PYF Subtle Movie Moments: Homeopathic dinosaur piss

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Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Khazar-khum posted:

I've always loved some little scenes in "Lord of the Rings".

The LotR trilogy was absolutely loaded with subtleties, in-jokes and obscure references. The imdb trivia pages list a bunch of them:

imdb posted:

Hobbiton was made a year before production began to make it look like it was a natural, lived-in place, complete with real vegetable patches. The greens department regulated the length of the grass by having sheep eat it.

During the Council of Elrond, leaves are continually falling in the background to suggest that this is a meeting that is taking place outside. This meant about half a dozen crew members were positioned above the set, dropping leaves at various intervals. This also meant that the production department had to collect sacks and sacks of leaves during autumn, and of course dead leaves turn brown fairly quickly. Which also meant that every single one of those leaves had to be individually painted.

For high-tech tasks, a computer program called MASSIVE made armies of CG orcs, elves, and humans. These digital creations could 'think' and battle independently - identifying friend or foe - thanks to individual fields of vision. Peter Jackson's team could click on one creature in a crowd scene of 20,000 and see through his "eyes". Different species even boast unique fighting styles.

The Orc blacksmiths shown beneath Isengard are actually the WETA Workshop staff who made the weapons used in the film.

The portraits hanging above the fireplace in Bag End are based on the likenesses of director Peter Jackson and producer Fran Walsh.

One of the indistinct words that Gandalf whispers to the moth when he is trapped by Saruman is "Gwaihir", the name of the eagle that later rescues him from the tower.

The different colors of blue for the elves' eyes revealed what race they were. The Lothlorien elves had light blue eyes, and the Rivendell elves were dark blue.

Production designer Grant Major personally supervised the translation of all the writings in Balin's tomb into Dwarvish. He was then horrified to learn that a visiting J.R.R. Tolkien scholar had taken great offence at seeing the phrase "Joe was here" among the writings. They scoured the contents of Balin's tomb and found nothing, only to learn that the scholar - who was overly serious about everything to do with Tolkien - had been told this by a crew carpenter who has having a joke at his expense. Intrepid fans later published screen captures and translations of Moria wall segments where the runes spelled "John was here" and "Made in New Zealand". During pre-production, Weta artists asked Tolkien expert Michael Martinez if there were any examples of Orc graffiti in the book. Martinez found one citation (in the scene where Frodo, Sam, and Gollum see a defaced statue in Gondor). He used other passages to argue that the Orcs would have used runes to carve graffiti on Moria's walls.

Romes128 posted:

I read somewhere that everything on Iron Mans HUD makes sense, and isn't just tech stuff to make it look complicated and cool. Someone from the Air Force helped design the layout for it. Pretty awesome stuff considering we only get to see it backwards and almost transparent. There are also different HUDs for each suit he wears.

Here's a close look at a whole bunch of them, plus the Helicarrier screen displays.

Goddrat they put a lot of work into stuff that most people would assume was just random lorem ipsum gibberish.

Snowglobe of Doom has a new favorite as of 19:30 on Jun 6, 2012

# ¿ Jun 6, 2012 18:51

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 05:51

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

owl_pellet posted:

should talk to somebody about these feelings

I guess someone might be ready to believe him, but who's he gonna call?

# ¿ Jun 7, 2012 03:55

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Goddamn, he starred in The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. I loving love that movie and I never made the Kill Bill connection.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2012 21:14

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Chichevache posted:

The narration was awful

Yeah he's saying not to watch the theatrical release and to stick with the narrative-less versions.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2012 18:23

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Chichevache posted:

Whoops, don't know how I misread that. I came away with him saying "dont watch the version without narration" somehow.

Wake up, time to ~~die~~ get glasses.

(The way he wrote it was pretty ambiguous.)

# ¿ Aug 24, 2012 18:59

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

The Third Man posted:

The first version I ever watched was the Director's cut, I had no idea the theatrical version had voice-overs until I watched the making-of documentary. It's an abomination, and completely ruins the dreamlike atmosphere, and just seeing snippets of it is goddamn depressing.

Harrison Ford apparently hated the idea of the voiceovers and unsuccessfully fought against them. In fact the entire shoot was so grueling (for an example, after two weeks of shooting Scott decided the lighting wasn't good enough and insisted they reshoot everything, putting the project two weeks behind schedule right from the start) that Ford refused to speak about it for years afterwards.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2012 19:17

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

pretty soft girl posted:

I suppose another message to be taken from D-FENS is that a bad guy who fights other bad guys does not a good guy make.

... but a good guy who tries to stand up for himself via non-violent means gets crushed by the system and ignored by everyone. There's the scene where he's buying the snowglobe for his daughter and a guy who was refused a loan for being "economically unviable" gets arrested for protesting outside the bank. Everyone else on the street completely ignores him except for D-FENS who he tells "Don't forget me." Just in case the audience didn't get the message the guy is actually dressed exactly the same as D-FENS right down to the same pattern on his tie.

Oh and the tune the snowglobe plays is "London Bridge is falling down," a song which keeps getting referenced throughout the film and which even gives it its title.

pretty soft girl posted:

To tack on top of this, all while he is raging against the machine, he never bothers to reach out to anyone who can correct any of the problems he has with society. He impotently thrashes out at people who have no authority or means to help him

Impotence, rejection and the inability to reconnect are the major themes in the film.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2012 06:53

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Dave Syndrome posted:

In Gremlins, the dad phones his wife from an inventors' convention. In the background, you see a character sitting in the prop from the old Time Machine movie. While dad is talking, the machine powers up.
There is a cutaway to his wife's home while the phone conversation continues. As we return to the shot of the dad on the phone, the time machine in the background is gone and people are standing around looking puzzled.

Fun fact: they used the original prop from the 1960 Time Machine movie in that scene. MGM actually sold it when they auctioned off a whole bunch of their props in the 1970s and it was lost for a while but film historian Bob Burns tracked it down eventually and restored it.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2012 17:25

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

A subtle TV moment!

The Dinosaurs TV show is set in the year 60,000,003 BC so their calendars run backwards.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2012 05:40

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Chamale posted:

What's the subtle moment supposed to be here?

Later in the film he suddenly cares very much about glass.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2012 19:12

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Aleph Null posted:

It has been ages for me, too. I thought his prosthetic forehead got damaged in the climactic battle scene and you were able to see a lot of his hair.

Yeah, that was representative of his character arc paying off.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2012 18:29

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

mind the walrus posted:

And Sigourney Weaver's fantastic breasts?

They save the entire ship in a deleted scene.

I'm not even kidding.

Snowglobe of Doom has a new favorite as of 18:51 on Nov 29, 2012

# ¿ Nov 29, 2012 18:48

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Sagebrush posted:

Goddamn, this is one of my favorite movies and yet I never noticed that that's Rainn Wilson as a Termite at 0:27

It's okay, judging by some of the earlier comments you're probably not the only goon to be distracted by Sigourney Weaver's rack for 15 entire years.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2012 08:57

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Boogaloo Shrimp posted:

It's a pretty timeless joke and not specifically a homage to Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Yeah, Bugs Bunny did the exact same joke (including incongruously pulling out a pair of glasses from nowhere) in the 1948 cartoon 'Hare Splitter' which means it was a well known reference back then.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2013 06:34

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

KozmoNaut posted:

Everything in Breaking Bad is sad and horrible, no exceptions.

Walter White is a monster.

I had a Facebook friend complain that BB was "relentless and nasty". I asked her exactly how cheerful she expected a show about a dying man's doomed attempt to keep his family together by secretly manufacturing drugs should be and she defriended me. :yum:

# ¿ Jan 21, 2013 14:07

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Leovinus posted:

Pretty sure this isn't true!

There's Fellini's Satyricon for a start.
Imdb has a listing of 'flatulence' films & TV shows by year and although there's a few entries before Blazing Saddles it's the first big Hollywood film to feature fart jokes. And boy, it sure makes up for lost time! :haw:

# ¿ Jan 30, 2013 12:20

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Coffee And Pie posted:

It was every game of every sport.

Yep.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2013 04:02

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Another subtle Jurassic Park moment, this time a reference to the themes of ethics vs. advancement and unleashing something you can't control that run through the film. You may have noticed this photo on Nedry's monitor:

It's J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father" of the atomic bomb.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2013 08:50

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Big Grunty Secret posted:

Dogs can detect terminators, the human resistance used them in 20XX

I just looked up the 'dog' entry in the Terminator Wiki and it's uncertain whether they used specifically trained dogs in 20XX or whether dogs just naturally react that way to Terminators.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2013 05:32

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Mescal posted:

He was hardworking, detail-oriented, picky, demanding, and sane.

The phrase 'detail-oriented' vastly undersells the monumental attention to detail he put into each of his films. If you haven't seen the documentary Stanley Kubrick's Boxes I can really recommend it - it's the story of how doco maker Jon Ronson got access to Kubrick's files after his death and finds himself suddenly trying to deal with the equivalent of several freightcars worth of boxes full of photos, clippings, outtakes, old memos, letters, etc etc etc..

Here's a snippet where they ponder a memo Kubrick sent asking someone to research the barometric pressure on Friday 11 October 1968. Why? We'll never know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_0exwQEZBo

Here's a trailer for the documentary.

Snowglobe of Doom has a new favorite as of 16:01 on Jun 20, 2013

# ¿ Jun 20, 2013 15:33

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Baron von Eevl posted:

During this campaign, Hitler was known to take his trusty metal detector and wander the desert for hours in his official Nazishorts, but all he ever seemed to find were old soda pull-tabs and $0.43 in assorted change.

I'm such a sperg that I went and checked when soda pull tabs were invented, turns out it was in 1959.

IMMERSION RUINED. :saddowns:

# ¿ Jul 1, 2013 12:07

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

The TNT TV series Falling Skies has lots of dumb moments but it's packed full of subtle things as well.

There's a weird collection of classical paintings scattered around the Charleston settlement that you only ever saw in the background of some shots and if you didn't pause the show to identify them you would never have figured out their significance. Pope's club has The Raft of the Medusa over the bar (a painting about humanity despairing and turning on itself after suffering a catastrophe), the Presidential office has Couder's Siege of Yorktown (depicting the last major land battle of the American Revolution where the combined American and French forces defeated the army of a leading British general after tricking them into believing they were going to attack a different stronghold. The French leader is shown taking charge and Washington is standing passively beside him), above the bed in Tom and Anne's room they have the first of the The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries (thought perhaps to be an allusion to the Virgin Mary, mother of the Messiah), on the next wall they have Bierstadt's A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie (showing a tiny native American settlement in the Rocky Mountains about to be engulfed by a massive thunderstorm, but although they're about to get swamped by a literal falling sky there's sunshine on the horizon) and on the other wall they have Church's South American landscape (showing a tiny remote village overlooked by a distant and imposing church building in an idealized South American landscape). Most of those foreshadow significant plot point in the third series even though many of those paintings were first seen at the end of the second series.

There were lots of other subtle little details as well, like how Dan Weaver always wore his wedding ring (even though his wife had divorced him a year before the invasion) and he also had twine tied around the two fingers next to his wedding ring, I guess as an added remembrance for his two daughters. There was also lots of anti-aliens graffiti in the background and murals with stirring quotes about war, some less obvious than others. Whenever a character got injured they usually showed signs of their injuries for several episodes after that or even for the rest of the series.

Someone in production must have been a big Star Wars fan because there's a few references to it appearing throughout the series, such as the Imperial Walker being used to indicate enemy positions on a map in one episode:

This is just scratching the surface, there was lots more.

_{_{Such a shame the plot was so dorky at times.}}

# ¿ Aug 13, 2013 16:15

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Magres posted:

it's really, really worth pausing the movie to read the full board for the betting pool.

Here it is:

I guess it's SPOILERS if you haven't seen the film.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2013 19:25

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Professor Shark posted:

"Angry Molesting Tree"

As seen in The Evil Dead, Poltergeist and Harry Potter. :eng101:

# ¿ Aug 19, 2013 19:40

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

^^^^^
I WILL SUMMON KEVIN ON YOUR rear end :argh:

There's a CitW wiki that has entries for all the monsters on the board including Kevin. Some of them only appeared in cut scenes or directors commentaries.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2013 19:46

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Jimbo Jaggins posted:

Redneck torture family, eh? eh? Sure are alot of genre films about those huh guys?

And Soon the Darkness
Ax 'Em
Cabin Fever
Carver
Children of the Corn
Chernobyl Diaries
Deliverance
The Devil's Rejects
Don't Go in the Woods
Eaten Alive
Eden Lake (for Oop North)
The Final Terror
Friday the 13th
Friday the 13th Part 2
Friday the 13th Part III
Friday the 13th (2009)
Frontier(s)
Hatchet
House of 1000 Corpses
House of Wax (2005)
The Hills Have Eyes
I Drink Your Blood
I Spit on Your Grave
Jeepers Creepers
Joy Ride
Just Before Dawn
Madman
Man-Thing
Monster Man
Motel Hell
Motor Home Massacre
The Nail Gun Massacre
Pumpkinhead
Severance
Sick Girl
Straw Dogs
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1974
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
Leatherface The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III
Texas Chainsaw Massacre The Next Generation
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre The Beginning
Texas Chainsaw 3 D
Tucker And Dale Vs Evil
Two Thousand Maniacs!
Violent poo poo
Venom
The Woman
Wrong Turn

I may have missed a few.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2013 18:28

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

synthetik posted:

You have never seen this movie if you put it on that list.

It's a parody/subversion of the genre.

Snowglobe of Doom has a new favorite as of 18:52 on Aug 23, 2013

# ¿ Aug 23, 2013 18:50

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Xander77 posted:

People say that, but unless you can show me a clip of him doing an airline food joke in earnest, I'm treating that as an urban legend (or comic folklore, whichever)

Although it looks like Seinfeld never used that phrase unironically he did popularize air travel material during the observational standup craze of the late 80s/early 90s and there would have been thousands of up-and-coming hack comedians riffing off his schtick. A lot of them weren't very subtle with their segues either so "What's up with airline food?" is a nod towards all the terrible observational comedians who were pretty much doing terrible Seinfeld impersonations instead of finding their own voice.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2013 19:59

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

scary ghost dog posted:

Yeah, it's a good use of the spoiler tags, but I think you're wrong about there being a dome.

It's a literal fourth wall.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2013 22:02

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

DrBouvenstein posted:

I really love Gremlins 2. Because they understood that to try and make a legit horror movie about 1 foot tall monsters again wouldn't work...it was the 90's now, people viewed that style of horror as campy, etc...so they took that ball and ran with it. Everything being over the top and goofy just worked, IMO.

One of the best bits was maybe 1/2 to 2/3 into the movie, it looks like the film breaks. Then Gremlin silhouettes appear and make it look like they are in the projection booth and messing with the movie.

For the VHS release, they actually changed it just slightly so instead of looking like a filmstrip breaking, it looked like a tape getting worn out and turning into to static.

The cinema version also had Hulk Hogan yelling at the gremlins to restart the film, the VHS version had a John Wayne impersonator.

Some subtle moments, cribbed from imdb:

quote:

For the special effects, Joe Dante turned to Rick Baker when Chris Walas and Rob Bottin had to turn it down.
The movie that Grandpa Fred presents in his show as "The Attack of the Octopus People" is, in fact, Octaman, which feature the first costume designed by Rick Baker.

quote:

In the scene where Mohawk drinks a potion which enables him to change into a centauroid spider, the pulsating sound effect from Tarantula can be heard. The effect was originally recorded for the Martian war machines in The War of the Worlds.

The film also has a huge number of cameo appearances by random Hollywood people as well as the film's screenwriter, composer, director, etc etc..

Warner Bros currently have a Gremlins reboot in production. Seth Grahame-Smith (of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Dark Shadows fame) is producing, and he's also working on a Beetlejuice sequel. Burton and Keaton say they'll come back for BJ2 if the script is good enough even though Keaton is now 62.
I'm apprehensive about all of the above. :smith:

# ¿ Aug 27, 2013 07:23

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

So they've got the same significance as the Sirens in 'O Brother Where Art Thou'? Dangerous Women

# ¿ Sep 5, 2013 11:08

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Lotish posted:

(my daughter likes repetition)

Go watch 'Run Lola Run' a few times in a row, it might cure her of that. :v:

# ¿ Jan 13, 2014 14:07

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Carl Killer Miller posted:

Small thing, but in Jackie Brown right after you're introduced to Louis (Robert De Niro) he has a conversation with Melanie (Bridget Fonda). It's a pretty quick shot reverse shot, but every time the camera goes back to Louis, he's looking away, unable to make eye contact with Bridget. He says a few words, then brings his eyes back. It tells pretty well about his character before you know much about him.

De Niro puts an amazing amount of work into getting into the head of the characters he plays. Apparently he held up the filming of Gilliam's Brazil for weeks because he was running around fuguring out Tuttle's character and then when he got to the set he insisted on doing a huge number of takes for each shot. I think at one point he decided that Tuttle's mechanical dexterity would be somewhat similar to a brain surgeon's performance so he went and sat in on some actual brain surgery to study it.

Brazil also has lots and lots of subtle moments and callbacks/foreshadowing:

quote:

1. Lowry records the destruction of the "personal transport" he signed out, but somehow a "personnel transport" is recorded as being destroyed. I think that the police vehicle that crashes and explodes after the truck chase links back to this. 2. Lowry sets Jill's official status to "Deceased", and later she is apparently shot by the police. 3. Lowry deletes Tuttle from the system. That is when we see Tuttle being "deleted" in real life.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2014 10:10

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Krypt-OOO-Nite!! posted:

It's maybe not that subtle but while we'r talking about Captain America I rewatched Avengers the other week and noticed that the Hydra agent with glasses (sorry forget his name) that Captain America drops off the roof at one pointwas hanging around the helicarrier.
Quite liked that they bother to show continuity even for minor characters like that.

Agent Sitwell has been hanging around a long time: he was in three of the MCU movies, two of the "one shot" shorts and four episodes of the AoS TV show. I'm going to have to go back and rewatch all those in the light of the revelations in TWS.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2014 10:56

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

KoRMaK posted:

Kubrick simultaneously helped fake the moon landing while filming the real one.

He was unhappy with the real one so he filmed a better version

# ¿ May 29, 2014 17:12

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

muscles like this? posted:

I mean stuff like how Kurt Russel, Kevin Costner, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Sacha Baron Cohen were all supposed to be in the movie, bro. Or how Jonah Hill was in the movie, quit and then came back. Or how Tarantino got so tired of people quitting the movie that he started cutting and combining characters instead of recasting.

Tarantino wasn't innocent of casting fuckery himself in Django Unchained: apparently Sid Haig's agent was told that he'd definitely got the part of Mr. Stonesipher but Tarantino gave it to David Steen, supposedly as a burn against Haig for turning down the role of Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2014 17:44

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

TMNT hits half of its markets in September and October and won't reach some parts of the world until December. Of course, anyone in those places who really gives a poo poo will pirating it rather than wait 5 months to see it legally in theatres. Or they'll be boycotting it altogether, I guess. :v:

# ¿ Aug 17, 2014 11:46

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

magic pantaloons posted:

Who put the stick up your butt?

Metaphors are going to go over his head

# ¿ Aug 17, 2014 15:53

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

priznat posted:

I've been binge watching "Supernatural" and I've noticed how often the number 237 is used, in apartment/hotel room numbers, codes to page doctors etc.

Also a particular mounted deer head and a starburst wall clock turn up really, really often in the backgrounds:

There's no particular significance to them, the set designers just really like them. :buddy:

# ¿ Aug 17, 2014 18:04

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 05:51

Snowglobe of Doom: Mar 30, 2012; sucks to be right

Literally Kermit posted:

edit: It's par for the course everyone learns something new about Watchman every loving time you watch :iamafag: or read it. Last time was discovering the chapter "Fearful Symmetry" is laid out symmetrically from the middle of the chapter - each panel has a mirror elsewhere in the chapter.

Also the story for that issue is symmetrical: the first 6 pages detail Rorschach breaking into Moloch's apartment and the last 6 pages detail him breaking back out, etc etc.. Symbols, character positions and even colours are often reflected or switched in the mirror panels.
Symmetry occurs throughout the entire series: Rorchach's mask and signature are symmetrical, as well as the neon sign for the Rum Runner bar next to Moloch's apartment (which is reminiscent of the symmetrical skull and crossbones from the pirate story but also of Rorschach's signature) as is Dr Manhattan's hydrogen atom logo etc etc etc..
The Comedian's smiley badge was symmetrical right up until it got that blood stain and that asymmetry set the entire plot in motion.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2014 14:36

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > PYF Subtle Movie Moments: Homeopathic dinosaur piss

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