Forrest Gump.
So there’s this middle aged man waiting on a bus and telling his life story to whichever strangers happens to walk by, and he like fought in Vietnam and got a medal from nixon and showed his ass on national television and became a pingis champion and started a successful fishing company and became a millionaire and gave Nike their slogan and ran across the continent and… Oh, and he’s mentally disabled and about to meet his son for the first time because the sons mom is dying of aids.
Absolutely bonkers premise, and such a fantastic movie still today.
Its even more mind blowing if you read the book. There are a lot more stupid things he does like becoming a wrestler, and an astronaut who goes on a mission in space with a baboon that he can speak with telepathically. They crash land on an uncharted island full of cannibals and they will only let him escape with their lives he he beats them at a game of chess. For whatever reason he has unlimited tries and after several years finally wins a game of chess, so they send him and his baboon on a raft and they eventually get found.
Obviously these things very fortunately didn’t make it into the movie, but it’s super weird to me that someone read all of that and was inspired to make it into a movie anyway. Somehow it was actually a very good movie too.
Armageddon! Basically an excuse to have rednecks in space.
Spontaneous
For some unknown reason, teenagers in a small town keep randomly exploding in a mess of blood and guts. The rest of the plot is a coming of age black comedy around that premise. I thought it was quite good.
Sahara.
The Blues Brothers (1980) or Clue.
The Fall.
Not sure if the plot was stupid but I don’t remember anything about it. The cinematography however? Absolutely outstanding.
Tropic Thunder! My favorite comedy. It’s so stupid but so funny.
What’s Up Tiger Lily
Allen took footage from a Japanese spy film, International Secret Police: Key of Keys (1965), and overdubbed it with completely original dialogue that had nothing to do with the plot of the original film. He both put in new scenes and rearranged the order of existing scenes, producing a one-hour movie from the 93 minutes of the original film. He completely changed the tone of the film from a James Bond clone into a comedy about the search for the world’s best egg salad recipe.
That sounds like genius. Will look it up cheers
Any movie done in Hollywood has a shitty plot in the last 30 years.
Action movies, many of which I enjoy, are the worst offenders.
Change my mind.
crickets
At the risk of being topical, K-Pop Demon Hunters comes to mind. Like, not really a stupid PLOT but a pretty stupid/ridiculous premise. They make it WORK, though. That movie is SO much better than the title gives it any right to be.
My seven-year-old niece showed me that movie.
I didn’t have high expectations going in but it’s an absolute banger, largely because of the excellent songs. It is, fundamentally, a musical.
And yes it’s silly, but not in the ways that matter.
I remember watching an anime years back which has an anthropomorhpic bread bun who is depressed because he came out the oven burnt. He spends his days working a miserable office job and his evenings getting ‘drunk’ on ‘milk’, wishing he wasn’t burnt so he could dare ask out the girl of his dreams, the beautiful and perfect strawberry bread.
The guy is literally bread. The premise is as silly as they come, but the characters are real and their feelings are intensely relatable, so it works.
Demon Hunters is the same show. Main girl is trying to make it with her band, but is secretly worried and self-conscious because she’s hiding a terrible secret that she knows would tear her friendships and her life apart. And the movie is about how she comes to terms with herself.
So yes it’s got unbelievable fights, and earth-protecting barriers that are somehow powered by music, and a group of demons that for some reason decide to form a shit-hot boy band (they’re very good). But that’s not the movie, that’s just the vehicle.
FWIW, the honmoon isn’t powered by music. It’s powered by the consciousness/mood of the populace, which is influenced with music. The demons are trying to steal souls so they can attack it directly. Ostensibly, what they’ve been trying before — such as terrorist attacks on planes as shown in the beginning — hasn’t been as effective. So they’re trying something else.
It’s supposed to be about how music brings people together.
Now, how the demons take souls by getting people to listen to this other band… that’s not as clear. I’d think Soda Pop bringing people together would have the exact same effect on the honmoon as Golden bringing people together, but what do I know?
I think whether KPDH has a stupid/ridiculous premise depends on how well it fits with the Korean stuff it’s based on. I’m not Korean, I don’t know anything about that stuff, so I just accept it at face value and it’s fine.
Pacific Rim. Building giant robots to fight large creatures… Ridiculous, but fantastic film!
Pacific rim was one of those movies that cemented that you can’t just say a movie is bad or good. The tomato-meter doesn’t have nuance.
There are days I want to come home and experience the perfect sci fi movie with amazing effects, and there are days I want a drama that brings me to tears. Then some days I just want to see giant robots punching the shit out of aliens. All three are good movies for their own merits.
Snakes on a Plane
Monty Python And The Holy Grail
Highly overrated
It’s definitely a product of its time. Some of the humour has become a bit dated, but it still holds up well, as a low budget production.
Cocain Bear = Give cocain to a bear
Bubba Ho-Tep. Nursing home Elvis fights the Mummy? Silly as hell. But they nailed it.
Saw this at a screening in DC. Bruce Campbell was there for a post movie Q&A.
That’s awesome! I heard that his only question before saying yes to the role was whether or not you’d see Elvis’s penis.
Don’t remember him talking about that, but I do remember him being asked about making another Evil Dead movie. His answer was, “you’ll have to get Sam to walk away from his multimillion dollar checks for making Spider-Man movies long enough to do another Evil Dead, but I’d be all for it!”
That’s been on my list for ages. I really need to watch it
You absolutely need to!
