Um, exactly how are the Nazis a maguffin in Schindler’s List? I mean, you can’t make a movie about the Nazi holocaust without the Nazis.
Anyway, my guess would be - glasses! They’re uncannily useful. They make hot babe models with limited acting ability seem like brainiac rocket scientists. A bookish, nerdy girl needs only remove a pair of specs to be transformed into a stunning beauty. Superman can handily disguise himself as a mere mortal by donning a pair. They make Sylvester Stallone look wise and soulful.
And second only to glasses are - cigarettes! What Hollywood star doesn’t look irrestistibly sexy with an addictive, cancer-causing stick in his/her hand? Carcinogenic fumes swirling around their head?
In that they were cartoon Nazis whose only purpose in the plot was to give Indiana Jones—sorry, Oskar Schindler[sup]TM[/sup]—something to be heroic against. (I’m talking about the movie Schindler, not the real Schindler.)
Gratuitously nude Nazi zombies with lightsabers vs cloned ninjas.
Not sure if either would be improved by eyeglasses and cigarettes. The zombies get a backdrop of lab coated mad scientists with a jacob’s ladder in the background and counters full of colored bubbling liquids in oddly shaped glassware.
Schindler’s List doesn’t have a Macguffin in the true sense of the term, but if you really, realy wanted to stretch the term, the closest approximation would be the JEWS, not the Nazis.
I get that you have a different opinion, but I stand by my use of the term. Obviously, I mean it as a pretty severe criticism that Spielberg managed to reduce the Nazis to a McGuffin. Which remains my opinion.
Chase scenes are as versatile as cigarets and eyeglasses, and chase scenes can go on for much longer. Car chases are best, but horseback, chariot and even two guys running instantly crystalize the struggle between hero and villain.
*Citizen Kane * would have been even better with a chase scene.
Let’s have a Nazi vs. zombie movie starring Robert Shaw (I guess he’d have to be a zombie now) with a good car chase.
Didn’t it have one, when Kane closes Susan Alexander’s apartment door and she objects, saying her landlady prefers it stay open when she has a gentleman caller?
The automatic, semi-automatic, and just plain “repeater” firearm.
Otherwise, when a tough guy wanted to show he was getting serious about facing down a threat, or just threatening someone’s face, all he’d be able to do would be…what, cock the hammer of his gun? That’s it? That’ll get old…and if you’ve got a long gun, it’s going to look even stupider…you’d have to say “Lets show these motherfuckahs how we do things uptown!” then dramatically breech load a single round into your converted 1861 Springfield.
Scientific jargon. A bunch of random scientificy sounding words strung together in order to explain the solution to an otherwise impossible situation that the writers have backed themselves into.
Woods. Chain killers and teenagers run around in them, search parties go into them, planes and helicopters crash into them, victims are taken out of them, the military fights in them, and criminals hide in them.
Name me a great movies that doesn’t have woods in it.
