Okay, the movie “Oh God!”. When God finally appears in person, he tells Jerry it’s okay to start asking questions. One of the questions is “People are always praying to You. Do You listen?”
“I can’t help hearing. I don’t always listen.”
Then a bunch of stuff happens, Jerry doesn’t get in legal trouble but is let go from his job, and God appears to him one last time. Jerry asks tentatively, “Sometimes…now and then…couldn’t we just…talk?”
“Tell you what. You talk; I’ll listen.”
See, I first saw that movie when I was fairly young, and that registered with me as the attitude I usually got from adults: I’m probably not listening, but if it’ll keep you happy, I’ll pretend to listen. Now I get it: God can’t listen to everyone, but Jerry will be one of the few people he makes sure to listen to.
Watching Margin Call again, which is a great movie because much of its story is told obliquely. This time I noticed that it opens with a large firing of employees, even though things were still going good for the trading firm. I wondered if the layoffs were just done as cover for Demi Moore’s and Simon Baker’s characters’ getting rid of Stanley Tucci’s, as he was about to blow the whistle. Especially when Paul Bettany says “you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I’ve seen” during this sequence.
It’s one of my all-time favorite films and one of the few films about the 2008 crash which didn’t make heroes out of villians (the biggest flaw of The Big Short, imho).
But to your point, I think the answer is “no” because it’s established that no one (including Bethany) really knew what he was working on. He even tried to tell Bethany what he was learning only to have Bethany say (effectively), “stop it. It’s over.”
Had they known and fired him for that reason, they would’ve Golden Parachuted his ass, complete with a lock-down NDA. And they effectively did this the very next day, paying him $176,471 per hour to keep quiet (about $1.5 million).
Btw, the Firing Lady was just throwing heat in her one scene.
I recently re-watched It Came from Outer Space (In 3D! – I got an anaglyph DVD) and something about this movie I’ve seen a zillion times suddenly struck me * . At the heart of the alien space ship is a power source and/or control mechanism that looks like a stylized atom. You can see it off to the left in the background here, through the hexagonal port:
It’s got a central Nucleus with spherical glowing lights, and around the outside are circular constructions with similar glowing spheres riding on them. It looks like those models of Bohr atoms they put in school books and popular science articles. When I got old enough to know and care about such things, I figured the set designer was just using it because it also acted as a metaphor for astomic power.
Another film from my childhood, and also from the 1950s, was This Island Earth. In the metalunan space ship, and also on the Metalunan home world, there’s a similar stylized atom power source/control mechanism (seen here behind the Metalunan Mutant):
I used to think “Huh! 1950s set designers didn’t have much imagination if they kept using the same cliche atom as a design element in their space ships” (Well, that was the substance of my thought, if not in those words.)
What I hadn’t realized was that both movies were made, only a couple of years apart, by Universal International. They were just re-using the same thing they’d already built (and paid for). So the ship center from It Came from Outer Space got re-used (in color) for the ship center in This Island Earth. And with a change to purple light bulbs, it was used as the planetary center in the same film. Duh!
Apparently the design of that Metalunan Mutant, with its bug-like limbs and exposed brain, was one of the proposed but unused designs for the aliens in It Came from Outer Space. Waste not want not.
(Both films also featured Russell Johnson as a technician or scientist. He would continue doing so over the years – in Attack of the Crab Monsters and Space Children and two episodes of The Twilight Zone before being fossilized in that role as The Professor in Gilligan’s Island.)
I used to own abbreviated versions of both It Came from Outer Space and This Island Earth on black and white 8 mm film, courtesy of William Castle’s Castle films. In those pre-VCR days I used to watch and re-watch them over and over, sometimes running them backwards, or progressing through frame by frame. It was a revelation to me, years later, when I finally found that This Island Earth was in color, and , better still, that It Came from Outer Space was in 3D.
Also firing someone doesn’t stop them from becoming a whistle blower.
On an unrelated note, I just realized how stupid the license plate flipping thing is on James Bond’s Aston Martin actually is. Who is it supposed to fool? Like he’s being chased by the police or INTERPOL or SPECTRE or whoever and they’ll be all “Oops! We’ve been following the wrong million dollar silver car!”
I’ve had a six year old relative visiting this week and as a result, I’ve watched the movie Bolt about thirty times.
For those unfamiliar with the movie, it’s an animated Disney movie with a lead character who’s a dog on a TV series. The dog thinks that everything that happens to him on the tv show is real.
One thing I noticed around the twenty-fifth viewing is that while the dog’s owner is named Penny in the tv show, nobody ever addresses her by that name in the real world scenes (except the dog and his animal friends). Which leads me to speculate that Penny was just the name of the character and the actress who played her actually had a different name that the dog never knew.
Community, Remedial Chaos Theory, the “Six Different Timelines” episode. I was just watching random youtube video and noticed that Jeff and Pierce are the same height (the characters and the actors).
And when standing, the ceiling fan (as seen as a vague blur above the T in Theory (or in this video at the shown timestamp), is a good two feet above his head.
And Jeff stands up into it over and over. I know Joel the actor and Jeff the character are both very tall, but the fan always seemed low. I had always told myself the fan was probably meant to be over a table but they moved the table to accommodate all the extra people but we can clearly see they moved it for the gag. Also, I’m not sure I ever noticed that Andy Warhol style painting of Troy and Abed in the background.
In Home Alone 2, Kevin explains that he can’t go into the bathroom while Uncle Frank is taking a shower because “he says that if I walked in there and saw him naked, I’d grow up never feeling like a real man.”
I just realized that Uncle Frank didn’t mean “seeing a naked man will screw up Kevin’s developing sexuality” - he meant “seeing my massive dong will make Kevin feel unmanly by comparison.”
I just realised last night that Mick Jagger wrote and sang the theme to “Slow Horses”. Once I knew that, I wonder how could I have possibly missed it, his voice being so distinctive.
From Back To The Future; Hill Valley. It’s an oxymoron. jesus christ. never. never ever would have noticed that if someone random youtuber didn’t just tell me.
(yes, I know about the Twin Pines/Lone Pine thing.)
