I’m loath to defend anything about Twilight, but I think it has been unfairly criticized/mocked over the “vegetarian vampires” thing. Yes, it’s true that Edward and his vampire family are the opposite of vegetarians – they cannot even digest actual vegetables, and subsist entirely on the blood of animals that they hunt and kill – but when Edward tells Bella that they’re vegetarians he’s joking. He obviously doesn’t believe they’re literally vegetarians. It’s not a bad metaphor, though; like many vegetarians, they’re following a restricted diet out of an ethical belief that it is wrong to kill and eat certain kinds of life forms. When mixing with humans, claiming to be vegetarians would also give these vampires a good excuse for not eating food that might be offered to them.
In the hands of a good humor writer then the idea of “vegetarian” vampires could be quite funny. “There’s not human blood in this, is there? I only drink cow’s blood, and it has to be organic.” Terry Pratchett did something similar in the Discworld books by having a movement among vampires to refrain from human blood that parodied the temperance movement.
Snip If you want to get technical, both would’ve been dead already because lava doesn’t just kill when you touch it, but getting anywhere near it would be more than a human can withstand.
Of course, the real answer for all these SW questions is that [del]a wizard[/del] the Force did it.
Lamia I would alternately agree with you or bash Twilight. It all depends on how it is worded in the movies/books. If he just says it once, then all those people are absolutely picking at straws. If it’s insisted multiple times in the book instead of a throwaway joke, then I’m with those people. I don’t remember it in the movie, but they we did have Rifftrax on…
What is Quite Interesting is what QI had to say on the matter of “vegetarian” it does not come from the word “vegetable” but from “vegetus”
So if we want to make an ever better fan wank, one just needs to point out that indeed the Twilight vampires were not referring to vegetables, but to proper or fresh food.
The scene where Edward tells Bella that his family is “vegetarian” is in the movie; the Rifftrax crew points out that Edward is totally not a vegetarian, but it’s their job to make fun of everything. I’ve seen this “They say they’re vegetarians when they actually kill animals!” thing come up as a semi-serious criticism of the Twilight though, which I think is a shame because there are plenty of better reasons to criticize/mock it. There’s no need to resort to taking something literally that wasn’t intended as such.
I can’t find the clip online, but I’m not sure Edward even says “we’re vegetarians”. I think it’s something like “we say we’re vegetarians” or “we’re like vegetarians”. He then compares the animal blood diet to being a human who can eat nothing but tofu: it’ll fill you up and keep you going, but it’s pretty bland. (Since they can’t digest other food I guess they can’t just stir in some hot sauce.) So it’s obviously an analogy and not a claim that killing animals and drinking their blood is what real vegetarians do. To the best of my recollection, the term “vegetarian” isn’t used again in the movie, although I don’t know about the sequels or books. (I couldn’t force myself to finish the first book.) Anyway, while I don’t think this scene is meant to be particularly amusing – Edward’s not exactly a barrel of laughs – the vegetarian thing is presented like it’s a family joke. IIRC in the movie he even gives a little emo chuckle when he says it.
In the episode Space Seed it’s made clear that Khan has a photographic memory which is why he’s able to learn how to run the Enterprise by speed-reading a number of tech manuals in the space of a few hours.
A lot of people have mocked Independence Day because Jeff Golblum’s character was able to upload a virus into the alien computer. Because obviously a human computer wouldn’t have a compatible operating system with an alien computer.
Except they forget that he was the guy who had been working on deciphering the alien signals at the beginning of the movie. He wasn’t using an ordinary off-the-shelf computer in the attack. He was using his computer which had specifically been adapted to handle alien programs.
So rather than being roll-you-eyes flat-out impossible, this was just normal action-thriller improbable.
ACTUALLY there is a deleted scene on the DVD which shows Brent Spiner’s character saying they have been working on the alien computer they recovered from Roswell for 50 YEARS! Area 51 has half a century of programming experience with the alien OS, and in fact modern computing may be based off the alien computer.
Back to the Future: Marty’s parents somehow don’t think twice that their second son grows into a clone of Calvin Klein from their old high school.
[ul]
[li]I have a great memory for faces, but I can’t recall high school people from decades ago, especially ones that fell off the face of the earth. From the end of the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, Marty won’t be born for another 13 years, and he won’t grow to resemble Calvin until he’s closer to a teenager. So as many as 26 years would pass by before George and Lorraine should recall that their kid looks exactly like a guy they last saw a quarter of a century ago.[/li][/ul]
Alien: It greeeeeeeeeeeeeew! Whinge.
[ul]
[li]Who’s to say the facehugger’s implant doesn’t come with a condensed million calorie yolk sac? These fuckers have pressurized acid for blood! Anything is possible.[/li][/ul]
The Empire Strikes Back: Of all gin joints, of all the swamps in the world, Luke crashes in Yoda’s.
[ul]
[li]A wizard did it. A little green one who can do telepathic shit across space, time, and death. And who later telekinetically raises an X-Wing with all the ease of me getting the blender down from the top shelf.[/li][/ul]
Star Trek (2009): They rip off the above, substitute Kirk for Luke and Old Spock for Yoda.
[ul]
[li]Fate and Destiny. Even Spock is shocked in his way. The universe declares the Kirk/Spock friendship so vital, it sets up this unlikely reunion across time. You either buy it or don’t, but it’s not a hole, it’s just a reason that doesn’t satisfy like a Snickers.[/li][/ul]
Gremlins: The rules. “Don’t feed him after midnight” Okay, but at what hour can I start feeding him? If I’m on a plane flying over timezones, etc?
[ul]
[li]Daytime. Morning. It’s just implied. Basically, don’t feed him really late at night, and wait for morning/sunup. Nothing we see implies this wouldn’t work.[/li][/ul]
I think once you start invoking the characters’ Fate as a reason why things happen, you’ve pretty much eliminated any possibility of there ever being a plot hole.
No, that was the crux of that particular movie. You don’t have to like it, but their reasoning is explicit. Plus, it seems like there’s more than a few classics that fit that bill too.
Which is exactly why they hired him. Not because the Russians complained at the time, because they wanted teenyboppers to watch and he was a dead ringer for Davy Jones.
OK, that’s acceptable, but just saying that Jeff Goldblum’s been working on decoding their transmissions doesn’t cut it. The transmission he’s been working with is… a countdown. That’s it. Now, that will give very useful information about the aliens’ number system, and understanding that might give some vague clues about how they think about mathematics, but let’s be honest: Does understanding how humans count enable you to write in Fortran?
I’ve NEVER heard anyone state that the apparent lack of food on a trip was a plot hole for ESB. For the record, I’ve never seen a bathroom on the Falcon either, but it’s never occured to me to question the defecation habits of Solo. Chewy, maybe.
The point was he had decoded their countdown. It might just be a sequence of numbers but it still meant he had successfully figured out how they transmitted information.
