As an example from the movie Pulp Fiction there are 2 that come to mind.
1st I have seen discussed here before, when Marcellus Wallace says the line about “Some hard, pipe hittin niggers” a lot of people failed to realize this was a reference to crack heads.
The second one is when Vincent Vega is buying his heroin his dealer is out of balloons and asks him if a baggie is ok…which becomes a major point later on when Marcellus’s wife finds the baggie and mistakes it for coke (heroin comes in balloons as an identifier)
anyone else notice these kinds of things? anyone not notice either of those from the movie?
I have to admit that I missed both of those. In my defense, I didn’t know that heroin came in balloons.
Iwonder how many people understand the scene early on in Forbidden Planet where everybody gets into what looks like Star Trek transporters. If you follow the dialogue and are familiar with period science fiction tropes, it ought to be clear, but how many people are any more, or even pay attention?
They’re approaching the DC Point, which is clearly the Deceleration point – they talk about dropping below light speed, and there’s an announcem,ent to make sure all Breakable Gear is stowed. The transporter-like effect is clearly a stasis field to protect the bodies of the crew of C57D from being pulped to jelly by the awesome deceleration forces they would encounter (I don’t know how many Gs you encounter dropping from faster than light to far below light speed in seconds, eveb if such a thing were possible, but it seems reasonable that it would be a LOT).
More recent pop culture ignores the issue (I suspect that in Star Trek the artificial gravity/relativistic effect stuff extends throughout the entire ship. To be frank, I’d feel better if the C57D’s stasis fields did, too. I don’t care how well you store your Breakable Gear – the consequences of it gettibng loose would be catastrophic) or addresses it in weird ways (I wouldn’t want to have to be reconstituted from my constituent biomass after having been killed by the sudden deceleration, as in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos), but I’ll bet most people simply have no idea what’s going on during that scene.
C. J. Cherryh handled the issue of decelerating from lightspeed well in “Downbelow Station” in that dumping vee as you left lightspeed was a huge problem for FTL ships and formed part of the calculations for the battles the FTL ships engaged in.
You’re right, of course…but when I first saw it, i thought he was referring to men kept in isolation in prison for so long they would bang on the pipes to communicate.
I still think my version sounds cooler; such men sound much more formidable than mere crackheads.
Spielberg’s Lincoln movie opens with a black-and-white dream sequence with Lincoln aboard a black ship rushing at great speed to an unknown shore.
That was a real, recurring dream Lincoln recounted shortly before his death. At the time, it might be assumed he had been dreaming about the unknown end of the war and the strange new land that Reconstruction would bring; but his assassination a short time later suggests a more sinister interpretation.
Historian Bruce Catton, who had a keen eye for the poetic, talks about this dream in one of his books, in a chapter appropriately titled “Toward a Dark, Infinite Shore.”
I’m not sure modern audiences recognized it was really something Lincoln experienced, as opposed to move stylistics.
I thought he meant “guys who’ll hit you very hard with lead pipes.”
Me too. I misheard the line as “pipe-swinging niggas” and thought the same thing you did. It fits in with the scene, and what Marcellus planned to do with the two hillbillies.
Also, in Pulp Fiction, when Travolta is bitching about someone having keyed his car? It’s kind of subtle, but that was Bruce Willis’s character who did it after being insulted by Travolta at the bar.
Another one: from Return of the King. After Denethor takes his flaming leap off the parapet, and the other guys are sitting around plotting what to do, Gimli is sitting in Denethor’s chair smoking his* pipe. It took me about four viewings to catch that.
*I mean his own, Gimli’s, pipe. That would have been too much to have him smoking Denethor’s pipe.
That’s how I always interpreted it. There was a line in the original script that didn’t make it into the movie: As Butch is leaving the pawn shop, he hears Marcellus dial the phone and say “Hello? Mr. Wolf?”