Given that the book and the movie are very, very, very, very different things, what would be the point in asking the guy who wrote the book what the movie’s about?
But [uh, SPOILERS] Lonnegan already hired a famous assassin to kill a nobody small-time grifter [Hooker] who stole a little bit from a low-level courier in Lonnegan’s organization. Why wouldn’t he do at least as much for the guys who stole much much more from him personally?
The article uses the book to make its point. Moreover, Wolf created the entire concept of Toons. None of it exists without his mind making it real. How can anyone produce a whole article on what an author’s invention means as a metaphor without at any point mentioning the author?
With a nod to Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan and Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts,":
Rosemary started drinking hard, and seeing her reflection in the knife
She was tired of the attention, tire of playing the role of Big Jim’s wife.
and later:
The next day was hanging day, and the sky was overcast and black.
And Big Jim laid covered up, killed by a pen knife in the back.
Rory’s “knife” was literal, and actually the knife she used to kill Big Jim.
I know this thread is almost zombified, but…
Cruella De Vil - I don’t think I’ve ever seen it written out. Cruella Devil!
I can’t believe I’ve never noticed that!
Not to rub salt in the wound – okay, maybe a bit – but it’s referenced in her song.
Along those lines, I only just now saw the name the character Mel Brooks plays in Spaceballs written out: President Skroob, which is one letter off from “Brooks” backwards.
Never caught that watching the film.
And if you read the book, it is specifically mentioned there.
If you listen to the long version of the song, where he talks about writing it, it almost seems like he’s making her up.
:hangs head in shame:
It also has the feature of suggesting “Skroob balls” = “screwballs” when coupled with the “balls” part of the planet’s name
(Or, as Mel Brooks said in the voice-over for the original trailer, after the word “Space” shows up, monolith-like after the opening 2 minutes of Also Sprach Zarathustra – “Space? — Where are the balls?” At which point the word “Balls” rushes in from the right, squeezing into “Space” to make “Spaceballs”. Mel Brooks intone “Spaceballs – The Movie!”
So “Skroob? Where are the Balls? — Skrooballs, the planet”)
There was something in The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down that I didn’t get, then I thought I got, and now it turns out it was never there to get.
The first line is
Virgil Caine is the name
And I heard the song many time before I made the connection to the last verse.
(referring to his brother, also presumably a Caine)
He was just 18, proud and brave
But a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the mud below my feet
You can’t raise a Caine back up
When he’s in the field
Ah, I thought, it’s a play on Caine/cane, and that one of them doesn’t grow back when it’s planted in the ground.
But I just looked it up, and two sources say it’s not “in the field”, it’s “in defeat”. I like mine better.
IMHO this comes out in the book, too, but a bit differently.
Move:
—Scarecrow does have a lot of clever ideas
—Tinman is a softy
—Lion IS mostly a coward.
Book:
—Scarecrow comes up with a lot of ideas (but IIRC, some are harebrained)
—Tinman is quite self-consciously self aware of his lack of heart so he studiously (frankly, heartlessly) always does the gentle thing because he doesn’t trust his own judgement (lacking a heart, and all)
—Lion is a ‘man of action’, ALWAYS doing the courageous thing without hesitation, never showing fear (maybe afraid to show fear, IIRC). He claims he is a coward because he feels fear inside. This may have been the view of people at the time the book was written, but Lion is definitely courageous by modern lights.
Same thing for the animals in “Cats Don’t Dance”.
I have a couple of creative works misconceptions: I thought Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay” was “Lady Of Spain”, and, because my father was an engineer and told me the little numbers after a song title were the time of a song, I thought the Beatles recorded most of their songs around three in the afternoon (at age six, this made perfect sense; they’d get to the studio at nine, rehearse until noon, lunch at one, more rehearsal until three or so, record the song, do overdubs and such until five and head for home!)…
-MMM-
In the episode of the Simpsons where Comic Book Guy is pushing a wheelbarrow with 100 tacos saying something like they would provide efficient nourishment for the Doctor Who marathon I was assuming that he had invited some nerd friends over to watch with him.
Today it just dawned on me that’s it’s probably a fat joke and he got all the tacos for himself.
I think it’s more a reference to just how long a Who marathon would take. 26 original series, 9 modern series, plus a movie? It would take a week to watch them all if you planned to sleep at all. 14 tacos a day isn’t all that much food, really, if that’s all you’re eating.
This was long before the series got revived, and I think before the movie too.
Watching “The Dawn of Man” sequence from “2001” with my daughter.
"Dad! Is that their… "
Uh, yes, apparently the proto-humans were anatomically correct. Never noticed that before. :smack:
I remembered a few more:
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I hadn’t heard George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” since I was a kid around the late seventies. I never paid attention to the lyrics back then, and in the meantime all I ever heard of it was a snippet of the chorus in commercials for Time-Life collections and such, so I always thought of it as a break-up song. Then it came on XM the other day and I really listened to it, and finally realized, “Oh, because he’s dead”.
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For many years, I thought Reni Santoni and Edward James Olmos were the same person.
Me, too!
For the record, I think misle (v. to cheat or fool) SHOULD be added to the English language ASAP.
Lastly, in the context of the trading card game , Magic, I understand that “to Mise” means to win by luck or to win undeserveely, named after a player who won some (many?) matches where observers thought he was sure to lose.