[QUOTE=OneCentStamp]
How about the fairly recent Clive Owen vehicle, Shoot 'Em Up?
[/QUOTE]
I just figured that the entire movie was a send-up of action films so by that time I didn’t really care if they were doing something obscenely stupid. I mean what could really seem that stupid after the skydiving sequence?
[QUOTE=Troy McClure SF]
Sidestepping Starship Troopers, the very premise of The Day After Tomorrow was stupid. So the Sad Muppet is stuck in the Manhattan library and Harrison-Ford-on-a-bender, his dad, will brave the storm and come find his son.
And do what exactly?
[/QUOTE]
I thought it was implied that once Dennis Quaid had reached his son, he radioed back to confirm that there were survivors in New York, and give his location, thus enabling the subsequent helicopter rescue.
[QUOTE=Wee Bairn]
As for the Bourne scene, did they really show him to not fall at the normal rate? I thought the guy was used to just absorb the blow of the landing so Bourne wouldn’t be hurt, not that the guy made him stay aloft longer.
[/QUOTE]
Sort of hard to tell with the jittery action camera thing they do in those movies, (and I haven’t seen the movie since it was in theaters, so memory is a little sketchy) but either he fell at the normal rate and still had time to shoot people on the way down and managed to somehow make the body “absorb” the impact of a three story fall or the body slowed him down. Either way it was cartoonish.
[QUOTE=jjimm]
It’s not just NYers - Londoners, pretty much anywhere in the UK, refer to London as “town”. I have had some genuinely confusing conversations a long way outside London, thinking that when people said “going into town” they were talking about walking to the shops or something. Me, I call it “the smoke”.
[/QUOTE]
Saying The City in London refers to a specific part of London, however.
Similiar to saying “Wall Street” in Manhattan. The context would matter. You might be going to the actual street itself or making a comment about the financial markets.
Battlefield Earth:
There is working gasoline in the planes.
The cavemen can fly them.
The entire human force is a few cavemen and they defeat a civilazation that annihalated them 1000 years ago.
1000 years of decay, and the Library of Congress is just barely covered in dust.
I can go on all day, but what’s the point?
[QUOTE=muldoonthief]
I haven’t seen the movie, but as you describe it, it’s actually worse - bullets require the barrel of a gun to get up to a nice mankilling speed. If you just toss a cartridge in a fire until it cooks off, you get a disappointingly slow bullet.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I figured that the result of someone doing that in real life (assuming you could get the bullets to go off before your fingers burned to a crisp) would be that your hand would go backwards really, really fast. Equal and opposite reactions and all that. 
In T2’s defense, a motorcross bike will accelerate much more rapidly than a semi. That wasn’t anysort of moped, either. Even the underpowered basic models are damn fast.
In the auto-racing movie Driven, two teammates are somehow able to go faster by driving the course side-by-side.
[QUOTE=iamthewalrus(:3=]
This scene seems pretty reasonable to me. He had a head start. He was on a motorized dirt bike, not one with pedals. And he didn’t stay ahead for long. The truck was almost on top of him when Arnie showed up on a Harley to save the day.
[/QUOTE]
Not to mention, a 100cc dirtbike will do at least 40mph on a relatively straight, level roadway.
A semi will obviously do more than 70, but not with only a few feet of clearance on each side, unless the slipway was perfectly straight (it wasn’t).
[QUOTE=Windwalker]
Better than a lot of New Yorkers I’ve met who annoyingly refer to it as “The City”, even when hundreds of miles away! I’ll take Manhattan-centrism in New York over New York-centrism in the universe any day 
[/QUOTE]
Not only when hundreds of miles away. I grew up in Queens, and when we went to Manhattan we said we were going into the city. Maybe it’s a holdover from before the boroughs merged into greater New York.
[QUOTE=The New and Improved Superman]
Two colossally stupid movie moments:
Terminator 2: The chase scene in which a kid peddling a dirt bike manages to stay ahead of an 18 wheeler truck with the pedal to the metal.
the Mummy 2: Another kid has some kind of amulet on that will make him explode (or something like that) as soon as sunlight hits him. As the dawn sun rises, Brendan Fraser picks up the kid and OUTRUNS the sunlight!
[/QUOTE]
Except the first one wasn’t a dirtbike, but a motorbike. And the second one was outrunning the shadow.
Still, except for being completely wrong, well done.
-Joe
[QUOTE=Gangster Octopus]
In Total Recall Arnie is outside the facility and exposed to the “elements” on Mars. His face distorts, expands his eyes start to pop out of their sockets due to the laco of atmosphere (or something). Then for some reason I can’t remember they are saved,but instead of suffering immense trauma from this event, they are perfectly fine.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, but it wasn’t really happening. The entire movie from the point he enters Recall is his hallucination.
[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
I kinda liked Wing Commander, actually, and am willing to overlook its many glaring flaws. What you describe is nearly identical to “sssshhhhhhh” part of the original Trek episode The Savage Curtain, which also had a stupid-Spock moment. Sure, starship combat won’t be anything like submarine warfare, but it looks cool.
[/QUOTE]
Do you mean Balance of Terror? Savage Curtain was the one with Abe Lincoln, and I don’t remember any sshhs. In Balance of Terror, Spock turns on an instrument by accident, which perfectly reasonably sends out radio noise. Kirks shush was a non-technical reaction. No one was whispering before the noise, IIRC. (One of my favorite episodes, and the movie it is based on is great also.)
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned that gem Armageddon. The killer asteroid is spinning rapidly, and Bruce has to fire the nuke at just the right moment. Does he count down? Does he look at his watch? No! He pontificates, he emotes, and then he randomly blows the thing up. Guess they forgot about the rotation. Plenty of other stupid moments in there also, but that’s my favorite.
Actually, the entire premise of the movie Total Recall is wrong. In both the Philip K. Dick short story and in the movie (as it’s initially explained), Arnold’s character is supposed to acquire false memories. He’s not supposed to undergo a hallucination or a dream or a virtual reality vision or any sort of real-time fantasy adventure. He’s supposed to simply remember things that didn’t actually happen as if they did.
Of course, that’d make for a pretty dull movie. You could argue that he’s simply remembering everything that hapened in sequential order, but my memories rarely work like that, and if that were the case, there would have been no possibility of the Rekall guy “breaking into” arnie’s dream – because he wouldn’t be having a dream.
[QUOTE=Miller]
Well, that’s why they couldn’t contact Concordia. Freddie Prinze, Jr. was tying up all the bandwidth downloading ringtones.
[/QUOTE]
Fucking Pilgrims*!
-Joe
*And how is that for unnecessary tacked-on subplots?
[QUOTE=OneCentStamp]
How about the fairly recent Clive Owen vehicle, Shoot 'Em Up?
In the climactic scene, Clive kills Paul Giamatti’s character by putting four bullets between his (own) fingers, then sticking his hand in a fire. The bullets somehow go off simultaneously, all four slugs striking Giamatti in the chest from across the room. Hello…recoil? Not to mention severe burns! The bullets went off in less than two seconds.
I laughed out loud in the theater, exclaiming “Are you kidding me?!?” as did about half the people in there.
[/QUOTE]
Come come now. That movie was intentionally ridiculous. It was something in between a satire and a parody.
[QUOTE=OneCentStamp]
Yeah, I figured that the result of someone doing that in real life (assuming you could get the bullets to go off before your fingers burned to a crisp) would be that your hand would go backwards really, really fast. Equal and opposite reactions and all that.
[/QUOTE]
Actually no, and even worse. Bullets from exploding ammunition just kinda pops out at low speed - being heaviest part of the cartridge they don’t soak a lot of momentum. So no real recoil. Now what can really do damage are fragments of case ripped from the edge of case. These can be propelled to quite high velocities. He would most probably just lost fingers.
[QUOTE=lisacurl]
Yes, but it wasn’t really happening. The entire movie from the point he enters Recall is his hallucination.
[/QUOTE]
There are bits in the film which Arnie couldn’t be aware of - like when the baddies are tracking him across town before he goes to Mars - which can’t be parts of his imaginary spy adventure (though I get the feeling this has been thoroughly gone over since the 90’s on the internet…).
[QUOTE=Voyager]
Do you mean Balance of Terror? Savage Curtain was the one with Abe Lincoln, and I don’t remember any sshhs. In Balance of Terror, Spock turns on an instrument by accident, which perfectly reasonably sends out radio noise. Kirks shush was a non-technical reaction. No one was whispering before the noise, IIRC. (One of my favorite episodes, and the movie it is based on is great also.)
[/QUOTE]
Not Quite. The bridge crew walk and talk in very subdued tones before the incident. There is a sense that they have to keep quiet which, of course, is totally unnecissary. It was done to mimick Run Silent Run Deep but it forgets the fact Space is a vacuum. I over look it because at the time it was far ahead of anything else on TV for Sci Fi… (Lost in space anyone?) and it is one of the best episodes of the series.
But how’s this for Stupid moments on Film. Star Trek TMP. We have a super sophisticated almost godlike probe that was originally from earth and rekajiggered by super smarty pants robots. It gains conciousness, because of all the knowledge it has acquired (Apparently all the knowledge of the Universe cause its super brain is full), and names itself… V’ger. Why? Well that is because it can’t read it’s own name plate.
“V’ger in another reality I could have called you friend but your reading comprehension skills are deplorable.”
[QUOTE=Voyager]
Do you mean Balance of Terror? Savage Curtain was the one with Abe Lincoln, and I don’t remember any sshhs. In Balance of Terror, Spock turns on an instrument by accident, which perfectly reasonably sends out radio noise. Kirks shush was a non-technical reaction. No one was whispering before the noise, IIRC. (One of my favorite episodes, and the movie it is based on is great also.)
[/QUOTE]
Actually, the bridge crew were talking in low voices (which can be justified as a psychological thing).