I’ve got a few, but first a couple of nitpicks:
GuanoLad already picked up Sam Stone’s THX-1138/TK-421 thing, but it’s also worth mentioning that one of the cars in Lucas’s American Grafitti has a THX-1138 license plate.
And Devil’s Grandmother: Soldier starred Kurt Russell, not Patrick Swayze.
Okay, here’s a few:
In Excalibur, there’s a scene where Arthur is talking to a guy (don’t remember who, it’s been a while) about something or other. As they talk, you sort of subconsciously realize that there’s a figure walking up in the background. Arthur mentions Merlin in the conversation, at which point the figure arrives – and it’s Merlin. When you see the movie a second time, you recognize that Merlin is anticipating being referred to, and is coming up just in time for the reference. Pretty cool.
Say what you like about Unbreakable, pro or con, but there’s a very cool bit of filmmaking late in the movie. (Skip to the next paragraph if you haven’t seen the movie and plan to. Last warning…) When Bruce Willis goes to the house to rescue the family, there’s a long shot where he goes into the upstairs bedroom and finds the woman tied up on the floor. The camera is outside the house, looking in through the window. Watch how the billowing curtains reveal first Bruce at the door, then the woman, then Bruce reacting, and so forth. It looks totally natural, but if you pay attention, it’s clear this is an artificial and deliberate effect. Very subtle, and very cool filmmaking.
Similar to the above is a moment in O Brother Where Art Thou. A newspaper gets tossed on a fire, and just the first page burns off, revealing an important story on the second page. A difficult effect, but par for the course for the Coens.
There are a couple of fun moments in Gremlins where director Joe Dante refers to Steven Spielberg, the movie’s producer. The billboard logo for Rockin’ Ricky Rialto is in the graphic style of the Raiders of the Lost Ark title. In the background of the beginning tour of the town, you see a movie marquee advertising Watch the Skies, which was an early/working title for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And when Stripe, the main villain gremlin, is skulking around the department store at the end, at one point he pops out from a row of stuffed animals, in particular an E.T. doll.
Shakespeare in Love has been mentioned as having a few funny little touches like this. My favorite, I think, is when the boy who enjoys torturing small animals says his name: John Webster. When I saw the movie, four people sprinkled throughout the packed theater burst out laughing, and then shut up quickly when they realized everybody else had turned to stare at them. (I was one of the four.) Webster, for anyone who doesn’t know classical dramas, would go on to write several plays in the Jacobean style, full of gratuitous death and suffering.
In the very funny South Korean slapstick comedy The Foul King, there’s a truly sublime moment about fifteen minutes into it. The hero, a spineless wimp, comes across a gang of youths roughing up a victim in an alley. The hero shouts at them to stop. The lead tough pauses, his leg raised in mid-kick over the victim on the ground. This scene holds for a long, tense moment, until we suddenly realize, after a few silent seconds, that everybody in the alley is physically mirroring the large soccer mural painted on the wall behind them. Hilarious.
Tim Burton loves referring to stuff in his movies (c.f. Max Shreck in Batman Returns), but some of his funniest are in his short film Frankenweenie. In particular, part of the story takes place on a miniature golf course, which allows Burton to show a windmill, referring to the same image in James Whale’s original film of Frankenstein.
And one excellent example of very subtle filmmaking: In Titanic (no, wait, go with me here), as the ship is really starting to sink in earnest, there’s a shot from behind the ship as the stern is raised at about forty-five degrees and a guy falls from the rail. The camera tilts down to follow the speck of his body against the huge ship, showing him dropping what look like hundreds of feet until he splashes hard against the water below. The subtle element is this: When his body impacts, the camera keeps moving down a hair before stopping the tilt and adjusting back up to focus on the splash. Why is this cool? Because this shot is almost entirely a digital effect. Whoever put the shot together recognized that in the real world, a cameraman following the body down would “overshoot” downward a bit. In the digital realm, the camera can do anything; the effects artist could have stopped the camera on a dime when the guy splashed down. That wouldn’t have looked realistic, and by simulating a real-world camera “error,” the special effects are made to seem more realistic.
Oh, and another cool touch like this, since I recently watched Toy Story with commentary: When Woody accidentally knocks Buzz out the window, the bit with the rolling ball across the desk is designed to reference the huge stone boulder at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The camera move sliding up to Buzz, looking up at him from beneath, is exactly the same camera move used by Spielberg looking up at Indiana Jones at the same moment. What’s more, the sounds of the thumbtacks falling and sticking in the desktop are exactly the same sound effects as the darts that shoot from the walls when Indy steps on the floor triggers.
I’ll probably be back when I think of more. I love this stuff.
