For how long…?
The new Jennifer Lopez film, The Boy Next Door, is taking a lot of flak for the beautiful moment when the guy gives her ‘a…a first edition of Homer’s Iliad! I can’t accept this!’’
(To which he replies, ‘It was a buck in a garage sale.’)
Beat that.
“Do you know what happens to a Toad when it’s struck by a bolt of lightning?”
(Shrugs)
“Same as anything else. It burns”
Joss Whedon can protest up & down from now until the end of time about how Halle Berry “delivered the line wrong.” It’s still the lamest one-liner ever spoken in a film.
Tommy Lee Jones, as a renowned geologist in Volcano (1997): "What’s magma?"
Tommy Lee Jones didn’t play a geologist in that movie. He was head of LA’s emergency services department or something similar. It’s still ridiculous that he didn’t know what magma was.
“It’s turkey time. Gobble gobble”
Ms. Lopez, are you insinuating that your lady bits hang like a turkey neck?
Exactly what I was going to post. (Wife and I have watched WUD? several dozen times, including last night.)
That was touching. 
“So, you are to have DNA-replacement therapy. Let me explain the two phases. First, we kill off your bone marrow, wipe the DNA slate clean. Phase two, introduction of new DNA, harvested from healthy donors. Orphans, runaways, people that won’t be missed…”
—Die Another Day (2002).
DNA does not work that way. Not remotely. Not even by soft-scifi space opera standards. And what this procedure is used to do in the movie is a bit of a spoiler, and by comparison only marginally worse.
That was the first thing that came to mind…but, as a matter of fact, I happened to stumble across a stupider one last night in a movie review.
In The Man Without A Body, a financier with a terminal brain tumor to remove and replace his brain with a healthy one. Okay, probably most of you can spot the flaw with that plan immediately.
But the next part is, he decides he needs a really smart new brain—hard to argue—and settles on…Nostradamus.
The film, made in 1957, is not a period piece. They plan on using the marginally preserved brain of a man who’s been dead for almost 400 years.
Step three involves stealing Nostradamus’ head, and bringing it back to life. Which works—and I’ll just leave the stupid there, for now. It has to be seen to be truly appreciated.
Right after I heard about the line of ‘The neutrinos have mutated!’ from the end of the world movie 2012 I knew that it was too stupid to continue watching.
As Dara O Brian commented on that line then:
" ‘The neutrinos have mutated.’ Now, for the non-nerds here: neutrinos are tiny, sub-atomic, really really almost massless particles, they’re released in nuclear breakdowns, like in the sun, for example. Five hundred trillion of them pass through your bodies every second. They can’t mutate. Their structure is fundamental to the structure of the universe. Right? They can’t just change. He might as well have gone, ‘The electrons are angry’."
-Dara Ó Briain: This is the Show (2010)
Damn it, GIGO, that was going to be mine!
“You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon?…It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.”
This is kind of cheating, because I didn’t actually see The China Syndrome, but I have it on good authority that one of the lines, spoken by a nuclear engineer, was “The reactor is critical!!!”
Yeah, let me know when it’s self-sustaining; we can bring a turbine online, plug in a toaster, and cook some Pop Tarts.
It is just possible that the writers of that movie had heard about neutrino oscillation, and were attempting to shoehorn it into a movie that was already chock-ablock full of pseudoscience.
Neutrinos behave a bit like the contents of a box of chocolates, one which has the warning on the lid ‘The contents of this box may vary from time to time’.
No doubt. But the wording…
it helps to see Dara ranting about it…
“The Latinos - they’ve mutated! And they’re heating up the planet!”
In Moonraker, Q looks at a chalkboard somewhere in Venice, and explains, “That’s the formula for human blood!!!”
Actually, if I picked on the James Bond films, I’d destroy their value as an adolescent boy’s sex fantasy.
Once on the TV show Criminal Minds, Dr. Reid gives his mother a copy of a book by her favorite author, Margery Kempe, and she scoffs “One of her lesser works.”
Maybe not quite as egregious, but still pretty good.
(And if someone called out the screenwriter on that Iliad gaffe, he’d probably mumble something about have he meant a first edition of a particular translation.)
Me, that’d be one of those moments where I’d get distracted by the wrong thing-- instead of paying attention to the rest of the movie, I’d keep thinking I wanted to see the scene where he finds the parchments at a garage sale, translates a bit, realizes they’re The Iliad, and quickly pays the buck asking price for the “antique placemats,” or whatever the garage owners think they are.
I just added a bit of information for people who might not have seen the film.
Death Before Dismount.
I’m sure I know of LOT of stupid things said in movies, but I’m blanking on most of them right now.
Here’s a good one for a start, though – Die, Monster, Die is a 1965 movie based on H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space, although Lovecraft’s name is barely mentioned (and isn’t on the advertising). It stars Boris Karloff. Karloff and Lovecraft – how can it go wrong?
Don’t ask that, even rhetorically, of the film industry. The film is awful. At one point Nick Adams’ character is investigating the secret laboratory (!) of Nahum Witley (Karloff) and finds a flask of material radiating its own heat. “I wonder if it’s an Element?” he muses. Because, as we all know, elements all glow and give off their own heat.*
*Yeah, I know that plutonium generates a slight amount of heat on its own, as do some other radioactive materials. It still doesn’t keep this from being a dumb line.
Well that and if the flask is glowing and giving off heat and he’s handling it, he’s at minimum likely to have a good case of radiation poisoning out of it.