I never noticed the line. And upon noticing it, my first thought it is just the name of their commanding officer.
That’s less of a WTF for me because it feels like a stylistic choice by the director to show the dehumanizing and institutional nature of the military.
That whole movie was a bit of a WTF for me.
IME from about the same era as the making of FMJ, USN (and hence USMC) was very serious about nicknames (AKA “callsigns”) for their pilots and especially the fighter & attack guys. USAF of the same era it was a LOT more selective. Maybe half the guys had nicknames = callsigns, the rest did not.
IIRC USN often used those nicknames on the radio. Not for ATC purposes but between airplanes in a group and also between carrier and airplane. USAF never did anything like that.
Nowadays? I have no clue.
At least it appears to answer the title question. (“Dead.”)
For anyone still wondering about watermelons, search Buckaroo.
Many low-budget movies have WTF moments due to slap-dash screenplays and limitations on re-takes. But one big-budget film from 1969 has (for me) an inexplicable reliance on the same cheap sound effect—“thunderous hooves”—for EVERY shot of horses galloping. It doesn’t matter if they’re on rock or sand, it’s the same sound effect.
So it’s not really a ‘what is going on here’ WTF, more of a ‘how did they fail to notice how stupid this is’ WTF:
Mackenna’s Gold. Gregory Peck, Omar Sharif, Telly Savalas, etc. (one of the late-60’s ensemble adventure pics.)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064615/?_ssoLoop=1
L.A. Story has a handful of lines where characters mention someone named Harry Zell, always in an offhand familiar tone as if we should already know who he is. Same deal - he was originally in the film (played by John Lithgow), but all his scenes were cut.
She was very stoic? sociopathic? when it came to that kind of thing and he pretended to be the same in order to get her to like him. She ‘tested’ him by killing his dog (brother) to see if he’d react. When he started crying, she knew he wasn’t for her and ended things between them. As far as what happens after that, he escapes and spends the rest of the movie in the woods with a group of people that also escaped. But it doesn’t get any less WTF. If you didn’t like it before the dog scene, you’re not likely to enjoy the rest of it either.
It’s also worth noting that The Lobster is a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, so at least some amount of WTF is to be expected.
The ending of Hope. It starts off as a pretty good “monster attacks town” movie, I can say that. Where it ends up…well, I’d say wait until you can see it for free on a streaming channel.
There are incurable diseases that cause parrots to lose all their feathers. In the wild they would just die, but in captivity their owners help them with little knitted sweaters etc.
There is no prospect at all of the filmmakers of a 1980’s mainstream Hollywood movie plucking a live bird.
The parrot would have been a (probably well loved) pet that had lost its feathers to disease.
I knew “The Hurt Locker” wasn’t a documentary before I watched it, but there’s a scene early on that gives it away, which actually may have been the idea. An American soldier points out an Iraqi on a rooftop with a video camera, and says, “I bet he’s going to put that on YouTube.” The movie is set in the fall of 2004, and YouTube was launched in the spring of 2005.
Also, “127 Hours” is one movie-long blooper; the main actor’s facial hair never changes throughout the film.
It’s also worth noting that The Lobster is a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, so at least some amount of WTF is to be expected.
Completely fair and I have very much enjoyed his other work (particularly The Killing of a Sacred Deer - Keoghan was brilliant). Perhaps one day I will revisit it.
It’s also not uncommon for parrots to experience a behavioral disorder that causes them to pluck their own feathers. It’s usually a psychological disorder but sometimes can be associated with allergies, parasites or other physical causes. However in such cases the bird doesn’t pluck literally all its feathers, since it can’t reach some areas with its beak, such as its head.
Wotta coincidence, I was rereading some old threads and
I’ve seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off three times, I think, and I’ve never understood why the movie does not show Cameron standing up to his father about the damage to his father’s car.
The ending of Enemy, although there’s a lot of WTF throughout the movie.
Maybe they thought that would be anticlimatic?
If YouTube film guru Cinemastix is to be believed, they didn’t realize that the movie was about Cameron until after they filmed it. They had to do some radical edits.
That’s what I recall. I’ll see if I can dig up the video.
Maybe they didn’t want you to see he was the same age as his father? (Warning: age of the actor has been exaggerated for purposes of humor)
It would have been too ugly. Even if Cameron was successful in standing up to his dad, it would have been a nasty, unpleasant confrontation, an that’s not the tone they wanted to end the movie on.
I conflated two different videos. There’s the one about all the edits and then there’s this one.
I was just thinking though, from a storytelling perspective, the central question isn’t whether he’s going to stand up to his father. It’s whether he’s going to live in constant dread of his father. And by the end of film he seems at peace with not only the fact that he’s going to get in trouble, but that his father is never going to really accept him. So there’s no need for a confrontation scene. It would kind of undermine the nature of his personal growth.
Barring that, apparently the film was written in a week.
But it was not. That is just a fun fan concept.