I was watching Gone With the Wind for the millionth time, and again I noticed this:
At the barbecue at Twelve Oaks, Scarlett is wearing the green sprigged muslin dress, and a wide straw bonnet that ties under her chin with a wide green ribbon. Later, when the Siege of Atlanta is beginning and Melanie is in labor, Scarlett leaves the house to go find the doctor to help her (just before the famous “Wounded Soldiers at the Train Station” scene). As she leaves, she grabs a hat and…it’s the same bonnet from the barbecue. It always strikes me as a sad little touch, showing how much things have changed from that day before the war started. It’s not directly referred to in the script, it’s just a subtle little detail.
Which little things like this have you noticed in your favorite movies? I’m not talking about mistakes/bloopers, I mean details that are not prominent but were intentional.
The Brady Bunch Movie was filled with these details, but they were more “inside jokes”, like the words “Pork Chops” “Applesauce” written on the kitchen blackboard, or the hand puppets on the table next to Rupaul when Jan goes to see the guidance counselor.
White Mischief was full of brilliant director’s touches like this.
In several instances towards the beginning of the movie, in which 1940’s British expatriates decadently live Kenya as Britain gears up for war, and they stretch their dollars and indulge hedonistic parties, pleasures and affairs, just the way their indulgences are shown to be to effortlessly cleared away by the servants through the filming of just a hand picking somehting up, or a mess quickly being swept away was flawlessly conceived as vignettes of the movies theme about recklessness and consequences.
As decadent and hedonistic as their lifestyles were, they were still British aristocracy, and still played by certain rules and only amongst their like; the film was about what happens when, within all this, the rules are broken. There was one character who’d lived in Kenya longer than any of them. Not only did she not indulge in any of the playmaking, she had decided to live by her own rules. This was exemplify clearly and simply in a three-second shot of a male servant’s hand being placed on her shoulder after she has wearily welcomed a newcomer into this world.
The line “Another fucking beautiful day,” uttered by Alice de Janzé (Sarah Miles) in the days before she commits suicide.
In Casablanca Rick tears up any check offered by the Germans…
A League of their Own, in the scene where Geena Davis and Lori Petty are arguing about Lori Petty being traded away, one of the team interrupts to ask “Has anyone seen my new, red hat?” Geena Davis replies, “Oh, piss on your hat!”
In the scene before this one, Madonna is going out on her date and Rosie O’Donnel comments on her borrowed dress. Madonna is also wearing the red hat.
The movie Playtime was a cornucopia of clever little touches, especially in the last 20 minutes, which takes place at the opening of a fancy restaurant. You can only notice many of them if you see the film in widescreen on a full-sized movie screen (it was shot in 70mm, so most prints make it too small to see everything).
One involves the front door of the restaurant. Early on, someone crashes into it, smashing is into small cubes (safety glass). When they’re gathering up the glass, someone sees it and asks if something broke. “No,” it’s ice, they say and put it into an ice bucket. About ten minutes later, you see someone reach into an ice bucket and put a cube to a head to soothe his headache. He touches it to his forehead for a minute, then looks at it funny.
There’s also the fish. Someone orders a whole fish that’s prepared at the table. Every few minutes, the waiter comes around adds seasoning and disappears. Then the people who order the fish spot some friends and go join them. Another group of people are seated at the empty table. The waiter comes around. The fish is ready, but they people at the table haven’t ordered it. Then, throughout the rest of the film, you can spot a waiter with the fish wandering in the background, looking for whoever ordered it.
(Note that these things didn’t happen in sequence; the film would move on for several minutes, then come back to them.)
Much more famous is the “Plate o’ Shrimp” in Repo Man.
I watched the movie just last week (again), and he does indeed say that. The more I watch “Forrest Gump,” the more interesting little touches I see - I’d say that was even a hallmark of the film. Of course, I can’t think of them now.
Oh, wait, one is that every picture of Forrest has his eyes closed in it.
In either Country or The River, Jessica Lange or Sissy Spacek is making lunch for her farmer husband (Mel Gibson or Sam Shepard), who’s about to spend a day in the fields. On the cluttered kitchen counter, she’s putting hamburger patties on bread. The nice touch was that she used bread, not hamburger buns. That’s what a farm wife would use, and I was impressed that somebody knew that.
I was already impressed that someone knew the farmer husband wouldn’t take time to come back to the house for a sitdown lunch, and that she wouldn’t have time to take it out to him later.
I’ve now been to see Iron Man 2 twice, and seen the original 4 times, after which I have noticed that Howard Stark could have conceivably named his son after his business partner (Anton/Anthony).
In Troy, Brad Pitt’s Achilles is the world’s greatest warrior. At one point he says to another character that Hector (Eric Bana) was the best warrior he had ever fought against. It’s one thing to say that, but the director does an incredible job of subtly showing it. Throughout the movie, Achilles uses one particular move over and over again, and it quickly becomes a signature maneuver. He will fake to his left, side step right, jump, and stab down at his foe’s neck or shoulder. (This is most prominently shown at the beginning in the one on one battle against the Thessalonian champion) This move is an automatic kill against everyone Achilles uses it against.
…except Hector. Hector is only person in the entire film who blocks that move (and he does it twice). He was the only person with enough skill to stand against Achilles’ best shot. Troy was no masterpiece (so Pitt couldn’t pull off the accent), but it was far better than most people realized. That fight scene still stands among the very best I’ve ever seen.
In A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, which takes place in a future with rampant global warming, there is a scene in a forest in the central US in which you can hear a Screaming Piha calling in the background. Today the bird is found only in Amazonia. I suspect it was done deliberately in order to suggest that tropical conditions had spread that far north. There can’t have been many people who picked up on it.
The scene in Mystic River where someone brings a case of beer to a funeral gathering. Nice authentic touch. I wonder if that’s only done in New England?
No. In West Virginia, it’s polite to bring a case of beer anywhere. If it’s someplace really special (like a funeral), it’s something more expensive than Bud Light!
The last Indiana Jones movie, while not all that great, had some really cool little touches in it that Indy fans would smile at. His saying to Mutt that he rode with Pancho Villa and picked up a local Mayan dialect was a nice inside reference to the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles series. Also, similar to the bird call in AI, there was a bird call from Raiders of the Lost Ark used in a scene in Crystal Skull.
In “The Incredibles” Mr. Incredible mispronounces “Prague” then corrects himself, just the way I would!
Am I the only person who thinks it’s ironic that Samuel L. Jackson plays the calm, cool, collected character in this movie?
In Jaws, there is a scene when Roy Scheider is looking through a book about sharks - one of the pictures that we see him look at is of a shark with an oxygen tank in its mouth, the same image from later in the film just before we hear “Smile you son of a bitch!”
Nice catch! I wouldn’t have picked up on that. How many times do you watch a movie before noticing something like that? Or how closely do you have to watch?
In Fargo, there’s a scene where Marge’s husband is eating “Old Dutch” potato chips, which is a regional brand in at least Minnesota and North Dakota. I didn’t realize that when I first saw the movie because I grew up in Fargo and hadn’t been anywhere else long enough to know what the local brands were. It was a real nice touch that almost made up for the bad accents.
Then, in The Big Lebowski, DeFino tells the Dude that Bunny’s real name is Fawn Knutson, and that she grew up on a farm outside of Moorhead, Minnesota. Moorhead is a town right across the Red River from Fargo; the area is called Fargo-Moorhead. The nod to Fargo was neat, but what’s really cool is that Bunny’s cheerleader outfit in the picture DeFino has uses Moorhead High’s actual colors.
