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daveyh's Replies
Going around in broad daylight was the whole point though at this stage - shouting Marlo's name, calling him a coward in front of all the street players. His reasoning may have been that none of the adult or even teenage dealers would seize on this, not because they were scared of the clearly incapacitated Omar, but because it would mean Marlo would find out that Omar was wandering around giving him a bad name in the street and would either be annoyed with his closer members for not informing him (which could lead to retaliation by them), or Marlo might want to teach a lesson to the individual who killed Omar for daring to act on his behalf without authorisation.
They way Omar saw it, either word gets back to Marlo, who faces him man to man, or word is out that Marlo is weak and is nothing in the streets.
What he hadn't factored in, as you say, is a child with nothing to lose and no prejudices towards Omar's reputation seeing it as an opportunity to take him out. As other posters have said, he maybe had gotten a little complacent re his reputation in that sense, especially since he'd been away from the street for at least 18 months.
In some way, though, it worked posthumously for Omar. Michael raised concerns with Chris and Snoop about them not wanting to let Marlo know that Omar had been calling him out in the street. This proved to be the final straw as far as their relationship with Michael was concerned, it led to the legendary MY NAME IS MY NAME rant from Marlo, and more importantly, their botched attempt on Michael led to the demise of Snoop (a key member of the Stansfield organisation) and later to Michael robbing that rim shop which had previously been Marlo's main stash house.
It's evident in the final scene featuring Marlo, too, that Omar's become a legend of that world while they don't even know who Marlo is. So in that sense, too, Omar "died the hero" and so arguably won in that way too.
only saw this movie a couple of weeks ago so i'm replying to a 15 year old question and a thread that hasn't been updated since the imdb days, but anyway....
As others have said, it depends on the individuals - and by that, both the chaser and chasee.
It's actually shown brilliantly in the movie, when they're at that party and 2 of James Franco's jock friends are shooting firecrackers at girls. Upon seeing this and overhearing James Franco saying words to the effect of"they'll be getting laid later", Aaron Paul does the same to the 3 girls that he and his friends had been sat opposite in awkward silence all night. It doesn't go well. He even says "I'm being a jerk" when one of the girls asked why he did that. To no avail.
So what works with one couple might not work for another.
There are numerous reasons why the firecracker stunt was OK for the jocks but not for Aaron Paul's character, the biggest one being context. I guess that's what it's all about.
i've gotta say, of all the teen-movies of that time (and there was a glut of them at the turn of the millennium, until Not Another Teen Movie destroyed them all, including this one!), this is the only one that I can re-watch and still enjoy.
Maybe it's simply one of those guilty-pleasure rainy-day movies - it possibly helps that I first saw it on TV in the daytime during winter, so I don't really associate it with being a big schools-out summer-friday-night kinda movie, even though that's what it's supposed to be.
I also think, though, that when you get past all the cheese and some of the over the top characters (plus the dubious "moral of the story" that obsessive behaviour pays off in the end), there is some nuance and depth to it. Whether it was intended or whether I've just seen this movie too many times and am reading to much into it, I can't say.
wouldn't really need it to have her fingerprints on it though if he was going to put the knife into her hand after the deed anyway
the original Invisible Man doesn't have this problem - at the beginning, he's even wearing clothes (including a hat, sunglasses and a scarf around his face) to mask the fact that he's invisible.
just to add, I'm about halfway through the book and there's no mention of any kind of music at all. Dickie's a wannabe painter, Freddie's a self-styled playwrite. They only go to bars/clubs to get drunk. They do go to San Remo but not for any kind of special jazz festival. There's also no mention of Tom being a amateur pianist or liking classical music either. Peter's not made an appearance yet though so maybe that will change.
Marge is still a wannabe novelist.
It's interesting the the film makers chose to bring the music element into it. Maybe they felt it would be more relatable, or maybe they figured a few musical numbers (especially My Funny Valentine and Americano - oh, and how could i forget May I?!) would make the movie flow better and add a bit of fun to what is a pretty dark story.
that, for me, is the problem - they were treating Casey and Frank as dual protagonists, when, for me, Casey is the main character - think how much more screen time she has, and the story is predominantly told from her side - in fact, if the "fix" the OP mentions is applied, the entire thing is from her point of view only.
Anyway, long story short, the first appearances of Casey and adult Frank were originally supposed to be the ones we only see well into the story, and the "is this thing on..." intro was added in post production. But not because it was originally supposed to be shown in the OP's "fixed" way, which for me is still the best option and how I view the movie now. If I knew anything about it, I'd make a 'fan edit' that way, maybe throwing some of the deleted scenes in there too. But not the 'extended family' ones, because they kinda sucked
my understanding now is that the entire movie was supposed to be chronological. As in, it was supposed to start with young Frank Walker at the farm trying to get the jetpack to work. Those scenes were originally a lot longer (they only appear as a couple of 30 second flashbacks in the final cut) - Chris Bauer, playing Frank's dad, is criminally underused here!
Then it was supposed to go to the Worlds Fair/Tomorrowland 1964 scenes, then to modern day Casey on the bike, and you know the rest.
However, when viewing, the makers felt the scenes on the farm weren't strong enough to begin the movie with - maybe they weren't happy with "young Frank"'s performance, or maybe it just wasn't gripping enough. Actually, it's only coming to me as I type this, but there's deleted scenes with Casey's extended family staying with them (Lochlyn Munro playing her uncle), like they were going for a Spielberg/Amblin vibe, which the original opening would have tied in with. So, getting rid of these 'extended family' scenes, they wanted to go in a different direction, which is maybe also why the intro was changed.
Basically, they felt it "needed something" to grip the viewer's attention from the beginning. I'm not sure that even the makers were overly enamoured with the messy intro they got, but they were pushed for time and anything was better with going in the chronological order they'd originally planned, plus they also wanted both Frank AND Casey to be in the first scene.
well underage Casey does keep demanding "take me there. I want you to take me there"
And he eventually does.
PS: Sorry about the multiple messages. I apparently reached my "character limit".
That's OK, having 2 replies instead of one makes me feel more popular :D
she wanted him to hook up with Shane Oman behind the auditorium
I'd rather that than a good story told badly
and just to add, "Dignam was never off the force. He was suspended with pay" - glad someone else has made this point. I think it's deliberately left vague - Sullivan tells Costello that Dignam had quit "put in his papers", then tells Costigan that he's taken a leave of absence. Well, he did say he was pretty good at lying.
More crucially, on the rooftop Costigan's yelling to trooper Brown "where's Dignam? I told you to bring Dignam" - quite what communication there had been between these 2 before the rooftop meeting isn't clear, but I'd like to think that when this was brought up, if Dignam really had left, Brown would have mentioned this to Costigan.
perhaps he was also influenced by what happened to both Queenan and Costello when they tried to go about it in the legit way. Plus Sullivan, already the golden boy in SIU before, was now even more of a hero in that department after he'd taken down Costello (from their perspective). His status there, a lot of colleagues in influencial positions in SIU would maybe close ranks around him, and as you say, it would also be embarrassing for the department to admit that their rising star had turned out to be Costello's biggest mole, so it would be in their interests for it to go way. This, combined with the way Sullivan had managed to weasel his way out of any previous suspicion and, either through Sullivan himself or from other moles that Costello had planted in the department, had anybody going after him murdered, would make it difficult and extremely dangerous for Dignam to tackle him through SIU - in fact it's clear from his interactions with Alec Baldwin's character (i forget his name) that Queenan was the only person he trusted and was comfortable working with, so he wouldn't even have known who to bring in to help him with this.
Hence he worked alone and exacted his own justice.
postgraduate work at Chino. Excellent. i'm loving it (...let's lay it on Harp)
I think an instrumental version of that song is played quite a bit during the movie.
Did anyone else catch the instrumental version of "call of the search" also playing (during Gordon's Lambeth and then 'rehabilitation' scenes)? Can't help feeling that would have been a more fitting song to play during the end credits, but maybe that's just because I'm more familiar with it (and maybe Mike Batt hadn't written the lyrics yet, as it's several years before Katie Melua released it)
in the book, it tells whole backstory of his childhood, his parents struggling and going into debt in order to keep up with their middle-class peers (a subject Orwell also talks about a lot in Road To Wigan Pier), feeling an outsider at school because he was one of the poorest there (and that it seemed to be hierarchical based on how much money each child's family had), his eccentric relatives, the family (and societal) pressure to "make good" (ie get a good job and earn money) and that with both himself and his sister childless and approaching middle age, it appears the Comstocks line would end with them - hence his line at the end of the movie about the Comstock's continuing, which had zero gravitas without that context.
More importantly, without the context of his backstory, it's difficult to explain why he does what he does. In the novel, he doesn't quit to become a serious writer/poet (I think he tells his boss that as his reason for leaving because he has to say something!), he does so because he's declaring "war on money" (hence the alternative title, A Merry War). It's also why he immediately squanders away the cheque from the American publishers.
Finally, finding out he's to be a father means giving up on his war on money and returning to the more conventional life. It wouldn't be fair on the child to be raised in that squalid flat when they could live in a comfortable home if only Gordon would give up his (Gordon's there by choice, the child wouldn't be), plus being an unmarried mother was looked down on then and he couldn't do that to her. To translate it to film, I guess they had to make the motives more simplistic.
The film's brilliantly acted, not that i'd expect anything less from the two leads, and it's great to see so many memorable scenes from the book played out, but I feel it works better as a companion piece to the book rather than as a coherent movie in its own right, because so much context is missing.
7 years later and probably to an old imdb account but there'll be a response at last!
I always assumed it was put in to stop the question of "why didn't she just leave" appearing on these boards. It just raises more questions than answers though. OK, so she was sentimental about her parents' house and the memories it held for her, to the point where she'd rather be there as a slave than not be there at all, but then she'd be living in the palace at the end anyway. Wonder what happened to the house?
further plot holes - the black honda that Ong was so concerned about turns out to be driven by the youths he'd hired to do the fake robbery. I get Ong pretending to be worried about it following them when Oscar's sat next to him, but he was acting the same while Oscar was still in the building and couldn't see him.
Also, when the same black honda puils up and 3 thuggish looking guys get out and rush into the alleyway where Ong's just gone alone, did he somehow think Oscar WOULDN'T get out of the van to check it out?!
Ong's story about having Oscar followed and that comment about letting his wife "whore herself out" - Oscar's wife only started working there after Oscar was already hired - in fact they both started their jobs on the same day?
Final and most crucial one to the story - when Ong's explaining how the place works, he says that when a box has been robbed, the key is confiscated. Therefore, why would the key to the box that was taken 6 months ago still be with all the others? (unless Ong was referring to the customer's copy of the key? Even so, you'd think they'd keep the keys to the stolen boxes in a separate, more secured place just in case of any rogue employees).
With it being a seemingly low budget movie, I get the impression they were making a lot of it up as they went along. It's a pity these little flaws weren't picked up during editing, though, because it's such a brilliantly shot and superbly acted movie - the fact that i've watched it several times and others seem to on here as well - and it is on the whole still a great tragic story, even with the plot holes. Imagine how amazing it would have been without them.
and just re how much money would be in the box.
On the balance of probability though, the clients wouldn't be using an armoured transportation company to deliver the boxes if there wasn't anything worth stealing in them.
The only issue would be if there was very distinctive jewellery or something that would be very difficult to fence.