Wasn’t it a shopping center, not a parking lot, that Jerry Lundegaard wanted to build in Wayzata? I haven’t seen the film for a long time though. Would somebody check this who owns a copy of the film?
That’s clear enough. What’s never made clear is what he did with the money. He apparently has not yet invested anything in the parking-lot scheme. He appears to have no expensive vices – no drug habit, no woman on the side, no gambling problem. Yet he has stolen a large amount of money and, for some reason, is unable to put it back, which probably would be enough to make the problem go away.
I didn’t get that. To me he just appeared to be a dishonest, stupid loser. He has committed a white-collar crime in a way that left an undeniable paper trail and he simply assumed it would never be noticed. He does appear to have some concern for his wife – the kidnap scheme is a last resort of desperation, the only way he can see to stay out of jail.
It’s never made clear in Wuthering Heights just where Heathcliff came from – whether he was Mr. Earnshaw’s bastard (and therefore Catherine’s half-brother) or merely a foundling, and, if the latter, why Earnshaw took him in. The story also leaves specifically unspecified (Lockwood asks Nellie, but she doesn’t know and Heathcliff never volunteers) where Heathcliff spent his years away from Wuthering Heights, and how he became rich. Both these points only add to the mystery of Heathcliff’s character, make him seem less a man than a dark force of nature. His being rich, of course, is necessary to the mechanism of the story, but how he became rich is not; Bronte made the right choice in leaving that in the dark.
No thanks. Personally, I feel that most of the strength of the character lies in his mystery. It’s a major part of what makes him such a badass: even those in the same “organization” know nothing about him except that he can solve any problem, and if they do come to meet him, he’s gone from their life forever (hopefully), as quickly as he came into it.
That’s a good one. I think it would be pretty cool to see what, exactly, he did to piss Jabba off. I’m sure dozens of published fanfics have fleshed out various stories about it, though.
You said it. The whole series lost all of the magic for me the moment I found out what caused the Force.
There’s a reason the public gobbled up episodes 4-6. I wish George had remembered that.
Not a movie, but for years Marvel Comics deliberately and emphatically left Wolverine’s backstory vague. He had no memory of his past beyond a certain point. His adamantium bones were a technological add-on, not a natural mutant feature, but he did not know when or by whom they had been implanted. He spoke and read Japanese but nobody knew how he had learned it. He was introduced in 1974, and his origin was not canonically cleared up until 2001.
Not that I ever thought long and hard on it but my assumption was that Jerry couldn’t keep up with maintaining a (large-ish) home and stay-at-home wife on his salary. He over-extended himself trying keep a standard of living for his wife which his father-in-law would find acceptable and eventually started doing stupid stuff like the financing theft to keep the mortgage paid and his over-extended credit from collapsing.
I don’t have anything solid to base this on except that, like BrainGlutton said, he didn’t seem to have expensive vices and he obviously felt put upon by his wealthy father-in-law who thought his daughter was too good for Jerry.
Actually, there are golf trophies all around Jerry’s office, leading me to speculate that he blew all his money on Callaway drivers and club fees.
My dad used to have a tan Ciera. And it’s CIERA, not “Sierra” as everyone on IMDB calls it. The Sierra is a GMC truck, the Ciera was a shitty Oldsmobile. Why do so many car names also sound like medications?
And Ciara is a hot, though completely unoriginal, R&B singer.
Actually, even if you ignore any of the EU books about his past, or the original “Han Solo trilogy” which IIRC is only semi-cannon anymore, Lucas set down a fair bit of Solo’s past through interviews and fan-magazines around the time of the old trilogy.
He comes from Corellia, a largely populated and fairly developed earth-like world, that is the center of many trade routes and the home to many of the galaxy’s leading starship manufacturers. Corellians are known for being natural pilots, and have certain culturally maintained traditions (eg, the stripes on Han’s pants; they’re known as bloodstripes, and are used as a decoration on clothing or spacecraft of pilots who have successfully shot down an enemy).
Han had a fairly non-descript childhood, aside from participating in dangerous speederbike races (the bandaged human bounty hunter in TESB, Dengar, is a cyborg who suffered a near-fatal crash in a race with Han and carries a vendetta), went into the Imperial Army Academy system to become a storm-trooper, served the Empire for a time, and became an outlaw when he defied his commander and sprung Chewbacca free from slavery.
Because of this, the two-centuries plus old Wookie swore a life-debt on Han, and they became smugglers (combining Chewies natural talent as a mechanic with Han’s piloting skill). At some point, they had a series of encounters with Lando and became friends. Han later won the Millenium Falcon from him in a game of Sabacc (fictional card game, vaguely similar to poker). Han goes on to gain a fair degree of notoriety in the underworld for his skill as a pilot, his marksmanship, and his personality.
It’s made pretty clear in the Special Edition Episode IV scene with Jabba (which was filmed at the time of the old trilogy with a human stand-in while they tried to figure out how to make a puppet, thanks to computers we finally got to see it) we get the full story there: Han nearly got busted by Imperial inspectors, panicked, dumped Jabba’s shipment and ran. Because of this he has to pay Jabba for the lost goods, or the Hut will have his head.
Now I haven’t really followed SW (besides watching the movies once in a while) since ~2000, so even I’m surprised at all that I know.
Where’s your proof that he served as a stormtrooper? Wikipedia says that he was a TIE pilot in the Imperial Navy, which would make much more sense.
If I were in charge of writing the Star Wars prequels, I would have scrapped the little-boy Anakin, the pod races, the krazy kreatures, all the special effects bullshit, the goofy-assed names, and just made three movies about Han Solo as a TIE pilot. Those guys had the most badass helmets and uniforms ever.
Do you mean just the first Star Wars, or around the time of the whole original trilogy?
If the latter, we knew he was Anakin Skywalker, a promising young Jedi who was taught by Obi-Wan Kenobi, who by his own admission wasn’t really ready to train. Anakin fought as a Knight and fighter pilot in the Clone Wars, being a galactic hero. He turned to the dark side, and helped Palpatine hunt down and eliminate virtually every Jedi, becoming the Dark Lord of the Sith (“there can only be two: a master and an apprentice” refers to the Lords, but at any time there can be many lesser Sith, and the Emperor and Vader had many puppets and assassins, IIRC).
He lost a fight against Obi-Wan and fell into Lava, hence the life-support equipment (this is more backstory that SW fans knew, even though it wasn’t explicitly shown in any movie or book at the time). He was the closest thing to an heir the Emperor had, and weilded totalitarian executive power where he liked. However, he was often inclined to leave actual administration and leadership to older, more experienced officials on a day-to-day basis (see his association with Grand Moff Tarkin* in Episode IV). He did not know he had any children until Luke appeared on the Galactic stage.
*The old man in charge of the first Death Star. Played by Peter Cushing, IIRC
:smack:
He saw stormtroopers handling the slaves, and got into a fight with them.
Sorry about that.
Hannibal Lecter was extremely free of backstory in Manhunter and Silence of the Lambs. You knew that he was a psychiatrist and a serial killer who cannibalized his victims, and that he was caught due to Wound Man and was a gourmet, but little to nothing about where he was from/his family/etc… He worked much better that way.
The thing is, everything outside of Episode I itself still pretty much treats the Force as it always did.
This is a total fanwank/hand-wave, but a pretty easy reconciliation is to say that the midichlorians, like various plants and animals in the EU, has a special relationship/association to the Force. They don’t cause the Force, but they generally are only seen in beings with the ability to consciously manipulate it, and there seems to be a correlation between their presence and the relative power of the individual. This makes sense in the context of the universe because naturally the Jedi would want to learn about such a thing, and would make regular use of the knowledge as it would be one of the very few reliable ways to guage and/or quantify an ethereal property.
The only problem with the theory is if Qui-Gonn explicitly says they cause the Force. I don’t believe he does.
PS. As for the immaculate conception, it still doesn’t really contradict the idea. If they have a special connection to the Force, then the Force could be used to manipulate them presumably. The only big leaps there are how one would remotely cause the conception over cosmic distances, and how trace amounts of micro-organisms could form a set of human chromosomes to fertilize an egg with.
I absolutely agree with you on this. I generally think the idea of any continued books beyond Red Dragon and Silence were a mistake, but even then they could have been written without creating the goofy Eastern-European noble storyline. Someone really should have stopped the author from doing any of that.
I appreciate your effort, H3Knuckles, but I just don’t feel like I should have to work that hard to justify spending money on a set of movies with way more hype than quality, which would have been overshadowed by Logan’s Run from the get-go if American moviegoers had had an ounce of sense in them. YMMV, and apparently does.
The novel The Godfather and the sequel Godfather 2 supply ample backstory on most of the characters, especially if you accept Pentangeli:Clemenza, but Godfather 3 suddenly springs Don Altobello (Eli Wallach) on us. This man was friendly enough with the Corleones that 50-odd years before the movie he was Connie’s godfather, yet he clearly wasn’t important in the Corleone family (we know Clemenza, Tessio, Genco, and Pentangeli were all above him) and it’s unlikely Vito would have chosen a common soldier as his daughter’s godfather, so obviously he’s from another crime family as opposed to someone like Zasa who rose when the family vacated their territories. While it’s unusual enough that Vito would have turned to a rival crime family for Connie’s godfather, it’s even more unusual that such a man would have been an underling in said family (which we know because the heads of the other 5 families were killed by the Corleones as well as the others who died in the war), would not have been killed during the war either as a turncoat by Vito or as a possible leak by his own don, and yet apparently decided to forgive/forget Michael’s orchestrating of the murders of the other dons or else just sit on it for 30+ years. It just didn’t play true.
It would actually have worked alright if he hadn’t been Connie’s godfather- you can believe that an old don who rose to head of the family because of Michael’s assassinations would make peace with- even have a sort of gratitude to- Michael (may even have helped set up the don), but nuh-uh.
Logan’s Run? You mean the movie starring Basil Exposition from Austin Powers? 
Yup, Baccarat Chemin de Fer.
CMC+fnord!
Ciara is also a floral perfume which was worn by the first girl I Frenched. I smelled it on a woman the other day in her 70s; it had quite an odd set of mixed emotions.
I should have thought that would be obvious. In IV he says, “There’ll be no one to stop us this time.”