Watching The Godfather tonight reminded me of something. When Michael is plotting his revenge on Sollozzo and McCluskey, everybody makes a big deal about how much danger he’s in if it goes wrong. First they’re worried because they don’t know where the meeting will be held. Then Sonny is worried that they won’t get somebody trustworthy to plant the gun at the restaurant.
Why are they so worried? The whole reason Michael is chosen for the meeting is that he hasn’t been part of the family business, and he can be trusted as a messenger. If the Corleones don’t find out what restaurant the meeting will be held at, or can’t plant a gun, then Michael goes to the meeting, has dinner and talks with Sollozzo, and comes home. Sollozzo doesn’t know that Michael is coming to kill him, and he won’t know until it’s too late. If they can’t pull the plan together in time, Michael isn’t in any danger.
I suppose it’s possible that Sollozzo has an informant with the Corleone family, but then the issue of planting the gun is still irrelevant. Sollozzo’s men will pick him up, drive him to Jersey, and just kill him.
The whole setup was dumb. After Lou, the Turk’s driver, dropped them off at Louis’s in the Bronx, he just went home? Somebody has to watch the door so errant rival gangsters don’t come in accidentally. Should have followed the inspiration for the scene: (according to legend), when Lucky Luciano wanted to rub out his boss, he conveniently went to the can, at which time a bunch of his buddies came in and blasted the guy away.
If all Solozzo wanted to do was send a message, he would have delivered it to Tom Hagen. As shown in the scene where Solozzo grabs Hagen off the street, he already considered Hagen to be a non-combatant and a reliable messenger.
Asking to talk directly with Michael raised the stakes. Maybe Solozzo wouldn’t actually kill Michael, but he might deliver a very specific threat about another member of the family. And it was Michael’s idea to kill Solozzo at the restaurant. Once he convinced Sonny and the others, well, they had to make sure they got the details right.
I don’t really think that’s what happens. They aren’t particularly worried about Michael being in danger, they are more concerned about the mechanics of making the plan work. That’s because they don’t have a plan B. There is no fall back position. Michael isn’t prepared to make any kind of a deal if they can’t get him the gun.
In fact, they pretty much know that Michael isn’t going to be in any danger because the Corleones are holding onto the negotiator. The negotiator’s purpose doesn’t get explained in the movie, but in the book we find out that the negotiator is a professional hostage used to guarantee Michael’s safety. If Sollozzo had killed Michael at the meeting, the Corleones would respond by killing the negotiator. The negotiator’s family, infamous for being a vicious, vendetta-driven clan, would then take their revenge on Sollozzo because he’s the one paying for the negotiator. So Michael is never really in any danger.
Granted, Tom says maybe it’s too much of a risk for Mike, but Tom isn’t particularly sold on the plan of Michael gunning them down anyway, and Clemenza brushes off his concern by saying, basically, as long as we have the negotiator, nothing is going to happen to Michael.
Inspired by a post in another thread about incapacitating zombies and how much damage is necessary to do so: how big a headshot will disable a zombie? Will a .22 do it? A bb gun? I now have this hilarious vision of something desperately trying to put enough pellets into a zombie to make it stop.
Under the headng of “stupid things I’ve seen people do” I saw some kid shoot a frog at least a dozen times with a BB gun, the frog just ignored it. I don’t think doing that to a zombie would go any better.
In Jurassic Park, how does the gap in the fence allow the T Rex to walk through it, yet later it becomes a cliff over which he pushes a car?
In Wall-E, as pointed out above, the big ship has artificial gravity; why then does everybody slide sideways when the ship tilts? Wouldn’t the artificial gravity always pull them straight towards the center of the ship, regardless of the ship’s position?
In Futurama, why does Amy Wong have to work as an intern at a delivery company if her family is so stinking rich?
How did they get Kong from Skull Island to the stage at Radio City Music Hall? They floated him out to the ship on a makeshift raft. Somehow they hoist him up on deck, and then what? No way he could fit down a hatch. So he’s lashed to the deck for however long it takes tramp steamers to get from the South Seas to NYC, and they wonder why he’s so pissed.
That would depend on how the artificial gravity of the setting works. If the gravity field or whatever generates it isn’t fixed relative to the ship (maybe something like a micro black hole), then the ship could potentially shift relative to the field. Or, it could be that the main artificial gravity system is separate from the “inertial compensator” system and maneuvering too quick overwhelms the latter.
Reading the plot description of the 1933 film, Kong was shackled to the deck but as I remember the 1976 version, he was lowered into an enormous empty oil storage tank. (In this version, the ship was an oil tanker.)
Nitpick: Skull Island is canonically somewhere southwest of Indonesia, in an area of the Indian Ocean where conventionally “there’s nothing there for 1000 miles”.
In Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Neal and Del enter their shared motel room. Neal takes a shower, and when he’s done, he discovers that all the towels have been used and are lying in a pool of water on the floor. How did this happen while he was showering? The bathroom was not in this state when he entered the shower. Del came in and used the bathroom to take a sponge bath at the sink while Neal was in the shower?