How about in the second movie where they enter a bar showing robot football on big screens? Or, the 50’s style diner replete with a short-order chef and nasal-voiced waitress? Argh! Leave the American arcana out of the Star Wars universe please.
Make that “Americana”.
No, that is correct, they don’t.
There is at least two major differences between the Ghost Army in the books vs. the movies. In the books they don’t get as far as Minas Tirith, and it also isn’t clear if they do any actual physical killing of the bad guys, or if they just scare the crap out of them.
Significantly the army that is attacking Southern Gondor (in the books) consists mostly or entirely of men, so you don’t have to wonder about if Orcs would find spirits of dead humans scary. The Ghost Army scares the bad guys away then leaves, and then the good (living, breathing) guys can follow Aragorn north to liberate Minas Tirith.
I see why Jackson didn’t do it this way, it would have required casting and outfitting hundreds more extras for what would have ended up being only a few minutes in the final film, and probably would have confused the heck out of audiences unless he threw in a lot of maps and explanation.
So instead we have the green Scrubbing Bubble Ghost Army liberating Minas Tirith by atttacking the oliphaunts. FWIW I’m pretty sure Jackson wasn’t crazy about it either but he knew he would never hear the end of it if he left the Ghost Army out.
I highly doubt the director of The Frighteners cused the idea that he might have to put ghosts in th movie.
Sounds pretty similar to my problem with the original Saw, which was:
[spoiler]what, these guys are trapped in a room with a “dead body” for like six hours, and not once do they catch him breathing? Or making the tiniest movement? As if!
My wife called it in the first few minutes of the movie. “Watch, I bet that dead body is really the killer!” I said, “…nah, that would be too stupid. They couldn’t possibly expect us to believe that.” And yet they did.[/spoiler]
Jack Ruby?
[shrug] That happens all the time IRL.
No
I usually can’t watch a movie or TV show where the entire cast looks like they just stepped off a fashion runway. It screams “Hollywood actors.” Yeah, one fox in a work place, I can see, but unless you work at Vogue or something, at least some of your coworkers will look at least normal.
I really want to like Shark because I love James Woods, but this will probably keep me from watching it.
cough GreysAnatomy cough :rolleyes:
They tried to explain this in Saw III. I didn’t follow that piece as I hadn’t seen Saw or Saw II, but now it makes better sense.
He drugged himself to slow his breathing and heartrate.
Yeah, I know it’s a TV show and all but I can’t help but ask my wife when it’s on “Would you really want to be a patient in a hospital like that with all the doctors and nurses running around sleeping with eachother and bringing their personal drama to work with them every day?”
I noticed that one, too. Which probably explains why the scene didn’t make the cut for the theatrical release.
I just saw **Little Miss Sunshine ** today. Great movie. However, just before the little girl is going to go on for her talent competition, her mother says, “Is that your costume?” It’s just not conceivable to me that the mother wouldn’t know what the little girl’s costume was, and indeed wouldn’t have been involved in making or acquiring it. The movie is so good that I give this a pass, (and the familie’s lack of knowledge about the nature of her performance is a plot point) but it just sort of jumped out at me while I was watching.
Given that you acknowledge it as a plot point (from the very first scene of the movie) – actually it’s more part of the premise rather than just a plot point – and given the movie’s pains to paint the various eccentricities of the characters – I don’t see how it could pull the viewer out at the end of the movie.
Well guess what? You’re wrong!
I listened again to the director’s/writers commentary on the Return of the King Extended Edition. Jackson specifically states he didn’t like the idea of a ghost army from a story point of view because an immortal army at one’s command becomes an unstoppable force that kind of eliminates dramatic tension. He tried to deal with this by playing up the uncertainty as to whether or not the Army of the Dead would in fact follow Aragorn or not.
Peter Jackson obviously has no problem with ghosts in movies per se, but he recognized as other people did upthread that these particular ghosts as depicted in this particular movie created plot difficulties.
Lots of things happen all the time IRL that have no place in a movie. RL and movies are different. In short, if my hands were made of metal, that might mean something.
How about where the protagonists do something incredibly stupid and against their own characters that it pulls you out of the movie. Frex, in Star Wars I, Obi Wan and Calgon Jim buy Anakin from the slaver, but leave his mother enslaved.
At that moment, I’m going what? You’re going to leave the mother of a potentially very powerful Jedi Knight enslaved on a distant planet? WTF? Nothing but good can come of that? It was so obviously a piece of “managed” stupidity that it pulled me right out of the film.
It’s worse than that. They left her enslaved, when they had the means to buy her. Follow me here:
Qui-Gon makes two bets with Watto. The first bet is their ship (that silver SR-71) against the parts they need to repair it. The second bet is Anakin’s freedom against Anakin’s pod racer. Qui-Gon does try to get Shmi in the bargain, but Watto says, “No pod is worth two slaves.” He takes the bet, though, so it seems that a pod can be worth one slave. And he’s pissed after the roll of the die that it turns out to be Anakin, who apparently he’d rather keep than Shmi.
Okay, so, the pod race ends, and Anakin wins. That means Qui-Gon wins both Anakin and the parts to fix the ship, free and clear. They keep their ship, and they keep the pod. Just before they leave, Anakin sells his racing pod, and apparently for a good price (and why not, it’s the pod that beat Sebulba). Shmi, when shown the money, is impressed and says, “That’s wonderful, Ani!”
So…why didn’t they use the money from the sale of the pod to buy Shmi from Watto? They didn’t need the money for anything else; they already had Anakin and the parts they needed. Watto apparently made other bets on the race, and he very likely needed money to cover them. It was established earlier that a pod is worth about one slave, and Anakin apparently got a great price for his. And it seemed earlier like Watto didn’t much care whether he lost Shmi anyway. So, why not buy her? They never even offered to buy her. For that matter, even Anakin didn’t think, “Hey, why don’t I use this cash to buy Mom’s freedom?” It’s just a big hole that the writer failed to fill.
For example, Claire Sterling’s falling in love **with a psychotic serial killer ** in “Hannibal”? Oh yeah, that fits into her character.