I’m going to complain at some length about a scene that IMO slightly mars an otherwise flawless movie. It’s the scene in Moonstruck when Cher comes home from her makeover to an empty house, and moons around trying on her purchases while sultry, smoky 80s saxophone music plays. It starts at about the 2:00 mark of this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LMYry0ejxk
This scene is fine, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it doesn’t belong in this movie. Most jarringly, the music. If the brilliant composer Dick Hyman wrote this, I hope it was under protest, because literally every other piece of music in the movie is classic and timeless, and this one is fully bound in the 1980s. It might as well be Baker Street. Good song, but it’s not Dean Martin or La Boheme. In this context, it sounds like a commercial in the middle of an opera.
It’s also (I think) literally the only solo scene by any character. This movie is obviously about family, and love. Solo scenes, especially as conspicuous as this one, just don’t fit into the theme.
In a different movie I wouldn’t complain about it. It’s not a big deal. But Moonstruck is unbelievably thematically tight. Every scene, every line, every bit of incidental music, it’s all seamlessly stitched. Cher by herself with smoky saxophone seems to belong in another movie, a perfectly fine movie no doubt, but not this one. Every time I come to it, it’s a WTF?!? moment for me.
I;m surprised that no one’s brought up the surreal Boat Ride from the 1971 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Or maybe people today think the scene is normal, after all
For my part I’m still puzzled about the scene in Alien (1979) where Ashe tries to gag Ripley with a rolled-up magazine (not a spoon). I didn’t understand the scene back when it first came out and I’m still puzzled by it. Only now I wonder “Why the hell do they have a paper magazine in board a space ship?” Learning that Ashe is a robot/android doesn’t help explain it one bit.
Could it just add to the alien feeling of everything? What Ash is doing doesn’t make sense because he isn’t human. It would seem like a good idea to something that isn’t human.
I thought it was a reference/callback to the facehugger shoving its ovipositor down Kane’s throat. With the implication that Ash was closer to the Alien than he was to a human. And they had magazines on the ship because it was an SF movie from the early 80s, so they still had magazines. Hell, they were all smoking cigarettes on board too.
To show Sundance and Etty- along with Butch, had a life besides robbing trains and banks.
Because SF often assumes Humans in the future will do things like we do. Many SF books and stories from the 1950s etc assume everyone will smoke in space (and there was even a fairly recent TV series that showed that) even though polluting the air in a closed system is clearly ridiculous. (Even today, astronauts do not/rarely get beans to eat, for gassy reasons) The first commercial handheld e-readers did not come out until the late 1990s, but that reading by computer was obviously on the way.
Frodo, in some sort of trance as a result of carrying the ring, offers it up to a Nazgul who is hovering above.
Not long after this, Faramir agrees to release Frodo and Sam as they continue their quest on towards Mordor.
Wait, isn’t Frodo a huge risk now? We know he’ll offer the rings up to the Nazgul, which is the same as handing them to Sauron himself. Why would Faramir let him go? Why does Sam not speak up at this point? Even Gollum/Smeagol should be worried at this point.
I think that’s a risk for anyone who holds the Ring. The Ring serves Sauron, and by extension the Nazgul. So I imagine anyone in possession of the Ring wouldn’t be able to resist handing it over if they were in close proximity.
The main risk of the Ring and why only someone like Frodo could bear it was thinking that you could safely wield it, even in self defense or to do good. The more you use it, the more it would twist your intentions to serve Sauron.
A perfect example is Daenerys Targaryen in GoT. Her “sudden” heel-change to madness in the final season wasn’t the WTF that people seem to believe it was. Between her family history of mental illness and her behavior in prior seasons, she is a perfect example of the sort of “I love peace with all my heart and don’t care how many people I have to kill to obtain it” behavior the Ring would induce in whoever wields it.
A bigger LoTR WTF moment was Legolas’s Tony Hawk moves and gymnastics in the heat of battle.
I don’t mind she was insane. I mind how quickly it happened. I think the books, which are never coming, would have this occur over a much longer timeframe/page-count.
The first time I saw the movie that whole scene had been edit out for some reason so my WTF moment was was when they were departing for Bolivia Butch throws the bicycle aside with, “The future’s all yours, you lousy bicycles!”
In the manga and anime Planetes one of the characters, Fee Carmichael, has a bad smoking habit. When the designated smoking rooms on the station are closed down due to terrorists planting a bomb in one she commandeers one of the hard shell space suits as her “smoker’s seat.”
The A2 models were always a bit…twitchy. I generally think of Ash’s choice of magazine stemming from a lack of programming for combat. But then there’s the Freudian subtext of trying to shove a phallic object down Ripley’s throat.
Yeah, but we had examples of non-magazine futures, as in Star Trek.
As for the cigarettes, the ship was a fereakin’ enormous ore-hauler with way too much oxygenated space. Befouling the air was the least of their worries.
I note, by the way, that the astronauts in It! The Terror from Beyond Space – the movie Alien shamelessly ripped off – also smoked cigarettes ojn board. And they had a lot less air volume than the Nostromo.
