Although it was actually done about as well as it could be (in order to provide crucial information to a non-golfing audience), I always cringe at the scenes in which Cheech Marin’s caddie explains the rules of golf to Kevin Costner’s pro in “Tin Cup.”
Any others?
In “The Giant Spider Invasion” on MST3k, Alan Hale as the sheriff as having a phone conversion. “Hello, Sheriff’s office? Oh, hi Mrs. Jones.”
And Crow chimes in with “What’s that? Repeat what you say for exposition?”
The last twenty minutes of every X-Files episode ever.
My vote is for the original version of ** Invaders from Mars**. Movie buffs seem to think that this is one of the great SF movies, but I think it an unbelievably cheesy one, although scary if you’re a kid (as I was when I first saw it.) Menzies was a hell of an art director (his work in **Thief of Bagdad was Superb), but that doesn’t automatically make his other work good. The expository section, where the astronomer holds forth or Martians and their “Mew–TANTS” (Mutants, with a very flat “a”) is hilariously bad, especially as he’s extrapolating on no basis and is going WAYY off the handle. I saw this at an art movie house (the kind attached to a museum, where they don’t serve refreshments, everyone dresses up nice, and they usually stay respectfully silent through the film), and at this point even these movie worshippers were yelling derisive comments at the screen and groaning.
Second vote (despite my SDMB pseudonym) goes to This Island Earth, for its clumsy and similarly idiotic explanation, also about mutants. These two movies alone show why your superior alien societies should never have mutants as servants.
Plan Nine from Outer Space. Not only is the alien’s explanation about the “Solarinite” pure exposition at its worst, but it’s utter nonsense. Of course, that’s part of the fun.
“The Matrix” is filled with long chunks of exposition, dragging it down and making most of it incredibly boring. Lawrence Fishburn spends the entire file explaining things over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
Even worse is the practice of voice-over introductory exposition to bring the dummies in the audience up to speed by giving away all the plot elements. This shows up in “Gattaca” (like we couldn’t figure out what was going on, another reason the movie was stupid), “Dark City” (where you need to keep the sound turned down for the first few minutes), and “The Dark Crystal” (which gives away everything).
Yeah, but to be fair, this is Keanu Reeves he’s dealing with.
The scene after the climax of Psycho, when the psychiatrist gives a lengthy explanation of how Norman Bates came to be the way he is, brings the movie to a complete halt. I guess it’s necessary, but you’d think a genius like Hitchcock would have come up with a more stylish way of doing it.
Speaking of “As you know …” exposition, the worst offender is the opening of The Longest Day. One general (played stiffly by John Wayne) spends a couple of minutes explaining the details of the D-Day invasion plan. The problem is, he’s shown explaining all this to another general, who already knows the plan backwards and forwards. It would have been much more sensible to work that info into a scene where troops or reporters are being briefed.
I’ve always been mildly amused when Roger Moore, playing James Bond, rattles off some extensive bit of obscure knowledge near the beginning of the movie, and not just on food or wine or whatnot. One of the worst examples was the bit on radiological horse muscle implants in A View to a Kill, causing my father to comment that Bond must have picked up his doctorate in nuclear biology between assignments.
Hitchcock was being subversive here. He didn’t think the psychiatrist was explaining anything, and the scene afterwards (where Norman wouldn’t hurt a fly) is meant to negate what the psychiatrist says: nothing about Norman was so pat.
He didn’t want to add the psychiatrist sequence, but realized that if it wasn’t there, people who needed neat explanations for everything (and I see a lot of that ilk on this board) would call it a plot hole and it’d ruin the word of mouth.
I’d guess that part of the reason it’s such dry exposition (as opposed to the vivid scene following) was to discredit it.
Things to Do in Devnver when You’re Dead. Every few minutes it would cut to some old fart in a diner who’d start explaining the relationship between two characters or the meaning behind some expression one of them had just used. Just another annoying aspect of a movie I came to despise. ‘Boat drinks’ my butt!
The way they worked the announcer (Lee Jordan) into explaining the scoring for Quidditch in the first Harry Potter movie was awfully awful. Just breeze past it, please. Oliver Wood had already mentioned that if Harry catches the snitch his team wins.
AND THAT TOOK PLACE IN A SCENE THAT WAS ACTIVELY EXPLAINING THE RULES TO THE GAME! IF THE POINTS WERE SO IMPORTANT WHY NOT MENTION THEM THEN!!!
If anyone has had the misfortune to see the un-released Fantastic Four, then you’ll know who the winner is. Doctor Doom spends the last twenty minutes os so giving the expo. I went out, made a cup of tea, came back and he was still going. It was like MoJo JoJo and Dr Evil had come together and produced a bastard child.
Anyone out there doing screenwriting? I’d like to correspond
with anyone who has written and tried selling a script. I’m
into my third script – a murder/adverture story that I’ve had
a couple of agent wanting a copy. I should be finished in a
week or so. Rereading it I continue seeing parts that could be
better, so rewriting keeps me busy.
But right now, I’d like to find another screenwriter to exchange
ideas, comments, etc.
You can contact me directly at hankhawk@juno.com to make
it go faster.
The endings of Vanilla Sky and A.I. both had exposition fairies in the form of magical old men explaining the films. Brought them both down, especially the former.
If you want the absolute worst nothing beats the near hour of “here’s everything you need to know with some concept art” jammed onto the front of the Alan Smithee version of Lynch’s Dune. The movie already had problems, they didn’t need to beat it to death with a monstrous slab of exposition.
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I actually have seen this, but I have no idea where. Anybody know if it ever came on TV or something?
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Much of the dialog in the execrable movie Spawn was a pathetically lame attempt to explain the otherwise inexplicable. I’ve never seen film dialog where there was so clearly a subtext of “this makes no sense, so let’s have the clown explain what’s going on.”
Conversely, there’s the scene in The Great Muppet Caper, where Diana Rigg explains her family background to Miss Piggy, including a whole lot of backstory for the villan.
Miss Piggy: “But why are you telling me this?”
Dianna Rigg: “It’s exposition, it has to go somewhere.”
villain
villain
villain
villain
villain
:smack: