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AlternateAccount posted:I believe that the sedative effects become tolerated very, very quickly. So if you're a habitual taker who's on it daily, it's not doing anything for you in that regard. I have gone through periods of taking it every night and it never got less effective.
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Mar 4, 2014 05:15
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Let's get back on topic, folks.
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Mar 4, 2014 05:33
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I think Galaxy Quest has been mentioned before in the thread but I rewatched it over the weekend and noticed that for all his fearful whining and crying about being an expendable redshirt throughout the movie, during the attack on the bridge near the end Guy is the only character who doesn't get shot. I love it. 
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Mar 4, 2014 20:20
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I know that it is a scene that has been often alluded to in other films and has been argued to death, but here's something about the Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin. Not gonna bother with plot context for this one, since it is not important here. Plus, for most people, even critics, Battleship Potemkin begins and ends with this sequence, anyway. So, critics have come up with plenty of arguments regarding the aesthetic origin of the suspense and drama of the sequence. While many just vaguely chalk it up to montage, I would more specifically argue that much of it stems from his subtle visual manipulation of space and time, and the contrast between our expectations of where and when the scene takes place versus what we actually see. In regards to the space of the sequence, we can look at the way in which Eisenstein exploits the construction of the Potemkin Stairs (originally the Primorsky Stairs) themselves. The original architects designed the stairs to be wider at the base than the top, creating the illusion that they are much longer and more magnificent than they are. Moreover, the stairs are designed such that, when looking down from the top, you only see the landings, and when looking up from the base, you only see stairs. So first, let's look at an example shot of the fleeing civilians (apologies for quality, I just grabbed these images off of youtube really quickly):  Here we see that Eisenstein is using a forced perspective to emphasize the optical illusions of the Stairs' original construction. The stairs seem interminably long, and, although we can see the landings, we mostly just see stairs. We cannot even see the soldiers in this shot. Now, here's a typical shot of the Tsar's soldiers:  Hmm, look, just landings! In this shot, too, Eisenstein's placement of the vanishing point center-frame makes the civilians seem to be almost running in place and getting nowhere fast. Moreover, Eisenstein's camera placement makes the Duc de Richelieu monument seem massive, whereas in the previous shot of the civilians, it is just barely visible in the upper-right of the frame, heightening the illusion of distance between the civilians and soldiers. The suspense, in part, comes from the disconnect between what we know of the sequence and what we see. We know that the soldiers and civilians are close to each other, because some civilians have already been shot, yet the stairs seem so drat long. We know that the soldiers and civilians and soldiers are marching/running down the same stairs, but the camera angle/placement makes it so that they seem to be running down completely different architectural works. In regards to time (this is something less easy to screenshot): this is an outdoors sequence, but the direction of the shadows just does not work out chronologically. They move back and forth, rather than just having a regular progression that you would expect from, y'know, the Earth's rotation. You would really expect the shadows to more or less remain the same way the entire time, since this sequence is only a few minutes long. Now, on one hand, this is just a classic IMDB goof and could be attributed to the fact that shooting this type of sequence is going to take a long time, so the shadows are going to move. But Eisenstein's editing decisions actually seem to emphasize the shadows' inconsistency. Shadows will be facing one way, then another way in the next shot, then back to where they were in the next shot. This is similar to how we knew one thing but saw another for the aforementioned optical illusions: we know that the sequence is occurring chronologically, but we see that it seems to be moving back and forth in time in an unpredictable, inconsistent way.
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Mar 4, 2014 22:20
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At the end of Goodfellas, when Henry Hill slams the door, the sound effect is of a jail cell slamming shut.
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Mar 9, 2014 09:02
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At the beginning of Fight Club when Edward Norton's character confronts Marla at one of their group therapy sessions, a background character is awkwardly advancing towards Marla in order to initiate conversation. As soon as Norton gets her attention, the guy does an about face and tries so hard to make it look nonchalant.
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Mar 9, 2014 09:21
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Fight Club, eh? When Jack goes to confront Marla about being a tourist, he distracts her from the coffee cup she is filling and it overflows. In the scene right after the mock castration where everyone is dressed as hotel attendant's, Bob's pants fall down while they are walking through the alley. Apparently they filmed that scene a few times, and Meatloaf couldn't keep his pants from falling down. Apparently David Fincher improvised Jack punching Tyler in the ear for their first fight. Right before filming it, he told Edward Norton to really punch Brad Pitt in the ear. The reaction is genuine. When Jack and Tyler are drunk and hitting golf balls, the actors were actually drunk and hitting golf balls at their catering truck. poonchasta has a new favorite as of 13:41 on Mar 9, 2014 |
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Mar 9, 2014 13:35
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To be fair only one of those is an actually intended subtle moment and the rest are, while still interesting, DYK movie trivia about its production
beep by grandpa has a new favorite as of 15:33 on Mar 9, 2014 |
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Mar 9, 2014 14:38
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In Winters Tale, the first time you see Will Smiths character, you see he is reading A Brief History of Time. This seems like a little anachronism, until he gives his big 'every time is now' speech, suggesting that he actually doesn't perceive time as a flow from past to future, but as one gestalt. He's reading to better understand humans perceptions of time..
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Mar 9, 2014 16:36
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poonchasta posted:Fight Club, eh? Wait, is it canon that his name is Jack? If so that's kind of cool, I just always thought he was just narrator.
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Mar 9, 2014 16:54
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you may die posted:Wait, is it canon that his name is Jack? If so that's kind of cool, I just always thought he was just narrator. It's not, as far as I know he wasn't given a name on purpose.
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Mar 9, 2014 16:57
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you may die posted:Wait, is it canon that his name is Jack? If so that's kind of cool, I just always thought he was just narrator. It's not "canon". His real name isn't mentioned in the movie and he's credited as the narrator. Whenever he uses the name Jack, he's referencing the "I am Jack's Colon" Reader's Digest articles (which are totally real, I remember watching a video called I Am Joe's Stomach when I was doing GCSE biology). The name Jack also appears on one of the multiple DVD edition blurbs, but nobody who ever did any creative work on Fight Club has ever said "yeah, his real name's Jack". More likely the blurb writer just completely missed the point of the "I am Jack's..." lines.
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Mar 9, 2014 17:04
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He's called Jack because of those short stories he found that were written from the perspective of organs ("I am Jack's colon.") Which he references several times over the course of the movie.
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Mar 9, 2014 17:04
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beep by grandpa posted:To be fair only one of those is an actually intended subtle moment and the rest are, while still interesting, DYK movie trivia about its production Two things I remember on this side of things, from different Cracked articles: Easy Rider: In that famous smoking scene, all of the actors are actually high. Special commendations to Jack Nicholson, who actually somehow managed to deliver all his lines perfectly despite this handicap. And thread favorite The Usual Suspects: Part of the reason it works so well is because Bryan Singer told everyone they were Keyser Soze. Pretty much every main character in the movie was told, either explicitly or implicitly during production, that they were Keyser Soze. Gabriel Byrne got especially mad about this when he saw the finished movie.
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Mar 10, 2014 04:24
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It makes sense for Byrne to think that seeing as he actually filmed a scene where he was playing Keyser. He just probably wasn't aware that it was from Kujan's theory of events.
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Mar 10, 2014 04:31
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Cleretic posted:Easy Rider: In that famous smoking scene, all of the actors are actually high. Special commendations to Jack Nicholson, who actually somehow managed to deliver all his lines perfectly despite this handicap. Can't remember if I've posted this before about Easy Rider, but after watching that movie with my mother who was very much a hippy in the "down with authority fight the power" sense, she asked me if I remembered what they set out to find at the start of the movie. They set out to find the real America. And in the very last scene, they found it.
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Mar 10, 2014 05:17
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Cleretic posted:And thread favorite The Usual Suspects: Part of the reason it works so well is because Bryan Singer told everyone they were Keyser Soze. Pretty much every main character in the movie was told, either explicitly or implicitly during production, that they were Keyser Soze. Gabriel Byrne got especially mad about this when he saw the finished movie. When Redfoot flicks his cigarette at McManus, Peter Greene was supposed to hit Stephen Baldwin in the chest. He missed and hit him in the eye with a lit cigarette. The other actors are holding Baldwin back because he honestly wanted to beat the crap out of Greene.
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Mar 10, 2014 15:38
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Cleretic posted:Two things I remember on this side of things, from different Cracked articles: I could be remembering incorrectly, but wasn't that also the first time Nicholson tried pot as well?
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Mar 11, 2014 02:28
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In Man of Steel In the fight in near the end between Supes and Zod, They end up fighting in a construction site. Zod hits Clark into some stuff near one of those "This site has been accident free for X days" sign. When Clark hits the wall near the sign the numbers get knocked off and a 0 gets left behind.
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Mar 11, 2014 04:27
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HOOLY BOOLY posted:In Man of Steel In the fight in near the end between Supes and Zod, They end up fighting in a construction site. Zod hits Clark into some stuff near one of those "This site has been accident free for X days" sign. When Clark hits the wall near the sign the numbers get knocked off and a 0 gets left behind. It's also the only bit of levity in the entire film.
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Mar 11, 2014 04:43
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I kinda dug the pissed off trucker trying to push him and bouncing off.
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Mar 11, 2014 05:43
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Goofus Giraffe posted:Battleship Potemkin Watching Battleship Potemkin for the first time and realizing just where all those "stairway" scenes in various movies came from was a bit of an eye-opener. In regards to all the shadows stuff though, how established was continuity editing at the time the film was made, especially in Soviet Cinema? Is it possible that Eisenstein just didn't consider the obvious time-jumps (in filming, not in the narrative) as being something the audience would notice?
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Mar 11, 2014 06:53
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That's a good question, one that I wish I knew the answer to! Even if we consider the shadows to be a simple mistake, though, they are still in the sequence, and still have an effect on our reception and interpretation of the text, or at least they have an effect on how I, a pervert that was tracking the shadows, receive and interpret it. Me stomping around and showing off that I've read and agree with "Death of the Author" is not a productive response to your post, though, so: While I am not aware of how established checking for continuity errors was at that time, I do know that during that era in Soviet cinema, film stock was hard to come by due to WW1, the revolution, and the Russian Civil War. It has even been suggested that this shortage of film stock was one of the factors accounting for the tendency toward montage in early Soviet film. I say this because, even if checking for errors in continuity was established at the time, film would have likely been too expensive or rare to allow for re-shoots over small, out-of-their-hands issues like shadows in an outdoors scene. So, it is possible that this was just an error that Eisenstein could not justify fixing, especially since, even if film was free, he still would have to re-do a sequence with hundreds of extras in it. Plus, it would have actually been more-or-less impossible to make sure the shadows were ever in their 'correct' places, anyway. A seven-minute sequence takes longer than seven minutes to shoot, most of the time, so the shadows were always going to at least move faster than they should have. Moreover, for Eisenstein to make sure that the shadows were at least not jumping back-and-forth, he would have had to have planned out each individual shot and its place in the sequence beforehand, and then actually shot the sequence in order. While I do not doubt that Eisenstein roughly knew what he was doing, it is hard to imagine that he had already accounted for every little split-second shot before the cameras started rolling. So, yeah, the shadows may have just been completely unavoidable errors. At least to me, though, the shadows' jumping around is so obvious, and goes along so well with how the sequence seems to work, that it seems like Eisenstein was just turning an inevitable error into opportunity. It is odd: I don't put much stock in authorial intent, yet I still somehow want this to have all been a part of Eisenstein's plan.
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Mar 11, 2014 09:04
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I don't believe continuity errors were a big deal at the time.
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Mar 11, 2014 11:59
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Considering Eisenstein is lauded as pretty much the inventor of montage and creative editing, I have to imagine that with the deliberation taken on the Potemkin Steps sequence, he was fully aware of the errors in the shadows and had little he could do to fix them.
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Mar 13, 2014 00:07
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Goofus Giraffe posted:So, yeah, the shadows may have just been completely unavoidable errors. At least to me, though, the shadows' jumping around is so obvious, and goes along so well with how the sequence seems to work, that it seems like Eisenstein was just turning an inevitable error into opportunity. It is odd: I don't put much stock in authorial intent, yet I still somehow want this to have all been a part of Eisenstein's plan. Choco1980 posted:Considering Eisenstein is lauded as pretty much the inventor of montage and creative editing, I have to imagine that with the deliberation taken on the Potemkin Steps sequence, he was fully aware of the errors in the shadows and had little he could do to fix them. Thanks for the answers. I guess we'll never know for certain but I like the idea that he was aware of the error, knew he couldn't do anything about it, and put them front and center in a way that emphasized the overall feeling of chaos and confusion of the sequence.
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Mar 13, 2014 00:15
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Dr. Strangelove: this is a film in which objects mediate, stymie, and even replace speech. I really briefly touched on this much earlier on in this thread, but I did it pretty shittily. Anyway, the objects tied up with speech in this film range from chewing gum to the hydrogen bomb. To start off, we can look at the sequence in which Group Captain Mandrake (Peter Sellers) first asks General Ripper (Sterling Hayden) for the 843rd bomb wing's recall code. The "speaking object" of this sequence is primarily Ripper's cigar, though, as a side note that is more in line with the spirit of this thread: Ripper's cigar cutter seems to be a miniature rifle with a bayonet attached. Anyway, Ripper denies Mandrake's request, Mandrake protests and then we cut to a well-known shot that I was able to easily google up a gif of: Just after he exhales, Ripper silently moves aside a file folder, revealing a handgun. The cigar and its smoke mediates Ripper's speech: the cigar not only modifies and punctuates the dialogue, but its smoke is essentially speech made visible. That is, he smokes, we can see the words come out. The handgun, rather than mediating his speech, outright replaces it, silently saying more about how serious Ripper is about this than he could make known in language. To move on, let's look at General Turgidson (George C. Scott). Throughout the War Room scenes, Turgidson more or less constantly chews gum. When President Muffley (Peter Sellers) first berates him for the failures of attack plan R, Turgidson shoves three pieces of gum in his mouth within like, three or four minutes. Let's now look at Turgidson in one of the internet's favorite optimized gifs, during Muffley's first call to Soviet Premier Kissov:  In this case, Turgidson is simply listening in, but his exaggerated gum chewing gives his mouth movement(if I recall correctly, Kubrick had convinced Scott to overact by claiming that he would get rid of that take, and then oops they ended up in the final film), as if to make visible the absence of speech. I would also go a bit further and claim that all this gum-chewing makes Turgidson look as if he is ruminating, in the sense of "chewing cud," made ironic by the fact that, in his immature jingoism, he hardly seems to ruminate in the sense of "to think deeply." Near the end of the film, aboard the bomber, we encounter two objects that don't just replace a character's speech, but seem to want to say something on their own:  Let's note that "Hi there!" and "Dear John" are both salutations, which reflects the fact that this is the first time in the film we actually see a hydrogen bomb. Let's also note that the bombs fall on an ICBM missile complex, so really the two bombs are just greeting their atomic peers. Though, if "Hi there!" begins a conversation, what phrase could you use to end it? Weeee'll meet agaaiin
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Mar 14, 2014 21:17
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Just a thought, isn't "Dear John" a shorthand for a breakup letter?
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Mar 14, 2014 22:33
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Just noticed a goofy subtle joke in the South Park episode "Lil Crime Stoppers" where the boys pretend to be cops and end up investigating real crimes. When the boys are meeting with the crime boss in strip club you hear a snippet from him stating that he wants "the McCormicks" to cook his meth. Who, of course, are Kenny's parents.
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Mar 14, 2014 23:33
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Bringing Kubrick into the subtle movie moments thread is kind of like cheating, wouldn't you say? Speaking of, I just watched Room 237, a documentary that lets a handful of people each talk about their pet theories about The Shining. The film strives to be unbiased, simply illustrating each person's argument, not even showing the people who are talking. However, it's clear that the real curse of the Overlook has hit each of these people: That is to say, you can analyze that movie in a hundred different ways, and come up with a hundred different subliminal readings of the film. And there'll be plenty of incidental evidence to support your theory, but the more you dig and look for clues, the more your clues will become your own invention. I personally believe that yes, the Native American stuff is deliberate, yes, the frequent doubling and mirroring of things is no accident either thematically. Beyond that, other popular theories seem quite reaching, like the sacred numerology stuff. I do think the Apollo 11 references are placed deliberately, but not because Kubrick staged the moon landing, but because he's planting a joke at the expense of the crackpots that think he did. This is the same guy that deliberately changed the maze filming layout overnight without telling anyone just because he thought it'd be funny.
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Mar 14, 2014 23:55
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Choco1980 posted:Bringing Kubrick into the subtle movie moments thread is kind of like cheating, wouldn't you say? Room 237 is probably the dumbest 'documentary' I've ever seen. But it did make me realize that, yeah, Kubrick probably threw all that in just to gently caress with people.
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Mar 15, 2014 01:02
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bunnyofdoom posted:Just a thought, isn't "Dear John" a shorthand for a breakup letter? True! The "Dear John" still refers to the salutation of the archetypal Dear John letter, so it still technically works with what I was saying. That being said, though, it is more interesting if we go with the shorthand idea, as the bomb becomes another type of communicative object, not unlike Ripper's handgun. In that case, then, the "Dear John" bomb is a very rude piece of airmail. In Peter George's Red Alert, the non-comedic novel that Dr. Strangelove was loosely adapted from, the bombs are instead marked with "Hi there!" and "Lolita." If I recall correctly, Kubrick's reason for changing the latter was because his adaptation of Lolita had been released just two years prior. I feel there is something to the fact that Kubrick didn't just change it to any ol' thing; whether we consider "Dear John" as salutation or shorthand, Kubrick ended up making the bomb more 'conversational.' Edit: I forgot to include an image of the cigar cutter/cigar knife in the original post and I don't feel like bloating it up with more images. You can see it in Ripper's right hand here:  It is pretty much impossible for me to grab a high-res shot at any other point while he is holding it, but it seems to have a tiny flintlock mechanism on it. It seems to be a miniature version of this musket, or something similar. 
Goofus Giraffe has a new favorite as of 03:02 on Mar 15, 2014 |
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Mar 15, 2014 02:41
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I just noticed in Wall-E right after Eva locks up, when Wall-E is sitting on the ledge he spins his wheel gears to play the notes of the song he loves, "Put On Your Sunday Clothes."
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Mar 15, 2014 20:39
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I believe that during the trailer intermission in Grindhouse there's a brief commercial for a Tex-Mex restaurant called "Acuņa Boys". This in itself is a reference to Kill Bill Vol. 2, but that's not the moment I'm talking about. When Death Proof starts, during the first car ride, Butterfly's drink cup has the Acuņa Boys logo on it.
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Mar 22, 2014 23:01
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Klown is a hilarious Dutch movie and on my second viewing of it I noticed that grandma character went blind or lost their eye from the pearl necklace Frank accidentally gave her and the damage is permanent as evidenced at the end by the eyepatch they had been wearing.
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Mar 23, 2014 07:21
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In Colombiana, the main character Cataleya makes a final call from a phonebox to someone who will never be able to find her again, which has a "Lost: Cat" sign on it. That's some subtlety right?
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Apr 6, 2014 12:09
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The more in tune with the force, Luke Skywalker becomes, the clearer the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi becomes. He starts up as a voice in ANH, becomes a really blurry ghost during the Hoth bit of ESB, then after training with Yoda, Obi-Wan's ghost becomes a lot more substantial. Finally just as he's leaving Dagobah, in ROTJ Obi-Wan is even more substantial, plus he has the ability to walk around and sit on logs and stuff. I don't know if it was intentional, but it's a nice subtle visual shorthand to how powerful Luke is.
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Apr 6, 2014 12:42
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Muppetjedi posted:I don't know if it was intentional, but it's a nice subtle visual shorthand to how powerful Luke is. Probably wasn't. I used to think that Luke had a green lightsaber in RotJ because green is the midpoint between blue and red on the visible light spectrum and he was teetering between the light and dark sides. Then I read an interview in which George Lucas said they gave him a green blade so it would show up better against the blue sky during the fight at the Sarlac pit.
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Apr 7, 2014 05:52
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I thought his green one was the one he made himself or something whereas the blue one was daddys. This is almost certainly expanded univerise bullshit though, sounds nice though.
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Apr 7, 2014 05:58
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Seaside Loafer posted:I thought his green one was the one he made himself or something whereas the blue one was daddys. That is what "happened." There were some deleted scenes where they showed him making his own lightsaber. And they did make it green to show up better against the blue sky.
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Apr 7, 2014 06:17
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