Agreed. Many criticisms are justified but you cannot assume perfect knowledge. Sometimes people/creatures make the wrong decision because they don’t know.
Silence of the Lambs.
Watching this right now for the umpteenth time, and it reminded me of this thread.
Just how does he get the pen, anyhow? Straight jacket, mask… you know the rest.
Oh, and now it’s just got to the dramatic crucifixion style disembowelling. Like he’d really take the time to do that.
Aha, but it was done for shock effect to make the police officers less aware of the state of their surviving colleague.
Complaint denied! 
Pay attention! The scene where he gets the pen is shown very explicitly.
In the book he had the pen for some time, scored it from his lawyer (I think) on one of Barney’s days off. the whole point of agreeing to meet with the Senator was to get himself into a venue where he could use it.
Didn’t see this thread the first time around; glad it’s back, 'cause I’ve got questions/comments:
This brings up something I’ve always wondered about this movie. Which of these would’ve been the worst:
a) The current ending, in which the lesson seems to be, as BlinkingDuck put it, "learn your place and stay there.
b) Shrek becomes human to be with Fiona, in which case the lesson would’ve been “guys who aren’t pretty don’t stand a chance to win a girl they like or be happy unless they change who they are.”
c) Shrek remains an ogre and Fiona a human, in which case the ending would’ve carried some creepy quasi beastiality overtones.
And is there a way out?
I’ve read the original, and I don’t think “violating [its] spirit” is a BAD thing. That was one story whose spirit needed to be violated, especially its ending. Oh, Lord, its ending.
I agree. If Fiona hadn’t ended up ogre-like, the apparent lesson of the movie would have seemed to be “fall in love with somebody for their inner qualities - as long as they’re a beautiful woman on the outside” and people would have complained about the hypocrisy of that.
While we’re on the subject of The Silence of the Lambs, the last scene had two big problems for me.
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You are an FBI agent who has discovered a violent serial killer at his home. He has a hostage. He knows who you are, and is trying to kill you. No one knows where you are. If ever a situation screamed “call for backup”, this is it.
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You are scared. You are in a dark room, can not see, and are fumbling your way around. The remorseless killer has night-vision glasses and has a gun aimed at your head. I just don’t believe she could turn, raise her weapon, fire, and drop him in the time it takes him to cock and fire.
The pen thing bothered me, too.
Again from my memory of the book:
She had no idea it was the killer at first, she was just trying to talk to people who had known the first victim, no cell phone, no radio, no one knows exactly where she is.
Jame had a habit of stalking his victims with the night vision goggles, watching them as they stumbled around, he wasn’t commited to firing when he cocked his weapon, and he’d never been up against to trained opponent before.
When Lector first acquired the pen, he immediately broke it open, flushed the big pieces down the toilet and slowly used a sharp edge on his cot to cut the metal insert into a key. kinda hard to spell all that out in the movie, so they cheated, I guess
Exactly, but once she finds out, she goes stumbling around the house looking for him. If she get shot, she’s dead, Catherine Martin is dead, and Buffalo Bill is on the loose with no one the wiser. (The feds could probably trace Starling’s movements to his house, but he’d have plenty of time to be long gone.) In a situation like that, call for backup.
Remembered another one.
In The Hunt for Red October, much is made of how this new, ultra-silent submarine is a provocative, first-strike weapon; but ballistic missile subs are second-strike weapons. That’s the whole point of being hidden, to survive the first strike and be a be assured of launching missiles in retaliation.
Plus the fact that it’s not untraceable at all. The sonar operator on the Dallas makes a tape and is able to track the sub with no problems. All they have to do is get that information to the rest of the fleet, and the Red October is just another Soviet sub. That’s several billion rubles of R&D defeated by ten bucks worth of parts from Radio Shack. We’d probably still love to have a look at it, but its status as a wonder weapon is gone.
The new Batman movie, whatever it was called, had me bored shitless. Heath Ledger was a caricature playing a caricature and it was a gross overacting piece of crap. Jack Nicholson was much better; at least you knew it was comic book fodder.
Sorry. I hated the Dark Knight or whatever the hell it was called. I felt no empathy for gravelly-voiced Batman and thought the Joker character was over-acted. Two thumbs down.
There was another dangling plothole in the movie. They set up an elaborate deception to convince the Soviets that the Red October was abandoned and lost at sea because of a radiation leak and the defecting officers went down with the ship. But they forgot that early in the movie, Ramius had told his officers that he had mailed a letter that revealed their plans to defect in order to commit everyone. In the movie, this letter would have revealed that the loss of the sub was a cover-up. Clancy fixed this in the book - he had a second CIA deception that made the letter look like a fake as well.
Well, the letter mobilized the Soviet navy, and got them to concoct the story that got the U.S. hunting for Ramius as well. As far as they know, we fell for that story hook, line, and sinker. The crew were convinced to leave the sub by the fake radiation leak. The Soviet leaders were (presumably) convinced she was sunk by the fake torpedo attack from the U.S. destroyer. They would be patting themselves on the back for their cleverness.
The only witnesses to the deception were on the Soviet attack sub. The plothole depends on what information they would have been able to communicate before they were blown up, or whether anyone is able to figure it out once the second sub goes missing.
Except that if she had just called for backup, Buffalo Bill would have killed Catherine Martin for sure. Going in there without support was the only way to save her.
It’s not explained in the movie, but Jones, the sonar operator is actually a tech genius who had been kicked out of . . . I believe it was CalTech. What he did was actually extremely difficult to come up with, particularly with the gazillion dollar computer telling him otherwise. It wasn’t as easy as it looked.
I’m no tech, but would the Soviet sub have had time to surface and relay this information before going on the attack? Tupolev struck me as a guy who wouldn’t call in except to say that it was already dead. The Soviets, already humiliated in the eyes of the American government by the loss of the October decided not to pursue the matter in order to save their reputation, and just assumed the best. Considering that the events of the book took place around the time of Chernobyl, I don’t consider this to be a particulary unrealistic event.
Debateable. If B.B. just wanted them dead, he would have hurried up and shot them. All Starling needs is enough time to call the local sheriff or FBI HQ, tell them who she is, where she is, and who the serial killer the whole country is looking for is. If she gets killed after that, at least the cops are on the way and Bill isn’t going to get anyone else. Worth the trade, it seems to me.
Besides which, when Starling makes the decision to go after Bill, does she even know that Catherine Martin is alive? I don’t think she does, until she sees her in the basement later.
It’s been a while since I’ve read the book. Even if Jonesy is a god among sonarmen, he’s already done the hard part. They can send his tape to the non-genius sonar operators in the fleet, and reprogram the sound-recognition computers. The next time that particular magma displacement is heard, they’ll be all over it.
They deliberately don’t show us much of the Konovalov so that here arrival at the end will be a surprise, and I have no idea what their procedures or ability to communicate would be. It’s possible the Soviet command knew every move she made, or they may not have even known that she was anywhere near the Laurentian Abyss.
Good points, both of them, but remember that Starling had maybe three seconds to weight the situation and decide what to do, and she wasn’t even out of the academy, let alone serving as an experienced field agent. Considering this, I’d say that not only did she act realistically, but her instincts turned out to be quite good.
Very true, but then again, no one has ever accused the leaders and engineers of the Soviet military of being geniuses. Like the example in Silence of the Lambs, it might not have been the best scenario, but that’s not to say it’s unrealistic.
First of all, if you think that way, it is already there, because Shrek is gaga over Fiona before he knows she splits time as an ogre. Second, it’s SOP for fairy tales, and kids are surprisingly blind and uncaring about that kind of thing.
Perhaps, but the rejoinder to that is that Fiona loves Shrek regardless of his appearance, so the lesson of inner qualities is already included.
But you have to think like a Cold War era military person. The Soviets have this super secret undetectable submarine. That means that not only can it hide in the vast scale of the ocean, and thus elude attack subs (i.e. conventional nuclear subs), but because it is undetectable it can sneak up and park right off the coast of the U.S. Okay, so the Soviets decide (because they are evil, you know) that they want to wipe the U.S. out in a first strike case. Are they going to use their ICBMs that take 90 minutes and give the U.S. plenty of opportunity to launch their ICBMs, or are they going to first strike from the hidden sub just off the coast that can surface and launch and hit Washinton,DC, New York City, etc before the U.S. can spin their ICBMs from park to launch? That’s what it means to be a first strike weapon.
Well, the fact that the Dallas figures out that they are getting a signal is very fortunate for the Americans. I wouldn’t say he could track the sub with no problems at all. It took some real guesswork and talent to ID that strange noise as a new submarine. Yes, it does mean the technology is not as worthwhile, but there was no guarantee that would happen. Besides, by getting their hands on the technology of the drive, there is the possibility they could steal the drive for their own use and then have better hidden ballistic missile subs. After all, there’s no reason to think the Soviets could detect the subs as well as the Americans did, is there?
If the Konovalov had been tracking for some time, you would have expected the Soviets to have had it engage the Red October. After all, they had that letter that the Red October was trying to defect. It plays out more reasonably that the Konovalov came across Red October and the Americans where they did at that time. As for communication, it would not be unreasonable to assume the Soviets had similar communication abilities as the Americans. It could be debated whether they stopped, put up an aerial on the periscope without fully surfacing to ask for orders, or whether they engaged based upon previous orders to prevent the loss of the Red October and the Captain’s judgment of the situation. I think the latter is what is intended by the story.
Is there a fairy tale where a human falls in love with a non-human, and the latter stays that way? All the ones I can think of (Beauty and the Beast, The Frog Prince, etc.), the guy becomes human by the end.
My petty rant…
In just about every sci-fi movie I can think of that depicts interstellar travel, when they show the ship blasting through space, the starfield is just zipping along, with the “closest” stars just shooting by. I understand it’s plot device, but it just looks weird to me.
Since space is so vast, wouldn’t a more accurate depiction be a **stationary **starfield, given the HUGE distances between stars?
Ludicrous speed aside, just how fast do you need to going to get that rapidly moving starfield?
I just sent in a pievce on this very issue to my magazine, OPN. I’ve had an issue with it for years. It’s obviously another piece of film-maker’s “Mickey-Mouse”, smething that conveys a sense of motion, even though it isn’t at all accurate.
The first movie I saw it in was in 1940’s Fantasia. It showed up all the time in the 1950s, even occasionally when the hip is within the Solar System! (Like in This Island Earth and – Heinlein must be rolling in his grave – Operation Moonbase). Not everybody did this – the better SF films of the 1950s avoided it, like Forbidden Planet, Destination Moon and It! The Terror from Beyonf Space.
But then Star Trek used it (well, they were travelling at faster than light speed. Nobody knows how that’s supposed to look), and ever since, it’s used all the time now.
As for what it should look like – until you’re going pretty close to the speed of light, there’s not a chance you’ll see anything. But when you start moving that fast, things start to look odd. The stars seem to pull towards where you’re going and where you’ve been, with not a lot in between, so you still don’t get to see them prettily whipping past you. There’s also Doppler-Shifting of the stars. Back in 1961 a fellow named Sanger thought that this would make the stars form a “Starbow”, with the stars going from blue in front towards red in the back, but he used a ludicrously simplified model, and his assumptions don’t really pan out. A couple of physicists redid the calculations and found out that the “starbow” didn’t exist (except in a very rough way), but not until Fred Pohl had already used the concept in the title f a story. Them’s the chances you take.