#david christopher bell

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The term 'movie magic' typically refers to the technical brilliance of bringing dinosaurs to life onscreen or how Denzel Washington can make an entire theatre of men and women pregnant with a single knowing glance. But there's a second type of movie magic that often goes overlooked: when movies are so good, we don't notice when their characters' plans' make absolutely no sense.

All the great ones do this. In 'Return of the Jedi', all of the main characters get captured attempting to break Han Solo out of Jabba's palace, but it's all good because that was seemingly their plan all along? Why wait to get captured when you can just drop in, lightsabers blazing, bust your dude out of the carbonite and smoke fools in an epic prison breakout? Seems like Luke wanted to fight the Rancor all along.

There's a whole category of these where bad guys try to weaponize monsters. From the 'Alien' series to 'Jurassic World', it's just a bad idea.

Christopher Nolan is a real magician when it comes to bad movie plans. 'The Dark Knight', 'The Dark Knight Rises', and 'The Prestige' all have glaring examples of movie schemes that don't hold up under an ounce of scrutiny.

THIS WEEK: Join Jack O'Brien, Michael Swaim, and David Christopher Bell as they discuss the failing of Nolan's villains, why 'Westworld' makes no sense, and how the dudes in 'Jaws' had a bigger boat the whole damn time.

23 Convoluted Movie Schemes That Need A Second Look

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“Not sure why you keep bringing up ‘Scrooge’, whoever that is.”

Why David Fincher Already Directed The Best Christmas Movie

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The live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles universe has so far been frustratingly barren of the beloved thug tag-team Bebop and Rocksteady. And, while the next Michael Bay installment will supposedly include the brothers in arms, Lord knows what kind of sad-eyed CG hulks that crap reel will yield. Luckily, there's Blood Brothers -- a fan-made, practical effects-driven take on everyone's favorite mutant wildlife.

6 Weird-Ass Upcoming Movies That Deserve More Hype

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Fun fact: This image is actually Breaking Bad's Vince Gilligan's fault. The future ones, however…

4 Signs The New Season Of 'The X-Files' Will Be Terrible

#3. They Clearly Ran Out Of Ideas Years Ago There's a reason people tend to shut out the later seasons of this show -- those episodes are circus crazy. Like, the slapstick, shit-your-pants insanity that you'd expect to appear only in a porn parody directed by the Wayans Brothers. That's a scene from "Hollywood A.D.," the episode where a slick-talking studio writer decides to make a film based on the plucky duo's exploits starring Tea Leoni and Garry Fucking Shandling. That's seriously an episode that happened -- as was the crossover they did with the show Cops (called "X-Cops," naturally), the one where the agents have a battle of wits with a magician who twists his head off ("The Amazing Maleeni"), Mulder getting trapped in a virtual reality video game ("First Person Shooter"), and the pair investigating doppelgangers that cause people to fight uncontrollably. That last one is just called "Fight Club," because no one was trying at that point.

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What's weirder than TV featuring the more grotesque is the fact that it's somehow less glorifying to do so. Growing up with parents who paid very little mind to gory films like Aliens and Terminator, I was always baffled when my father would shake his head at TV shows like America's Funniest Home Videos for glorifying violence. As I got older, the logic finally clicked when watching World War Z and The Lone Ranger gruesomely slaughter hundreds of people without actually showing the bloody consequences in the same indifferent way that AFV slaps goofy music and laugh tracks over dogs getting concussions.

The national hard-on for PG-13 has turned R-rated premises like Die Hard into pre-edited-for-TV movies, John McClane being forced to censor the word "motherfucker" over the sound of him murdering someone with a gun. And thanks to a study from Ohio State University, we know that gun violence has actually become more prevalent in PG-13 than R films, due to the MPAA's preference for death over blood, dick, and boobies.

5 Advantages Movies Always Had Over TV (That TV Stole Away)

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Apparently, we're only two WrestleManias away from the point when entire human bodies will become just another fashion accessory. With any luck, by 2020 we won't even need to buy clothes anymore -- we'll simply switch head receptacles when we get sick of the color. News of this Cronenbergian miracle is brought to you by CBS, Discovery, CNET, Telegraph, Fox, and Mashable, all debating the morality brought on by a single neuroscientist's prediction -- one he also made back in 2013, only with a slightly more conservative date estimate. Newsweek even speculated that this could revolutionize gender reassignment surgery. All of this despite the fact that pretty much everyone else in the medical community has called out this claim for being about as realistic as a Futurama episode, considering every head transplant attempted so far has ended with a depressing menagerie of paralyzed animals.

Human Head Transplants By 2017: 5 BS Stories That Went Viral

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Harrison Ford started his injured-body-parts list a solid decade before anyone put him in an action movie -- and he's been beating his body up ever since. If Ford was a quirky young twenty-something-year-old girl, we'd call him "adorkable" and make sure he had lots of pratfalls in his cute sitcom called The New Girl. But he's not a young girl, he's Harrison Ford. So instead of "clumsy," we think he's "rugged." What if we're wrong?

When filming a fight scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, he tore his ACL and refused medical treatment. Then he came down with diarrhea and asked that an elaborate whip-vs.-sword scene be cut down to a single gunshot so he could get back to his toilet.

During The Temple of Doom, Ford suffered spinal injuries while riding elephants. In The Fugitive he re-tore his ACL while running through the woods for his big escape scene. And when they rolled him out for the new Star Wars reboot, the door to the Millennium Falcon promptly fell on his leg and broke it. He was 71 at this point.

So, clearly, terrible things happen to Harrison Ford when he's on movie sets. But also, when he's not on movie sets. Like when his helicopter lost power in 1999 and his six-passenger plane crashed in Nebraska in 2000. And last week when his vintage WWII-era plane lost power in Santa Monica so he astutely landed it on a golf course. Good job, Southern California golf course for providing one of our most beloved movie stars a safe landing zone for his tiny, terrible, malfunctioning plane. We owe you one.

4 Signs Harrison Ford Is a Blind Guy Acting Like He Can See

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If you take the most religious states in the U.S. and put them next to the ones preordering the most Fifty Shades tickets on Fandango, it's the same fucking list. Like those kids in high school, the people who were stereotypically the least condoning of an alternative lifestyle are the same ones ironically celebrating its commercialization. … For Fifty Shades, that ironic commercialism also comes in the form of vibrating dick-rings and blindfolds being sold within spitting distance of children's toothbrushes at your local Target, which is actually pushing Fifty Shades-brand sex tools as if they were camping equipment. And since Fifty Shades became a hit, sadomasochism has been turned into a $150 "fan experience" hotel package that includes a gift box of lube and frilly leather whips, is being called "the new yoga" in health articles, and was made into a Vermont teddy bear complete with an adorable set of handcuffs.

Slapping on dollar-store toy cuffs and weak-arming a few softball lashes into the mother of your children is this year's Valentine's Day special. And now, thanks to the film being on IMAX, never has this been a better time for anyone who's wanted to see Buick-sized genitalia. But commercialized nudity is nothing new.

Remember that? Suddenly, with Blink-182's "What's My Age Again?" punk rock was whittled down to the fake shock value of not actually seeing a naked person -- which came years after a pug-faced man named GG Allin performed countless sets naked and covered in a puree of bodily fluid.

For more: '4 Reasons 50 Shades of Grey Is the Limp Bizkit of Sex'