I liked him in My Own Private Idaho. I have the feeling that right around then, he sold his soul to ensure continued financial success, and the devil took what little talent he could muster.
General Lee #1, the first General Lee, the one shown in the TV show intro, survives to this day. Apparently, it took the jump in the intro pretty decently. I’m not saying you can expect a car to survive much more than that, but it looks like a '69 Charger can take a decent bump into the air.
Of course it was unrealistic! As if it were happening in a dream…or in an artificial memory.
What everyone seems to miss about Total Recall is that Quade had exactly the adventure he asked for when he went to the memory vacation place at the beginning of the movie. Five minutes (or less) after the movie ends, he wakes up back in the chair at the memory store.
The implausible things we see during the movie, from the thing with the air to the parasitic twin to the impossibly-large electronic booger, were all signals to the audience that Quade’s adventure wasn’t actually happening.
It’s possible, but it’s equally possible that the rescue missions began because Randy Quaid called for help. Again, the missions begin AFTER he finds his son. Having him call for help (even if it’s not explicitly stated on screen) is the most logical reason for them.
Plus, I love a good disaster movie and I think Day After Tomorrow is (unfairly) maligned a lot for this one particular plot point.
I just imagine it’s a precisely focused beam. It helps a little.
I agree with Morbo on the holding the breath thing. Whenever a character goes under water or whatever I always take a deep breath and see if I can match them. I never can. I do realize that some of these characters are perhaps highly trained and athletic, and that people in crisis can achieve more than the average movie patron. Still, I’m a good swimmer, and when the character can hold their breath for 30 to 40 times longer than me it just ruins the moment. My wife gets annoyed at me for doing it though.
BG, I hate to say it, but explosive collisions do happen. They’re rare, and usually the result of great speed, but… locally, this accident is still having huge repurcussions. (Sorry for the CNN link - the local paper kills it’s free archive after a week.)
For the OP, there are a lot of movies that kick me out when they break my suspension of disbelief. Die Hard 2 is a particular bugaboo for me. As was Jurassic Park.
But the story that really gets me is CSI. I’ve only watched a few shows, and not by choice. Part of it is that I really like the real crime forensic science shows - they’re endlessly fascinating and informative, I think. But because of those, and the readings I’ve done as well, the procedural errors, the science errors, and simply the wrong-headed thinking… I can’t enjoy the show. I mean if you’re going to list possible medical conditions that might give someone an odd body odor, wouldn’t diabetic ketosis be the first condition one considered? :mad:
I’m with Fiver. Also, one of the techs comments as Quaid is being strapped in for his memory implant, as he handles the cube, or tape, or whatever
“Hunh, Blue sky on Mars…” or something like that. And isn’t that pretty much the final shot?
I’ll echo the sentiments about ordering “a beer” at a bar, or even worse, just sitting down at a bar and lifting a finger in some kind of beer salute and then being rewarded with precisely what you wanted. Nothing blows the moment away quite like that for me.
Depends. I can walk into a couple of taverns in this area and know that all I have to do is nod, and a pint of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale will be placed in front of me. There are some advantages in being a regular. 
I don’t know a single thing about fighting, but head-butting… you know, I just don’t see how using your head to hit things (even noses) is ever the right decision.
There’s also the “back of the head knockout with no long (or short) term health reprecussions”. I don’t watch much TV but Buffy and Lost wouldn’t be able to advance their plots if people weren’t getting knocked unconscious every other episode. You’d think that of Xander, Willow, Spike, and Giles that at least one of them would start slurring their speech a little bit by season 6, season 7.
Action movies are set in an alternate universe where nitrocellulose is widely used as the main plastic in automobiles. 
Well, the Inventor took a heart-shaped cookie off the Rube-Goldberg-Peewee-Herman’s-breakfast-cookie machine, and held it up against the chest of the coleslaw-chopping robot (that every well-appointed cookie factory has) over along the wall. This was what gave hm the idea to build Edward in the first place. So he didn’t build Edward from scratch and somehow get the daft idea that he should put scissor hands on it while he taught himself how to make human-looking hands. He took a pre-existing invention and started adding parts…
Welll sure, if you’re going to think like a doctor. There are detectives.
Just so you know, I’ve never seen CSI.
It’s worse than that. The chopper is flying in a tunnel with an electric wire overhead. Zap.
This is actually explained in the movie. I mean, I don’t want to try too hard to defend it, but the movie does actually explain that Goldblum’s character deduced details of the alien technology by studying their communication transmissions. What he does is more like a Denial Of Service attack.
He was only supposed to have scissors in his prototype phase. Possibly the handmaking is the most difficult part of the construction (I can imagine the double joints can be tricky to coordinate). Now, why he had to have *scissors *instead of say, sticks… I cannot say.
Regarding the beer thing, I have ordered it like in the movies (though I didn’t think of it like that) at several occasions: “A beer please”. Say the words and the barkeep simply proceeds to select a beer of his choice or what is popular among the rest of the clientele. This is not rocket science people.
Well, it’s not just implausible that it pumped out so much. The bigger problem is that if it did, the result would have been even more dramatic than in the movie. More like the planet gets resurfaced, and probably fried, or even molten from the frictional heating.
See above. Perhaps there was a label in Martian saying “Incredibly Stupid Machine; Do Not Use.” And on this board I bet someone actually gets that reference
Seriously, that never bothered me; I just assumed some super-advanced race had left it there for us to use, someday. Throwing a toy to the primitives.
Or the Martians were still there, in stasis or something waiting for when the Stars Are Right and it’s time to wake up and restart their ecosphere, and Arnie screwed up their plans by prematurely turning the machine on. Which would likely seriously irritate them, and might have made a nice sequel.
At best, that undercuts the movie in a different way. He’s supposed to not be able to figure out if it’s real or not - if physically impossible things start happening, that’s not a problem. If the stuff going on was as impossible in that universe as they are in the real world, he would’ve popped that pill he was offered near the end and woken up.
And as I understand it, he doesn’t wake up; he gets lobotomized; that’s why the screen fades to white at the end.
And eventually (Voyager and DS9) they seemed to get so lazy or cheap that most of those aliens were just people with some odd bit of rubber stuck to their head.
Why? I often (well, used to, anyway) just order a beer. The bartender picks one and gives it to you, accepting money in exchange.
Same with Xena’s first musical episode “The Bitter Suite”.
We don’t know that. That’s the whole point.
L&O: SVU has done a little better with the beer thing. Elliott will point in the direction of something behind the bar “One of them”. Or “domestic draft”.
It actually takes me out of the moment because it’s such a refreshing change.