The other day I watched the West Wing episode with Penn and Teller. After a trick in which they (apparently) burned an American flag, Penn had this exchange with the staff:
I was sooo expecting the next line to be, “What’s the difference?” Could have been any of them except Penn, though it would have been best coming from Teller (with a quizzical look on his face). But the line wasn’t there despite my anticipation.
Can you think of examples of scenes that seemed to lead up to a line that you delivered in your own head, but didn’t actually get put on the screen?
At the end of the movie Kiss The Girls (from about 15 years ago), Morgan Freeman’s character faces off with the killer in the kitchen of a house. The gas from the oven/stove has been turned on, and is beginning to fill the room. Freeman has his gun drawn, but if he fires the muzzle flash could ignite the gas and blow everyone up, including himself and the killer’s intended victim (Ashley Judd). But Freeman thinks quickly and makes use of a handy carton of milk on the kitchen table. He puts the muzzle of his gun up against the carton and fires through it to take out the killer without igniting the gas.
I halfway expected Freeman to turn to the camera, smile, and say
Pretty sure the whole point of that scene, and writing the dialogue that way, was for “What’s the difference ?” to immediately pop in the viewer’s head. It’s clever, not missing. Although I do agree with you - Teller saying it and making one of his faces would have been another kind of perfect.
As an aside, in their own act the whole flag burning discussion is addressed in more depth, in their habitual way of re-doing the same trick twice and showing you exactly how they did it the second time around (which often happens to be even more flabbergasting than the first time - that’s the real trick) - and indeed they show that the flag is vanished into a special pocket sewed into Penn’s jacket flap as soon as the Constitution gets rolled up.
Oddly enough, I thought that was a bit of a cop out. Seems to me you don’t get to speechify about the wonderful freedom to burn the flag, and brag about having it, if you don’t burn the fucking thing (and in fact make it a point to reassure your brave, free and patriotic audience that it was all just pretend and they can calm down now).
Minor example, but in the Babylon 5 episode “View from the Gallery,” the two maintenance men interact like an old married couple (and make a joke about another unlikely married pair). Since JMS had already pushed the boundaries of relationships a few times in the show’s run, I always feel that there’s one missing line at the end, indicating the pair ARE married.
Sue me but I always LIKED Tomorrow Never Dies–except for one line which I thought could have been better.
Right as the villain is about to be chewed up by machinery, Bond sneers, “You forgot the first rule of journalism, Elliot–give the people what they want!”
I thought “if it bleeds, it leads” would have been a MUCH better death quip. (It’s a common proverb among the journalism world referring to the tendency of violent news to make the front page.)
The first thing that comes to me is the season two episode of Reba’s first show when she put her wedding ring up on Ebay in order to have money to pay for the work that needed doing on her car and when Brock said to her at the end that he still cared about the ring, I was like, “Well you should have thought about that before you cheated on her!!!”
Did Teller break character in the episode at all? (I imagine not, since I think he remains silent whenever working with Penn… Though he can talk your ear off when he’s off stage, or working alone, from what I understand.)
(I can’t decide whether it would have made the line funnier for him to break character for it, or just make it incongruous in an unfunny way.)
OK, We have to have Data swear. It’s a new rule. But instead of doing it early in the movie. “To hell with our orders” it should have been when he breaks the coolant pipe to kill the Borg. Instead of saying “Resistance is futile” should have been “Resistance is futile, Bitch!”
No, no no… given that the villain’s name was Elliot Carver, the line should have been “What a carve up!” delivered immediately after he gets… carved up.
What they should’ve done is have Teller say it while the camera was showing only Penn’s face. That way he still maintains his schtick, at least partially, and it would reward viewers who were paying attention, since only they would realize that the voice wasn’t any of the regular cast members, and must’ve been Teller’s.
Plus it fits well into what’s being said. The plausible deniability of it having been Teller that actually spoke the line provided by not showing him saying it seems vaguely lawyerly.
As ever, I marvel at the scene in LES MISERABLES where the fugitive with ‘24601’ on his chest strides into court and tears open his shirt like Superman to vindicate an innocent accused of being the fugitive with a ‘24601’ on his chest: “That man bears no more guilt than you; who am I? TWO! FOUR! SIX! OH! ONE!”
The line should’ve been: “That man bears no more guilt than you; remove his shirt; does it say TWO-FOUR-SIX-OH-ONE on his chest? No? The defense rests.”
A scene in NCIS where someone mentioned Ted Bundy. I so wanted Mark Harmon to say something like “I know all about Ted Bundy.” He played Bundy in the mini-series.
Towards the end of The American President, the sitting president goes before the White House Press Corps to (finally) answer some of the campaign mud that Senator Bob Rumsen has been slinging at him.
The speech ends with “My name is Andrew Sheppard, and I AM the President.”
Missing from that has always been “So FUCK YOU, Bob.”
From the moment I saw it, I felt that when Liam Neeson in Taken is about to walk out the door and leave the slimeball to be shocked until he dies, he should have said:
“There’s actually a bright side to this. When you finally die, and it WILL, eventually, kill you, at least Hell will hold no surprises”.
