Things in movies that you just can't understand!

Sarah

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Has there ever been anything in a movie that you've seen that despite trying, you just can't understand??

I'm a huge fan of The Silence of the Lambs - not so much of Red Dragon or Hannibal - but have seen them all, TSOTL many many times.

If anyone else is too, you will know the bit about the anagram 'Hester Moffet' - can someone please explain to me how Clarice comes to the conclusion that this means 'the rest of me - miss the rest of me'? Is she referring to the head in the garage?

And then in Hannibal, when we see Barney meeting Clarice, does anyone know what Clarice means when she says to Barney that 'Karen Flox' has signed his tax returns???

Is there anything in any movie you like that you've struggled to understand, despite trying??

Thanks for any assistance - I'll buy you a bottle of Chianti if you can help me......
 

Sarah

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Yes, it's just the way Clarice delivers the line though. Had she just said Hester Moffat but she says 'Hester Moffat miss the rest of me' which caused my intitial confusion.

I can tell we're going to have fun with this one @Ome :giggle:
 

Alexis

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Sometimes it's the editing of a film that causes things that don't really make sense. There could have been a cut scene or even a line that would have made the "miss the rest of me" line mean something.
 
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Mel O'Drama

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Yes, it's just the way Clarice delivers the line though. Had she just said Hester Moffat but she says 'Hester Moffat miss the rest of me' which caused my intitial confusion.

Sometimes it's the editing of a film that causes things that don't really make sense.


There's a similar example in Jaws. During the morgue scene there's a really strange dialogue edit over an inserted shot where Richard Dreyfuss's intonation changes drastically and the flow of his dialogue becomes very random.

Pre-internet, I thought I was the only person to find the edit strange but it turns out it's one of the most discussed moments in the entire film among fans.



It was down to the scene needing to be edited in order to get a PG rating. Decades later, Steven Spielberg revealed that a line of the dialogue had been strung together from dialogue intended for another part of the film.

Naturally, there's always the person who falsely claims to have seen the uncensored version when it was first in the cinema or the first time it was on telly, which perhaps shows the power of The Mandela Effect.
 

Alexis

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There's a similar example in Jaws. During the morgue scene there's a really strange dialogue edit over an inserted shot where Richard Dreyfuss's intonation changes drastically and the flow of his dialogue becomes very random.

Pre-internet, I thought I was the only person to find the edit strange but it turns out it's one of the most discussed moments in the entire film among fans.
This was what I was thinking when I replied. I have seen Jaws but don't know it by heart. Though this example I had read about or noticed myself, I can't remember exactly. Though it was on my mind, or at least a morgue scene in a film that seemed strange or badly edited.
 

thomaswak

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Not the really the subject, but I tend to hate action movies like John Wick. I mean, the first one was enjoyable, but I really can't understand how he - alone - can fight against so many people, waiting for their turn to be kicked in the ass. I mean, in JW2 (that was crap imo), he fights against what, 30 guys in one scene? And they just wait for their turn to be killed. Nowadays action movies are mostly like this. It doesn't make any sense. I really, really don't understand how can producers let this happen. That's plain stupid.

I can't buy it.
 

DallasFanForever

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I was never a big fan of one person taking out an entire “army” of people at the same time either. The original Kill Bill comes to mind as a perfect example of this when Uma Thurman takes out Lucy Liu’s entire gang. That scene is ridiculous! I know she has the best sword on the planet but come on! I laugh that entire scene because it’s just so over the top.
 

thomaswak

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I agree. At least, Kill bill is an hommage to the genre, and almost bend on parody... But John Wick, the franchise, is sadly very first degree and takes it too seriously...
 

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In Terminator 2, it has always driven me insane that the killer terminator threatens John Conner's foster mother with impaling her eye to get her to call out for the child. I mean, he can morph into anyone he wants, right? Why not just killer her, be done with it, and the morph into the mama and trick Conner? Why the need to threaten torture?
 

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In Terminator 2, it has always driven me insane that the killer terminator threatens John Conner's foster mother with impaling her eye to get her to call out for the child. I mean, he can morph into anyone he wants, right? Why not just killer her, be done with it, and the morph into the mama and trick Conner? Why the need to threaten torture?
In the deleted scenes, the T1000 starts malfunctioning after he’s frozen and shot into a million pieces. Simple tasks like touching a hand rail mimicked it’s pattern, strange reconfigurations after he pushed the T800 into the cog wheel... anyhoo it’s implied that the T1000 was starting to crash & was finding it difficult to morph/terminate on its own, etc.
 

CeeCee72

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In the deleted scenes, the T1000 starts malfunctioning after he’s frozen and shot into a million pieces. Simple tasks like touching a hand rail mimicked it’s pattern, strange reconfigurations after he pushed the T800 into the cog wheel... anyhoo it’s implied that the T1000 was starting to crash & was finding it difficult to morph/terminate on its own, etc.
Aaaahhhh....

Thank you!
 

Biggie

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Moving a corpse, offen into the boot of a car.

I'd suggest that moving a corpse is hard work, the weight of the dead guy plus all the bullets in him, without anyone noticing and calling the police.

Jackie Brown is the only movie or TV show that I can recall where the soon to be corpse is tricked by the bad guy into climbing into the boot first, then killed.
 

darkshadows38

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yeah a dead body apparently is well dead weight pun intended and it's pretty damn heavy they say i wouldn't know i've never picked up a dead body before but you need a lot of help. in movies they make it look so easy and it may be with the actor or actress alive at the time.
 

Jimmy Todd

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In the movie Badlands Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek's characters run away and live in the forest for awhile. There are very quick flashes of llamas, which obviously don't live in the United States. I never understood why the director put them in there.
 

Biggie

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So the bullet riddled guy is is in the boot of the car and his body is not leaking fluid Hansel and Gretel style.

The guy that made the corpse always knows a spot in the woods. Digging a hole with a shovel deep enough and long enough to bury the corpse always magic happens.

Digging into the ground is hard going. The police always found their bodies on the surface covered by a leaf or two.
 
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