Eve: You got it. Some woman finds it difficult to choose Rhett Butler over Ashley Wilkes? She just can’t be playing with a full deck. I mean, who wants a wimpy whiner in preference to a handsome, rakish, sexy, wealthy adventurer who loves you heart and soul? Get OVER it, Scarlett!
And along virtually the same lines, in Red Dust, why should Clark Gable lust for prim, school marm-like Mary Astor when he already has the bombshell of the decade right in his lap? Mr. Pug has more than once made this observation (I think he watches the movie with me just to see Jean Harlow put her gams up on the desk).
With all due respect, it seems to me what Dougie is objecting to is the anti-hero? The lead who does bad things but whom we’re still supposed to like and/or identify with? Dougie, is it just these movies where that bothers you are there others?
Gee, is there still room in the Smokey and the Bandit love fest?
Everything I wanted in a man in the late 70’s was embodied in Burt Reynolds- smart, sassy, great looking, funny, not too dangerous… in a word, yummy.
Still a damn good looking man, and I will sit through almost any movie he’s ever made. Trying to explain to the husband why I need to watch “Cannonball Run” AGAIN can be a stretch, until he remembers that Farrah Fawcett, Adriennne Barbeau, and some other ladies are in it…
What pisses me off about movies? Some women get mad about the geezer with the beautiful young woman, but if it was Burt or Sean Connery, I’d do it too!
Well, this topic is one of the few that can take me out of lurking and into posting. I have a huge beef with movies that depict the high school band as full of taped-glasses geeks who sound like they can’t play their way out of a paper bag.
Case in point – “Never Been Kissed” starring Drew Barrymore. She goes back to high school and being a brainiac/geek, she naturally gravitates to the band. I really have no problem with that … the problem is that in the small scene where the band is actually playing they absolutely suck out loud! She’s supposedly attending a school in the suburbs of Chicago, where I’ve heard some of the best High School bands in the country. I am a band teacher in Illinois and some of those burb school bands play better than my college concert band!!! I am amazed that students in bands up there didn’t start an uproar about the way that band sounded.
Anyway, that is hardly the only time that a school band has been portrayed as sounding poor. I don’t mind so much if the band is supposed to be from a small school – I went to a small school and our band stunk it up good most of the time. When your dealing with a large student body however, you get a lot better quality musicians and a lot more of them. Any hollywood depiction of a large school band as being pathetic is really insulting.
You bet I object to the anti-hero!
A clarification: The movie poster shows a big rig crumpling a police car. (The TV ad for the movie also showed a totaled police car being dragged away). If the movie was as good as Dopers seem to make out, I see no acceptable reason the movie company could have, to resort to false advertising on the posters to attract moviegoers. (I had heard the bit about trucker-flattens-a-row-of-motorcycles six years before the movie came out; it was even alluded to in Jan Harold Brunvand’s book The Baby Train.)
The ads for James Garner’s movie Tank, likewise showed a good ol’ boy mashing cop cars.
And something else I alluded to on the Snopes website, under “Glurge Gallery” on the UL Message Board: the movie Back to the Future. I had been urged to see this movie by a family I have known since the 60s; the year before an older customer of mine, whose daughter was also a classmate of mine in 1967, had urged me to go see [í]Amadeus;* I did and was quite impressed. With this in mind I went to see Back to the Future, and had one too many straws put on my back.
Specifically: these elements each irritated me just a little bit:
The movie opened on a filthy laboratory which had obviously been abandoned for a week.
Fox’s character was a snide little smart-aleck, the likes of which would, or should, get his teeth knocked out early on in the real world. In one scene, he pays as much attention to the infuriated high-school principal as he might to a blank wall.
At one point he hitches a ride (on skates) by holding on to the rear bumper of a police car. This may show Spielberg’s contempt for the police, but it’s a foolhardy and dangerous stunt that could even have put the stuntman’s life in jeopardy.
At Fox’s home, he finds out, not only has his father’s employer used Fox’s family car (without permission, presumably), but has wrecked it. And he treats the family, whose car he has just wrecked, to severe verbasl abuse in their own home! Sounds like something I might read about in The Daily Worker.
Huey Lewis and the News (billed in the opening credits, so I was at least forewarned) played one of their songs at one point. I stayed out in the lobby until it was done.
The topper was the old man (Christopher Lloyd) with Fox in a mall-parking lot; a VW bus full of maniacs approaches and they fire on Lloyd with sub-machine guns.
As I have noted elsewhere, it isn’t the existence of negative elements in a movie that irritate me; it’s the combination of the six, and the apparent use of these elements to appeal to the viewer. Why would I want, for example, to see Arnold Schawrzenegger (in any movie) gun down helpless people with a howitzer, or whatever, unless I condoned murder myself?
The six items in Back to the Future, put together, pushed me past the point of tolerance. Without a word to anyone I left, just after the sub-machine-gun attack, and went home, lest I lose my tempter in the movie house and run the risk of being thrown out or arrested. (As for the family that recommeneded the movie to me: about two months after IU went to see it, the father died. I went to the funeral. This sure enough was a low point. :(:(:(:()
Doug, it is simple. Suspension of disbelief. It is what makes 90% of all movies watchable. I mean you are coming across as one of those “Hollywood is to blame for everything” types. Get a grip.
Did you see Austin Powers:TSWSM? The character, Fat Bastard talks about how he had eaten a baby. Do you think that anybody who didn’t walk out of the movie at that point was condoning baby eating?
Movies are often supposed to be about things that DON’T happen in the real world.
Cletus Snow did, indeed, smash up cop cars, in the penultimate scene. Bandit was just about to give up the quest, and said that the various troopers were chasing him – “They don’t even know who Cletus Snow is!”
Cletus responded “They don’t, do they? Well, we just gonna have to introduce them to the boy! So move over Bandit, the Snowman is comin’ thru!”
Then he proceeded to run over at least a couple of cop cars who were barricading a back entrance to the fairgrounds.
Back to the Future is a movie. Fiction. Make Believe on Celluoid. It is not a test of moral fiber or anything else.
Not that I recall. It opens in Mcfly’s [Fox, in case you didn’t catch that little detail] bedroom.
So? Lots of kids like that. Some learn. His character grows beyond this stage in the series. By the end he’s learned his lesson.
In case you didn’t realise it, stuntmen are paid Big Bucks to do this very thing. And even this small stunt wasn’t that dangerous. As opposed to, say, taking a 30 story fall.
Watch Real TV… they show videos of Kids doing things even more dangerous than McFly’s little jaunt.
Also sounds like someone needs to understand the movie. George McFly had no assertiveness. His boss was his old High School Bully, Biff. Biff knew he could just abuse him and get away with it. I know lots of people who let people get away with a little verbal abuse.
Personal Preference, here. Don’t bitch.
Damn… you just didn’t connect anything in the movie, did you? Doc Brown had conned some Arabs out of the plutonium to test the thing. Doc dismissed it as “Saving the world from an atomic bomb”, but the arabs didn’t, and killed him for it. It was part of the plot. Marty uses the machine to escape the Arabs, and goes back in time inadvertently. He fumbles around, but he manages to get everything right in the end, and saves Doc Brown’s life in the process.
So, if you had stayed, you might have understood the movie. I’ve seen it dozens of times, because it is a good movie. Has weak parts, but overall, it is a good movie.
You’re already on my shitlist because you didn’t understand Smokey and the Bandit, so don’t push your luck.
Saint Zero, you talk much like my own bellicose older brother–with whom I have long since ceased trying to discuss movies, or much of anything. (He is in the doghouse with the rest of the family for reasons I won’t go into here.)
I must point out that the movie had pushed me beyond my own limit of tolerance. If I saw fighter pilots firing on an American Navy ship–as I did in The Caine Mutiny–this did not inspire me to hate the Japanese. If I saw Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore) drive Jimmy Stewart to the brink of suicide in It’s a Wonderful Life, I was not inspired to hate all financiers or all men in wheelchairs.
If I saw, as I did, a bunch of cases of arrested development, in a pickup with a Confederate-flag emblem on the side, chasing a hapless Forrest Gump (who is on foot), this does not make me hate all Southerners.
So, too, with Back to the Future. I heard the opening dialog of the movie–which, as I recall, did open in Lloyd’s laboratory (such things as an automated dog-feeder for the dog “Einstein”)–in which it was said that a Libyan supply of plutonium had been stolen. I did put this together with the maniacs firing on Lloyd and Fox. This didn’t make it any easier to accept. I decided that the wisest thing for me to do was leave, for the reasons I gave in the earlier posting: A movie is supposed to be entertainment but for me it was nothing short of emotional torture. (I have been diagnosed as schizophrenic by five psychiatrists; I’m far from proud of it. :()
Walk a mile in my moccasins before you put me on any of your “lists.”
FYI, I quit going to movies in June 1987, after seeing a ghastly film called The Believers. I swore to the woman who asked me to go with her, that I would never go to the movies again–and I have kept that promise. So I have not seen Austin Powers.
{your tax dollars at work–d.m.]
And to think someone who posted in this thread said cop cars didn’t get crushed under a big rig–motorcycles did. I rest my case.
So you admit, Dougie, that your criticism is wholly subjective - it’s not that you think these movies have problems, it’s that you have problems with these movies. This thread isn’t about film, it’s about you.
how about “interview with a vampire” when that all american boy tom cruise murders that young woman while brad pitt watched-and as the woman screamed in terror for her life cruise’s character made a big joke about it as he “taught” pitt’s character how to kill-
what kind of shit was that? it was nothing more than a snuff film-
why would cruise and pitt even act in a scene like that? i am open minded but that scene to me was horrific-why is it ok to terrorize and murder women in films and its just a joke?
and in “the terminator”, didn’t schwartzeneger murder a woman on her front porch in front of her children because he didnt know if she was the mother of blah blah blah…they could send a guy back in time, but couldnt find where their target was born or who his parents were? and then that great talent arnold shoots the young mother while her kids watched?
i dont mind violence like in “goodfellas” but this mindless schwartzeneger, stallone shit is appaling and doesnt show the true effects of violence-
Ummm…it’s called “character development.” OK, so Schwarzeneggar movies don’t involve a lot of character, but consider these:
Cruise and Pitt were playing vampires. You know, unholy creatures of the night, feed on human blood, that sort of thing? Do you think such creatures would be polite and merciful?
And Arnold was playing a Terminator! You know, emotionless, cold-blooded, unstoppable, killer cyborg, bent only on fulfilling his mission, that sort of thing? Do you think such a creature would ask the kids to leave the room first? Or that he wouldn’t take out all the Sarah Connors in the area, just to be sure? It is, after all, highly unlikely that detailed records, including home addresses, are going to be kept of people, especially after widespread nuclear holocaust.
As someone else pointed out, movies are not meant to be depcitions of reality, especially action movies. They are meant to be over the top entertainment. And when the bullets stop flying and the fires from the explosions die down and the blood gets mopped up, we can take relief in the fact that it is just a movie, and that real life isn’t like that.
I sure hope your not a lawyer Dougie, because you’d lose this case. Your grasp of details is tentative at best.
No truck, especially the one driven by Cletus Snow at the climatic end of Smokey and the Bandit, drives over a cop car. He drives through two of them near the end of the movie, but not over and crushingly. He pretty much pushes them aside to reach the finish line and start the wheels turning to the sequel. That’s not really being crushed under a big rig, now is it.
I stick by my original assesment of your post. You were referring to the truck running over, and smashing, the motorcycles around the middle of the movie, not the end.
I’ll let it slide… you’ve got your work cut out for you defending your latest round of movie blunders and misinterpretations.
Amen, Eve. Rhett was one sexy mo-fo, even with big ole’ monkey ears. Mmmmm…
My rant is regarding the 80s teen classic The Goonies. Spoilers to follow.
OK, so the idea is that these pirates got their ship caught in this cave and couldn’t escape, so they spend like 50 years devising silly booby traps to foil potential treasure hunters. OK, Hollywoody, but I’ll accept that.
However, the end of the movie has the kids kinding the pirate ship, and having a final showdown with the bad guys, at which point a hole is blown in the wall of the cave and the entire cave wall crumbles. The kids escape, the boat sails away into the sunset.
WAIT A MINUTE. If the pirates could just BLOW a hole in the freakin’ wall of the cave and escape, why the hell would they go to the trouble of making all those booby traps? And last time I checked, it took a full crew to sail a frigate, they don’t just sail away at a fair clip into the sunset. Feh.
As I watch this movie at least twice a month in my video store (the one that was mentioned in the OP) I get annoyed every time.
You missed out on a great movie. You were literally so aghast at the machine-gunnin’ Libyans that you were forced to retire to the lobby, lest your anger get the better of you? What exactly did you object to? The stereotyping? The implausability? The movie is essentially an action-comedy.
let me ask you this mauve dog:
if a movie was made where a bus load of kindergarten kids was shot up and they graphically showed small children being blown away, would you view it as “just a movie”? or would you maybe think, that was a little too over the top?
and my point about “vampire” was that the scene was done with this odd comical theme while the woman screamed in terror just as a woman would scream in real life-the vampires were just a couple of good looking guys having some fun-VAMPIRES ARE NOT REAL MAUVE DOG!
this movie simply glorified the murder and humiliation of women, which seems to be ok and then it ended with a big laugh at the end-and meanwhile women are murdered every day FOR REAL
Um, didn’t one of the “big blowin’ somebody away” scenes in Dirty Harry happen on a school bus?
(adds fuel to bonfire)
Yes, I agree that dougie has issues- has banished entire family? Hasn’t gone to a movie since 1987?
Dougie, a lot of sick, cheap & twisted things have come out of Hollywood and Europe since you’ve been gone. A lot of amazing, inspirational and brilliant things have also come our way. Get over yourself and come on out of your cave.
I saw The Believers, and didn’t have to hide out for 13 years. A bad film is JUST A MOVIE. If you don’t like a particular genre, vote with your wallet. But if you don’t support ANYTHING, than you’re just a pain in the ass.
And you can’t argue that you support anything in modern cinema if you never see movies.
