I really liked the whole movie… it was really well directed, edited, and acted without being too unnecessarily exploitative.
And this was really no exception in the scene where Roller Girl starts kicking the man lying on the ground after being beaten up by Burt Reynolds with her skates and shouting “Don’t disrespect me!” This scene was, in truth, well done, but it was double-a AAwful to watch. It made me cringe and feel volatilely ill… Subsequent viewings of the movie have forced me to avert my eyes and cover my ears. Baaaaaaad.
The Exorcist, the scene where Regan goes in for what appears to be a SG nerve block (though for the life of me I can’t figure out why)- where they stick the needle in her neck. I look away for that one.
The scene in Poltergeist with the maggots also makes me oogy.
“??? I thought that was one of the hottest scenes in the whole flick!”
You ARE joking, right?
Now I’m as horny as the next guy, and normally a scene with a bunch of women nude and about to enter a shower would be “hot”. But when that scene is set at a Nazi death camp, where (the audience knows but the characters don’t that) a shower is most likely NOT a shower :eek: any possible sexual element goes right out the window for me.
Vertigo is undoubtedly a great movie, and should have been an Oscar-winner for Jimmy Stewart. But there’s a scene about two-thirds through, at a point where the (first-time) viewer isn’t at all sure what’s going on, where a character sits down and writes a letter that explains everything.
I can’t think of a good dramatic reason for that scene; it just removes the ambiguity and deflates the story as a detective story, although it retains the emotional dramatic tension. I can’t help feeling it would be a better experience to see the rest of the movie without having been handed that explanation. In any case, the exact same facts are all explained again in a masterful scene at the end (one of the scenes Stewart occasionally has in movies where you suddenly realize that, no matter how mild-mannered his character seems to be, you do not push him too far). Without the letter scene, a sharp viewer would be able to make the essential realization at the same time as Stewart’s character, which I think would be more powerful.
In Contact, the climax of the movie has Jodie Foster’s character zipping off into space for several hours. However, to observers on Earth, she’s not even gone for a second. When she later testifies about her experience, she admits that she has no hard evidence to back up her subjective experience. This sets up a really nice set of questions for the audience to think about at movie’s end about the limits of science and the role of faith.
And then they absolutely ruin it where the “evil investigator” played by James Woods is shown to have kept secret the fact that the recorder in Foster’s pod had recorded 18 hours of static. There was, apparently, empirical proof that Foster was in fact gone for more than a second or two.
Drives. Me. Crazy. Every. Time. I. See. It. Grrrrr.
The “unnecessary play for the kiddies” category
In The Prince of Egypt – an otherwise excellent retelling of the Exodus story – they throw in this Godawful comedy musical number called “Playing With The Big Boys Now” with Martin Short and Steve Martin. I hate, hate, hate this song, and it throws a big monkey wrench into the overall dramatic tone of the film. Again: grrrrrrr.
The “gruesome scene I can’t watch” category
I gotta also go with the previously-mentioned scene in Amerian History X. The dentist scenes in Marathon Man are no walk in the park, either.
I couldn’t watch the scene in Casino where they put the guys head in a vice. Closed my eyes, covered my ears and went “lalaalala”. Mr. Mouse says his eyes popped out. True or False?
Yep, his eye does pop out. Even worse, that scene is (allegedly) based on a true incident.
Also, in American History X, I always thought Edward Norton breaks the guy’s neck when he makes him “kiss the curb”. Doesn’t he go to jail for manslaughter ( or some similar charge) as opposed to battery? Yuch either way.
For myself, I’ll add the “lightening the load” scene in Amistad. Good movie, truly horrifying scene.
I would have to say, for my nomination, the portion of Contact that follows the part where the radio broadcasts are resonating out farther and farther away from Earth. The opening credits, more or less.
Ashtar—finally someone else who remembers Jacob’s Ladder! My favorite bizzarro movie . . . but that Hospital from Hell was truly nerve-wracking. <brrrr> Because it’s so vivid you can all too easily imagine yourself there.
The scene where Harry and Tyrone are in the car and Harry shoots up into his infected arm. I could stand to look at the arm but as soon as Harry was going to put the needle in closes eyes, counts to 10 and hopes lunch stays down
It’s been a while since I’ve read the novel, but I do recall the movie as being something a gross approximation of how the novel ends. There were many adaptations from the book that worked well (especially the one-person instead of seven-person craft, IMHO) but the ending was not well adapted. I agree that your take on it probably would have been more compelling for the film.
As for me the greater portion of Resevoir Dogs makes me cringe, but I’m forced to watch it still because I think it is a great film.
The excessively long flashback sequence in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon when the younger female fighter reminisces about her years-ago romantic encounter with some brigand. After she’d stopped beating him up, they had sex and some kind of torturously sensitive love connection (I’m not sure; I dozed off during this part) but they all-too-soon parted. Then the brigand shows up in the main story, she talks to him for about 10 seconds and he leaves!
WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THAT ENTIRE SEQUENCE?!?!?!
I hated Contact but the single scene that irritated me most was the first videopohone conversation between Jodie Foster and John Hurt. He smugly regales her with her life story, including how her parents died and her growing interest in astronomy, yada-yada-yada. DUH!!! We’ve only been watching this movie for the last hour, we know her life story, already. If you’re going to have exposition, please exposit something the audience hasn’t already seen!
The finger-snapping scene towards the end of Blade Runner.
The arm wrestling scene in Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly.
The infamous bunny scene in Roger and Me
Gotta second the ending of Schindler’s List. 3 hours of restraint suddenly thrown away for cheap melodramatics from Liam Neeson, followed by the “you-will-be-moved-now” manipulative sledgehammer subtle coda.
Speaking of bad Spielberg endings, the end of Saving Private Ryan. Again, forced tearjeaking, except this time it makes no sense from a narrative perspective. How can he be flashing back to events he didn’t experience?
The first time I saw Gandhi, Easter 1983, I was tripping on LSD. Seeing Gandhi get shot — twice — was as intense a cinematic experience as you could ask for. “Oh, God. God…”
But every single time I see that movie, the scene I absolutely can’t stand to watch is the horrifying Amritsar Massacre. Still the most unbearable scene in any movie, ever.
I’ll second Saving Private Ryan. I just pretend the present-day bookends don’t exist.
I love ALIENS, but I’ve actually redubbed my video copy to eliminate a totally uneccessary scene where Bishop the android dissects a facehugger.
One other thing, re: Contact…
In the novel, the hoax theory gains support from the fact that the several crewmembers describe different subjective experiences during their journey. Also, the message from space stops the moment the machine was activated – though it would have been impossible for aliens at Vega, 26 light-years away, when to cease the transmission.
The blank videos are mentioned in the book, but the real empirical proof comes when Ellie employs knowledge gained from the aliens: she finds a message in a long calculation of pi. Which also implies that the aliens somehow configured our mathematical space such that the ratio would work out like that.
