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Martoto's Replies
Is it a supernatural twist though?
Doesn't it just make you consider that there might be a supernatural element? Myers could, in reality, have simply crawled a few yards and is dying in the rose bushes or in a hedgerow.
The ending kind of means that Michael haunts everywhere and everyone in Haddonfield (if he didn't already). He doesn't necessarily need to be supernatural to do that.
We're still nowhere nearer to comprehending what Michael is and Loomis's idea that he isn't human is as good as anyone by this point.
Fresh air? Are you kidding? The intensity was followed by the quiet moment between Will and Reba, then Will and Jack by the riverbank......... CLANG/CLATTER/BANG/CRASH!!!! Heartbeat!! In that full throated rock power ballad mode.
Saw the subject and thought "This better be about eggs..."
People being injected with a syringe.
Uhm... if you heard someone honking their horn, you would assume it was someone behind you trying to get your attention. Not that there was somebody driving straight at you in he opposite direction.
Benney hasn't committed a crime here.
There's no connection between Benney's tip and Van Zant's operation. Unless you think McAuley would rat on Van Zant if captured. What would McAuley know about Van Zant's cartel dealings anyway?
The cops are already investigating the truck heist at the beginning of the film. If Van Zant was under any suspicion for anything then it would have been from that job where his bonds were stolen and for which he is claiming the insurance.
I think you've misinterpreted the violent contempt that Hanna shows towards Benney because he's a rat as proof that what he did, calling in the tip, was somehow recklessly incriminating.
CIs (confidential informer) are people already known to police. Benney is a serial informer. That's why the tip is given credence. He gave his name so that it would carry weight. It wasn't because the call got traced that they know it was Benny.
The issue of how Benney got the tip only came up because the job turned into a firefight and Hanna was determined to nail McAuley after it.
It's not vague if you follow the plot. If the timeline and the sequence of events leading up to the tip being phoned in can't be discerned from the plot of the movie, where is it supposed to be taken from?
How exactly did he bumble it? The tip source is only an issue because the job turned into a massive battle. If Chris doesn't see the cops before getting in the car, Benny and Van Zant are home free.
Trejo spells out the betrayal all pretty clearly to Neil later on. So how you think it and the timing is vague is a mystery.
It's only remotely vague if you've been ignoring the Van Sant/Waingro subplot for the entire film.
Van Sant hasn't heard anything from McAuley following the bonds fiasco (because he's busy planning the bank job) and he cannot stand it any longer. He gets Benny to try and get to him first. Waingro, who has been looking for work, has something on McAuley they can use. They apprehend Trejo as he is making his way to the job and get the information about the job that McAuley's crew are doing that day.
What's unrealistic about that? When were they realistically supposed to get the information? When is Van Zant supposed to, realistically, try to go after McAuley? When is Trejo, realistically, supposed to be fingered by Waingro? (maybe when he's broke cover to go do a bank job he's been laying low in anticipation of.)
All plot devices are a convenience. If it's an unrealistic or gratuitous convenience, that's another thing.
CIs give tips. If the cops make a score off of it, fine. If the CI is lying then it's a problem.
But they couldn't predict the carnage that ensued. So why would they think it such a bad idea to phone in the tip.
A CI is someone already known to the police. If he gave the tip to his contact in, say, the narcotics or vice squad, he may not be expecting homicide to roll back on the tip off so zealously. Or expected that the cops would capture McAuley's gang and the original source of the tip would not be put under such scrutiny.
Actually. The cop does say Benny's name. But like I said. He expected them to be captured. Not for it to come back to him.
IIRC, I think that Benny had actually put someone else up to tipping off the LAPD. I'm sure when the cop give the message to Hannah's guys in the Major Crimes Unit, it's a different name that he says left the message.
The CI who made the call must have given up who passed the tip on to him.
And in that one, he demonstrates how tenacious and thorough he is when Pleasence wonders aloud if the remarkably high temperatures that spoiled his wine and incriminated him might have been a record. No, Columbo replies, sheepishly pulling out his notebook. Two prior instances in the past one hundred years sent the mercury even higher. They don't keep records before that. In other words, this is what Columbo does. He needs to know. And do you know how hard it is to find out last week's weather in the middle of the night?
In a modern cop show, this kind of thing is the remit of the smart alec rookie sitting at the PC, reading stuff off the screen as if they already know it. Totally perfunctory and charmless unless you count sassiness or affected nerdiness that seems to be mandatory.
I guess "Exercise..." being a fairly early episode explains the slight deviation from the familiar characterisation. In Etude In Black we also see Columbo going immediately for the shakedown with Cassavettes character, like he was back in NYC on Sgt Mahoney's (or was it Mooney's?) precinct.
You could put it down to Columbo wanting the suspect to drop their "nice" subterfuge. But as the series went on, it became the Lt's usual M.O. to allow the suspect to remain being nice until they simply can't sustain it any longer.
The telling things is how Columbo doesn't even try the subterfuge on with colleagues and subordinates (except that one time with the commissioner, which makes no sense but is fun anyway). In fact he's almost unnecessarily brusque at times. The few occasions we see Columbo in innocent mode with colleagues, you can see them rolling their eyes and thinking "I'm not the suspect Lt. You can drop the schtick."
Anyway. I love all the little moments of Columbo not being Columbo. There's a little moment in Old Fashioned Murder where Columbo makes an aside to another policeman about antiques that shows how articulate and intuitively adept he is at getting his head around stuff.
I watched this for the first time in years last night. I was surprised how much the story and the characters kept me engaged. It's only the low budget that kind of hampers the feature length experience. But not too much.
The acting is non-professional mostly. But that's ok. Plus, O'Bannon is a riot.
I just wish there was more bomb chat.
I do not like this thread. The OP is uncouth and does not appreciate the movie's skills.
So, because later O'Bannon films weren't comedies and later Carpenter films weren't comedies, this wasn't a comedy?
Sure.
But the rarity of Columbo's outbursts make them stand out for that reason. He's not a hot-head. Sometimes though, but not often, the "innocent savant" subterfuge has to be dropped. In most of those instances, Columbo challenges the suspect outright or expresses his desire and his will to put them away, or "hang" them (in once case). But on a couple of occasions, Columbo has been sufficiently outraged by the killer's callousness. The other, most notable instance is in A Stitch In Crime when he explodes in Leonard Nimoy's office.
The score is great. Most of the songs in it are fine.
The "Heartbeat" song at the end is excruciating. Even for the eighties it was a lurid hand grenade chucked at you just as you are starting to come to terms with what happened in the movie. It was the kind of track you'd expect to hear used in a montage, in a lesser film.
It has the same effect as someone opening all the doors to the cinema and letting in all the daylight and the noise from the street the moment the credits roll.
I and a lot of my British friends have noticed it's a recurring issue with Nolan's films.
He tries to undercut otherwise perfunctory dialogue that is intended to move the plot along e.g. "You're going to go there and do that because ..[mufflemufflemufffleloudmusiccrescendo]..."
It's not a coincidence. Nolan has explained that he was trying to be impressionistic with the sound (good grief). It doesn't happen as much in Dunkirk but there is at least one moment where you're at the edge of your seat wondering what Rylance's character is going to say next and his voice suddenly drops in the mix when he's about to say something that seems important.