But he’s not crying because he failed to save another 10 people. He’s crying because he realized that if he had worked harder he could have saved another 10 here, 10 there, another 10 and another 10, and another and another.
And each life that he didn’t save was another person lost forever. And there were millions he didn’t save. If he could save 1000, why not 1001? Why not 1002? Why not 2000, or 3000, or 10,000 or 50,000? That’s what he’s talking about.
The Goblins in Harry Potter are a failed attempt by Rowling to create some sort of metaphor commentary on copyrights / intellectual property issues. Goblins consider the maker of an object to be the ‘true’ owner and purchasers to be merely renting the object until their death, and they resent it being passed on to other ‘users’ without further payment. She seems to be equivocating somewhat - showing some respect for the Goblins point of view while also letting the heroes ‘borrow’ the Sword of Godric at opportune moments.
Thanks, Lemur, that is a much more eloquent way to say what I was trying to say. I think my issue is that I’ve been unable to compromise the external hype (“Schindler was some big altruistic hero!”) from what I actually saw in the movie (“Meh… not so much a hero, but not a bad guy at all.”), which is what you have so nicely stated.
Carry on…
Not to sound like a fanboi (though I am 
)…but Schindler was one, if not the, of the greatest heroes ever. One of the tip of the tip greatest human beings who ever lived.
I love Ratatouille…I did not take the critics article as anti-critic. It was basically saying that chefs put their work out to be critisized and so rtake many chances. He also said it is easy and fun to be critical and slam these people and by doing so you are also safe (as a critic). However, to enthusiastically support someone new is to take a risk as a critic and that was what he was doing.
I actually took it as in character of the critic even though he had been given quite a shock…it was actually somewhat egotistical…I AM TAKING this bold step and saying this chef is the greatest in the world! I may be made fun of it but I am brave!
Darned straight. Bewitched is really quite loathsome at the core. Can’t stand it.
Curious George - Series of books aimed at killing intellectual curiousity in children. George constantly gets into trouble because he is curious. If he just did what his superiors told him to do, he would never get into trouble.
The books are anti-intellectual, anti-progress, and anti-liberal.
This is exactly my theory. It fits the facts a lot better. Dumb aliens with a weakness to one of the more common substances in the universe who don’t wear clothes or use technology, and who can’t figure out how to use a doorknob? There’s no way they’re the bosses.
Well, they aren’t entirely bad then. 
My theory about Signs, as I wrote on this Board when it came out, is that they’re the Loser Aliens. The Aliens don’t want to conquer the Earth – they want to relieve overcrowding on their homeworld and get rid of some of their less desirable citizens, so they conscript them for war duty on a backwards world, then don’t give them any equipment, or even clothes. The fact that the world they’re invading is 72% covered with highly corrosive universal solvent just guarantees the outcome.
So, what your saying is that sometime after the movie, the alien’s homeworld is wiped out by an unsanitized telephone?
To me the ending of Clerks II was very happy. I don’t think that Dante ever really wanted to leave New Jersey or that he felt like he wanted to be some big shot, I think he thought he was supposed to want those things and that is why he was miserable. Even when he was with Emma and getting out of Jersey to Florida and heading towards the life he always “wanted” he was still miserable. It wasn’t until he made the decision to do what made him happy instead of what he thought was supposed to make him happy that he married the girl he really loved, opened his own business and finally took control of his life. I thought the point of the movie was that you need to do what really makes you happy and not what everyone else thinks would make you happy.
Not at all.
He may be called “Curious” George, but his problems don’t stem from his curiosity. They stem from the fact that he’s a moron with a serious case of ADD.
And the fact that his guardian is even dumber than he is.
Interesting how they never address the utter and shameless custodial negligence of The Man with the Yellow Hat.
In the End of Evangelion, Asuka, Rei, and Misato merge into one because Shinji desires all 3 of them.
The Oompa Loompa’s are obviously slaves in every sense of the word. They were kidnapped from some place that looked like Africa or South America. They are locked into the factory and there is no indication that they get paid. They wouldn’t have anything to spend it on anyway because they are trapped there. They even have their own songs and singing style which is a hallmark of slave culture. Charlie could not handle that. He would probably let them go out of misplaced sympathy and cause instant collapse of the factory. Veruca could crack the whip both literally and figuratively to keep the slaves under control to keep everything running smoothly like an antebellum plantation.
This may be a bit off-topic since it’s not about the creative-work itself but about people’s speculation on “what happened next”, but I’ll add Gone With the Wind. There have been two authorized and a couple of unauthorized sequels to the novel* but pretty much every fan’s assessment is that Rhett and Scarlett are meant to be together and will reunite.
I read Rhett’s goodbye as ‘Goodbye’. He has no intention of ever coming back to Scarlett, and while they may be in and out of each other’s lives for a time they’ll never get back together. Scarlett is only a few steps short of being a sociopath and Rhett has finally realized this; he knows that she’s not immature or just suffering from (what we would call) PTSD but that she’s broken or incomplete; she can’t be fixed.
Her marriage to Frank Kennedy could be argued to be a necessity- she had to provide for herself and others and it was the only way she could avoid poverty and eviction- but her first marriage, to Charles Hamilton before the war and before she’d ever known poverty, was born of complete selfishness and greed (in the book it says money was an incentive- the orphaned Charles had inherited a fortune in Atlanta real estate from his parents). She did not love him, could not care less about his happiness, could not care less about the fact he was unofficially engaged to his cousin India- she wanted him so that she could always stalk Ashley (his cousin/brother-in-law) and live in style while she did it.
Her love of Ashley was not really love- it was obsession and irritation that he didn’t see her as the brightest star in the universe. Had he yielded to her and married her then she’d have lost interest immediately. Later she loves him largely because he’s the avatar of a time when she didn’t have to worry about starvation and poverty and all hell being loosed on Georgia in general and her in particular.
She’s a completely self absorbed person. When Frank dies she’s not impoverished anymore and marries Rhett strictly for his money (and perhaps somewhat due to sexual attraction, but mainly money). Her love for him, such as it is, is born of the fact she doesn’t have to pretend to be humble or selfless or the doting wife around him- it’s almost a marriage of convenience. The only person in the book she seems to have genuine natural love for is Bonnie, and even that would probably be different if she weren’t such a pretty child. She’s indifferent to her son, pretty much can’t stand the sight of her oldest daughter, and while she provides for the needs of those around her she’s oblivious to their feelings or emotions.
Scarlett will never be happy with any man. Rhett has latched onto this fact. It’s not a matter of poor timing or of the War having disrupted their lives or much else- she’s incapable of putting another person before herself and perhaps of anything like being in love.
Rhett on the other hand, while he can be selfish and brutal and blunt, does have the ability to put others before himself (Bonnie, his joining of the CSA when it was hopeless, the people who can’t stand him that he supports anyway, Mammy, etc.). In fact he actually has a big heart and in some ways he is ahead of his time (his way to look beyond social class and background and to some extent race). At 45 (or thereabouts) he’s too old to waste a lot of time in getting on with his life and too young to put up with a narcissistic ice queen like Scarlett, and while he doesn’t know exactly what he wants from the rest of his life he knows that it has little to do with a narcissistic ice queen like Scarlett. Just like when he was a blockade runner he knows when to fight and when to just dump his cargo and run for it and he is cutting her off like a gangrenous limb- no second chances, no reconsiderations, no “call me when you find yourself”, but “the only thing we had in common was Bonnie, she’s dead, so are we, keep the house, here’s some money, tell Mammy and the kids I said bye-bye, if you’re ever where I am don’t look me up”.
She may try for a reconciliation, but there won’t be one. The best she’ll ever do is have sex with him again, but I don’t think she was that great in bed, and being far more self-knowing than Scarlett he’s woken from his infatuation with her more than she has from her infatuation with Ashley.
*In addition to The Wind Done Gone there’s a bestselling unauthorized sequel published in Australia where the book is public domain.
Harry Caul (of The Conversation) is an utter incompetent, and always has been. He fails to notice something utterly obvious while he’s working. I’m iffy on whether he was specifically hired because of his ineptness, since he does have an apparent reputation. But any reputation he has he came to by accident. By the end perhaps he comes to realize this, and maybe it’s supposed to be him falling apart, but I think he never had it to begin with.
I don’t know if this is unpopular, since it’s just an odd side note and not a full interpretation (one person suggested this to me and I sort of like it): Paul Sunday (There Will Be Blood) doesn’t exist. Eli just uses a pseudonym the first time he visits Plainview for deniability later. At the end, when Plainview is telling him what happened to ‘Paul’ he’s describing a fantasy, in effect saying, “This is what you should have done.”
The parallels between Kevin Smith and Dante Hicks are too strong to be ignored. If you feel that Dante made the right choice and was happy then the conclusion is that Smith feels he made the wrong choice and regrets leaving New Jersey.
That said, I’ve argued this point before and I don’t want to sidetrack this thread. Suffice it to say this is a my personal example of an unpopular interpretation of a creative work.
I agree. And I’ve seen the same thing with Casablanca - there’s a lot of fans who feel that Rick and Ilsa were meant to be together and the ending needs to be fixed with a sequel.
I agree with the notion that Signs features devils of some sort rather than the standard gray aliens. The film isn’t about the beings anyway so it doesn’t really matter. I can’t decide whether or not the director made a mistake by making the things look like today’s common depiction of space aliens, or if he did it intentionally as a wry statement about audience expectations. The whole gray alien mythos is no more rational or interesting than any other imaginative demonology. Automatically assuming the monsters are space aliens and applying scientific reality checks to the story makes as much sense as engaging in archeological searches for Rohan. It is a symptom of the common misunderstanding of the difference between Fantasy and Science Fiction; a difference of core purpose rather than detail. Star Wars is a fantasy story set in space, but even its creator didn’t fully understand this distinction and later tried to backstory-in the vigors of rational scientific speculation, and he ruined the essence of the myth as a result.
Let monsters be monsters for Eru’s sake.