HOMES isn’t canon, is it? IIRC those are based on Tolkien’s notes over decades of research and several ideas evolve over that time, e.g., Strider at Bree originally being a crippled hobbit or something like that. (And I’m pretty sure I remember from one of the Appendices of LOTR that Tolkien explicitly stated that female dwarves don’t have beards.)
Because I want Total Recall to not all be a dream, I tell myself that the similarities between the Recall implant and what happened to him (like his old GF) were put there intentionally to make Arnie think he was imagining it. This was their way to both get Arnie to Mars and convince him he was mad.
Same for the predictions made by the bad guy - after all, if he was previously a leader of the resistance and there really is air on Mars, then it’d be kinda easy to make that prediction. It’d be like me trying to convince David Cameron he was insane because he believes himself to be a millionaire and Prime Minister. Oh, I wish!
You remember incorrectly. Appendix A for The Return of the King has this :
>>>>>“It was said by Gimli that there are few dwarf-women, probably no more than a third of the whole people. They seldom walk abroad except at great need. They are in voice and appearance, and in garb if they must go on a journey, so like to the dwarf-men that the eyes and ears of other peoples cannot tell them apart. This has given rise to the foolish opinion among men that there are no dwarf women and that the dwarves ‘grow out of stone’” <<<<<
That certainly implies that dwarf women had beards, as you can’t tell the difference between a dwarf man and a dwarf woman just by looking at them. The lack of a beard would certainly be a noticeable difference. But since there aren’t any noticeable differences…
Interesting, I have never heard anyone ever think Ash was anything other than a robot!
Yes, and it was Marcellus’s uzi that killed Vincent. Couldn’t very well bring it with him to get donuts.
This one was always the most ambiguous, in my mind.
I suppose the implication was that if Jules hadn’t decided to walk away, he’d be dead with Vincent or hit by car.
But maybe he doesn’t leave a loaded gun sitting on the counter and instead ambushes Butch.
Although, now that I think about it, why are they expecting Butch to turn up? He already packed his bags and left. That’s probably obvious from a cursory look at his apartment. They presumably don’t know about the watch or its significance to Butch. He just double crossed a mob boss and packed his bags, he should be long gone.
Maybe they’re not; as you say, the guy “already packed his bags and left. That’s probably obvious from a cursory look at his apartment. They presumably don’t know about the watch or its significance to Butch. He just double crossed a mob boss and packed his bags, he should be long gone.” Maybe they’re just there to rummage through his stuff, hoping to find a lead?
In the Harlan Ellison short story, the military had bred super-intelligent telepathic dogs for combat use. Einstein was one of these.
I don’t think they are expecting him to turn up. That’s why Vincent is taking a crap while Marcellus grabs some donuts. I figure they had just got there a few minutes earlier, looked around, and thought, “Fuck, this guy’s long gone.” Vincent decides he needs to use the facilities, and Marcellus figures he’ll go grab some food while Vincent’s busy.
In The Godfather:
Michael did not know Carlo set up Sonny or who he did it for until he trick Carlo to confess. Sure he was probably 75% convinced before but he needed the confirmation before he killed his own brother in law. Some of Al Pacino’s best work in that scene. You can tell he wasn’t sure by how his eyes change after Carlo breaks down. I don’t know how people interpret it any other way. He would have had him killed right away without the meeting if he knew.
Actually, that was better explained in the book - they knew it was Barzini (actually, that point was made clear in the movie after the peace settlement… “It was Barzini all along”.) The thing with Carlos is that Vito couldn’t do what needed doing because it would cause too much pain for Connie, his favorite child, and therefore he passed the torch to Michael, who could do it.
For his father’s sake, not his own, Michael gets the confession from Carlos before having him killed.
Its Carlo.
Never read the book. Heard too much about giant vagina plotlines to be interested. At that point in the movie Vito is out of the picture, Michael is firmly in control.
He’s not “firmly” in control until the final scene, after he’s earned the respect of the consigliori’s (as indicated when Clemenza kisses Michael’s ring) because of the massacre, but again, in the book, Vito exacts a promise from Michael that Michael will “be 100% sure”, i.e., get a confession.
No, in the book the capos’ opinions of Michael were slightly diminished by seeing his need an explicit confession from Carlo, to reassure his own conscience. The capos were surprised Michael even brought it up, knowing that Vito would have acted without hesitation based on the evidence they already had.
The reason Vito didn’t do it was because killing Carlo would have alerted Barzini before the Corleones were ready to massacre their enemies. And that massacre couldn’t take place while Vito was in charge because he had made a personal promise to the heads of the other families that he wouldn’t seek revenge. So it fell to Michael to do his dad’s dirty work when the time was right.
But did he drop the ball on purpose, or to trick Khan?
Finally. You actually argue against the alternative interpretation instead of acting like you can’t understand it, somehow equating something that people inferred from what is shown onscreen to something that is made up out of the whole cloth and breaks not just one scene but the entire movie.
That’s what was frustrating me. It seemed like you couldn’t even grasp the argument that it was fake, rather than having considered each part of it and rejected it. I just wish I’d have read this first so I wouldn’t have worked so hard in trying to explain what was so frustrating about discussing this.
You and Meatros might be right. A more depressing ending but it seems to ring true. Need to resee the movie again 
Kirk would have found a way to drop the ball and still win.
I assumed they were aliens because they looked almost exactly like the aliens from Abyss, who were also pretty hip to technology, as well as interfacing with it.
It makes more sense that they were robots, and I agree they were, but I also think the presentation of them by the filmmakers was a giant fail.
Even the very first time I saw it this logic didn’t ring true. The big company honcho is begging the guy to come out of his dream or be lobotomized; of course he’s sweating. The very real clear and present danger to him is a massive PR shitstorm that could torpedo his whole company. “Come take one of our mind vacations; the chance for full lobotomy is pretty low!” is a terrible sales pitch.