(At least, I hope that last one is in response to my entry, and not, say, The Lion in Winter)
The solution is that they placed another piece of living tissue near the arm, then they attached electrodes to the arm and started giving it mild jolts. The idea was to make the arm inhospitable, and to make the other piece of tissue look more attractive, so the amoeba gradually moved over to the tissue, leaving the arm compltely. Very clever, and I’ve heard similar solutions used in ral-life ases.
Yes, actually it was intended to quote Shalmanese but I’m not as good with the quick reply box as I think I am and forgot to check the “Quote message in reply?” box.
My nominees for best scene in a bad movie, pretty much any scene in the bad movies of “When Harry Met Sally” or “Fried Green Tomatoes”. Both of these movies have some brilliant acting by some very talented performers, in a sequence of great individual scenes. But the overall story arc is so weak in comparison that it is hard to remember the plot at all versus the individual scenes, which stick with you. It’s almost like a collection of skits with similar characters versus the same characters going through a progression of a coherent plot.
Enjoy,
Steven
I loved the movie Contact, but I though the scene of young Ellie trying to contact her dead parents on radio was just cheesy and completely unbelievable.
I really liked the comedy Trading Places but thought that the Franken/Davis gorilla suit sideplot was too corny and contrived to be funny.
Porky’s 2 is a very bad film even by “horny kids low budget comedy” standards, but the scene in which the Reverend Bubba Flavel and Coach Baubricker read from Taming of the Shrew to demonstrate the sinfulness of Shakespeare is something I can watch on a loop. The actor who plays Flavel’s voice, pronunciations and emoting is up there with the best of film comedy.
I may get flack for this one, but I thought the “I could have done more” sequence in Schindler’s List (which did not happen in real life- Schindler basically hit the road running, understandably so) detracted from the whole and was untrue to his character. It may even have worked better if he had done the piece in the back of his limousine with his wife and mistress away from the Jewish workers.
Jeeze, I remember this scene quite fondly, but I had completely forgotten what movie it was from. Thanks for nothin’!
Yeah, Peter O’Toole’s line in Lion in Winter (which by the way has an excellent score!) is pretty skeevy, and by all accounts isn’t historically accurate. Now his son Richard, on the other hand…
Lion in Winter also has one of my favorite lines of all time:
Henry II: “I have blundered onto peace.”
Elinor of Aquitaine: “On Christmas Eve? How poetic.”
Henry: “Since Louis died I’ve had no wars to fight. I’ve had the time to pass a law, to make a tax more fair, to sit in judgement on which peasant gets a cow. I tell you, Elinor, there is nothing more important in the world.”
“And now Phillip is grown and I am sick of war.”
O’Toole’s delivery of the bolded line is just perfect.
Well, she didn’t say the year 1033. I think she said 1183. And Peter O’Toole didn’t say the last line. Geoffery did. “We’re a very knowledgeable family.”
What does that have to do with how bad those scenes are? 1183 makes the line less jarring? Geoffrey saying that line instead of Peter O’Toole makes it flow more easily? Really, why pick those nits when they do nothing to lessen the point of the post?
Patrick Stewart’s delivery of the same in the remake was far more throwaway, and they omitted the “little boys” from the opening list of conquests. While Stewart’s a great actor, this was O’Toole’s finest hour as an actor and just can’t be touched (and Glenn Close “ain’t the beginnin’s of a pimple on the late great” Katharine Hepburn’s “hang you from the nipples”.
I think the “It’s 1183 and we’re all savages” isn’t meant to be ironic except to the audience; while to us the middle ages was a barbaric time to those who lived then they were, like us, living on the last page of history and in the most enlightened time the world had known for some while. I think this was a(n admittedly botched) attempt to remind the audience of that.
I was very disappointed in the film version of Evita, but the Waltz for Eva and Che was, I thought, perfectly realized.
I loved the first two Godfather movies (GF3 never happened, of course) but I thought that the scene in the whorehouse in part 2 was unrealistic and inexplicable. While I didn’t like part 3, I thought the office scene with Michael, Zasa and his nephew (I never did understand why he was a bastard when Sonny had legitimate sons as well) was worthy of the first two, and the scene in which Michael kidnaps Kay in Sicily was amazingly touching (perhaps because Pacino & Keaton were ending their own off-again on-again long term relationship at the time).
I have wildly mixed views of the film Hannibal- it’s such a totally different feel from Silence of the Lambs as to be only incidentally related- but I loved Lecter’s lecture on the deaths of traitors in the Palazzo Vecchio (though how exactly Pazzi was betraying him I’m not sure- he was betraying the Italian police [wasn’t it odd they spoke English among themselves?] but I can’t imagine this would p.o. the good doctor).
Yes, that scene in the aeroplane is absolutely the best, most memorable one in an otherwise dreadful film. A close second would the scene as the train “arrives” at the railway station.
I nominate Elizabeth, a film which I thought was excellent except for the final transformation scene, accompanied by Mozart’s Requiem. This musical faux pas completely ruined it for me.
Seconds, a John Frankenheimer film from (I think) 1966, is great but for that one freak-out scene where Rock Hudson goes into the woods with the hippies and everybody gets nekkid. It goes forever and is incredibly boring, not to mention completely irrelevant to the plot as far as I can tell.
Don’t feel bad; I had to see Roger Ebert explain it on TV before I got it.
The Highlander 2 thread reminded me of this one, probably the only good scene in the entire movie: Ramirez rising up from the stage during a “Shakespeare in the Park” sort of thing.
While I’m here, I’ll mention the best part of Battlefield Earth: the end! Not because it just because it was the end but also the secene itself. Terl (Travolta) had been after gold during the entire movie and ends up stranded inside Fort Knox. He finally got his gold but couldn’t do a thing with it!
I think that The Messenger: The Joan of Arc Story was one of the most pathetic, miserable movies ever made. But the scene where Dustin Hoffman “debunks” the sword is absolutely brilliant.
In a bad-to-mediocre hentai called “Fragile Hearts” there’s a scene that’s curiously touching. It’s about a wistful young android with a hot bod who’s designed as a sex droid. She goes on various assignments and is eventually captured by bad guys who turn her into a sexy female fighting robot.
The weird thing is, throughout this pretty much unthinking male sex fantasy, there are weird intimations of mortality. She walks down the street and sees a box of replacement android heads that look like hers. She walks out on a plaza after being gang-raped in a subway into a beautiful sunset and pauses to drink it in. Then, in the very last scene, the camera pans across a stack of discarded robot bodies, and we realize that the sex droid is in what is likely to be her final resting place.
A touching, almost poetic scene. Then the camera pans across the robot bodiies, we see her bent over a crate, being raped. One last use before she’s discarded … also strangely poetic. Then we see that her molestor is a gorilla. Not a guy in a gorilla suit, a gorilla. What the hell is a gorilla doing in a warehouse for discarded androids? It has not appeared in any previous scenes, neither has anything like it. It’s like they said, “Too touching and poetic with the warehouse for androids. Throw in a sex scene. Wait a minute, that could be touching and poetic, too. Make it a gorilla she’s having sex with.”
God, hentai are weird.
Speaking of anime, there was a cheesy little OVA series I saw a couple of years ago, Amazing Nurse Nanako. [Spoilers to follow] Basically softcore T&A and somewhat interesting Mad Science, but a little too heavy on the former at the expense of the latter. (It did have the Catholic church trying to ressurect Jesus with the help of alien DNA)
Anyway, in the last episode, there’s a brief dream sequence where the hero talks to the “ghost” of a dead friend. It was really one of the most wistful, honestly touching scenes I’ve ever seen on screen. 
That scene was great. Billy Bob’s motivation for the whole stock extended/stock folded discussion is that “When I kill this son of a bitch, I want to feel good about myself.” I love that line.