These all seem to be older works. Is that because we don’t watch new stuff ‘those damn kids like’, or because cinema has lost it’s subtlety?
Maybe it’s because it takes time and repeated viewings to catch a subtle thing. I’ve been watching The Wizard of Oz all my life and never caught that flash of light. Pepper Mill had to point it out. I’d beebn watching What’s Up Doc? for over thirty years before I caught the gag with the radio.
Could be, could be.
All the symbolism in the Matrix has been beaten to death (and it’s 11 years old. ugh.)
I noticed in the Fifth Element that they keep REALLY close track of the matches Corbin Dallas has, from teh very beginning of the film.
In Creator, David Ogden Stiers plays a extremenly competent doctor who is a bit of a prick. In one scene is doing a physical on Virginia Madsen. He tells her to squeeze his hand, then says to Vicent Spano, “Oh, she’s left-handed.” Spano says, “No, she’s right-handed.”
Stiers says only “Hm.” But in that “Hm.” you know that something is very, very wrong. Excellently played.
One of my all-time faves! Notice who places the wreath on the maypole in the scene where Sergeant Howie is being a dick at the school? It’s Ash Buchanan - the same lad whom Lord Summerisle had the honor to introduce to Willow the night before. I guess he had the right. 
There is a beautiful moment in True Romance in which Christopher Walken has come to get information from Dennis Hopper by any means necessary. Walken gives his speech about being the son of the world’s greatest Sicilian liar. Hopper goes into his speech about the Moorish blood in the Sicilian gene pool, during which Walken timidly corrects Hopper’s pronunciation of ‘Sicilian.’ At that moment, Hopper is owns the conversation, despite being surrounded by thugs. His coolness results in forcing Walken to kill him before getting the information. Then of course an all-too-casual slip of paper ironically makes Hopper’s heroism moot.
I like Peter Stone’s script for Charade. Writers frequently do clever things in the script. In this case
[spoiler] Pay close attention to what happens when Walter Matthau’s character explains to Audrey Hepburn’s character what the situation is with the sstolen gold and why four people are chasing her, during the coffee shop scene. He explains that “Dial was dead”, then gets interrupted by the waiter bringing coffee. Then starts the story again, saying “Dial was dead…” and interrupts himself, commenting on Hepburn’s smoking. Then asks “Where was I”? Hepburn answer’s “Dial was dead.” “Dial was dead…” he begins again.
We this get treated to Four repetitions of “Dial was dead” (and, as Lewis Carroll told us, what you hear three times is true), but it’s been done pretty unobtrusively, and you can pass this off as simply showing that Bartholomew, the Matthau character, is slightly comic and inept.
…except that he isn’t comic or inept, and he isn’t Bartholomew. He’s really Dial. Stone found an interesting way to hammer home the concept that Dial really was dead, and not have you question it.
He’s similarly clever at misdirection every time they look for the hidden money. Notice how , one time when they get close, he throws in an irrekevancy about Cary Grant’s reading glasses.
[/spoiler]
In one of my least favorite movies of all time (but my brother and sis-in-law love it, so we watch it occasionally)… Hudson Hawk… When Hawk has been ejected from the back of the ambulance and is cruising past the tollbooth, the ambulance (IIRC) flips and explodes… In the background is a ‘now entering’ sign, which shows that Hawk and the aforementioned ambulance are entering ‘Collisionville’.
Sorry, because this is a total nitpick, but it’s Toht. (God, I’m such a geek.)
Or I’m just a bad typist in the morning. I actually looked him up on IMDB.
“Tossed in”- nice touch!
Monty Python & the Holy Grail - the scene in which Sir Bedivere uses “scientific methods” to determine whether a woman is a witch; few people notice that when the villagers first approach him, Sir Bedivere is performing an experiment of tying a coconut to a swallow. (Anyone familiar with this movie will know why that’s significant.)
the Shining - Not a specific action, but a “stylistic theme.” Somebody pointed it out to me that the film begins with a panoramic shot of the Rocky Mountains. For the first half-hour or so, the film has nothing but very wide shots of enormous cavernous rooms, in which actors appear almost like tiny figurines in the space (even the Torrences apart in Boulder looks huge). As the film progresses though, the shots become tighter and tighter, and are increasingly featured in smaller, enclosed areas (such as Wendy cowering in the bathroom), until the final shot of the film is of a tiny photograph about half the size of the monitor screen you’re looking at now. It’s all done to encourage a sense of claustrophobia, the hotel is closing in around the characters.
Thank you–I added it at edit, remembering that scene.
Not very subtle, but there is that delightful moment when Clark Kent, looking for a spot to change into Superman eyes the modern Metropolis public phone sans booth.
In “Life of Brian,” Brian tells the crowd that they are all individuals. They all chant in unison, “Yes! We are all individuals!” Then one little voice peeps out, “I’m not.” The part that escaped me was that only one person claims not to be an individual. The one person showing any individuality was the one person disclaiming it.
This really was incredibly subtle, but after I watched Saving Private Ryan, somebody had to explain to me that the guy weeping in the graveyard at the very end of the movie was in fact the Ryan of the title, who had been played by Matt Damon in the rest of the film.
To use another TV example, there’s a bit of a running gag on the TV show Firefly where Kaylee is always nagging the tightwad tight-pantsed captain of the ship, Mal, to go through the minor expense of buying a new Compressor Coil to replace a worn out part in the ship’s engine, and the captain always refuses, asking her to keep the existing part in working order just a little bit longer.
About halfway through the run of the show (granted, this is like, 5 episodes), the compression coil fails, causing another part to fail, causing the back half of the ship to burst into flames and knock out the life support systems along with the engine itself, leaving them adrift in deep space. (No spoilers here, this is just the beginning of one of the greatest episodes of Firefly ever)
I just saw Hot Fuzz over the weekend for the first time. Everything that local cop Butterfield asks Top Cop Nick Angel (“Have you ever ahd to shoot two people at once?” to which Angel responds something like “No, that only happens in the movies”) actually gets done by the end of the film.
It;'s similar to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where Indy debunks the popular image of archaeology in class (“Most archaeology happens in the library. Archaeology is not about treasure hunting, and X never, ever marks the spot.”). After doing this, he goes treasure hunting i n a library where “X” marks the spot (he explicitly points out the last coincidence, but the other ones hold as well.)
That wasn’t very subtle. You could tell it was him because he asks his wife, “Have I lived a good life?” Or something like that. That’s what Tom Hanks character tells him right before he dies, that he needs to earn those men dying to bring him home.
You wouldn’t think that KB is a movie that has a bit of subtlety, but one of my favorite moments is right after the “Green Hornet” sequence, when the Bride pulls up beside Sophie Fatale at the intersection. Sophies cell phone goes off, the Bride looks over at her, and only then does she remember Sophie at the massacre.
The ringtone? Auld Lang Syne, the part that includes the lyrics “If auld acquaintance be forgot…”
That wasn’t the best part - the best part is when they’re digging through the dump on the core world that one time and Wash, I think, holds one up that he finds and throws it away in disgust.