[quote=“Sampiro, post:32, topic:603862”]
Independence Day- Yeaaa, we beat the bad guys!
Of course there’s about a trillion tons of dead mothership just above our atmosphere, and nuclear fallout from the bombs we used on (Dallas? Somewhere in Texas I think), …QUOTE]
Houston, man - they bombed Houston!! :eek:
I watched part of the Hugh Jackman version of the musical Oklahoma! recently, and this is one, just like the movie version, has “They do not live happily ever after” written all over it.
Curly, even when played by the gorgeous Jackman, is one of the most loathsome “heroes” of any musical. In the first scene of the play he tells an elaborate lie to Laurie about the rig he’s going to take her to the dance in- “Oh, it’s gonna be the sharpest ride in the territory, snow white horses and fringe on the top, etc. etc.”, and then when she’s eating out of his hand he says “I made that whole thing up, bitch, if you wanna go with me you can walk behind my horse”. He laughs at how upset she gets with him for his lying- clearly has no clue about the female temperament or even common decency.
Then there’s how he treats Jud- that’s downright sociopathic. Alright, true, Jud is deranged; he’s a porn loving recluse who may have murdered his last employer (never proven), BUT all that Curly knows for absolute sure is that Jud has the hots for Laurie. Does Jud have a shot at Laurie? Hell no, he’s ugly and mean and creepy and while she might go to the dance with him she’d never in a million years marry him and Curly knows this.
But what does he do to get Jud out of the picture? Does he go to him and say “Look dude, I don’t like you, I think you’re a creep, and if you ever touch a hair on Laurie’s head I’ll blow your damned head off”? Because if he did that I could respect it. No, instead he pulls some Hannibal Lecter shit and tries to talk Jud into suicide (though in an admittedly, if somewhat perversely,beautiful song). You want Jud dead but you’re too cowardly to even confront him or too lazy to do some research into the murder of his former employers to get him arrested (and, likely in Oklahoma in 1908, hanged)?
So just in two songs (Surry With the Fringe on Top and Poor Jud is Dead) we know that Curly is a coward who loves to play mind games and doesn’t even care about Laurie’s feelings, he just doesn’t want anybody else to happen. Oh, and he’s also a narcissist- praises himself constantly in his songs and takes offense at any slight. Killing Jud in the end is certainly justified (if only for that really terrible dream sequence I’ve never understood why they included), but I fear it sets a dangerous precedent in Curly realizing he can kill without even having to go to a trial.
My best guess for their future: Curly and Laurie come back from the honeymoon. He proves to be no good at running a farm- he’s a cowman after all- so the place begins to go to seed. As sex with Laurie becomes routine and she has a kid or two his eye probably begins to wander. Sooner or later he comes back from Kansas City with the clap (“Everything’s up to date in Kansas City/except for the whore’s vaginal exams”), but, with his skill at mind games he’ll convince her it’s her fault for not being a better wife to him.
Then somebody strikes oil near the territory. Curly realizes he’s likely sitting on a Plainview Milkshake goldmine. The trouble is the property belongs to Aunt Eller, and she’s still healthy. Thus Laurie, nursing their son, deaf to his father’s veneral diseases, is surprised to hear Curly and Eller singing a duet one day- “Aunt Eller’s daid/we laid her in the shade/her rheumatiz and cat’racts gone for good… Good!” and even more surprised when Aunt Eller accidentally throws herself down the well. Then Curly inherits the land and sets off on a land buying Bonanza.
Of course by this time he’s long been having an affair with Ado Annie, very lonely ever since Will went to prison after turning to drink after their baby was born with decidedly Persian features and then shooting the two plowhands and the ice salesman he caught her in bed with. Annie of course was heir to her father’s considerable spread, and suddenly she makes him her business manager for all kinds of promises about what her field will yield, though it turns out he already drank her milkshake.
So Curlie gallivants with a young harem all over the state and throws money at Laurie from time to time but has long since left her in all but fact. For some comic relief one of his floozies has a fetish for dressing up like animals but is also addicted to the legal narcotics of the time (dealt with in the song Furry with the Syringe on the Top). The final scene is Laurie looking on in terror as Curly kills Ali Hakim with a bowling pin.
ftg, I saw “Family Man” as being more of a dream than a genuinely-extant “alternate reality.” Certainly the ending comes out happier that way, and it’s not at all an implausible interpretation.
I’ve always been amused at the thought of the three-months-later scene in Gattaca when a spaceship crashes horribly, killing all on board, due to one of the crew suffering a sudden heart attack. When it comes out that the crewman had falsified his medical records, there is a vicious witch-hunt for anyone who enabled him and possibley a set of “reforms” to make genetically deficient people easier to identify. (tattoos, anyone?)
Similar to The Graduate, the 1972 The Heartbreak Kid ends with Cybill Shepard inexplicably married to Charles Grodin, when her whole family just loathes him. But it’s more of a ‘you win, but you are such jerks that you lose’.
She was also in a movie called- one google later- Chances Are in which her character was widowed when she was pregnant. Twenty years or so later her daughter is dating a guy (Robert Downey, Jr.) who, it turns out, is the reincarnation of Shepard’s character’s husband. When boyfriend gets his memory of his last life back he has an affair with Shepard, his “past life ex-wife”, but ultimately- in a happy ending mind- he loses his memory ends up marrying his girlfriend, the daughter of the woman he’s been banging and the daughter of the guy he’s the reincarnation of, all with Cybill’s blessing.
This is not a happy ending for a light romantic comedy but an episode of American Horror Story. If only spiritually you’re committing incest, and on a very practical and physical level you have, ala The Graduate again, carnal knowledge of your mother-in-law, and even if you don’t remember it, she does.
Except I’m pretty sure that Marty wasn’t born looking exactly like “Calvin.” He probably looked more, y’know… like a baby.* It’s going to take years before that baby grows up enough to look like Calvin - probably at least a decade. And the entire time he’s watching his son’s facial features gradually take shape, his memories of that one guy he hung out with for two weeks in his senior year of high school are going to get fuzzier and fuzzier. Add to that effect that Marty wasn’t their first kid together. He’s got two older siblings. By the time Marty’s even born (let alone recognizable as his adult self) George’ll be hard pressed to remember Calvin’s name, let alone what he looked like.
*I wonder if Winston Churchill ever got in trouble with his wife for that. “I was just over at Beatrice’s, and her new baby looks exactly like you!” SLAP!
At the very least, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss’s character) abandoned his wife and children for however long. And of course before he left, they thought he went nuts, so they’re not even going to have happy memories of him.
Blazing saddles. The townspeople have gained the upper hand against Lamar’s goons, but the resulting ruckus breaks the space time continuum and transports everybody into a gay musical and then the studio commissary. Eventually, they all return to the town and their own time line. All except Lamar, who runs off and Bart and Jim, who chase after. Bart catches up to Lamar outside of Grauman’s Chinese Theater and guns Lamar down. He and Jim then watch a movie at the theater, hop in a limo, and then head off into the sunset.
He’s the thing. Bart isn’t the Sherriff of a lawless western town in 1874 here. In this universe, he’s just a random black dude who appeared out of nowhere, shot a white guy, and stole a limo. And he did all this in 1974 Los Angeles. What do you think the LAPD is going to do when they catch up to him?
If the sharks stop eating fish, it will finally bring culture to the ocean.
Both The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Jumanji have the problem Big had, to a much higher degree — children who have lived well into adulthood suddenly regressed back to where they were, but with full memory of their past life. I can’t imagine a normal life for them after that. (For the Pevensies, it may not be so bad since the world’s going to end soon enough).
You’re close, but not quite there. Ronnie left Roy halfway through the film. In a phone conversation, we hear pretty clear evidence that she has no plans of coming back soon. I’d say Roy was abandoned more than did the abandoning, and the ship had already sailed on whatever opinion his kids were going to have of him.
It’s clear that he is the hero of the story and we’re meant to see Ronnie as small-minded and unable to have faith in his story. This is one of the things I find refreshing and liberating about this particular movie: it’s not afraid to make the wife the bad guy in a failed marriage.
Yes, but Roy’s wife left him because he was acting crazy (due to the thoughts implanted by the alien encounter). Presumably she would not have left him had he not been acting weirdly.
WARNING: Do not click on the link (SFW) unless you have tons of spare time to waste. Which on a 4 day holiday weekend you might.
This does not contradict anything I said. You said he abandoned his family, and I assert that they abandoned him because Ronnie was narrow-minded and unable to believe in what Roy suddenly believed in. I would claim that “acting crazy” vs. “finding something to believe in” is to-may-to vs. to-mah-to.
Another musical- The Music Man-
Okay, the River City Boys Band has miraculously sorta kinda played a song on their instruments Hill convinced them to buy. But, what now?
Most likely, they never get any better and Hill is ridden out of town on a rail.
If they do get better, he settles down until- probably sooner than later- the people he’s pissed off throughout the MidWest come looking for them. If they’re in a particularly good mood they’ll let him come back to their Hicktown and teach the kids, more likely they’ll ride him there on a rail.
Either way, Marion needs to keep looking further to find a father for Winthrop. (I know, technically he’s her brother, but does anybody really believe her mother isn’t just covering up his illegitimate birth to save the family honor? For one thing the woman is 60 years old- how does she have a 7 year old? And also there’s a reason Old Miser Madison left Marion the library books and I’m guessing it’s more than her intellectual enrichment.)
But Curly really did hire the surrey with the fringe on top over at Claremore.
They don’t steal the limo in 1974, though. Bart shoots Hedley, and he and Jim watch the movie. In the movie, Bart and Jim are back in Rockridge, and ride off on horses for about twenty yards, when they dismount and get into a waiting limo. The limo is obviously waiting for them, and they’re back in 1874, with a car that’s a hundred years ahead of the technological curve. Clearly, Bart ends up founding General Motors using his borrowed future-tech limo and lives like a king until the end of his days.
It’s entirely based on how things fade out. When Marty prevents his parents from meeting, he still has a lot of time before he doesn’t exist. There’s some sort of temporal inertia, but eventually the change becomes the way things always were. I think this also applies in this situation:
Marty prime, with his past history, fades out of existence. The difference is that Marty prime fades into the other Marty. If this didn’t happen, then where did Marty prime come from, since his original past didn’t happen? BttF does not seem to support the multiple universe theory, or Marty’s parents not getting together wouldn’t be a problem, as they did in another universe. A delayed reaction to changes fits.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s still a fan wank over what I consider a plot hole. They should have explicitly explained this, IMO.
The movie Rumor Has It… has this as the starting premise.
Holy Christmas, I can’t follow that plot summary. My head wants to explode!