I honestly can’t think of a clearer way to describe the thread topic than the title line.
I’ll start with Return of the King.* Can’t stand the vast majority of the film, and when it’s playing on TNT or whatnot I just snort derisively and say insulting things about [del]Viggo Mortensen[/del] Elijah Wood.[sup]†[/sup] But nonetheless I’ll watch it on DVD, because that let’s me skip to any one of the three wonderful scenes–Sam versus Shelob, Eowyn versus the Witch-King, and Pippin singing Bilbo’s travelling song–without having to put up with the other crap.
Anybody else have a nomination?
*Yes, I know most of y’all like the movie, but so what? The threads about films each poster personally despises, not about movies universally derided as steaming piles of triceratops vomit. Anyway, I don’t deny that Fellowship is one of the greatest movies ever made, and that Towers, while flawed, still rocks overall, so be content.
[sup]†[/sup]I try to hate Viggo for this movie, I really do, but then I think of A History of Violence and I fall in love all over again. And obviously only a madman can hate Ian McKellen. Fortunately Wood is there to be a sacrificial victim.
The very last clip before the credits in X-Men: The Last Stand where Magneto moves the chess piece. The rest of the movie blows but showing a brief flash of the chess piece moving right before the cut to credits is brilliant. You can see it here (low quality - someone just stuck a camera in front of a television screen).
I wouldn’t say I despised Triple X, I just thought it was really silly. But I did like the scene where Vin Diesel goes to meet his contact, and the zither theme from The Third Man is playing quietly in the background.
I have absolutely nothing good to say about Phantom Menace, except for one thing: that scene where the blast doors open to reveal Darth Maul and John Williams’ *Duel of the Fates *is one of the coolest moments in any SW film.
I thought Jennifer’s Body was a pretty dumb horror flick, even by the standards of the genre. But I loved the following exchange after an emo kid tried asking out Megan Fox, who plays the title character.
Hey, that stupid movie had some great bits that were much better written than they had any reason to be:
Xander Cage: What is this place?
Gibbons: Looks like a diner.
Xander Cage: That’s clever. You know, you almost had me going there for a while. I was a bit groggy before, then I started noticing things. Like, you got a stockbroker over here, all dressed up reading the Financial Times on a Sunday morning when the market’s closed. Unlikely, but okay, I can go with that. I can even go with the stick-up man packing a cop-issue Beretta. But you want to know where you blew it?
[points at waitress]
Xander Cage: With her. My aunt was in the restaurant business all her life. There’s no way in hell a career waitress comes to work in high heels. She’d have blisters the size of pancakes before lunch. And if she ain’t real, then this whole thing ain’t real. That’s how I knew this bozo over here wouldn’t get a shot off even if we waited till St. Patrick’s Day.
[fires shotgun at wall]
Xander Cage: Because there’s nothing but blanks in these guns. Oh, and no offense, but their performances were terrible.
That scene, and the one where he asks the girl to dance, she refuses, and he replies “But I’m a really good dancer!” It was so out of the blue.
I was going to pretend that the Charge happened in the second movie, but I lost interest in the joke halfway through.
And you’re right. The whole sequence – from the moment Theoden King gives his robust, kingly speech (which makes Aragorn’s later one sound all hollow) to Eowyn hiding her face from him, then telling Merry to have courage for their friends, and finally with the Eorlingas chanting “Death!” as they charge down to have words with the Nazgul – is awesome. Not to mention that Aragorn
:: ritual spitting ::
I don’t care for the lighting of the Beacons, though. It just doesn’t work for me.
Fair enough. Sam’s confrontation with Shelob doesn’t excite me all that much either (although I love the High-Noon shot of Sam’s arm), so we’re even. Great minds can differ.
I didn’t care much for that either. Pulled me right out of the movie. I’m willing to accept a lot in a movie, a fantasy/adventure movie especially, but seriously I’m supposed to believe there are people living on the summits of some of the tallest mountains keeping watch 24/7 waiting for the once-in-several-generations chance that the other beacons are lit?
I’m aware it’s different in the books, but the portrayal of the beacons in the movie were ludicrous. At least one of them was above the cloud level!
I was trying to think of an example, but I pretty much realized, if I hate a movie, I hate all of it. If I like some significant parts of it, my opinion changes to “liked it OK”.
But I will say, as much as I hated Avatar (and please don’t let’s get into an argument over it here, I HATED IT) I guess it was kind of pretty at times. The aliens went right into uncanny valley for me though.
XXX was actually a lot better than it had any right to be. Besides the diner scene, there’s also the scene right in the beginning where the tuxedo-wearing James Bond stand-in tries to infiltrate the dance club and gets shot practically before he’s through the door.
Please don’t be sad. When you’re sad I feel guilty, and when I feel guilty I get all stabby and do something cruel to random, non-Mika people.
See, that’s me and Two Towers. It has long stretches of stupid, but its best sequences make up for it; and if I were insane enough to watch it with a stopwatch, I’m confident that the scenes that annoy me would be much less than half of the movie. But Return has (to me) more crap time than diamond time. It’s like Superman Returns: four or five sequences of sublime wonderment encased by two and a half hours of mammoth entrails.
That’s it! I just shouldn’t watch movies with Return in the title!
Superman Returns, incidentally, is overall a bad movie (Superman is not a goddamn deadbeat dad, damn it! And if he were, Perry White and/or Diana Prince would have sat down and read him the riot act!) but the shuttle-airplane rescue at the beginning and the super-first-responder bit during the earthquake keep it from being an utter waste.
I can’t say I disliked Avatar, as I was so bored by it I couldn’t finish. I bailed out after about 30 minutes, when I realized that I simply didn’t care what happened to the lead character.
I didn’t hate the Liam Neeson movie Unknown as much as I thought it was just boring and predictable. But the two or three scenes with Bruno Ganz were awesome. I kinda saw his trick with the tea coming, but I still loved it when he was on screen. And I thought having him play an unapologetic-ex-Stasi character was an interesting choice in a movie otherwise devoid of interesting choices.
I’d never seen him in anything other than the Downfall parodies, but now I really want to see more movies with him.
It’s not so much that I hated him. Hating implies that I wanted bad things to happen to him, like, oh, Kirk in the latest Star Trek. I just didn’t care if he lived or died. He was worse than odious; he was boring.
So I’m told. And the big problem is Supes in that movie is that the Superman I know & love is a hero because he has history’s worst case of survivor’s guilt and (not to mention abandonment issues up the wazoo), and thus is positively compulsive about doing the right thing. I can see him thinking that it would be impossible for him to knock up Lois, but it’s just not in him not to immediately come clean to Lois.
A friend of mine checked out emotionally of that movie because she just couldn’t stand that he never apologized to his mother.
