Has to be extremely subtle, something that you missed the first few times you saw the movie or something that someone had to point out to you
Something the director wanted you to see. Some guy tripping in the background doesn’t count unless it was intentional
It doesn’t have to be integral to the part, but it helps
For example, in Vacation, Beverly D’Angelo and Chevy Chase are doing the dinner dishes while discussing their upcoming vacation. Beverly scrapes the dishes off and hands the dishes who dries them and puts them away - the dishes never get washed.
Including rule number 3, in Easy Money, the guys are starving and try to stop at various restaurants. One restaurant closes right as the pull up. In the backgound, one can see their sign - “Open 23 Hours”.
I dunno how subtle it was, but the significance of Jimmy Durante’s literal kicking of a bucket at the beginning of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World escaped me for years.
At the end of LOTR:TTT, Merry and Pippin are lamenting their hunger at the submerged Isengard when they find apples floating in the water. Pippin grabs one and looks up into the air - I think it’s a reference to the scene in FOTR in which the Hobbits want to stop for “second breakfast” and Aragorn pitches apples to Pippin.
ETA: I probably saw the Isengard scene a dozen times, wondering about the expression on Pippin’s face, before I made the connection. I’m still not sure.
This one is Mr. S’s, in one of our favorite movies, Tootsie. It’s the scene where Michael (Dustin Hoffman) is arguing with his agent (Sydney Pollack) in his office about sending someone else up for an acting part that he thought had been promised to him, because the director wanted “a name”:
Michael: Oh, so Terry Bishop [the other actor] is a name.
George: No, Michael Dorsey is a name. When you want to send a steak back, Michael Dorsey is a name.
(Dustin Hoffman’s character, Michael Dorsey, is an unemployed actor working as a waiter in a cruddy restaurant.) Mr. S didn’t notice that crack for YEARS.
I know I’ve got some of my own. They’ll come to me later.
Near the end of the Huston/Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon, Gutman is explaining to Spade why Thursby was shot. As he says that Thursby “was quite determinedly loyal to Miss O’Shaughnessy,” a look of realization crosses Bogart’s face, and he looks at Mary Astor, whose eyes drop guiltily. It was only a couple of years ago, on watching the film for perhaps the 10,000th time, that I caught on to the fact that Spade has only just realized that Brigid had won Thursby’s loyalty by sleeping with him.
Very significant in light of how Spade will deal with Brigid just a few minutes later.
One that I’d never noticed until someone here on the SDMB mentioned it - in Back to the Future, the mall is called “Twin Pines Mall”. When Marty travels back in time, he knocks a tree over. Then at the end, when he returns, the sign now reads “Lone Pine Mall”.
The Bridge on the River Kwai - Col. Nicholson origionally declines a glass of scotch from his captor Col. Saito, eventually he’s told Saito will have to kill himself if he does not complete the bridge on time. Col. Saito askes what would Nicholson do in his position. Col. Nicholson says, “I suppose I should have to kill myself”, and drinks the scotch…a subtle English ‘fuck you’ that made the entire scene.
In “Diamonds Are Forever” Bond is discussing how diamonds were smuggled in a corpse. His reply is something like “Alimentary, my dear Watson”. The diamonds were up the rear end of the corpse.
In the Disney movie Treasure Planet they show what appears to be a crescent moon, then they zoom in and it turns out to be a crescent shaped space sport.
But very subtly before the zoom in, they had a small tiny star inside of the crescent moon. It’s just a single pixel but it’s enough to piss off nitpickers likeme. And then they zoom in and now you understand. I was the only person in the theater to laugh at that. Sadly there weren’t too many people in the theater anyway.
While interrogating Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects, Agent Kujan takes a sip from his coffee mug … and Verbal ever-so-briefly scans the bottom of it, noting the brand.
I assume you are just referring to the beginning part. Without spoiling the movie (I don’t care how long it’s been out, nobody deserves to have that movie spolied), they do show it again at the end, along with a few other things (the bulletin board, the picture of the boat…).
You know what’s hillarious? I was channel surfing one time, and I happened to catch only the very last part of the movie. To this day, I’ve only seen the very end of the movie.
“Miller’s Crossing” in the span of a glance down and up Gabriel Bryne’s character concocts the entire scheme his character has to use to save his boss.
In The Bourne Identity, the red bag that Bourne carried his money and passports in for the whole movie ends up as a hanging flower pot in Marie’s shop at the end.
It took at least a couple of viewings of Paths of Glory, one of my all-time favorite movies, before I realized that the three soldiers with whom General Mireau speaks at the beginning are the same three who later are sentenced to death by drawing lots pour encourager les autres.
In Casablanca when Lazlo is trying to get the band leader to play Les Marsailles, the leader looks at Rick. Rick hesitates for a fraction of a second, then gives a very very little nod.
In that fraction of a second hesitation, Rick is deciding whether to join the war effort and by extension the world again. In a fraction of a second.
In the Fellowship of the Ring, the party are trudging up the snowy-covered side of Mount Caradhras, Frodo slips and the Ring falls off his neck (probably looking for a bigger owner!).
Boromir picks it up but doesn’t hand it back immediately.
In the background, Aragorn puts his hand on his sword’s hilt.
