I never did like Silent Running. Stupid hipppie doesn't even realize his plants need sunlight? And did he really have to blow up his crewmates once he had ejected them from the ship?

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

I had more or less the same reaction to Silent Running, initially (not quite as negative). Rewatching it many years later, I've become somewhat reconciled with it. I was annoyed by the several illogical details in the story, but perhaps that was part of the point being made. Lowell acts irrationally because he's lost his mind; he's a madman, quite literally. But what the film then does is challenge us to weigh this madman against -- the rest of mankind. Which of the two weighs more, ethically? The answer is not simple.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I just don't like swearing. I really don't.

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

Quite understandable. But put yourself in their place: floating in a can 200,000 miles from earth and suddenly there's a big bump! and your life support suddenly seems to be going away. I think they can be cut some slack. In this case, the language was not gratuitous.

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

I understand that. I'm sort of the person who doesn't really need to see everything. If I see somebody get cornered by a vicious animal, I don't need to see them ripped to shreads, I know they're dead if you cut to something else. Likewise, if you show me somebody getting angry and cut to something else, I'll assume that person is swearing, I don't have to see/hear it.

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

I'm not a big fan of gratuitous swearing in movies or otherwise, and personally reserve swearing mostly for the important things, like accidentally smashing my thumb with a hammer, but I honestly don't remember the swearing in that movie, despite having seen it several times. There must not have been much, to make so little impression.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

I always thought that the Firefly ships had two drives. One for space, and one for the atmosphere. I remember one show, showed them switching from the firefly drive to air breathers.

The movie "Forbidden Planet was pretty accurate, but then they did have the help of Cal Tech.

David.

Amen!
Funny, tho, the word itself is a cornerstone of the legal system, in and out of court. A lawyer friend, who, when seeking positive reassurance a personal request will be honored, inadvertedly relies on, "You swear?" to seal the deal, after first going through "You will?", "You promise?"

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*

In some languages, it's an art form. Some Arabic cursing, for instance, can be like dirty poetry. But it's become too commonplace and coarse in English; we even call it "vulgar". The one-word Anglo-Saxon swear is the microwave popcorn of curses.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I'm one of those people for whom the "no swearing" policy on the board has caused no problem. I also think it's an example of limited verbal skills if you swear a lot. However, I think it's a good way in a work of fiction to demonstrate, for example, someone's limited verbal skills. (I'm perfectly aware, in addition, that I'm looking at this from a purely English-language position, though I can swear with limited degrees of proficiency in three.) I'm also aware that there are times when swearing demonstrates a mood as few other words can or do. There are times when it wouldn't be an accurate portrayal to leave out the swearing, though of course, if you want your book in schools, for example, you'd be well-served to find a way around that. (A lot of challenges of books in schools are due to language, and that's not just in elementary schools.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I certainly think occasional use of "bad words" is far, far, FAR more effective than having one in every other sentence. In John Carpenter's The Thing, I think there is only one single instance of swearing. It occurs at the end of a particularly fraught scene, and it actually breaks the tension right when it needs to be broken.

Swearing is a resource that gets used up very quickly.

I don't use profane language myself, but it doesn't bother me in movies. That is how many people really speak, and using a realistic vocabulary adds verisimilitude.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

National Treasure has Very Good Archeology, but the story these facts support is fictional, so I don't know if it goes here or in the bad movie thread.

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

It always puzzles me how uptight people are about swearing. Its just words, they don't hurt anybody. Certainly not a good enough reason to dislike a good movie.

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"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive." - Carl Sagan, 1995

I consider Apollo 13 a brilliant film. I could have lived without the description Fred Haise used for his appetite, but other than that I consider it nearly perfect.

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Scienara: A rejection of reason and evidence.

Profanity is like seasoning. Just a little bit can add spice and variety to a movie. Too much and you spoil the taste.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

To me, excessive profanity just makes a film (or a story in general) feel forced, and frequently juvenile. It hurts the credibility of the story, more than anything. This is especially transparent in the cinema. Maybe I'm being naive, but my theory is that actors in general are educated and sensitive people who don't normally use swear words left and right -- or when they do use them, it's quite deliberately, not as mere expletives. When they play a character who swears too much, they often end up sounding unnatural. For example, unlike many people I liked Eyes Wide Shut, but one of my minor quibbles with it is that Nicole Kidman never sounds quite comfortable with the f-word.

Of course, how much is too much swearing depends a lot on the context.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I know these four have already been nominated but I want to second them:

- Destination Moon (as stated above, very good for 1950)
- 2001
- Andromeda Strain
- Contact

I think Samual L. Jackson is quite proficient in the use of profanity. He makes it seem so natural.

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Spock Jenkins of the Vulcan Jenkins'.

Samuel L. Jackson is the exception who proves the rule.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

It depends on how the profanity is handled... or avoided. Having a character who can't say even one sentence w/o swearing may be realistic, but it's unnecessary and can quickly detract from the story; having a character who mutters "Oh, heck" when the situation warrants more is not realistic and can become equally distracting (unless the character is properly set up).

Don't Go Near the Water handled the use of profanity brilliantly. One character, Farragut Jones, could not open his mouth without swearing. However, anytime he swore, all you heard was a ship's horn; the other characters reacted with proper dismay at his words, but you never heard them.

That allowed the entire scenario to be played for comedy rather than shock value, and lets me remember it fondly over 20 years after last seeing the movie. Indeed, it's the one part of the movie I still remember.

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov