Question: Near the end when Sally is in the circle with Gilly, there is a series of flashbacks. There is a shot of a woman with curly shoulder length hair surrounded by white. Who is she? She's not their mother as she has long straight hair.
Question: I haven't read the novel, so I don't know if it's addressed there, but after Javert interrogates whom he later finds out to be Cosette in her own home, he goes back to find the house empty, and Cosette and Valjean are now living in another house. Is this an additional house that Valjean already owned as a safe house, or did he just rent it?
Answer: I'd say it was a house he rented.
Question: For the card game at Hatchet Harry's: one of the rules is that an open man can't see a blind one. I'm only familiar with "blind" referring to forced bets at certain spots on the table (e.g. the opening antes for Texas Hold 'Em). For this it seems to be a designation of the bet, for example when Harry counters Eddie's 10K, open, with 20K, blind, which is then topped by 20K, open. Could someone explain to me what open/blind means?
Answer: First, keep in mind they're not playing poker. It's similar, but there isn't a check/bet/call. They put in money, and you have to match it, then it's back on the other guy to match or raise. If you "see" the last guys bet, you put in double, and the cards are shown. Yes, "blind" means you didn't look, "open" means you did.
Answer: When you play a poker hand blind (I think it's in 5 card draw poker) you bet without looking at your cards and so you don't get the chance to change any cards. The others that are betting against you (the opens) have seen their cards, exchanged as many of their 5 cards as they want but then have to double your bet amount.
Answer: They're playing "3-card Brag." In this game, to play blind, you're not looking at your cards when betting. There are certain advantages to this because you only have to put in half the bet while blind. When the round gets to 2 players remaining, if one person wants to "see" a player's hand, he doubles the previous bet and the hands are revealed with the best hand winning (in the event of a tie, the player "seeing" loses). If a player is "open", meaning he looked at his hand, he can not double the bet and "see" a blind hand, he can only bet or fold. The round continues until the blind hand sees or there is a fold. At any time a person playing blind can look at their hand and then continues playing as an open hand, without the blind advantages.
Question: Todd has been raised from birth to be totally emotionless. When he is thrown out of the colony, what caused him to cry?
Answer: Emotions aren't just learned. Some are inborn and can't be fully suppressed.
Question: What game are the three guys playing at the table where Matthew Lillard slaps Randall Batinkoff for no apparent reason?
Answer: Russian Beer Roulette. The scene is meant to be a recreation/tribute of "The Deer Hunter", where they slapped a lot. Instead of a revolver with one round in the chamber, one beer can is shaken up and put in with unshaken up ones so that the "loser" gets sprayed when opening the wrong one.
Question: According to IMCDB, Bobby rides a John Deere 200-series lawn tractor. Assuming he didn't do anything to spruce it up, how many miles would he realistically be able to ride it before having to fill it up? How fast could he ride it? Does it take regular gasoline or would it need a special fuel mix? I couldn't find any specs on its mpg, although JD says it has a 3.5 gallon tank and a top speed of 5.5 mph.
Answer: Didn't see the movie, but I looked up the specifications for the John Deere model 200 on TractorData. It was the first of the series and manufactured from 1975-1976. It had a Kohler one-cylinder 305cc 8 HP 4-cycle engine that runs on regular gas and a surprising maximum speed in 4th gear of 7 miles per hour! No one seems to rate lawn tractor MPGs, but similar-sized engines running generators at full load might use about 3/4 to 1 gallon per hour. So, he should be able to go at least 3 and 1/2 hours on a tank, or about 25 miles. He could fill up at a gas station without having to add oil to the gas.
Question: The ending apparently had to be reshot, because the original ending leaked out. What was this original ending?
Answer: The original ending features a huge shoot-em-up, involving more than 150 cops, but it was changed to a shoot-em-up on a much smaller scale that involves only Kevin Spacey, Samuel L. Jackson and Ron Rifkin.
Question: There is a scene where Canton says he believes the creatures were a strange offshoot of the ARCHAEA OTTOIA family. He then describes how big they get based on how deep down they are as well as what they do to their victims. Question is does the Archaea Ottoia really exist? If so is anything Canton said about it true? I tried looking for this creature in the search engine but with no luck.
Chosen answer: According to the DVD commentary, the monsters in the film are a combination of 3 different undersea creatures. All of them are microscopic.
Question: Was a lot of the dialogue dubbed? It seems that a lot of the actors' voices don't seem to match up with the movements of their mouths.
Question: When Z joins the soldiers and Weaver joins the workers, why couldn't the soldiers and workers tell that Z is actually a worker and Weaver is a soldier as the soldier ants are muscular and the workers aren't?
Answer: It seems there are cases where smaller ants are soldiers, and larger ones are workers. Remember the workers didn't seem to care that Weaver was huge and muscular.
Question: There is a short scene with a group of African-American youths on a staircase playing this dice game where they throw the dice and take money, or something along those lines. This game has been featured in many other films. What is this game called, and what exactly do you do in it?
Answer: This is almost exactly like the casino game 'Craps'. Except you are only trying to roll your original number. If you roll a '7' before your original number then you lose. If you roll your original number before the '7', then you win. The other crap rules usually do not apply.
Question: What is the story behind Grizabella? Why do the other cats seem to hate her and shun her?
Answer: It's a bit vague, but when Grizabella was young, she left the other Jellicle cats, turning her back on them to live another life, thinking she was more glamorous than the others. Now that she is older and has fallen on hard times, she returns, wanting to rejoin the tribe. The other cats are resentful that she considered herself better than them, and they are put off by her shabby appearance, so do not want her back.
Answer: She is the one from the opening sequence, their "great, great, great" grandmother who started the whole "curse" thing.
Bruce Minnick