Someone here had a great post about it some time ago, so I might have forgotten some of the details. But basically, since the lonely-dude lied about being married IIRC, it gave her reason to doubt the story she had been told by the car salesman.
In Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, you could cut out practically every scene with Liv Tyler and you wouldn’t lose anything (except for Liv Tyler fans, I guess).
If we’re talking about the original Swedish version, I gotta disagree with you somewhat there. Yes, a large part of why those scenes need to be a part of the plot is because of the role they play in the subsequent movies. However, they do contribute both to Lisbeth’s background and character development, and to giving Lisbeth a personal and thematic connection to the crime she is investigating.
If you mean the Americanized version, then yeah, totally. The extra attention paid to the rape and the sex was gratuitous in an offensive manner. And the movie was overall less artful, reducing any effectiveness such scenes had towards thematic development.
You could probably cut out the sex scene in Delicatessen and not lose much more than a bit of comic relief, except, what is a French movie without a sex scene? Might as well just watch Jacques Tati stuff.
Flagg called in all of his people from outside Vegas and out toward the west coast to witness the execution. Because of that, ALL of the people allied with Flagg were caught in the explosion. The Boulder people were the sacrifice to make it so complete.
Not that some other excuse couldn’t have been thought up that didn’t involve so many extra pages. Story starts to seriously drag art that point.
Well, since you haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil it, but rest assured that humans (or at least one specific human) having telekinesis is more or less what drives the entire plot.
Trashy didn’t set off the bomb - God did. And for that to happen, Flagg had to use his little ball of evil energy to kill a couple of Christ figures. It’s all very Mistik.
Plus, since when does King need an excuse to fill in extra pages?
- No it wouldn’t. They were both frigates, the books and naval history are both full of examples where smaller ships of the same class fought larger. Not forgetting the Acheron was a privateer so looked down on by the Admiralty…
- Captains on detached duty had a lot of freedom, due to communications being so poor.
- Not at all we still had an empire to protect and merchant ships to protect, the Acheron was attacking whalers and presumably the company fleets, an east or west India fleet could be worth millions even back in 1805 a substantial loss for the country. We had hundreds of post ships not all were looking for the French and Spanish fleet.
Roger Ebert goes into this explanation in his Great Movies write-up of Fargo. The conversation in the hotel bar is very relevant.
They don’t need a reason why he needs the money. Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.
Not sure whether it’s just a plot hole or a redundant element as well but… the scene where Leeloo looks up the entire dictionary and loses her shit when she reaches W A R in *The Fifth Element.
*
Now, as has already been pointed out a million times, there are plenty of 'orrible words before you get to war - Holocaust, torture, genocide… nuclear weapons… but fine, fine, fair enough, one notes she did enter the word herself instead of just flipping all the way through the virtual book. She could have just been googling for food recipes, cat pictures and hundreds of gigs of porn prior, or been on a random TVTropes/Wikipedia binge, like anybody discovering the Internet.
But still… she’s a super advanced alien from some godlike civilization. Her spaceship was shot down at the beginning of the movie. She’s been flip-kicking her way through bad guys trying to shoot her or blow her up for half a movie. Her boyfriend has been happily shooting and blowing them up right back. She’s a living weapon against the big bad, that’s her entire reason for existing. And yet the concept of war somehow eludes her ? I don’t… whut ?!
If you need her all frail and unconscious-like for Bruce Willis to be able to do the prince charming thing on her (stunning) ass, get her wounded and in a coma following the explosion of the cruise ship. There, done. Stupid averted. And if you need the whole crisis of conscience, “why should humanity be saved ?” angle, have her ask Bruce Willis why *he *oughta be saved, when he’s pretty much just as terrible as the bad guys.
I don’t think it’s anything that complex. IIRC, the lightning bolt just flips the AI’s alignment switch from “Good” to “Evil.”
I 100% agree with you, but King’s “reasoning” is that God–the Judeo-Christian God* needed/wanted them as human sacrifices* before he was willing make Trashcan Man nuke Vegas. Why God would have wanted a sacrifice is a whole 'nother question.
I think this reasoning is idiotic, but it was King’s point.
*Regardless of the fact that (Jesus excepted) the character of the Judeo-Christian God is explicitly against human sacrifice–there’s the whole Abraham/Isaac story that makes the point. it’d be like writing a novel and having Robin Hood just show up, rob from peasants and give the money to Prince John as added taxes without explaining why the character is acting the opposite of the way he historically should.
As long as we’re on Stephen King books, the section of IT that details how Beverly helped the Losers get out of the tunnels/sewers the first time they faced the monster could have been chunked, as far as I’m concerned.
I just re-read that book, and I STILL don’t understand why he had to write that part of the book that way.
OK, I think I was reading to much into the special effects then. Still though it remains an unneccesary element, just have someone tell the AI, “Watch and learn from these guys” (the human pilots) and everything would have still happened the way it actually did.
Anyway, I have to say I enjoyed that particular movie a lot more than I thought I would.
Neither does Stephen King. He’s admitted to being so coked-up in the mid-80’s that he has no real memory of writing the book.
Agreed. I heard so many bad things about it, but it was an entirely enjoyable “It’s Saturday and it’s raining and it’s on cable” movie.
The latter.
Nope, central to the plot.
Agree on the Hancock mention. I kind of liked the movie up to that point.
In Dances with Wolves, part of the point is to show that the frontier is where they put the weirdoes and fuck-ups (like Dunbar). The two soldiers from his old society who capture him near the end of the film are meant to be shocking. What ameliorates their disgusting behavior somewhat is the realization that they would, after all, have been viewed as ignorant, cruel, and repellent by most other characters in that setting. Dunbar isn’t seeing a typical soldier, he’s seeing the dregs.
Prometheus: most of the movie. I kid. Two pointless threads, though, the ancient star map to the Sooper Sekrit military research facility that brings them there. Why not a more believable and realistic backtracking from artifacts/signals encountered in space? The anti-aging plotline that goes absolutely nowhere.
- In none of those cases - such as Indefatigable vs Droits de l’Homme, Surprise vs Hermione, or of course Speedy vs El Gamo was the action ordered by the admiralty, as it would have been nuts. Captains were either acting on their own initiative, in small fleet actions, or defending themselves. I have never heard of any British admiralty order for a frigate captain to single-handedly engage a vessel in a superior class. (I’m happy to be proven wrong, if you’ve got a cite to the contrary?)
- Yes, but come on, this is clearly excessive, when even the overzealous Capt. Aubrey admits he’s exceeded his orders. In the detached/crusing orders I’m familiar with, the limits to the orders were clear.
- I concede this is the weakest part of my argument, as a lot of odd orders pop up once in a while, especially in a period where rising in the ranks was primarily through seniority instead of capability. Still, one would think that a threat like the Acheron would be worth a “real” frigate, such as how Edward Cooke raised merry hell in the Indian ocean in Sybille.