This could be really good. You have an SS officer hunting a serial killer. In the first scene you remind the audience that the officer is a Nazi by having him participate somehow in sending Jews to camps, but the rest of the movie you make him the good cop. Then in the final confrontation, they kill each other in some dramatic simultaneous way. ie. they shoot each other in the head at point blank range.
Cool Runnings does a good job with this.
In Night of the Generals, you have a German army intelligence officer searching for a serial killer. The three prime suspects are all army generals. When he finally confronts the killer, well, you need to see the movie.
Flying, or simply falling upwards?
I’ve seen it twice, and read the book before I saw it. What do you mean that’s not how it played out? It didn’t even happen on screen. That’s what a non-event it was.
Mark this post, this will happen soon. Enough people have called for it for long enough. Someone makes this comment every time a romantic comedy comes up in discussion ever since the OJ trial.
Dammit! I came in here to post this. Should’ve known on the SDMB I wouldn’t be the first to know about it. 
Not quite the Nazis but almost as unsympathetic: Citizen X, a made for HBO film about the pursuit of Andrei Chikatilo, the Soviet Union’s most prolific serial killer. I only remember it vaguely, but it didn’t seem to gloss over the evil of the Soviet system either. After he’s caught, in the very last scene, his prison guards ask him to enter a small room, and (from his POV) he notices it’s entirely empty – (camera pans doward) – except for a drain in the middle of the floor. Boom.
A big star stalks a fan.
You have forgotten some of the details:
Llewelyn wasn’t killed by the villian Chigurh, he was killed by the Mexicans. Chigurh came by the motel for the money after he was already dead.
How about:
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A car chase where everyone gets pulled over by the cops after only a few minutes of crazy driving.
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The good guy can’t seem to shoot anyone, while the villains knock off all the good guys they shoot at.
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A head villain who screams “stop them you fools!” to his henchmen…and that motivates them to actually stop the good guys.
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I’d like to see the nose pointing by the head of the SWAT team be misinterpreted. You know, they enter the house where villains may be hiding so the SWAT team leader points to his nose and makes some other finger gestures to the left or right and the team members know exactly what to do as they go to search room after room. I’d like to see one of the team look at the leader and mouth “what?”
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In the TV world classrooms, the teacher makes some really important point…and then the bell rings. I’d like to see the bell go off during the important speech and watch the teacher try to finish up while the students scurry to get the hell out.
[QUOTE]
Originally Posted by BigT View Post
…[li]An alternate history with white slaves owned by black people, and a black KKK against white people.[/li][/QUOTE]
Wasn’t Planet of the Apes essentially this?
Oh, the invaders need not “rightfully subjugate the wicked”… the payoff would be the epiphany when the audience realizes the natives are just as much asshats as the conquerors… so there’s no one to root for other than the heroic colonizer dude and the hot native princess finally getting it on and riding off while telling each other’s people’s to get crammed…
I’m quite fond of that movie, for all its '60s-cinema era shortcomings, and it overthrows a lot of movie expectations entertainingly. I’m particularly fond of the way the German cop protagonist, amid much suspense and build-up…
uncovers the plot to assassinate Hitler, and then neither reports nor assists it, but ignores it, because it’s not what he’s investigating.
This reminds me of an ***old Twilight Zone ***episode starring Diana (***Eight ***Is Enough) Hyland.
A rich young woman is about to marry a nice but stiff and boring rich guy that her parents adore… but she’s secretly in love with a carefree, wild boy from the wrong side of the tracks. The woman sees a ghost on a horse. The ghostly rider screams at her, and chases her. When the woman returns home, she knows that the “ghost” is her future self, warning her not to marry the wrong man.
She dumps the prim, proper boring man her parents wanted her to marry, and runs off with her true love.
At the end, we see her future. Her true love WAS a bum, just as her parents thought. He’s a drunken wastrel who’s spent all her family’s money and left them both destitute. The “ghost” was warning her younger self to marry the boring guy, and NOT her true love!
Dang, Brother Cadfael already mentioned my episode.
At any rate, it was called “Spur of the Moment,” and was written by Richard Matheson.
You have to get up REALLY early to beat me to a quote.
If it’s a quote from Heinlein, Peter Wimsey, or Buffy, you have to get up yesterday. Or perhaps the day before.
The apes were meant to be black people? But I thought there was only one human (white person) and that they hadn’t seen humans for years. How are they subjugating them?
Oops, nevermind…turns out I had no idea what I was talking about. Ignore the poster behind the curtain…
The apes were not supposed to be black people in the original “Planet of the Apes,” but in some of the sequels, that was DEFINITELY the case. When Cornelius and Zira’s son Caesar leads a rebellion of apes against humans in “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes,” we’re supposed to see him as a Malcolm X of sorts, and the apes as blacks rising up against “the man.”
I haven’t read Pierre Boulle’s novel, but some sources suggest that in his book, the apes were the Japanese, while Ulysse Merou (yes, the original astronaut hero was French) represented the white Westerners that the Japanese de-humanized during WW2.
The technologically advanced Western invaders need not necessarily be portrayed as righteous, but history tells us that they will indeed subjugate the native people. Even if the movie ends before the victory of the Westerners, everyone in the audience is going to know that this is what happens.
*I really don’t think you’ve thought this through. There may be some alternate world where such a film could work, but making it in this world would be asking filmgoers to watch a scenario that’s played out all too often in history, resulting in generations of oppression for Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, etc., – and react with indifference. They were all “asshats”, so who cares what happens to them as long as the hero gets the girl? Worse still, it invites white viewers to conclude “It’s no worse than they’d have done to us if they’d had the chance. It was going to be us or them, so it’s better that it was us.”
A similar film could (and probably has, although I can’t think of an example offhand) be made about a conflict between two roughly equal powers and the hot guy and gal on opposing sides who ultimately reject both their backgrounds to run off together, but I can’t see using the conquest of a less technologically advanced indigeonous people by a Western power as the backdrop. Not unless the target audience is white supremacists, and they’d be rooting for the Western conquerors no matter how brutally they’re depicted.
Caesar’s speech at the end of the movie had to be redone. Originally it was a call to arms for all the apes. They would lead a bloody revolution against their oppressors. This was the dark ending that would lead into the Planet of the Apes timeline that we see in the first movie. The film was preview screened at a theater in Watts and the largely (entirely?) black audience was riled and applauded. They did not see this as a dark ending. They saw it as revloutionary.
The filmmakers all crapped their pants and ordered the end of the speech to be changed. You’ll notice after the call to arms and revloution- we suddenly see a lot of reused footage and extreme close ups of Caesar (too costly to reshoot so they just used footage they already had and then had Roddy dub some new lines) and the speech is tempered with “We need to be better than our oppressors.” I think the last line is something like “We may not be human but we can be humane.”