Bad Scenes in Great Movies OR Great Scenes in Bad Movies

Started by modage, March 31, 2005, 09:55:35 PM

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By Noel Murray, Keith Phipps, Nathan Rabin, Tasha Robinson, and Scott Tobias

Consider the yin-yang, that ancient symbol of duality. Now consider its dots, symbols that everything contains at least a trace of its opposite. Pure darkness and pure light: The yin-yang dismisses these ideas, insisting instead that we acknowledge the light within the darkness and the darkness within the light.

So it is with movies. Look hard enough at even the most perfect-seeming film, and the flaws will present themselves. They may be miniscule, or they may be vast. Skimming the dregs yields the same results, calling attention to moments of greatness in even the sorriest material. Here, The Onion A.V. Club presents some of the results of its recent research project: Finding the worst scenes in the greatest movies, and rescuing some terrific scenes from the awful films around them.



15 bad scenes in great movies

1. Psycho (1960)

Scene: Wrapped up with a ribbon

Alfred Hitchcock is widely considered among the most psychologically perceptive of the great directors, but the more overtly psychological aspects of his films today often look cheesy and dated. This is especially true of Psycho's post-climactic wrap-up, in which Simon Oakland's savvy head-shrinker turns into a walking psychology textbook as he explains—in the patient, vaguely condescending tone he might use on a particularly slow child—the peculiar relationship between the creepy proprietor of the Bates Motel (Anthony Perkins) and his ever-lovin' mama. Oakland's stiff speech has the unfortunate effect of explaining away and diminishing the madness of Perkins' character, replacing the archetypal power of evil with the muddled logic of dime-store Freudianism.


2. The Great Escape (1963)

Scene: Steve McQueen flees the Nazis on a motorcycle

Yes, it's thrilling. Yes, it's on the poster. Yes, it's probably the most iconic moment in McQueen's career. But there's no understating the ridiculousness of McQueen racing his Nazi captors across the countryside and attempting to pop a Dukes Of Hazzard wheelie over two barbed-wire fences leading into Switzerland. The scene owes everything to McQueen's contract and nothing to history: He only agreed to star in the movie on the condition that he'd have a chance to show off his motorcycle skills. Meanwhile, in a more sobering (and true-to-life) development, the Germans round up all but three of the 72 Allied escapees from a POW camp and later gun down 50 of them in cold blood. So why does McQueen's derring-do make it seem like a happy ending?


3. Lost In Translation (2003)

Scene: "Hey! Lip my stocking!"

For the most part, Sofia Coppola keeps the isolation and melancholy culture shock of Lost In Translation at a sweetly low-key ebb. But she breaks the tone entirely for the thoroughly embarrassing scene where Bill Murray deals with a well-aged "premium fantasy" call girl, a Japanese woman who enters his hotel room to give him the baffling order "Lip my stockings, prease, prease, prease!" When he politely tries to get rid of her, she falls on her back, makes bicycling motions with her legs, howls "Oh no! Help, prease!" and attempts to wrap herself around him. Highly awkward physical comedy ensues. Murray's discomfort and distaste certainly extends to the audience, which is no doubt what Coppola had in mind, but the scene's crassness is vast and overbearing, particularly compared with the restrained sorrow of the rest of the film.


4. An American In Paris (1951)

Scene: The ballet

In the '50s, MGM tried to class up the musical by inserting ballet interludes, to show that the studio's contract players were capable of more than just gauche hoofing. In An American In Paris, Gene Kelly pursues the unattainable Leslie Caron while ducking his amorous patron Nina Foch, and just when the story reaches its critical point, the movie breaks into an 18-minute George Gershwin-scored dance sequence that relates everything that's gone before, in abstract, symbolic form. It's simultaneously wondrous and tedious, but it makes this list for what happens next: nothing. The movie just ends, with the ballet apparently having resolved all the problems that the audience spent 90 pre-ballet minutes caring about.

5. Million Dollar Baby (2004)

Scene: Hilary Swank's family visits her hospital bed

The recent controversy over Million Dollar Baby afforded the surreal spectacle of conservatives attacking the ostensibly liberal messages of a movie made by one of film's pre-eminent conservatives. And while the film is fairly progressive overall, it's downright reactionary in its depiction of Swank's family, a white-trash brood of hillbilly monsters dominated by the worst cinematic matriarch (Margo Martindale) this side of Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. Million Dollar Baby traffics largely in shades of gray, but Martindale's welfare queen is a grotesque caricature of entitlement run amok, especially in the scene where she tries to convince her bedridden daughter to sign away her assets. Martindale doesn't flat-out say she's going to sell the house Swank bought her and spend the proceeds on malt liquor, lottery tickets, and a closet full of "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts, but that's clearly implied. It's hard to say which is more surprising: that even Swank's saintly pugilist calls Martindale a fat, lazy hillbilly, or that she waits until late into the film.


6. Network (1976)

Scene: A weekend getaway with Faye Dunaway

Director Sidney Lumet and writer Paddy Cheyefsky might have been prescient with Network, their acclaimed satire on the state of television news, but it doesn't tread lightly, especially in the unlikely (and purely symbolic) relationship between wizened old newsman William Holden and ratings-hungry sexpot Faye Dunaway. In the worst of several scenes designed to establish Dunaway's subhuman narcissism, Holden and Dunaway enjoy a brief lovemaking session in which she climaxes somewhere between talking about entertainment law and choice time slots. Afterward, she gently coos, "What's really bugging me now is daytime programming."


7. Malcolm X (1992)

Scene: "I am Malcolm X!"

When Spike Lee needs to get a point across, the phrase "by any means necessary" often applies: He ended School Daze with a character exhorting the audience to "wake up" as an alarm bell rings, and closed Jungle Fever with a man placing a smoking gun on the Bible. After closing his stately biopic Malcolm X with Ossie Davis' stirring eulogy, Lee overreaches again with a scene set in contemporary South Africa, where young students in a classroom celebrate Malcolm X Day. Lee then cuts to a montage of the kids leaping out of their chairs and chiming "I am Malcolm X," just in case anyone doubted after 200 minutes that X's legacy lives on.


8. Bull Durham (1988)

Scene: The big speech

Even writer-director Ron Shelton admits that Bull Durham's most famous scene—Kevin Costner's "what I believe" speech—doesn't ring true. Shelton wrote it to attract actors to the project, and though Costner brings a lot of conviction to the lines, the litany of pleasures sounds forced. "I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy... I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone"? That's an e-mail rant, not a timeless monologue.


9. A Night At The Opera (1935)

Scene: The endless trans-Atlantic musical voyage

Justly revered as one of the Marx brothers' best comedies, A Night At The Opera opens and closes brilliantly, but beware the dusty middle that hits around the 42-minute mark. Most Marx films take a few moments for Harpo and Chico to show off their musical chops, but the musical sequence in Night At The Opera just keeps going, eventually exploding into a full-on production number of "ethnic" pageantry. Meanwhile, singing straight-man Allan Jones proves he's no Zeppo. It's a blip in the midst of brilliance, but it sadly set the pattern for the brothers' subsequent overstuffed MGM films.


10. Elephant (2002)

Scene: Teen-killer homoerotica

Gus Van Sant's tender, hypnotic day-in-the-life portrait of a high school just before a Columbine-style massacre goes to some length to show its teen murderers and their targets as humans, rather than angels or demons; for the most part, the film avoids easy answers and obnoxious stereotypes. At least until the murderers climb into the shower together and start making out, in a faux-erotic moment that rings both false and exploitative. Van Sant sticks so closely to the actual Columbine story otherwise that it's hard not to see this little bit of poetic license as cheap theorizing and cheaper pop psychology: "I've never even kissed anybody, have you?" one asks the other before the naked necking starts. Shades of early Brian De Palma...


11. Casualties Of War (1989)

Scene: The coda on the train

With Citizen Kane as the grand exception, framing devices are almost always killers, and Brian De Palma's otherwise wrenching tragedy Casualties Of War is hampered by a doozy. The only reason to put Vietnam vet Michael J. Fox on a MUNI train in present-day San Francisco is to show how haunted he remains by his experience in the war, where he saw his unit enslave, repeatedly rape, and later slaughter a young female villager. At the end, he shares a moment on the train with a pretty Asian student, who just happens to be played by the same actress (Thuy Thu Lee) victimized in the Vietnam scenes. The spookily perceptive woman comments that he must have had a bad dream, but it's over now.


12. Short Cuts (1993)

Scene: "Goddamn yew!"

Andie MacDowell has been the weak link in countless movies, dating back to her breakthrough film sex, lies, and videotape, where her blankness and her character's timidity become indistinguishable. Aside from the clunker finale of Four Weddings And A Funeral—where MacDowell offers noncommittal praises for rain—her most poisonous performance comes toward the end of Robert Altman's Raymond Carver pastiche Short Cuts. She confronts baker Lyle Lovett, who's been tormenting her with prank calls, but the best she can manage is a shrill curse delivered in a pinched Southern accent. She quickly deflates the movie's tensest moment.


13. Schindler's List (1993)

Scene: Liam Neeson does some Oscar-baiting breast-beating

Steven Spielberg rarely does anything small any more, and he certainly wasn't trying for restraint with his three-hour-plus, Oscar-sweeping black-and-white biopic about Oskar Schindler, a German factory owner whose risky machinations saved more than a thousand Jews from the death camps during World War II. But the film's material is powerful and the performances are profound, and when Spielberg sticks to personal human drama, Schindler's List is deeply moving. Still, things break down during a climactic scene, as Schindler prepares to flee after the war. In front of a massive symbolic audience of the people he saved, Schindler breaks down sobbing, babbling about the additional lives he could have saved by selling his car, or his Nazi pin. His rescuees, whom he ignores in his hysteria, silently move in to hug and pat him, validating his mawkish drama-queening and placing it on a level with their own tragedy. "Look at that man's emotion and sensitivity!" their worn, iconic, emotionally exploited faces seem to say. "Surely the Academy wouldn't dishonor our lost families by denying him an Oscar!"


14. Last Tango In Paris (1972)

Scene: Marlon Brando's dirty talk

Brando's Last Tango In Paris performance is so searing because he plays his character—a depressed American recovering from his wife's suicide—as an extension of himself, with mannerisms and preoccupations that are quintessentially Brando. Which is all well and good, until Brando and his anonymous sex partner (Maria Schneider) start getting playfully naughty with each other. When she says "What big claws you have!", he responds "The better to squeeze a fart out of you!", puncturing the film's intense erotic despair with improv sprung from a notoriously scatological mind.

15. Showgirls (1995)

Scene: Gang rape

It's hard to criticize a scene for going too far in a movie whose whole glitzy aesthetic revolves around mind-numbing excess. But whether it's embraced as a gonzo, Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls-style satire of American excess or the ultimate in so-good-it's-bad camp, one scene in Showgirls brings the fun and games screaming to a halt: the brutal gang rape of Elizabeth Berkley's best friend by her favorite singer and his entourage. The rest of the film qualifies as transcendently, brilliantly cheesy, but this scene merely feels sleazy, wrong, and sordid, not to mention devoid of the trademark psychotic wit and humor of director Paul Verhoeven. Granted, Showgirls' revenge finale hinges on Berkley having something to avenge, but the filmmakers didn't have to resort to an ugly, disturbing sexual assault to raise the stakes.

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15 great scenes in bad movies

1. Deep Blue Sea (1999)

Scene: Samuel L. Jackson gets eaten by a motherfucking shark

There's a point in Samuel L. Jackson's big monologues, in virtually any of his films, when the volume and intensity suddenly increase, and the actor enters full-on screaming-at-the-top-of-his-lungs apocalyptic fury. At precisely that moment in Deep Blue Sea, when Jackson hits the line, "Nature can be lethal, but it doesn't hold a candle to man!", a shark leaps out of the murky abyss and snaps Jackson in half like a number-two pencil, in one of the all-time great gotcha shocks. Upon repeat viewing, said super-smart underwater assassin bears an unfortunate resemblance to the cartoon shark Jabberjaw, but it's still a kick-ass moment in an otherwise rote Jaws knockoff whose effectiveness is undermined by the generous screen time it affords the low-wattage comedy stylings of LL Cool J and his sassy parrot sidekick.

2. The Country Bears (2002)

Scene: Christopher Walken practices his evil

A stray Christopher Walken scene can improve almost any movie, good or bad, from Pulp Fiction to Gigli: Walken has made a career out of creepily memorable, iconic performances that linger in the brain (and the shuddering nerves) long after the framing material is forgotten. But Walken cameos don't get much better than his central scene in Disney's numbingly bad The Country Bears. As an evil developer out to destroy the old-timey music venue Country Bear Hall, Walken shows up at intervals to threaten the animatronic-suited Country Bears in standard baddie form. But in a deliriously bizarre mid-film moment, he dances around his office alone in red boxers and bunny slippers, playing with his own face, cackling, and dropping an immense remote-controlled weight on balsa-wood models of Country Bear Hall in order to practice the none-too-shocked line "Oh no! Country Bear Hall has been crushed!"


3. Walk On The Wild Side (1962)

Scene: The credits

Blessed with an uncanny ability to boil a film's tone and themes down to a few basic elements, Saul Bass designed credits sequences that were often as memorable as the attached films. Composers employ many of the same skills, and few did it better than Elmer Bernstein. Together, they created a credits sequence for Walk On The Wild Side that can (and should) stand apart from the rest of the film. As Bernstein's jazzy theme builds, a black cat slinks across back alleys, walking along fences and through drainage pipes. Just as the music begins to boil over, it encounters a rival, and fur flies. The black cat stalks away in victory to a Bernstein decrescendo. The forgettable Edward Dmytryk-directed Nelson Algren adaptation that follows—filled with the none-too-powerful charms of Capucine, Barbara Stanwyck as an unconvincing lesbian pimp, and plenty of well-scrubbed sleaze—never escapes its shadow.


4. Death To Smoochy (2002)

Scene: Smoochy the Rhino sings "My Stepdad's Not Mean, He's Just Adjusting"

Long after the hated purple dinosaur had been thoroughly worked over in talk-show monologues, director Danny DeVito waved a tire iron at the Barney craze with his overdetermined satire Death To Smoochy. But just when the ice-cream headache induced by DeVito's manic visual style and Robin Williams' profane shtick really starts to throb, along comes Smoochy (Edward Norton) with an inspired acoustic number about putting up with a bitter, unemployed stepfather called Stan. "He slams the door, he stomps his feet / He sends me to bed with zilch to eat / But my stepdad's not mean, he's just adjusting." Hey kids, what are the magic numbers? "Nine! One! One!"


5. Duets (2000)

Scene: Paul Giamatti sings!

Hard to believe that a Robert Altman-lite road movie about the amateur karaoke circuit ever scaled the studio firewall, but one transcendent scene in Duets suggests that a great karaoke movie isn't out of the question. Playing one of his patented middle-aged schlubs—in this case, a suburban family man who leaves home after a nervous breakdown—Giamatti gets coaxed to the stage at a karaoke bar for a rendition of Todd Rundgren's "Hello, It's Me." Reluctant at first, Giamatti slowly loses himself in the song and starts belting it out as if he were in the shower, shaking off any traces of self-consciousness. For a touching few minutes, his problems (and the movie's) momentarily disappear.


6. Like Mike (2002)

Scene: Crispin Glover terrorizes an orphan

Sometimes, the strangest actors do their most subversive work in children's films, where their demented quirks stand in sharp relief to the family-friendly wholesomeness. (See also: Christopher Walken in The Country Bears, above.) As the prototypically cruel head of a orphanage, Glover forgets he's in an overlong Nike commercial and sets about terrorizing kids in his inimitably peculiar style. In the most twisted scene, Glover tries to squeeze information out of young Jonathan Lipnicki (the bespectacled moppet from Jerry Maguire) by holding a lighter under the sole remaining picture of his long-lost mother.


7. What About Bob? (1991)

Scene: Bill Murray appears on Good Morning, America

Few comedic actors are more adept at redeeming dire projects than Bill Murray, but he really had his work cut out for him in What About Bob?, in which a joke-killing Richard Dreyfuss fumes like a whistling teakettle. Playing an intensely phobic weirdo who drives his new therapist (Dreyfuss) insane, Murray squeezes a few scattered laughs from his offbeat improvisation, especially in a scene where he appears live with Dreyfuss on Good Morning, America. As the high-strung Dreyfuss fumbles in promoting his book Baby Steps, Murray enthusiastically endorses it as "mashed potatoes and gravy" and compares the doctor to great humanitarians like Dr. Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa. And he's only been a patient for three or four days! That's the miracle of Baby Steps.


8. The Village (2004)

Scene: Joaquin Phoenix and Bryce Howard share a quiet moment on the porch

For all his shortcomings as a screenwriter and gimmick maestro—both major detriments to The Village—M. Night Shyamalan's gifts as a visual storyteller are hard to deny. Case in point: A sweet exchange that's so hauntingly beautiful, clunky lines like "I find dancing very agreeable" get swallowed in the hushed atmosphere. Set in the hours following an attack on the titular village, the scene is shot with the actors in profile as an evening fog rolls into the fields in front of them. Looking like a clip from a classic movie by Jacques Tourneur (I Walked With A Zombie), the sequence subtly underlines Phoenix and Howard's resilience and bravery through the interplay between the romance in the foreground and the terrifying unknown in the background.


9. The Devil's Advocate (1997)

Scene: Unmasked as Satan incarnate, Al Pacino philosophizes

The culmination of his "hoo-ahh" period, in which every performance seemed to call for bulging eyes and wild gesticulation, The Devil's Advocate gave Pacino the opportunity to cut loose like he hadn't since he inhaled that mountain of coke in Scarface. In the bravura finale to this lame piece of supernatural/metaphysical hokum, Pacino builds up a nice head of steam and keeps rolling: First, he taunts attorney Keanu Reeves by confessing the nasty things he did to Reeves' wife ("On a scale of one to 10, 10 being the most depraved act of sexual theater known to man..."), then he turns his attentions to the great battle between good and evil. Calling himself "the last humanist" ("I'm a fan of man!"), Pacino licks his lips, flares his nostrils, and dismisses God as a voyeur, a sadist, and, most memorable of all, "an absentee landlord!"


10. Run Ronnie Run (2002)

Scene: Ronnie Dobbs: The Musical

For the most part, Run Ronnie Run is a maddening exercise in botched opportunities, self-indulgent celebrity cameos, and arbitrary subplots. But one scene illustrates just how brilliant a Mr. Show movie could and should be: Mandy Patinkin—rehearsing the main part in a musical based on the life of David Cross' oft-arrested hillbilly shitkicker—offers an epic take on the title character's theme song, beautifully playing up the mock-nobility of his persecution while brilliantly spoofing every musical in which the wretched of the earth express themselves with crystal-clear, Juilliard-trained pronunciation and delicate melodies. Clad in overalls and a straw hat for the full Li'l Abner effect, Patinkin croons the song with the conviction and intensity of a veteran trouper debuting a new Gershwin number on opening night. Never has Dobbs' catchphrase "Y'all are brutalizing me" seemed so melancholy, or so rife with noble indignation.


11. Superman III (1983)

Scene: Pratfalls in Metropolis

Borrowing tricks from Rube Goldberg, Buster Keaton, and his own Beatles comedies, director Richard Lester kicks off the third Superman film (the follow-up to his great Superman II) with a comic setpiece in which a hot-dog cart, a head-turning blonde in a tight dress, a misplaced seeing-eye dog, and a burning wind-up toy all unwittingly conspire to create chaos in the streets of Metropolis. Eventually, Superman sweeps in to save the day, but his arrival barely interrupts five minutes of sustained slapstick comedy that confirm Lester's gifts. So where'd Lester disappear to for the rest of the film, which is a half-assed mix of action, comedy, and out-of-place Richard Pryor routines?


12. Absolute Power (1996)

Scene: Secret chambers, forbidden desires

Playing a taciturn master thief, Clint Eastwood gets more than he expected when he breaks into a sprawling mansion. Trapped in a secret room filled with loot, he's interrupted by the arrival of a drunken couple, and he watches with mounting distress (or is that excitement?) as their lovemaking goes from rough to rougher to homicidal. More than most great directors, Eastwood succeeds or fails in direct relation to the quality of the scripts handed to him. That may explain why this bravura stretch, with its near-wordless commentary on the voyeurism of movie-going itself, looks like an oasis in the middle of a phoned-in William Goldman script that attempts to tap into the same anti-Clinton hysteria that fueled Murder At 1600.


13. The Swinger (1966)

Scene: Dance of the bohemians

The Swinger is a not-as-sexy-as-it-wants-to-be mid-'60s sex comedy, with Ann-Margret as a struggling writer pretending to be a libertine to impress girlie-magazine editor Tony Franciosa. It's excruciatingly silly most of the time, but it contains a handful of stunning moments, including an opening montage of Los Angeles sleaze parlors that's both a revealing document of the 1966 smut business and a bait-and-switch for the movie to come. In The Swinger's liveliest scene, Ann-Margret tours her beachside beatnik pad, traveling from room to room by doing a vigorous frug, surrounded by similarly turtleneck-and-capri-pants-attired free spirits. Welcome to L.A., man.


14. The Bonfire Of The Vanities (1990)

Scene: The opening credits

A drunken Bruce Willis exits a car in the basement of a luxury hotel and gets ferried by golf cart to a service entrance, where a fawning handler escorts him through the food-service area to a freight elevator filled with salmon and a sexy student. Willis paws at the student with one hand and scoops at the salmon with the other before spilling out into a lobby where another fawning handler helps him change into a fresh tuxedo to meet the press. All this in one unbroken take. Director Brian De Palma looks to be fully in charge—his broad comic sensibility and visual mastery are in perfect sync. Then the movie starts.


15. Staying Alive (1983)

Scene: Travolta struts

"You know what I want to do?" John Travolta asks late in the otherwise misbegotten, Sylvester Stallone-directed Staying Alive. He answers himself exuberantly, with a single word: "Strut!" Still basking in the heady afterglow of his big Broadway triumph, Travolta then kicks open the door separating him from the nightlife and begins strutting joyfully down the street to the conspiratorial accompaniment of the Bee Gees' fascistically catchy title song. Grinning broadly, Travolta turns his gleeful stomp down Broadway into a victory lap, a master class in the wonderfully gratuitous deployment of movie-star charisma. For its last few moments, at least, Staying Alive stops writhing in leaden disco camp and finally resembles a worthy sequel to Saturday Night Fever. Travolta's shit-eating grin says it all: Why just walk when you can strut?
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

Weak2ndAct

Great scene in a bad movie:

The opening of 'Swordfish.'  Travolta's speech (prophetic for the film we're about to see), the confusion, the panic, and the explosion... everything's downhill from there.  But it's a great opening.

soixante

I think the last scene in Casualties of War was unforgettable.  How could they say that was a bad scene?

Good scene in a bad film -- Golden Child, where Eddie Murphy compares the villain to Morris Day.  That really sticks in my mind.
Music is your best entertainment value.

Gamblour.

I really really agree with their choices for The Village and especially The Devil's Advocate.

Bad Scene/Great Movie: Maria Villalobos - Pulp Fiction - I've always had problems with that taxi cab ride. It's really slow and I think it's 100% worthless.

Great Scene/Bad Movie: Motherfuckin' Peter Stormare - Constantine - That man almost saved the entire movie for me. He was glorious and absolutely marvelous as Lucifer.
WWPTAD?

Alethia

they're a little mixed up in some of their choices for bad and good movies.

Myxo

QuoteStill, things break down during a climactic scene, as Schindler prepares to flee after the war. In front of a massive symbolic audience of the people he saved, Schindler breaks down sobbing, babbling about the additional lives he could have saved by selling his car, or his Nazi pin. His rescuees, whom he ignores in his hysteria, silently move in to hug and pat him, validating his mawkish drama-queening and placing it on a level with their own tragedy. "Look at that man's emotion and sensitivity!" their worn, iconic, emotionally exploited faces seem to say. "Surely the Academy wouldn't dishonor our lost families by denying him an Oscar!"

Actually, that's one of the most memorable scenes for me. Sure, the acting might have been a little stiff but the purpose was dead on. Oh, and Showgirls is a good movie?

Alethia

i actually agree with the scene in schindler.  it cheapens the whole fuckin thing.  what schindler really did is far more interesting (actually, had the character in the film been more like the actual man, it would have been more interesting too, i think, something tells me had scorsese directed it that is the version we would have gotten).  it's still a very good film tho, if you ask me.  i own it and find a great great deal of good in it.

and since when is What About Bob anything but hilarious?!?!?  :yabbse-angry:   :yabbse-thumbdown:  :yabbse-thumbdown:

pete

lets trek back a little further than two decades ago shall we?
the final scene in La Strada, when the giant guy walked down the village and found some girl singing the tune of his lover, and he asked her about the tune, and the girl was like "you mean this one?" and then performed an obviously lip-sycnhed rendition of the tune.  I knew back then synch-sound was not popular outside the US and this and that, but I always had to laugh.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

UncleJoey

Quote from: ewardand since when is What About Bob anything but hilarious?!?!?  :yabbse-angry:   :yabbse-thumbdown:  :yabbse-thumbdown:

I agree. I actually think Richard Dreyfuss is reasonably funny in that movie.
Well, I've got news for you pal, you ain't leadin' but two things: Jack and shit . . . and Jack just left town.

Gabe

How about scenes that could be their own movie?

......Punch Drunk Birthday Party is all I can think of.

Find Your Magali

Great scenes in Less-Than-Great Movies

1. "Over the Rainbow" shootout in Face-Off

2. The soccer-playing sequences in Victory

3. Everything with Jango Fett in Attack of the Clones