Speaking of Minority Report (and there was a pit thread on this back when it came out IIRC, and IIRC that this is the right movie), what the hell was the deal with the sandwich? What was the purpose of that scene, other than a gratuitous gross-out?
It’s been a while since i saw it but he needed them to get to Coruscant to begin the process of removing the existing chancellor. If Darth Maul was successful, they would have never made it to Coruscant.
Both the Folksmen and the New Main Street Singers seem surprised to hear Mitch & Mickey sing “The Kiss at the End of the Rainbow” so I guess it’s a given that they didn’t have a full rehearsal. One of the Folksmen was asking if they had discussed their set list with anyone from TNMSS. I guess I’d write it off the the very short time in which the show was arranged and put together.
On the other hand, the people in the audience all have programs so don’t ask me what was on them. Just biographical information on the acts, I guess.
He used them for that purpose, but that’s a far cry from needing them for that purpose. Realistically (and I realize that term hardly applies when it comes to Star Wars movies), there’s no way his plan could have relied on Amidala getting to Coruscant - she has to survive an invasion, escape an occupied city, shoot her way through a planetary blockade, and then journey all the way to Coruscant. There’s just too many places she could have gotten killed for him to rely on her showing up in the Senate as a lynchpin of his plot. More likely, his plot assumed (or, perhaps, required) that she would die during the invasion, and he had some other machination to unseat the current chancellor. When against all odds, she showed up alive on Coruscant, he switched to Plan B, or simply started improvising. The fact that he told his Trade Federation stooges to capture her, and then sent his apprentice after her when she escaped, supports this. Amidala and the Jedi represented part of his plan being foiled - but he’d developed his plan with enough contingencies, and was such a natural schemer and manipulator, that he was able to adapt to circumstances and achieve his over-all goal despite the setback.
There’s a great webcomic, Darths and Droids, that re-imagines the Star Wars saga, not as a blockbuster movie franchise, but as a homebrew roleplaying game. It’s a hilarious strip, and does a great job of reversing a lot of the expectations you’d have from watching the movies (Jar-Jar is one of the better characters in the strip, and Anakin is genuinely dark and creepy even before he turns to the dark side). I bring it up here, because it’s a good example of how a master manipulator (the GM) can react to having his carefully laid plots (the adventure he designed) disrupted by the unexpected actions of the heroes (the players), while still keeping the overall plot on track. For example, in the comic, the players were never supposed to go to Naboo at all - the adventure was supposed to take place on the Trade Federation battleship, but the players surprised him by sneaking onto a troop transport, and he had to hastily improvise the events on the planet surface. If you read the comic, and note how the GM is constantly having to deal with the curveballs his players are sending his way, you can kind of appreciate how the character of Darth Sidious was probably doing the same thing when the heroes kept doing pesky things like not dying according to his schedule.
I enjoyed Batman Begins, but I’ve watched it multiple times and still don’t understand the stuff at the end with the runaway train and releasing the fear toxin.
Connor keeps Ramirez’s sword after the Kurgan takes his head. After Heather dies, Connor uses his own sword (with MacLeod on it) as her grave marker, sets fire to their croft, and leaves, with Ramirez’s samurai sword clearly visible amongst the belongings he his carrying.
Well, I guess I might as well write this entire day off.
I just remembered something about the 2009 Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law Sherlock Holmes movie that puzzled me at the time. There’s a scene where Holmes is drugged by Irene Adlerand left handcuffed naked to a bed in a hotel room. He’s found by a chambermaid and comedy ensues. But as far as I could tell this scene existed only for comedy relief. The other character had no obvious motivation for drugging and locking up Holmes. I kept expecting that it would be revealed that someone had been up to something that couldn’t have been done if Holmes hadn’t been out of the way for a while, but if there was any such revelation then I missed it.
I really don’t get zombie movies. The old-school “Brrraainsss” kind, not the modern biovirus type. All right, so zombies apparently eat brains. And coincidentally, the only way to kill a zombie permanently is to destroy its brain. So that means that if you are killed by a zombie, they will eat your brain, and you can’t come back as an undead? Except that people seem to do exactly that, all the time. And where do all these zombies come from anyway, if it’s transmitted via physical contact? It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
I guess it depends on your definition of happy ending. I think, given the situation, that was the happy ending - kinda the point.
Awesome link Miller, Knight of the Dinner Table meet Star Wars.
I just lost half my day to that site. Bad enough that he links to TvTropes on every other post.
Zombies don’t eat brains, except in very rare circumstances.
There aren’t many movies where zombies actually eat brains. The only one that comes to mind is Return of the Living Dead. There, as in the Romero zombie movies, the circumstances that create the living dead reanimate anyone who died for whatever reason (though in RotLD it is confined to the area of the graveyard), not just people who are bitten by zombies.
That’s what makes zombies a bigger problem in, say, Night of the Living Dead as opposed to 28 Days Later. In the latter, zombie-ism is a plague that can be controlled and contained. In old school movies anyone who dies, ever, for any reason, will become a zombie as long as there’s enough left of him to stumble around.
Sorry…another strange Star Wars situation…
It’s iconic, I know, but the trash compactor scene has always bothered me. It’s fairly obvious that the heroes (after blasting the shit out of the cell-block and stealing Vader’s prize) slid down the trash shoot into the compactor. Assuming that the compactor was turned on in an effort to dispose of Luke and company (instead of assuming it was just an automatic disposal cycle) why wasn’t there any troops waiting on the other side of the compactor door? They were down there for a good while…R2D2 shuts of the compactor and they get out, change their clothing and leisurely walk down a vacant corridor as if all the Imperials were on coffee break.
Granted, Imperial functionaries were never that bright in the films, that even the most dimwitted stormtrooper would recommend a couple guys head down to the compactor to confirm the situation. Working under Vader would necessitate such redundancy checks among personnel.
Heh, reminds me of the classic McSweeney’s article:
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2002/01/10deathstar.html
I haven’t seen the film for some years, so I may be misremembering, but I don’t think they do anything much for “no good reason” or by being “carried away”. As I recall, they’ve both been heartily and repeatedly screwed over by men: at least one of them is in an unhappy (abusive?) marriage, there’s the attempted rape which the guy follows up by telling the woman with the gun that he has so little respect for her anger and takes his crime so lightly that it’s fine for him to tell her to suck his cock, there’s Pitt’s character… the truck driver’s casual assumption that they must be dying to have sex with someone like him, the casual and revolting obscenity he directed at them simply for the crime of driving while female, and the misogynist decoration of his truck, would surely be enough to push the two of them into believing that this man, like all the others, only wants them for their orifices and has no respect for them. Which it turns out is true. It’s quite restrained of them only to blow up his truck! So it goes on… even the good cop, as I recall, tricks one of them into speaking to him or staying on the phone long enough to be traced. There’s no trust at all between either of them and any male figure, including him, so why would they surrender to him at the end?
As the film continues, they realise more and more that the only person each of them can rely on is the other. They’ve both given up/lost more than they can ever replace, mostly for each other’s benefit, and there’s no way of ever going back. Also, after an experience that intense, how could they be separated and probably locked up for a long time? They love each other, to a level determined by the more or less fevered imagination of the viewer(!), and have nothing else left: they couldn’t have done anything else at the end but die together. It wasn’t a depressing ending, it was a big fuck you - you made us unhappy but we’ve found happiness now and we’re not giving it up by going back to be abused some more.
Lately, the comics have been getting less and less like RPG sessions, in my opinion. “DM of the Rings” was better.
Nothing in your recollection amounts to anything more than “no good reason.” Just because some men are jerks to you doesn’t give you justification for theft or destruction of property.
Assuming you’re a woman, if there are women in my life who treat me badly, and then you and I get in a fight, does that mean I would be “quite restrained” if I blew up your car?
It’s logical in the context of a gynsploitation fantasy.