I won't even touch swordplay in movies (like shooting fish in a barrel), other than to mention that probably the best fencing in any movie to date was in the 1940 rendition of "The Mark of Zorro" with Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone (the duel in the alcalde's study). Both Power and Rathbone were pretty good fencers in real life, so they knew what they were doing. Major goof, however, was that the weapons used were modern light-weight fencing sabers, strictly for sport fencing (no cutting edge, of course), and probably didn't come into common usage until about a hundred years after the period being portrayed. You can buy ones just like them out of any fencing equipment catalog. Also, both Power and Rathbone were fencing the modern Hungarian-Italian style of saber-play pretty much developed by Italo Santelli, who hadn't been born yet when Diego Vega and Captain Estaban Pasquale tried to slice-and-dice each other.

Be that as it may. . . .

A couple of Great Moments at the Movies:

1. In "Independence Day," when the alien space ship blew up the White House, the audience cheered!! Kinda makes you wonder.

2. In "Armageddon," OY! Where to start!??

a) Picking an oil drilling team to go into space and blow up a killer asteroid?
b) The decision to blow up the asteroid in the first place, so that instead of the earth getting punched out by one big rock, it gets thoroughly shot-gun blasted by a rain of smaller rocks ("A fine mess you got us into this time, Ollie!")?
c) The space shuttles (not equipped with the big orange fuel tank) go all the way to the incoming asteroid under power, zipping and zooming about like fighter planes!
d) Then, they crash-land on the asteroid and nobody gets killed, and one of the shuttles is still space-worthy, so they can get off again.

There's much more, but even if I were a young man, I probably wouldn't live long enough to list them all.

Best line in the movie (as close as I can recall it):   Having planted the nuclear bombs deep inside the asteroid, they prepare to blast off. And the engines won't fire! Obligatory quick cuts to the timer ticking off the seconds before the bombs explode. Determining that the problem is electrical, a Russian cosmonaut in the crew starts to open an electrical panel. An American astronaut objects, saying something like, "That's a military secret!" (Military secret on a space shuttle? As if that's a matter of any importance when they're all about to be vaporized!). The Russian shoulders her aside and says something like, "Secret, schmecret! They're all made in Taiwan!" He then bangs the thing with his elbow and suddenly the engines fire! And they're well away (just in the nick, of course) before the bombs blow.

Lotsa fun, though!

Don Firth

P. S. One of the best movies ever made was "To Kill a Mockingbird."