I was going to make this a Top 5 Tuesday entry but had trouble coming up with 5 examples I could find video for. While I was at work today I started thinking about my favorite content edits made to movies so they can air on network TV stations. I found a few of the best ones I could think of on youtube, but not enough for a real Top 5 Tuesday, so I’ll have to delay that category’s resurrection another week.
I’ll begin with arguably the two most legendarily awful edits, the ones most frequently brought up in discussions on this topic.
The Big Lebowski: John Goodman takes a crowbar and breaks all of the windows on a nice sports car, yelling at its supposed owner, “You see what happens when you f*** a stranger in the a**?” But in TV edits, the line is heard as “You see what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps?”
Die Hard 2: Bruce Willis has just had a fight with a terrorist on the wing of a passenger jet about to take off, and the fight ended with Willis getting kicked off the wing and falling to the ground, but in the process he manages to open the fuel door/hatch thing (do planes really have those right there?) and as the plane escapes it leaves a trail of fuel behind it. Willis takes out his lighter, says his trademark “Yippie ki yay, motherf*****!” line and throws the lighter onto the line of fuel, which eventually gets to the plane just as its taking off and blows it up. But in the TV version, Bruce Willis says, “Yippie ki yay, Mr. Falcon”, and in a voice that is obviously not that of Willis.” High comedy.
The Usual Suspects: Career criminals (played by Kevin Pollack, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro, Gabriel Byrne, and Kevin Spacey) are put together for a police lineup of suspects. They are told to read the line on the card they are passed. They all take their turns reading the line, “Hand me the keys, you f****** c*********!” In the TV version, however, they all say “Hand me the keys, you fairy godmother.” That’s one of the more inspired ones I’ve ever seen.
Pulp Fiction, as you can imagine, is nearly unrecognizable when it appears on edited TV stations. There’s not really one good clip, but there is a pretty good video compiling some of the more obvious edits.
One of my other favorites was a number of Samuel L. Jackson’s lines in Jackie Brown, such as “motherf*****” becoming “my friend”, or “motherfu**ing” becoming “mutual-funded”, but I haven’t found any videos of that. And it’s late and I need sleep. If anyone can think of other good ones, feel free to mention them, or post video links.
From a conversation overheard at work today. The two parties will go unnamed, but they were talking about sandwiches and one had just brought up Subway’s roasted chicken breast subs and the sub-par texture of the chicken.
Person A: I’ll get it about once a month, and I’m never satisfied.
Person B: That’s what she said.
Back in my high school and early college years, if there was a movie I was thinking of seeing but wasn’t sure about the appropriateness of its content, I would pay a visit to either Kids-In-Mind.com or Screenit.com, two sites that provided objective analysis of content in movies, particularly the kind that parents or morally discerning types might be concerned about. Kids-In-Mind rates the amount of sex/nudity, violence/gore, and profanity each on a 0-10 scale, and gives somewhat detailed explanations of how much of each is shown on screen, usually without giving away key plot points that be involved in those scenes.
Today they break up their analysis in bullet points, one for each individual scene being described. For instance, here’s how the Kids-In-Mind page for the new movie Twilight described two scenes that earned mention in the sex/nudity category:
► A vampire teen boy and a teen girl kiss tenderly, then passionately, she leans back on her bed (she is wearing a T-shirt and panties) pulling him on top of her, they continue to kiss, and he jumps off and tells her to stop.
► A teen girl and a boy vampire dance close together at a dance, they kiss, she asks him to bite her neck, and he dips her and kisses her neck instead.
It describes exactly what you hear and/or see on the screen, giving little-to-no context for it, but making it clear that the instances described there are in different scenes. Unfortunately, in years past that site didn’t split up their descriptions into their respective scenes and instead just mentioned all the content in the movie that fell into their respective categories, which sometimes lead to some hilarious confusion.
The 2001 movie Enemy at the Gates, which takes place during the drawn-out World War II battle of Stalingrad in Russia, doesn’t have much sexual content to speak of, but it does have one (quite unnecessary) scene where two characters have sex in the middle of a large room full of people who are sleeping. I saw the movie with my dad when it was first released because he’s a history teacher and he wanted to watch it for its historical aspects. I read over the movie’s Kids-In-Mind page before watching the movie, and it left me a little bewildered. Here’s the entire paragraph the site dedicated to describing the movie’s sex/nudity content:
“A few kisses and a couple of kissing scenes (with a few kisses in each scene, but not any “making out” scenes). An extended sex scene takes place in barracks while people are sleeping around the couple; the couple kiss and put their hands down each other’s pants, then the man thrusts on top of the woman (the woman’s bare buttocks are shown briefly). We see the side of a man’s bare buttocks (he passes gas to blow out a candle).”
The described sex scene and the incident at the end of the paragraph take place in completely different scenes probably an hour apart, but when I first read that paragraph I got the impression that they took place in the same scene, since the writer made no effort to put them in different scenes or explain the context of the latter one. The mental image that the paragraph gave me was one where Jude Law and Rachel Weisz (the two actors in the movie’s sex scene) are in bed kissing and either having sex or about to begin, and in the middle of it, Jude Law rolls over and passes gas toward a candle to blow it out and make the room go dark. Of course that’s not how the scene played out but it was the idea I got from Kids-In-Mind. This week I randomly remembered the confusion I had about that, and laughed hysterically for a long time. I asked a co-worker if he’d seen the movie, and then described the false impression Kids-In-Mind had given me about its sex scene. We had a lot of fun discussing what the dialogue would have sounded like had the scene actually taken place the way I’d first imagined it. (Example: “There’s too much light in the room, honey. Here, watch this trick!”)
Truly, had they staged the scene like that, it would have been the funniest (and probably least romantic) moment in any movie I’ve ever seen, by far. If only they’d explained the content by scene and not lumped it all together back then, misunderstandings like that wouldn’t have happened. Context truly makes all the difference.
That’s the funniest memory that has randomly come back to me in a long time.
The past couple weeks at work have been pretty slow for the most part. I’ve had some books to deliver but I’ve had several days where I’ve either gotten all of my work done pretty early or I’ve come into work in the morning with nothing there for me to do. Scott, the guy I share an office with, has had a similarly tedious time with his job during that time. Predictably, this has lead to even more extended pop culture conversations than we usually have in a given week, and several visits to wikipedia whenever we’ve brought up an obscure movie one of us barely remembers, or a random actor who came up in a conversation. Yesterday I mentioned Ryan O’Neal after a story Scott told me – which involved him buying lunch from Quizno’s and then absent-mindedly walking out with chips and a drink when he’d only ordered a sandwich – reminded me of a scene in What’s Up Doc?, a 1972 movie that starred O’Neal and a very young Barbara Streisand. Scott couldn’t remember who O’Neal was, so he read a bit from his wikipedia page, which detailed the various domestic disputes he and his sons have gotten into. This was quite hilarious in a most unintentional way.
Later in the day, Scott ended up on the wikipedia page of British actor Roger Moore, or rather Sir Roger Moore, I should say (he was knighted 5 years ago). One of the pictures on that page seemed to tell us more about his altruism (or possible lack thereof) than he might want people to know. In the picture, which was taken on his 80th birthday just over a year ago, Moore is wearing a very nice grey suit and is holding something in each hand. If you zoom in on the photo (see below) you can see a $1 bill in his left hand, which was presumably drawn from the huge roll of money in his right hand, which he seems to be putting back in his pocket.
The photo is cropped a bit and even in the full picture you can’t see the entire context of the photo, but in looking at it Scott and I guessed that he had the bill out as a tip for someone. I mean, what else would he possibly be doing with a $1 bill? Getting a Cherry Coke or a Snickers from a machine perhaps? If he was intending to give that as a tip, then he’s either a lousy tipper or he’s fallen on hard times. It’s an amusing photo to see; a wealthy movie star who has been a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire for five years wearing an expensive three-piece suit and holding a large roll of cash in one hand and a solitary Washington in the other. Is our economy that bad? Is Sir Roger Moore reaching the point where he can only afford to give $1 tips to valets or bellhops?
If the U.S. government is going to designate tens of billions of dollars for bailouts of large corporations like A.I.G., Bear Stearns, and General Motors (that last one hasn’t happened yet, but the liberal union-friendly Democrats in Congress want it to) because those are institutions which are – we are told – vital and “too big to fail”, then surely a bailout for Sir Roger Moore should be in order. Sure he’s British and is most famous for playing two iconic British characters (James Bond and Simon Templar), but the James Bond series of movies have been vital to the long-term financial success of landmark American film studio United Artists (started in 1919) and its parent company MGM Studios (founded in 1924), and Roger Moore, having played Bond in seven movies, is a man inextricably linked to that character and that series. We can’t have him in such a state, as it’s not just him who could be hurt, but also the James Bond image and the studios who produce his celluloid exploits. Stated plainly: he is just too big to fail (and if you saw Moore’s last turn as James Bond in A View To A Kill, then you know that sentence could have multiple meanings). We need to get the Senate Appropriations Committee working on this right away.
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Speaking of Bond, the 22nd James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, will be released tomorrow and I’ve already bought my ticket. I’m going with a small group from church, and the ringleader who sent out the email asked that all the men going wear a suit and tie. I don’t have a proper suit coat at my apartment so I may have to settle for my dark jacket. The previous Bond film, 2006’s Casino Royale, was the first one of the series that I watched in the theater, and only the second one that I’d seen period (the first was Moore’s first Bond film, Live and Let Die). So needless to say, I’m not a huge aficionado of the series, but I really enjoyed Casino Royale, which was light years above anything Roger Moore did with the series.
I’m hoping the new movie will be just as good, though my expectations have been somewhat muted after I read a review in this week’s Dallas Observer in which the writer (Robert Wilonsky) praised Casino Royale before calling Quantum of Solace “easily one of the worst” films in the series. For much of his stated criticism of the movie and its supposed failures, he blames director Marc Forster, who he thinks was in over his head helming a James Bond movie when his “biggest action sequence to date involved Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton getting it on” in 2001’s Monster’s Ball (which is a terrible choice for a first movie to watch with a girl, I might add). It’s a clever line, though only if you forget the more visually rich sequences in such Forster-directed movies as Finding Neverland and Stranger Than Fiction, or last year’s adaptation of The Kite Runner for that matter. Mocking Forster’s filmography is a low blow when other directors who worked with the Bond franchise had similarly thin résumés in the area of action filmmaking. Before John Glen directed 1981’s For Your Eyes Only (the first of five Bond movies he would direct), his sole directorial credit was one episode of the TV series “Man in a Suitcase” (which aired 30 episodes in its only season, which ran from 1967 to 1968). 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (which is widely regarded as one of the best entries in the franchise) was Peter Hunt’s directorial debut, though in his case he had worked as a film editor for several years (and four previous Bond films) before his first turn in the director’s chair.
So that’s what’s on tap for tomorrow evening. Traffic can be bad around here so I’ll probably go to the theater straight from work. My brother called while I was writing this and told me he had tomorrow off from work and might drive up here to watch the movie with the rest of us. When I mentioned the suit and tie requirement, he seemed unfazed, which is odd because he’s rarely seen in something so formal as khaki pants, let alone a suit and tie. So we’ll see how that goes.
I was channel surfing yesterday afternoon and I tuned to one of the local channels and saw the last few minutes of the movie Rebound, which stars Martin Lawrence as a short-fused college basketball coach who gets fired and kicked out of coaching at the college level and ends up taking a job coaching a junior high school team. All I saw was the very end of the “big game” where Lawrence’s team is behind by one point and one of his players is fouled at the buzzer and has to make two free throws to win the game. The kid sets up and makes his first shot, but jumps and lands over the free throw line when he shoots. In the logic of the movie, the referee either isn’t watching as closely as the camera is or he doesn’t know that this is a violation and the shot shouldn’t count. I just stared in disbelief, and then laughed out loud when the kid made his second free throw to win the game… again while jumping over the line.
Thus it is with so many sports movies involving kids, they way too often make a big play or win a big game with an implausible play that would never stand up to a referee actually enforcing the rules of the game. In the realm of sports movie implausibilities, I guess a kid being allowed to step over the free throw line on two consecutive shots to win a big game doesn’t rate much higher on the Implausibility Scale than, say, the kid in Rookie of the Year getting a crucial out in a baseball game by using an illegal version of the “hidden ball trick”, or the American hockey team in D2: The Mighty Ducks being allowed to disguise a player in the goalie’s jersey and pads so he could get off a game-tying “knucklepuck” shot in the championship of the (fictional) Junior Goodwill Games. Just as implausible as any of those is the very idea that an international hockey game played with a bunch of kids not even old enough to drive could actually draw a crowd big enough to fill up a professional hockey arena in California, or that hundreds of people would actually turn out to watch a middle school basketball game.
The message of these movies: it’s okay if you break the rules in order to win, and hundreds of people will be there to cheer when you do.
I hope there weren’t too many kids who watched those and other sports movies and got unrealistic expectations that they’d one day be playing the little league baseball or pee wee football city championship in front of a stadium full of fans, let alone their whole town’s population (see: Little Giants). Those movies appeal to a certain age group, and as you get older the movies you liked as a kid will seem sillier, and few will still be seen as classics a decade later (among kid sports movies, The Sandlot probably holds up the best). For all its goofiness, I still have a nostalgic attachment to Rookie of the Year, and not just because of the pure comedy of seeing a pre-steroids Barry Bonds in one brief cameo. One of these days I’ll have to get the DVD and write a running diary while I watch it.
I’ve had the idea for this list for a few months now, and over that time I’ve thought of new examples, added to the list, and rearranged the order. Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general has produced decades worth of far-fetched plot twists, action scenes, and character changes, but the past few years have seen some exceptional examples, and a few films and TV series have practically turned implausibility into an art form.
I’ll admit a certain amount of inspiration for the concept came from sportswriter Bill Simmons’ Unintentional Comedy Scale. This isn’t supposed to be a conclusive or exclusive list; it’s more of a guideline about where I would rate certain scenes or sequences. The scale rates as high as 100, with the list getting steadily more implausible as it goes, and the tip top most implausible example or examples rating a 100. Ideally, such a list would work so that you would read #65 and say, “now that’s implausible, but I’d believe it before I’d believe #66″ and so on, though a lot of it is just for fun and the list doesn’t strictly follow that formula. Hope you’re entertained, and feel free to add your own examples and where you think they should rate.
I should also note that I’m picking and choosing my implausibilities here, as I’m including, for the most part, only examples that I’ve actually seen, and examples of scenes or sequences that defied logic and/or reason. Because of this I don’t include scenes from sci-fi or fantasy type movies like The Matrix, which has some far-out action scenes, but which take place in a reality not governed by normal laws of physics, and thus they make sense within the movie’s own internal logic (until the whole plot jumped the shark in the 3rd film, but that’s another topic).
I’m beginning the list at #60 and moving on from there. Fair warning: a few of the examples cited here may be plot spoilers to those who haven’t seen those films or TV shows.
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60: TV personality Katherine Heigl sleeping with, getting pregnant by, and ultimately deciding to have the baby of immature and unemployed pothead slob Seth Rogen in Knocked Up. Two of those three might happen, all three happening would be very unlikely.
61: Rachael Leigh Cook as the average, un-pretty girl in She’s All That.
62: Kenan Thompson scoring a goal on a lengh-of-the-ice “knucklepuck” shot at the end of the Junior Goodwill Games championship hockey game to tie the score and force overtime in D2: The Mighty Ducks. No way the shot would have flown that straight or that far, or that they could have gotten away with having him secretly change into another player’s jersey. And the Icelandic coach’s reaction is priceless (“The goalie! Nooooo!”)
63: Joshua Jackson’s character arc in the Mighty Ducks movies. In D2, he’s team-oriented and unselfish to the point of giving up his spot on the team right before the championship game to make room on the roster for a teammate who has just recovered from an injury. In D3, he’s selfish and arrogant, only wants to play as a scorer and yells at his coach who wants him to play defense.
64: Anakin Skywalker’s character arc in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I didn’t believe it for one second.
65: The dialogue in any radio ad for Just Brakes.
female caller – “Wow, you repair disc pads and brake shoes and inspect and rotate the balance on all four wheels?! That’s an even better deal than when I bought my car new!! Why do you do it, Just Brakes?”
Just Brakes repair guy – “Because at Just Brakes, we really do care.”
66: The dialogue in any radio ad for Ovaltine. (“MORE OVALTINE, PLEASE!!”)
67: 5’7” Tom Cruise as a star defensive back on his high school football team, and getting recruited by several major colleges in All The Right Moves.
68: 5’9” Jamie Foxx as an NFL quarterback in Any Given Sunday. That’s a good 3-5 inches shorter than any pro team would want their quarterback to be.
69: Sarah Jessica Parker falling for Dennis Quaid in Smart People; Amidala falling for Anakin in the Star Wars prequels; and Maggie Gyllenhaal falling for Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction.
70: Luke Wilson actually being a bestselling author in Alex & Emma. In real life, the story he and Kate Hudson come up with in the movie wouldn’t have gotten a passing grade in a junior college writing course, let alone a six-figure advance.
71: “Tool Time” actually being a popular show on Home Improvement. In real life it probably would have been cancelled in under a month.
72: The impossible aerial maneuver James Franco pulls with his World War I-era fighter plane to slip behind and shoot down the plane of his ace German archenemy in Flyboys, a maneuver right out of Top Gun, I might add.
73: The Middle Eastern villains in season four of 24 conveniently speaking English when counter-terrorist agents manage to listen in on their cell phone conversations. That series could fill a list like this on its own, but I’ll be nice and only include this one example.
74: The end of the $500,000 poker tournament in the movie Maverick, where on the final hand, with the three remaining players betting all their chips, they show hands with four 8’s, a straight flush, and a royal flush, respectively. There’s no way all three of those happen at the same time, the odds are too astronomical. But I’d believe that before I’d believe…
75: Estella Warren’s improbably nice skin, hair, and makeup in the 2001 Planet of the Apes remake. Humans have been enslaved for hundreds of years and the women still have a hidden supply of lipstick? Sure…
I might also add the three-day stubble Martin Henderson sports for all of his scenes throughout the length of Flyboys. He has one of those razors that only exist in the movies, one that allows characters to always look like they haven’t shaved in a few days.
76: President Andrew Shepard’s (Michael Douglas) speech during a press conference at the end of The American President, which is full of combative and hokey dialogue no President would ever say, and even has Shepard utter the line: “You cannot address crime prevention without getting rid of assault weapons and handguns. I consider them a threat to national security, and I will go door to door if I have to, but I’m gonna convince Americans that I’m right, and I’m gonna get the guns.”
No President in his right mind would make such a statement publicly, and any who did would have next to no chance of being re-elected (at least one would hope). Also, I think the movie’s screenwriter (Aaron Sorkin) missed the irony in the President promising to “go door to door if I have to” in order to “get the guns” just minutes after praising the ACLU and calling it “an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights”, because apparently his copy of the Bill of Rights doesn’t include the 2nd Amendment. (Note: The scene is hokey, self-congratulatory, and emotionally exploitative enough on its own, but when you add the music in the background and the serious, uncritical looks on the faces of the reporters as he’s talking, it’s almost comedic).
77: Orlando Bloom’s “Who has claim? No one has claim” speech before the siege of Jerusalem in Kingdom of Heaven, which is only slightly more historically improbable than Leonidas’ “an age of freedom” speech in 300, or Joely Richardson’s “It’s a free country. Or at least it will be” line in The Patriot.
78: The boxing arena spectators in Cold War-era Moscow chanting American Rocky Balboa’s name as he fights against the Russian giant Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. A rough equivalent might be a baseball movie set in Boston where Red Sox fans chant Derek Jeter’s name.
79: Pretty much any episode of CSI (including both spin-off series).
80: Any movie where a character gets a few simple lessons or pointers on fencing or swordplay, and then becomes a near master swordsman in about 5 minutes of screen time (see: The Mask of Zorro, Kingdom of Heaven, The Last Samurai, The Count of Monte Cristo, and the hobbits in The Fellowship of the Ring.)
81: The end of Alien vs. Predator where the Predator saves Sanaa Lathan’s life and essentially joins forces with her for a short while, which goes against everything previously known about the Predators.
82: The endings of The Fast and the Furious and the 2007 version of 3:10 To Yuma.
83: Angelina Jolie as Colin Farrell’s mother in Alexander (she’s just under a year older than him).
84: Any McDonald’s TV ad that portrays the employees as young, clean cut, good-looking, always smiling, and nearly always white or black. Have the producers of those commercials ever been inside a McDonald’s?
85: Nicholas Cage and John Travolta being able to shoot and hit people or airborne objects from long distances, but frequently being unable to shoot each other even when they’re 5 feet apart in Face/Off.
86: The plot of National Treasure.
87: The plot of National Treasure: Book of Secrets.
88: Jack Sparrow and the crew of the Black Pearl turning the ship completely upside down by running back and forth across the deck in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. (There’s also the para-sailing bit near the end of the movie, which might rate slightly lower).
89: The action sequence in Live Free or Die Hard that immediately precedes this line: “You just killed a helicopter with a car!“
90: The long jungle sequence in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that includes: A. Mutt (Shia Lebouf) swinging on vines through the trees following a pack of monkeys, B. Marion Ravenwood driving a Jeep off the edge of a cliff and onto the branches of a tree, which gently lowers the vehicle onto the river below before swinging back and swatting some Russians who are climbing down the cliff, C. the Jeep (and its 5 passengers) going over 3 large waterfalls in succession without anyone falling out of the car or getting any scrapes, bruises, or concussions, and D. Indiana Jones never once losing his hat the whole time. The quantity of implausibilities in those 10 minutes piles up high enough to make it among the most implausible things ever put on film, but to save room I’ll mention them all together and take the rough average of their implausibility scale rating.
91: The Tom Cruise-Dougray Scott motorcycle joust/beach fight sequence in Mission: Impossible II. Neither character should have been able to walk (if they were even still alive) after a collision like that, which you can see at the end of this video clip.
92: In Transporter 2, Jason Statham driving up the levels of a parking garage, crashing his car through a short concrete wall at the edge of the roof, then still having the inertia to fly well over 100 feet forward through the air and land on an upper floor of a nearby building under construction. You can see it at the 4:40 mark of this video clip.
93: The scene in the 2005 King Kong remake just before Kong goes unconscious after having bottles of chloroform thrown at him. Just before this, there’s a shot of lots of men throwing ropes and a net over Kong and actually holding him down, which would seem more than a little unlikely since earlier in the film Kong had picked up and thrown a Tyrannosaurus, a dinosaur that weighed between 7 and 8 tons.
94: The bus in Speed hopping and flying over a long gap on an unfinished highway overpass and landing safely on the other side, with the speedometer somehow staying above 50 mph the whole time. The jump occurs just before the 4:00 mark in this video (warning: contains some R-rated language).
95: The entire plot of Flightplan. The villains would have needed psychic powers or a crystal ball for their plan to have worked the way it did. I’ve never seen any other movie be so interesting and then completely fall apart in the third act the way that movie did when the plot was revealed.
96: Jeff Goldblum hacking and sending a computer virus to an alien computer system from an earth-based computer system in Independence Day. Apparently, those aliens can manufacture fighter ships armed with laser guns and deflector shields and can communicate telepathically, but they can’t be bothered to update their anti-virus software.
97: Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt surviving an F5 tornado without a scratch by tying themselves to the pipes of a water well just before it passes right over them at the end of Twister.
98: In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the title character surviving a nuclear bomb blast by shutting himself inside a 1950s-era refrigerator, feeling no ill effects from the fridge being blown hundreds of feet away by the force of the blast, and not getting radiation poisoning when he climbs out of it and stands directly under a mushroom cloud and breathes the air. Who does he think he is, Chuck Norris?
99: In Wanted, the scene where James McAvoy is supposed to kill a guy in a limousine as he drives along the side of it, but finds the limo has bulletproof windows. So Angelina Jolie, working with him, drives her sports car toward McAvoy’s, then hits the brakes just as they’re about to meet, and an invisible ramp allows McAvoy’s car to shoot up off her car’s hood, fly up into the air, and flip over the limousine where an open sunroof gives McAvoy a clear shot at the guy (which he takes) before his car harmlessly lands back onto the street and he drives away. In real life, this would result in a fiery crash and the guy in the limo would speed away from the scene laughing. You can see an edited part of this scene at about the 2:00 mark of the movie’s third trailer.
100: The sequence in Transporter 2 described here by Roger Ebert:
“Seeing the reflection of a bomb in a pool of liquid under his car, and knowing that the bad guys will not explode it while they’re standing right next to it, the hero races the car out of a garage and up an incline, spinning the car neatly through the air, so that it makes one complete rotation and the bomb is pulled off by a hook on a crane, exploding harmlessly as the car lands safely. Uh, huh.
I could observe that this is preposterous, but the fact is, I laughed aloud.”
So did I, as I’d never seen anything so outlandish before. The scene is so ridiculous (and also fun in its own way) that not even comic books or video games would try something like it. On the Implausibility Scale, I don’t think it will ever be topped by any movie that takes itself the least bit seriously.
*101: I’m adding one extra example to the list, a clip from the 1985 Indian movie Adavi Donga, starring Indian movie icon Chiranjeevi. I’m putting an asterisk on it and not putting it with the others because it was probably designed as a parody, though without seeing it in its full context it’s hard to know. I saw this clip over the weekend (and posted it in a previous blog) and decided that parody or not, it completely shattered the Implausibility Scale. The brief clip involves a horse skidding underneath a large trailer (with its rider still on it) and a pursuing Jeep leaping over that same trailer at its driver’s command (apparently, vehicles in India can jump when their driver stands up slightly in the driver’s seat). It truly has to be seen to be (dis)believed.
I helped a certain newly-engaged friend move out of her apartment and back to her parents’ house on Saturday (and may even end up helping again soon, as she’s getting married in a month). My shoulders were very sore on Sunday. I played a few pickup basketball games on Monday night. My lower back and my legs are sore today. It feels good to feel like I’m getting some semblance of a workout, though I sweat like no other. I’ve always been a heavy sweater but it seems to be turned up even more lately for some reason. At one point on Saturday morning between carrying loads down the stairs and into a van or the back of a truck bed, I looked in the mirror and between my absolutely soaked t-shirt and my thoroughly wet hair, one could have been excused for thinking I’d just hopped out of a shower. I don’t remember sweating that much back in my basketball or track days, but maybe it’s just been so long that I’ve forgotten what it was like, either that or I’m sweating more because I’m likely carrying 35-40 more pounds than I was when I last participated in any organized sport (track and field my junior year of high school).
This reminds me of a good quote from Robert Downey Jr. in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: “Wow, I feel sore. I mean physically, not like a guy who’s angry in a movie in the 1950’s.”
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Joke of the week:
How do you intimidate an agnostic who has moved into your neighborhood?
You burn a wooden question mark on his lawn
I saw that one recently in a review of a book on the history of jokes, although the original version had “unitarian” in place of “agnostic”, but I told the joke to a couple friends at church and they both thought “agnostic” fit better, so I’ll go with that one.
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Overheard at the law library this week…
“I need to go back to criminal defense. This family law stuff is for the birds.”
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Movies I’ve seen lately: Get Smart, Vantage Point, Wanted, WALL-E
Get Smart – I must have missed the boat on this one. I’ve heard a few people I know say they thought it was absolutely hilarious, and one of the funniest things they’d seen in a long time. Me, I chuckled a lot, laughed out loud maybe once or twice, but that’s about it. If you’ve seen Steve Carell in The Office, The 40 Year Old Virgin, or Bruce/Evan Almighty, then he doesn’t do much here that you haven’t seen him do before. It has a lot of sight gags, some of them amusing, and three pretty well filmed action scenes, which feel like they belong in a much better movie. Overall, it’s a decent comedy, harmless but largely forgettable, and I doubt anyone will still be talking about this movie 5 years from now. My grade: C+
Vantage Point – An interesting movie to watch, but almost completely forgettable. I appreciate any movie that tries to pull off Rashomon-style multiple perspectives or Memento-like uses of time, but this movie is over almost as soon as it feels like it’s begun, and it leaves a lot unsaid and unexplained, probably because to say or explain those things would only make the plot holes seem bigger. My grade: C-
Wanted – A bloody, violent, vulgar, adrenaline rush of a good time if ever a movie was one. It doesn’t quite pass Transporter 2 as my favorite implausible action movie, but it’s up there. The plot is ludicrous, and I’m afraid for what will happen when somebody inevitably tries to “curve the bullet” like the characters in this movie do, but it’s one of the more original looking pieces of pop action to hit the screen in a while. There’s a big action scene at the end that has parts that reminded me of everything from Equilibrium to The Last of the Mohicans, and finally Swordfish. My grade: B+
WALL-E – I was really excited about seeing this after seeing the trailers a bunch of times on TV and in the theater. I’ve liked everything Pixar has done so far and WALL-E had the look of a movie that I expected to threaten Monsters, Inc.’s place atop my list of favorite Pixar films. But in the end I’ll confess I was mildly disappointed. Any movie with a plot involving robots having human emotions can have its problems if it isn’t done right. The TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation had many interesting episodes centered on the character Data, an android who had much to say about humans and human emotions, and later in the series (and in four movie spin-offs) he was even programmed with a range of emotions. That was a good example.
A bad example was the 2005 animated film Robots. Rather than have robots programmed with or displaying human emotions, the robots in that movie may as well have been metallic humans, as in everything from their character to their anatomy, they seemed to be humanoid first, and robot second. The robots in the movie had hopes, dreams, goals, they were “born” as tiny robots ordered from a store, and steadily they grew as their parent robots ordered them newer and bigger parts, until they grew into adulthood, or whatever stage in robot life it was supposed to be. Humans, as far as I could tell, didn’t exist in that movie’s world, and thus it was hard to figure out where these robots came from, and why they should have been designed as different sexes, or what the point could possibly be of a “male” robot and a “female” robot “marrying”. When two robots are putting together the parts that will become their son, the movie unambiguously says that the baby robot has a male sex organ. Which can only lead one to ask, “Why????” What need could he ever have for it? Why don’t robots just get delivered fully grown? It’s not like it should need parents to teach it, when it can just be programmed with whatever knowledge it needs. The movie didn’t work at all because it made the robots far more human than they needed to be, rather than make them robots first, and emotional second.
WALL-E I largely enjoyed, though I was put off by the cynicism and not-so-veiled environmental message and corporate satire. The movie portrays a future where Earth is uninhabitable because it’s piled sky-high with trash as far as the eye can see, so humans have lived several centuries on ships in space, which are staffed by robots and apparently run by Buy n Large, a satirical take on big corporations that is probably supposed to be a composite of companies like Wal-Mart and Starbucks. All the humans are fat and lazy, they get around on floating easy chairs, and they know nothing beyond the messages that Buy n Large broadcasts to them. It’s the sort of dystopian vision that liberal-minded Literature majors will eat up, but I found all the cynicism a bit insulting, and more than a little hypocritical coming from a company like Disney, which has probably done more to over-commercialize all forms of entertainment and merchandising and mold young kids into budding consumerists than Wal-Mart or Starbucks ever have.
The story between WALL-E and EVE was sweet and very enjoyable, but the plot itself and the cynicism lost it some points from me. My grade: B
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I read in the newspaper this morning that the movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has inspired the new term, “nuking the fridge”, which is meant to be used in a similar vein as “jumping the shark“. The Urban Dictionary defines “nuke the fridge” as, “A colloquialism used to delineate the precise moment at which a cinematic franchise has crossed over from remote plausibility to self parodying absurdity, usually indicating a low point in the series from which it is unlikely to recover.”
My brother told me several weeks ago that he’d seen this term used by people on message boards he frequents, but the apparently it’s just now become big enough for the mainstream media to note it.
This is one of the funniest ones I’ve seen in a long time. From today’s Dallas Morning News, page 1A, below the fold, a story about this weekend’s Republican state convention in Houston.
The 2nd paragraph reads as follows: “For the first time in 15 years, Texas Republicans are on the defensive — consider Democratic leader Boyd Richie’s bold promise that his party would seize control of Harris County just as Dallas County did in 2006.”
Um, Dallas County seized control of Harris County in 2006??? I had no idea! So there’s been a secret war between Dallas County and a county 300 miles away, and nobody knew about it? Maybe that’s why Dallas County is $30+ million in the hole and trying to cut costs. It all makes perfect sense now. All I know is that my co-workers and I got a big kick out of that sentence.
I think the writer meant to say the Dems were promising to take control of Harris County (which is where Houston is) just as they did in Dallas County two years ago, when public dissatisfaction with Republicans spilled over into local races that had nothing to do with the national party and every single Republican judge in Dallas County who had a Democrat opponent lost in the 2006 election.
I know the Morning News has laid off or bought out a lot of their staff in the past couple of years, but seriously, do they not employ copy editors anymore? How did that sentence make it to print without being spotted? Morning News publishers, in case you’re reading this, I can do editing work and I’ll ask for very reasonable pay. Trust me, you could use the help.
A friend I’ve known for essentially my whole life got married early in March, after about a yearlong courtship and a 5 month engagement. He and his bride are quite the bubbly, happy couple. In fact, they’d been married barely a month when they announced they were expecting their first child in December, which prompted this response from an anonymous source: “That’s what you call hitting the first pitch.”
Marriage, I’m sure, has a way of changing people, in ways both subtle and obvious. My friend seems to have changed in at least a few noticeable ways. His birthday came on a Wednesday in late March and I went to talk to him after church that night because I had a gift for him. I kinda jumped into a conversation he was having with another guy, wherin he ended a sentence with the phrase, “that kinda sucks”, or something similar to that anyway. My jaw almost dropped because he’d always made a point to avoid using even the most seemingly harmless of potentially rude words, “sucks” in particular. In fact, I remember a Sunday when I was probably about 11 or 12 and having a lunchtime football conversation with some friends at church and his mother got really upset and told my mom when she overheard me say “sucks”, a word which, if memory serves, was preceded by, “Dan Marino”.
So it was, in its own way, shocking when my friend said that. I turned to the guy he was talking to and said, “did he just say ’sucks’”? My friend chuckled and responded, “Yeah. And I say ‘crap’ now too!” Hmm, where are his standards going? One day you get married, have your first kiss, and lose your virginity, then before the month is over you’ve started saying “sucks” and “crap”? Is there a pattern here?
Sportswriter Bill Simmons coined the term “I’m Keith Hernandez” status, which was named after a memorable scene in a legendary episode of Seinfeld. In the scene, pro baseball player Keith Hernandez goes out on a date with Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and it ends with the following bit of dialogue:
ELAINE: Well, thanks for a nice evening. It was really fun.
KEITH: Yeah, it was. [mind] Gosh, should I kiss her good night?
ELAINE: [mind] Is he going to try to kiss me?
ELAINE: I love Cajun cooking.
KEITH: Really, you know my mom’s one quarter Cajun.
ELAINE: Uh, my father’s half drunk. ha ha ha ha
KEITH: Maybe they should get together. [mind] Go ahead. Kiss her.
I’m a baseball player dammit.
ELAINE: [mind] What’s he waiting for? I thought he was a cool guy.
KEITH: [mind] Come on I won the MVP in 79. I can do whatever I want to.
ELAINE: [mind] This is getting awkward.
KEITH: Well, goodnight
ELAINE: Good night
[they kiss - REALLY KISS]
ELAINE: [mind] Who does this guy think he is?
KEITH: [mind] I’m Keith Hernandez.
Thus, “I’m Keith Hernandez” status is reached when an athlete, beloved by the fans and possessing of great skill, reaches a ridiculous level of self-confidence and believes that he can do anything – especially things that lesser athletes couldn’t get away with – and it will be okay because he’s a superstar and he can do that. Just like Keith Hernandez saying in his mind, “Come on, I won the MVP in ‘79. I can do whatever I want to.”
In a similar vein, a newly married man might start doing things and saying certain things unashamedly that he never would have done before, thinking “Come on, I’m married. I’ve left my father and mother and I’m leading a new family now! I’m free. I can say whatever I want to!”
After a lifetime of shying away from saying things as mild as “sucks” and “crap”, he’s suddently started using those words. He’s a prolific photographer and he posted several Facebook albums worth of pictures from his honeymoon trip, one of which included a picture of his wife holding up (and giving a thumbs-up to) the book Sheet Music: Uncovering the Secrets of Sexual Intimacy in Marriage. Not a hint of awkwardness there on his part, and even his sister responded with “good grief”. And this week he announced his wife’s pregnancy by posting a picture on facebook of her positive pregnancy test stick, predictably prompting comments like “ok, that’s gross”, “wow…?”, and “Err..yeah…that’s…yeah…”
Has this whole marriage thing totally gotten to his head? Should we call this “I’m leading my own household now” status? I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with any of those things in the previous paragraph, but it just goes to show how marriage might give you a sense of freedom and strip you of a lot of awkwardness and inhibition you had before. That being said, I hope I don’t suddenly become that open after getting married, whenever that ends up happening.
