Hey, I did say that the Awards didn’t mean anything and cited last year as an example.
**
I was trying to think of a bad part in BC&SK so as not to have a complete hijack, but I couldn’t come up with it. I’d forgotten all about that “Raindrops Are Falling on my Head” scene. Maybe because I always skip over it when I’m watching the movie. I agree with you. It doesn’t advance the plot, it’s out of place, and it doesn’t do anything really except establish that Butch and what’s-her-name really like each other, and I’m sure they could have accomplished that in a better way. I blame the director, not Goldman for that bit. (Even if Goldman had written in a montage like that, the director could’ve chosen to edit it out.)
Yeah, pre-nuclear subs usually had diesel engines which could only run when on the surface (for obvious reasons) and batteries that they ran on underwater. You could only run the engines a certain amount of time underwater, were limited to about 10 knots at best, and had to run your engine on the surface hours to recharge the batteries afterwards. I learned all this from some old sub simulator, I believe it was called Silent Hunter or something like that.
Atreyu, yeah, I used to play that on my Commodore 128 too. I wish they’d come out with a Windows version. Who needs all the fancy schmancy graphics and stuff, huh?
Unbreakable Fine movie that totally blew it with the America’s Most Wanted “this is what happened to the two characters” titles at the end. Now Dunn is a superhero and Price is revealed as a maniac so he just calls the cops and they throw him in a mental hospital? It would have been a thousand times better if it had simply said “Based on an anonymous tip, the police discovered evidence of multiple acts of terrorism, but Elijah Price is still at large …” Or, better yet, just had Dunn’s reaction of horror be the finale without tacking on the text.
The Abyss A miraculous rescue of our heroic crew by … a giant, ugly, plastic soap dish.
Four Weddings and a Funeral “Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed.” The entire audience groaned.
The Matrix Thermodynamics, shmermodynamics. Conservation of energy is for losers.
L.A. Story The traffic sign scenes.
O Brother Where Art Thou Babyface Nelson machineguns some cows - jarring and unneccessary. We already know he’s nuts just by the way he acts. Didn’t wreck the movie, but seriously hurt it.
Shawshank Redemption The “good to see you old buddy” scene at the very end. The movie should have ended with Redd’s narration “I hope” and left the actual reunion to our imaginations.
Singin’ in the Rain The entire “Broadway Rhythm” bit where Gene Kelly keeps blasting out “Gotta Dance!” What the hell is that even doing in the movie, much less taking up a good fifth of it?
Shrek “All Star” by Smashmouth. How many more movies are going to subject us to this crappy song?
The cow-killing scene in O Brother is supposed to be an inside joke. There’s another movie where the actor who plays Babyface Nelson is playing an escaped convict. He’s walking through a field and finds a herd of cows. Then he yells “Cows! If there’s one thing I love, it’s cows!” and hugs one of them.
That’s the way Stephen King’s novella ended. This was from Different Seasons, which also had Apt Pupil and The Body (which translated into the movie title Stand By Me). I haven’t seen either of the latter two movies, and I don’t think I will. A lot of Stephen King’s best work includes a lot of psychological tension and interior monologues that don’t translate well to the screen. Apt Pupil was an especially disturbing story, much more so than any “supernatural” thriller. I don’t intend to ruin that story for myself by seeing it trivialized in the form of one of them thar flicker shows.
Speaking of Stand by Me, I’d like to add the scene where the boy tells a story about the fat kid participating in a pie eating contest only to throw up all over the place as a means of revenge. It’s an incredibly stupid story to begin with, it drags the film to a screeching halt, and to top it all off it has nothing whatsoever to do with any other part of the film. Reiner should have edited it out.
Better yet, he shouldn’t have filmed it to begin with.
I saw this movie again last Saturday on the tube. The joke is the sign has been telling people mundane information all this time, but now it’s decided to tell a select few stuff they REALLY need to know. (The first time Steve Martin sees the sign, there is a forlorn-looking guy holding a briefcase standing at the foot of the sign, looking up at it.)
Kelly’s character has an idea for a musical number. (Or was it a whole movie?) Anyway, he’s pitching it to a producer. We’re seeing what he’s describing. (However, Singin’ takes place in the late 1920s, so the movie-within-the-movie would NOT have been filmed in Technicolor!)
The parts of LA Story and Shawshank Redemption both work well for me, but that’s a matter of taste.
Long Answer: The “Broadway Melody” section of Singin in the Rain shows us the new plot of “The Dancing Cavelier”. The scenes we see describe the framing story for the picture. The already filmed cavalier scenes are to function as a dream sequence after the protaganist gets hit on the head, much the same as the dream sequence in “The Wizard of Oz”.
Short Answer: Gene Kelly was primarily a dancer. This was his big dance sequence.
Crunchy Frog: Sounds like you read the article I am talking about. It also tore into the other three best picture nominees that year.
Lux Fiat: The article was written for New York magazine, but I can’t give you the date (the book I read doesn’t give the information). However, you can read the article in a book titled The Big Picture: Who Killed Hollywood? and Other Essays. The essay is titled “The Emperor’s New Fatigues (and Other Stories)” and is on page 245 of the hardcover edition.
(The archives at http://www.nymag.com may have this article but they were unavailable when I just tried it)
Field of Dreams and Goodfellas are both fine films, the latter especially so, and it would take a lot to ruin either, but that’s damn near what happened in both:
The scene in which Amy Madigan’s character (wife of the Costner character) gets on her high horse in the school gymnasium and then carries her dreadful performance into the nearby corridor–one of the worst acting performances I have ever seen in any movie.
The courtroom scene toward the end in which Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta) steps out of character to describe what’s going on. Not that there’s anything wrong with the acting in his case. It’s the writing. The flow and rhythm of the entire film is irretrievably disrupted. Horribly, horribly jarring.
The part in “showgirls” when she barfs by the side of the car. sheesh. and
SPOILER
I thought the end of “Swiming with Sharks” was horrendous. Specifically the part when Frank Whaley’s friend comes into his office and explains exactly what we know (probably) happened. It would have been much more effective had we gone from Keven Spacey’s home after the pistol shot, to F. Whaley’s office when Spacey pokes his head in the door.
I forgot this one. I don’t by any stretch of the imagination think this movie was academy-award winning stuff, but I bring it up because I found this one detail so jarring and wrong I could not get over it. I’m talking about the movie “Days of Thunder.” Nicole Kidman’s character is a neurologist. She treats two drivers in the movie for their injuries after head trauma. But later in the movie, we see her riding on the back of a motorcycle without a helmet.
A neurologist on the back of a big bike with no helmet.
The Straight Story - Richard Farnsworth’s daughter saying “What’s the number for 911?” in the beginning of the movie made me wince more than any other scene in any other movie that I can think of.
That is not a good way to illustrate that a person is slow, Disney movie or no Disney movie.
Come to think of it, that whole movie frustrated me to no end. Farnsworth’s acting was superb, and there was some gorgeous cinematography, but all the overbearing sentimentality and Sissy Spacek’s godawful attempt at a speech impediment made it very hard for me to really enjoy the movie. It’s currently rated #108 on IMDB so I guess there are plenty of people who adore it, and I respect their opinion, but I’m not one of them.
P.S. I think this is the first time that I’ve had two posts in a thread that were made a year apart.
Well, howdy stranger! I have Silent Service II for DOS, but stopped playing because it didn’t work too well on my 333mHz. Now that I also have a 166, I’ll start playing again.
