irritated me, it was Kumar in the beginning with the bong in the airplane. He does something so ENORMOUSLY stupid. It’s not even funny, yet it drives the story. To me, it really smacked of bad writing. You wonder why Harold hangs out with him… it pulls you out of the movie because the only logical conclusion is “the studio paid for two actors, not one.”
Well, board ate my post. Pisses me off.
“Before I kill you, Mister Bond…”
But it would have; Adrian alive can do yet more damage in the service of his scheme. If Manhattan cared enough to kill Rorschach, he should have killed Adrian too.
Lionel Hutz: “Sideshow Bob, did you fix the mayoral election?”
SS Bob: “No.”
Lionel Hutz: (after long pause) “Kids, help me out here.”
Unless he was setting him up as an experiment. I could picture that.
You’re correct, but Marion does realize this, and, just before she’s takes a shower, it’s clear she has decided to return the money and accept the consequences.
Of course, everyone in Alien makes stupid decisions. But everyone in Alien is dumber than rock salt.
Memoirs of an Invisible Man (the book) is filled with stupid decisions by the main character. Most obvious:
[ul][li]The army is searching for him in the beginning, but have no evidence that the invisible man actually exists. He decides to talk to the general in charge. So now they know for sure.[/li][li]His girlfriend is a reporter for the New York Times. Now, if there’s anything he needs to keep the army at bay, it’s publicity, but he decides not to bother her about it.[/li][li]He notices that the army is getting ready to surround his apartment. He then spends at least 20 minutes watching as they set things up so that he can’t sneak past them. Then he waits until the army officers are coming up the stairs to try to escape.[/li][/ul]
I recently read The Lovely Bones, a novel that started off strong but then lost its way. The worst I could say about most of the latter portion of the book is that it got kinda dull, but there was one scene that really ticked me off.
SPOILERS BELOW!
The basic premise of the book is that a 14 year old girl (Susie) is raped and murdered but continues to watch her family from a non-traditional kind of heaven. A stupid decision by the author is that one of Susie’s former classmates (Ruth) has an out-of-body experience and Susie is able to take over her body for a couple of hours.
At this point Susie has been dead for about eight years and has watched her father suffer both physically and mentally from his fruitless attempts to bring her murderer to justice. Susie’s own sister narrowly escaped becoming another of this serial killer’s victims when she broke into his house to look for evidence. Susie knows he has gone on to kill other girls since her own death.
At the moment when Susie takes over Ruth’s body she knows that her murderer is in the immediate area, she’s in the company of another old friend who has a car, and there’s also a phone nearby. So what does Susie decide to do with her brief return to the land of the living? She has a hot shower, has sex with the guy, and then takes a nap.
I guess I can’t blame the girl for wanting to get some action, but I think choosing sex over stopping a serial killer is pretty stupid…and selfish. Especially since it’s already been established that in heaven Susie can both meet other people and have anything she wants. She could have been making sweet angel love to guys up in heaven all the time.
Oh, the book never addresses how Ruth feels about having her body used for sex by someone else.
I’m not a fan myself. First page pretty much undermines the stated premise and telegraphed that this was going to be the kind of story where “genius” really means “protected by script”. Voted for Urban Myths instead.
Hmmmm; so could I, actually.
In all fairness, how is she going to convince anyone? “I know Susie Salmon’s murderer!” “What? You do? How?” “I am Susie Salmon! I’m her spirit living up in heaven, I just took over Ruth’s body temporarily!” “…”
As for boinking angel guys, I think it was implied that Susie had a crush on that boy (I can’t remember his name) specifically. But yeah, the fact that Ruth doesn’t know about the sex is pretty creepy–a weird little parallel to Susie’s assault in the beginning of the book, if you think about it.
Heh. Slight hijack, but - do you know many public defenders? I know a few, and quite a lot of people who’re planning to become public defenders. I don’t know one who’d be willing to “lay down” for anything, or work for anyone who wanted them to.
Every decision made by Denis Leary’s character on Rescue Me is stupid. #1 would probably be the time he kidnapped his (non-custodial) kids. BRILLIANT.
This is, of course, the point.
I have to disagree with this. Like RealityChuck says, what Marion did was undeniably stupid, but the movie takes pains to show that her actions are stupid, even within the context of the movie. She feels trapped in her current life and is so desperate for a better one that she does something rash and impulsive without taking the time to think it over. As Norman says, we all go a little crazy sometimes. And Marion agrees, describing her actions as having deliberately stepped into a trap. As the story progresses, she begins to realize how stupid what she did actually was and by the time she’s finished talking to Norman over dinner, she’s decided to take the money back to Phoenix and face the music.
As for the consequences she would have faced had she not died, she would have taken the money back to Phoenix, spent a year or so paying back the part of it that she spent on the car, and gotten on with her life. Sam might have dumped her, but not necessarily. For that matter, if she’d returned to Phoenix before the private investigator was hired, Sam wouldn’t necessarily have found out about her stealing the money; after all, the detective himself says that the police hadn’t been notified and that his clients didn’t want to bring the police into it if they didn’t have to. That also means that she wouldn’t have gone to jail. Though you’re probably right about her losing her job.
Even though the film’s title refers to Norman, I’ve always thought that early audiences, not knowing they story beforehand, must have thought it referred to Marion at first.
Makes me wonder all of a sudden, Doctor Manhatten zapped Rorschach, knowing (he must have, given his nature) how the future would work out. So does that mean nothing comes of Rorschach’s diary in that nut job paper?
“Dr. Grant, I was wondering if you’d like to visit my Tropical Island which happens to be full of Dinosaurs, but it’s all completely safe and protected by Computers, so nothing could possibly go wrong…”
I wouldn’t bet on it. Remember Manhattan’s enigmatic little goodbye ?
Adrian : “I did the right thing, didn’t I ? It all worked out in the end ?”
Manhattan : " ‘In the end’ ? Nothing ends. Nothing ever ends, Adrian."
Alien…Ripley going back for the cat.
I mean seriously, I have three cats and I love them all to bits, but in that situation. Dead cat. I can always get another. Are cats almost extinct in the future so this “Jones” is invaluable? I doubt it, else why would it be on mining ship?
Dangerous, extremely deadly hostil, hard to kill alien life form on the loose, ship about to explode like a supernova, all other crewmembers killed in a gorey grisly painful way and she goes looking for the cat. Idiot.
I remembered that, which made me think the diary had been revealed, but then why off poor Rorschach?
Was that after someone else had already been taken by the Alien, while looking for said cat?