Old is in ‘quotes’ because, dammit, BTTF shouldn’t oughta be 20 years old!
Last night I saw two movies, I’ve seen them many times. but I found it odd that I’m still seeing little things that were new to me:
Back to the Future: At the end, when Doc Brown is setting up for the ‘weather experiment’ and McFly is putting the warning note in Doc’s jacket, I just noticed that the Police officer asked him if he had a permit. The look on Doc’s face is significant, and you can see him reaching for his wallet. I doubt it was for a permit. Looks like he was paying off the Cop.
Men In Black: At the traffic stop, where the alien mother is giving birth and flinging Will Smith all over the place, centered prominently in the middle of the frame is the Twin Towers. You just never know what will end up making a film dated.
But then you mention Men in Black. ‘Old’ movie.
Anyway- one thing that annoys me about that movie is that the woman knows her husband is really an alien because he asks for ‘sugar water’ instead of coke or gatorade or any other sugarless drink.
Well, that was just what she could articulate - people are kind of like that. You’ll say “I knew something wasn’t right when he kept scratching his arms” when what you really mean was “I sensed he was really nervous and kept looking at the door and stuff, but what I can tell you is that he scratched his arms.” So I can deal with that.
If we’re talking old movies: I never noticed this until a prof* pointed it out: In Citizen Kane, the scene late in the film where Kane, living in his incredibly vast palace of Xanadu with his second wife Susan, takes her and a few dozen hangers-on on a well-catered “picnic” (for which she shows no enthusiasm). Off to one side, among the dense Florida foliage, you can see the shadows or silhouettes of flying pterodactyls. That was because Wells was using background footage salvaged from King Kong.
Not a film prof, either. It came up when I was taking a history-of-journalism course and doing a book report on Citizen Hearst, by W.A. Swanberg.
Unintentionally Blank, I read about it long before I saw the film, but were you already aware of the mall name joke in Back to the Future? (When he first travels back to 1955, Marty knocks over a pine tree with the DeLorean. At the end of the film, when he returns to 1985 and the site of Doc’s first experiment, the name of the mall has changed from Twin Pines to Lone Pine.)
Resurrecting this because I didn’t feel my comment necessitated a fresh thread, plus, since this original thread didn’t seem to garner a great deal of interest at the time, could find some new life today.
Anyway,I was just watching National Lampoon’s Vacation, which I’ve seen dozens, if not hundreds of times, but today was the first time I noticed that in the beginning (3rd scene, following picking up the Family Truckster and bringing it home) when Clark and Ellen are cleaning dishes at home, Ellen is scraping the uneaten food into a bowl, then handing the plates to Clark who is merely wiping them off with a dish cloth and placing them back in the cupboard.
In Catch Me If You Can, Tom Hanks wears horn-rimmed glasses throughout the movie. But in the very final scenes, he’s wearing wire rims. Nice attention to detail there. My father made that same change in those years.
I was raised on a steady cinematic diet of war movies and big splashy musicals. Why, yes, as a matter of fact – my parents *did *take turns picking out our family evening entertainment. My daughter, now 13, shows little interest in The Longest Day or Das Boot, but absolutely adores anything with Gene Kelley, Danny Kaye, Bing Crosby, Donald O’Connor, etc.
Our local library has a nicely stocked DVD section, and the musical section has plenty of titles that I’d never seen before. So one day Kizarvexilla picks out Zigfield Follies, a multi-million dollar MGM extravaganza featuring dozens of stars in a revue of comedy routines and over-the-top lavish production numbers. One of the less memorable bits is a somewhat Kafkaesque sketch about a guy who gets a ticket from a beat cop for “expectorating on the sidewalk.” The guy’s lawyer happens to be right on the scene, and, despite the fact that the fine is only $2, persuades the guy to fight it out in court. He loses, but the lawyers steamrolls him into fighting on, over and over again. Each time, the guy pleads with the lawyer, “Just pay the two dollars!” Not exactly a comic gem, but there it is.
A couple of weeks later we checked out one of my all-time favorite movies, North By Northwest. At one point in the movie, Cary Grant’s character is trying to explain the bizarre episode of the previous evening (during which he was mistaken for a spy, kidnapped at gunpoint, interrogated at length, forcibly intoxicated, and narrowly escaped a staged auto accident) to a judge, who is simply not prepared to believe to believe the outlandish tale. His mother turns out to be no help, either, as she gives him a withering look and says “Just pay the two dollars.”
