[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Ross *
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[Nitpick]Its Huzzah not Hurrah.[/Nitpick]
It’s a nice touch, but it was stolen (or “paid homage to”) the 1932 Carl Dreyer flick ** Vampyr**, a historically important, but (in my humble opinion) a terminally boring and confusing film. (The folks at Mad magazine claimed in their parody that it was lifted from Sergio Aragones’ wonderful series “The Shadow Knows”, but Dreyer’s got 'em both beat by decades.)
The best touch of this movie is in the very beginning where two characters are talking about (break-away? cut-aways? not-stop? I forget the term) shooting movie scenes with no editing. Meaning that the camera keeps filming continuously even though it looks like it has gone through a wall or otherwise would need to be editted. The two are talking about one movie that has a scene like that that lasts for 10 whole seconds…while what is actually happening is that THIS scene in The Player goes on for over 30 seconds- the camera never stops filming and it looks like it is going through windows, walls, down the street, etc. They must have spent ages getting that right.
I liked the scene in ‘The Breakfast Club’ when the stoner says that he’ll kill the jock, sticks the knife into the chair, and then the freaker girl slowly reaches over and steals the knife while he keeps talking…
-Tcat
Oh yeah, I liked the tribute made in E.T. when they are walking down the street during Halloween and they pass Yoda and E.T. starts walking towards him going “Mama, Mama!”
-Tcat
It’s called a tracking shot, and it actually lasts over 6 minutes. They discuss several famous tracking shots in movies, most notably in “Rope” and “The Third Man”. For other recent examples, try “The Sheltering Sky”, “Snake Eyes” and “Boogie Nights”. “Unbreakable” is made almost entirely of shots longer than a minute.
In Resevoir Dogs…Who killed Mr. Brown (Tarantino himself)? He’s driving the getaway car, they crash, and you see him rubbing his bleeding head screaming he’s blind (“You’re not blind, that’s blood.”)- very much alive. After Keitel shoots the oncoming cops he asks about Brown- and Orange (Tim Roth) says “He’s dead…” Some say that Brown got shot in the head by cops while escaping, but it was strange that he was alive and acting dazed, and then is just dead after 5 seconds of shooting (when Orange could have shot Brown without White knowing).
-Tcat
In Charlie’s Angels, the suburban house that Drew Barrymore runs into naked after falling from the bad guy’s fancy cliffside home is the same house used for E.T.
– Bob
That’s ‘Tremors’, and the scene (just to add some detail) is the man-eating-alien-worm-monster-whozit busts through the basement wall of these survivalists, the camera slowly pans as they fire off whatever rounds they have in their weapons in hand while slowly backing away from the menace.
The back wall slowly appears in view and we see it is an NRA wetdream. A WALL of various rifles, machine guns, shotguns, riot guns and other small cannons. As our intrepid duo run out of ammo, they simply turn to grab the next weapon and continue firing a John Woo movie’s worth of bullets into the big baddy until it slumps in death.
Exausted, he blurts out “Hah! Broke into the wrong REC ROOM, didn’t ya!”
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has loads of neat touches.
At the beginning when Johnny Depp is doing the voice over he starts mumbling along in the film as well. Then he stops and thinks ‘Did I just say that out loud?’
He also starts to hallucinate bats and stops the car to get a fly swat to get rid of them. As he drives away there is a dead bat by the roadside.
Plus it contains a million and one too subtle to even notice, let alone explain, touches.
The 'droid’s name was C3PO. Don’t know about shipboard communications, but my father was the communications officer aboard the 7th Fleet’s flagship CLG-5 USS Oklahoma City in the 1960s (the flagship alternated between CLG-5 and CLG-6 USS Providence) and he was a lieutenant.
Contact - The opening sequence. With stars flying in complete, beautiful silence.
Twister - Towards the end where Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton are running from the twister. They make their way to a barn, the only shelter they can find, only to open the door and find knives and sickles swinging from the walls. Hunt yells “Who the hell are these people?” (or something to that effect).
Also, in the drive-in scene, the movie that’s playing in the background as the twister descends is ‘The Shining’, with scenes of Jack Nicholson axing down the door and Shelley Duvall screaming.
Castaway - When Tom Hanks’ plane crashes in the middle of the storm and he’s seen riding the waves. The screen blacks out, only to be lit by flashes of lightning. All we see are these huge-ass waves. I thought that was the best part of the whole movie.
That’s not all. One of the characters in the movie is named “Kubrick”.
Star Trek: First Contact
“Borg? Sounds Swedish.”
Someone mentioned Pulp Fiction, and there was another little touch that I thought was fantastic. The scene with Butch (Bruce Willis) and Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) in the hotel. This takes place after the flashback with Christopher Walken, where Walken goes into the long story about Butch’s watch. When Fabienne forgets the watch, and Butch goes on his rampage. He asks her if she had any idea what his dad had to go through to give him that watch. Then he says, “I don’t have time to go into it, but he went through a lot.”
Not to mention the scene where he’s in a flashback and says something like ‘hey is that me?’, and the camera pans to the actual Hunter S. Thompson sitting at a table
Actually he says ‘Home! Home!’ but it is a great scene.
Also the end of ET with the ‘Be Good’ or B, Good!’ lines.
ET says a line back to each kid that is specific to them.
Drew gets B Good.
The older brother gets ‘Ouch’ from when ET mistakes the fake knife for real and tries to heal it. At the end ET feels the ‘ouch’ in his glowing heart.
Of course Eliot gets “I’ll be ritght here” which Eliot says to hime a couple of times in the movie.
Another great touch is that when mom isn’t around the older boys are listening to Jim Carrol’s song People that Died but when she is there they are listening to some inane stuff.
Also, the dog was part of the inspiration for a Star Wars character. Lucas observed his wife driving off one day with Indiana, a big hairy dog, in the passenger seat. Lucas took Chewbacca from the visual that he had.
…had they been a little more careful…
In the scene in which the ark is opened, the villian (sorry, I don’t remember his name) who is wearing the imitation High Priest clothing is saying a prayer. Anyone familiar with Jewish prayers will recognize the prayer as brich sh’mei, a prayer said when the Ark in synagouge is opened. Unfortuantely, the Ark from the Tabernacle and the Ark in a synagouge (where the Torahs are kept) have nothing to do with each other.
The producers/writers probably asked someone to find out what prayer the Jews say when the Ark is opened and didn’t bother to investigate further.
(FTR, there wouldn’t be any prayers that were said when the Tabernacle ark was opened, since it wasn’t opened on any regular basis.)
Zev Steinhardt
Now, Zev, that may not have been a mistake. Perhaps if the guy had said the right prayer, God wouldn’t have melted his face off.
Oh, more stuff.
This is one you’d only catch the second time through. In The Shawshank Redemption, the warden hands Andy back the bible saying “remember, salvation lies within,” which is a nice touch considering what’s inside the Bible.
In Back to the Future II, the holographic Jaws in the year 2015 comes down and attacks Marty. The marquee in the back says “Jaws 15, directed by Max Spielberg,” who’s Steven’s son.
Cameos by Danny Glover, Matt Damon, and Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy in Maverick, Finding Forester and Coming to America respetively, were all funny bits. Oh yeah, and Charleton Heston in the new Planet of the Apes.