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One of my favourite scenes. There's a bit in it where the music playing at the disco and the ambient soundtrack mesh for a moment. It's right where Kyle Reese and Sarah Conner lock eyes across the dancefloor. Full body goosebumps.
Burning in the 3rd Degree is a pretty catchy song, too.
I did, but I think it was in about 3 or 4 sittings. It's not bad if you watch it like it's little vignettes, but it's hard to stomach as a full feature.
Probably Begbie is the more intimidating. Begbie wouldn't back down from a fight with anyone, whereas Larry strikes me as more of a chancer and opportunist who'd turn and run if someone bigger put it up to him.
It didn't take up much screen time. Besides, most guys watching this probably end up living vicariously through this group of teens for the runtime of the movie. Idyllic, nostalgic 80s Summer. Tight knit group of friends. Why not throw in the pretty neighbour girl who wants the protagonist for no particular reason? It's pretty common in teen movies. Why would the smoking hot eastern European girl in American Pie want dorky Jim? No real reason, but it's a fun fantasy. Wouldn't really sweat it.
She saw him as possibly the love of her life and was into the whole building a nest and having the pitter-patter of tiny feet in the near future. He saw her more as a woman he likes hanging around with, and was kind of just going along with her notions while planning towards his next climb. Clearly, there was an emotional imbalance in the relationship.
Although I find the idea of free solo climbing completely mental, it was/is obviously this guy's raison d'etre, and the thing that put him on this girl's radar in the first place and the thing that made him interesting to her. It's a catch-22. Convince him to give it up and he might live a long life, but he'd be dead inside.
Cage is one of those guys who bounces between really bats**t roles that you think will sink his career, then to making some brilliant serious movie that gets all the wreaths. You can't ever count him out. Unless he seriously p***es off the powers-that-be in Hollywood, that is.
Rick Dyer and Tom Biscardi are real-life comedy characters.
Dyer's five year old daughter knowing he was full of s**t was so funny, as was Biscardi's insistence on Snapple even when balls deep in the woods.
As I think was said in the film, the abortion debate strikes right into the heart of the human condition. Human beings whose brains are wired correctly will naturally feel a certain amount of empathy toward their fellows, or even things in which we find a sense of humanity, like a pet animal. And this sense of empathy makes it very hard for us to want to do harm to those things. Not that this sense of empathy cannot be overcome, but it usually starts with convincing ourselves that the thing is less than human. We see this in genocides - the people being eradicated are not human, they are vermin who must be destroyed. And it is often the case in abortion, too - it is not a person until it is born. Therefore, killing it is OK.
It's never going to be totally settled as an issue. I'm not totally anti-abortion - I can understand that there are times when it's medically advisable, but out my sense of empathy, I'd much rather it be done when the pregnancy is at the stage where it is little more than a clump of flesh that has not yet attained anything you could call consciousness. After that stage, it's a lot harder to condone it.
To say to the pro-lifers 'Oh, but do you kill flies' is to really ignore the fact that humans are walking contradictions, too. You could just as easily ask a pro-choice person if they'd ever kill their pet dog if it ever became inconvenient to have around. I'm sure you know what the answer would be.
That band were a bunch of posers. When I want authenticity, I listen to Joe Bonamassa.
It's a fun theory, but I don't think it is in any way what the filmmakers were going for. If you look at the mythology surrounding the film, it has no legs whatsoever.
"Their tapes, film reels, and cameras, along with Donahue's journal, were discovered a year later by a University of Maryland anthropology class on a trip to the area, buried beneath the foundation of a hundred-year-old house. Forensic examination of the site indicated that the soil and rocks above and around the site of the discovery had not been disturbed previously, making the equipment an out-of-place artifact whose presence at the site could not be explained by conventional scientific and forensic knowledge."
If Mike and Josh were the killers, how did that bag get there? There's nothing to suggest that Josh or Mike were forensics prodigies, or nothing to suggest they even studied it. They were both film guys.
It's one of the most hilariously dumb films ever to come out of Hollywood.
There are things that just totally take you by surprise in the film, like when his friend horribly breaks his leg on the skate ramp, and it randomly cuts to Gordy licking the wound for no apparent reason. Or when he puts all the cheese on the guy's sandwich and the guy goes, "What the hell am I supposed to do with this??" and Gordy goes, "Well, you can stick it up your bum-bum!". Sounds incredibly stupid and childish written down, but the delivery of the line just gets me.
Has to be the tent scene. I didn't find out 'til years later that they had someone outside pressing down on the tent. It's hard to make that out in the film with the shaky camera work. And another detail is the creepy groaning sound made by whatever is outside, which, again, is something I didn't pick up on until being told exactly where to expect it.
Stripping the girl and then standing around in a circle taunting her is pretty f'd up. Seems to me that if the scene wasn't broken up, she was going to get raped.
But I don't agree when Sphreeris says the things like shooting dogs should have been left out of the movie. I think they work to get the viewer out of their comfort zone. Just when you think this is going to be a fun movie about some punk kids, something shocking happens that reminds you about the environment these kids are living in, and the consequences of their lifestyle and attitude.
I thought that the 'seers', to use that word, were just people who were already insane, so the 'presence', to use another word, didn't have the same effect on them.
It was an interesting, if somewhat unlikely plot element, designed to introduce a further conflict for the character. He wanted Allison, but he was incredibly preoccupied by a horrible secret that made the relationship hard to pursue.
I don't see why people are so worried about a pretty standard movie trope. Did people walk out of American Pie going, "No way would an ultra-hot eastern European want to have sex with *that* guy!" No, they didn't, 'cause it's a movie.
I think Josh had some obvious rage issues even before killing Daryl. After the killing, he was sent into a spiral of psychosis and paranoia about who might expose him, and if/when the opportunity arose, he also tried to kill these people. It didn't make much sense that he'd want to kill Allison, but then his thought process was probably all twisted up by this point.
Good insights. Intimacy issues + stressful day + PTSD from prison rape, could all lead to physically assaulting that fruit in the toilets. I think pre-prison Billy would have been uncomfortable in the same situation but the reaction probably wouldn't have been so violent.
Agree about it being one of the funniest movies of all time. I think Mike Schank, even more so than Mark, is just funny without having to try, really. Like, the combination of the abstract thoughts he has, delivered in his child-like, spaced-out, Fargo-type accent just turns almost everything he says into comedic gold. In fact, I don't know if there's a single thing he says in the film that hasn't raised a chuckle from me at one time or another.
But maybe his funniest, for me -
* Mike arrives at Mark's house for Thanksgiving dinner *
Mark (drunk with his arm around Mike ) - "What do you know that we don't?"
* smash cut to Mike alone in the basement, speaking confidentially to the camera *
"Well, I won 50 dollars on a lottery ticket, today, but I don't want those guys to know because otherwise they'll wanna borrow money from me" ( smiles mischievously )
"Hey, man, how you doing? You're just sitting there, eh? Cheer up, man. The world is yours."
The reason why this is funny is because it sounds like an upbeat pep talk, but it's being said to a rather elderly man sitting alone in his trailer home.
Not a movie, but Leo from That 70s Show is pretty similar, as is Jim Ignatowski from Taxi. Both have apparently taken so much drugs that they are permanently stoned.
My theory on Mike is that the time he overdosed on PCP and was technically dead for a minute or so lead to some mild brain damage.
And there's no way Kevin Smith does not love this film, if he's seen it. It just seems to have everything he would like.