Frankly, any thinking is overthinking when it comes to “Police Squad” movies.
It’s already apparent in the books we do have that she’s not up to the role of messianic world conqueror she believes herself to be.
It’s a problem for all the viewpoint characters: the show tends to present them as being objectively as sympathetic as they see themselves. I suppose an unreliable narrator is tricky to put across on screen.
There’s a scene in Ferris Bueller that always confused me. When Ferris, Cameron and Sloane are at the fancy restaurant (when Ferris was pretending to be Abe Froman), Ferris goes to the bathroom and they show a few random shots of Cameron making odd faces. Not even at anyone, just doing it. I finally learned that, originally, he was making faces because he was grossed out by the fancy food but they removed that scene with them eating but still used those few shots. And because of how it’s edited, with just his face in the frame (not the food or Sloane and Ferris) it never made sense. I think at the time I just assumed it was a random thing, kind of like the museum scene or Cameron randomly falling into the pool and saying “Ferris Bueller you’re my hero” when Ferris pulls him out. (Note, I was 6 when this movie came out, I’m sure plenty of it went right over my head the first few dozen times I saw it).
Cameron standing up for himself is why I would have liked to see the confrontation - to see the father realize that he no longer has any power over Cameron.
In Hook, Tinker Bell inexplicably becomes human-sized for all of one scene. Apparently, Julia Roberts insisted on appearing onscreen with at least one other actor (after doing all her other scenes alone in green screen), and Spielberg added that scene to keep her from quitting.
The whole film was a bit odd for me but the frogs raining from the sky at the end of Magnolia (1999) definitely had me going WTF?
As I remember, Steven Spielberg and Julia Roberts did not get along at all well during the making of that film.
Was an explanation ever offered for the fish downpour in the first Fargo series?
It’s something would sound better in the character’s head than would realistically happen in real life. It’s hard to maintain the high ground when you just destroyed a $15 million car.
From Google AI:
"In Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 masterpiece film Magnolia, the climactic downpour of frogs (often misremembered as fish) was directly inspired by the historical writings of Charles Fort. [1, 2, 3]
The Connection Explained
| Entity / Concept | Role & Context in Magnolia |
|---|---|
| Charles Fort (1874–1932) | An American writer and researcher who dedicated his life to collecting thousands of documented, unexplained anomalous phenomena that mainstream science ignored. |
| The Animal Downpour | While the film features a rain of frogs rather than fish, Fort famously categorized both. He challenged the scientific consensus that tornadoes simply “scooped up” ponds, noting how these storms inexplicably pick out only the animals without mud or debris. |
| Director’s Inspiration | Paul Thomas Anderson was introduced to Fort’s work by musician Michael Penn. Anderson used Fort’s ideas to anchor the film’s core theme: that completely bizarre, seemingly impossible coincidences “happen all the time”. |
| In-Film Nods | 1. Hidden Book: The child prodigy Stanley Spector has Fort’s book, Wild Talents, stacked on his desk in the library scene. 2. Closing Credits: Anderson explicitly includes a “Special Thanks” credit to Charles Fort. |
Coincidence vs. The Biblical Plague
Though many audiences and film critics view the downpour as a direct reference to the biblical plague of frogs in Exodus 8:2 (a theory supported by Exodus “8:2” hidden as an easter egg throughout the movie’s background props), Anderson has stated in interviews that he did not originally know it was in the Bible. His primary text of reference was always Charles Fort’s documentation of real-world “Fortean” rain anomalies." [1, 2]
Her nickname was Tinker-hell.
Within the show, they said it was from a tornado. The only clip I could find was from a reaction video, but it’s cued up here.
Symbolically, and I had to look this up since I watched it so long ago, it’s Stavros (Oliver Platt) thinking God is punishing him for opening up the supermarkets with money he found on the side of the road. But in reality (maybe) it’s actually Malvo fucking with him because he just likes fucking with people.
Also, from here:
“The fish symbolize what they symbolize,” the show’s creator and executive producer Noah Hawley told Yahoo TV, basically telling us absolutley nothing as only the most secretive showrunners can. He then gave a bit more insight: “The presence of the fish, you know… in some ways, all the fish imagery builds from Episode 1 until the fish fall from the sky in Episode 6, and then there’s no more fish imagery. You could think, I suppose, that all that imagery along the way was a foreshadowing or a set-up to the fish fall. I think there’s a real theme in a lot of the Coens’ work, but especially in Fargo, which is civilization in the wilderness. The fact that, in this region specifically, you’re living on the edge of the frozen tundra… just this idea of running that wilderness imagery in the story to keep that idea alive.”
Helpful, I know.
That article also goes over all the other fish imagery from S1.
There’s more, but these were the ones I could quickly find pictures of.
At the very end of Being There, Peter Sellars as the great Chauncey Gardiner walks out into a large pond so that he’s literally walking on water. An out-of-view board was snuck just under the water, to make a joke about him achieving the Jesus-like status of walking on water, and at one point, he stops after several paces, and sticks his umbrella well down into the water, as if to demonstrate that he’s “actually” walking on water.
Still WTF-y for this viewer.
In “King of Comedy”, Jerry Lewis unloads a round of blanks at Sarah Bernhart. Despite the goofball kidnapping hell she and De Niro put him through, I can’t see Jerry’s character actually wanting to kill one of his captors. Maybe he ultimately realised they were going be blanks and decided to “scare” her anyway, just to show his contempt for her? I dunno.
Seeing the beast, at the end, in Sexy Beast.