Questions about specific movies, TV shows and more

These are questions relating to specific titles. General questions for movies and TV shows are here. Members get e-mailed when any of their questions are answered.

Question: In the scene where the bad guys catch Rita and Roddy on her boat, her ruby falls from her pocket. Shouldn't it have broken down or at least have some scratches?

Answer: Not really, when you consider it's a fake so it probably very light, and only falls an inch or two (given the height of the average rat).

Show generally

Question: How is Naruto able to easily create dozens of shadow clones when he needs to, but will sometimes struggle to create just a few.

Answer: In-character, he's not very good at Bunshin No Jutsu, so it's unreliable. Out-of-character, it's a classic plot device shared by hundreds of anime that people who're not generally too great can do spectacularly well when it really matters.

Moose

Question: Does anyone know the name and location of the buildings used for exterior shots of the Professor's university? Is it an actual campus or some other facility?

Answer: According to the IMDb, the University of California, Los Angeles (often just called UCLA) was used as a primary filming location, with some other shots taken at Mayfield Senior School in Pasadena, California.

Tailkinker

Question: When Benji Dunn is guiding Ethan through the streets via satellite to find his wife at the end of the film, Ethan is on a silver phone. Does anyone know the make and model it was? I've been told that it is a Bang and Olufsen but I can't find it.

Answer: It's a Nokia N92. Nokia had promotional tie-ins with the film, and all the phones in the film were made by them.

Sierra1

Question: What happened to the movie that Chris was shooting. It just disappears from the script after Burke Dennings dies?

????

Chosen answer: It's never explained. Presumably shooting was suspended during her daughter's "illness," or they were able to continue filming around her absence.

raywest

Question: Who put the cross under Regan's pillow? It couldn't be the demon. (01:12:35)

????

Chosen answer: Burke Dennings, that's why he was murdered.

According to William P. Blatty, it was Karl who put the crucifix under Regan's pillow.

Question: This is pertaining to the dice game where the crew were betting their years as part of Davey Jones's ship. Did anybody understand how the game worked. What was the purpose? What was the deal with the numbers they were calling out?

SAZOO1975

Chosen answer: This is a real game called Liar's Dice, specifically the Common Hand variation. The idea is to predict, or pretend to predict, what will appear when the dice are finally revealed; for example, a call of "six fives" is a claim that, when the dice are revealed, there'll be six (or more) fives showing. Each player, however, can only see their own set of dice, so must guess what the other players have, based on what bids they make. The game proceeds with each player having the choice to either raise the bid to a higher level, or challenge the preceding player's claim. Once a challenge is made, the dice are revealed; if the challenged bid is shown to be correct, the challenger loses; if it's shown to be false, then whoever made that bid loses.

Tailkinker

Question: To my understanding, the creatures only come out when the 'darkness' comes. But in the scene where Rose and Cybil run into the acid-vomiting zombies, there was no 'darkness'. Am I misunderstanding something?

Answer: In the games at least, the monsters are present even when the darkness isn't there - they could be a sign to indicate that the darkness is coming. It's not until the darkness comes that they are bombarded with them, and the most fierce creatures come out (in the case of the film, Pyramid Head - though he appears in the second game where there isn't a 'darkness' per se).

Sam Johnson

Question: How did the Dutchess poison the prince and plan on him passing out as soon as they got to the stable? The servant watched him chase her there, and he supposedly passed out at just the right time? Before he was able to kill her?

Answer: Eisenheim apparently was a master of mechanics and chemistry. He gave her a substance that would make the prince pass out in a certain amount of time, and then depended on the Dutchess to take the correct amount of time to get to the stable.

wizard_of_gore

Question: I didn't understand where the engine that killed Donnie at the end of the movie came from. This plane belonged to the tangent universe right? So when Donnie gets back to his room where all has started, he gets back to the real world. Is this engine a residue from the tangent universe? Because they say in the movie that no plane has lost an engine in the real universe.

Answer: Yes the engine has come from the tangent universe or the alternate future so to speak. The reason they have trouble finding the engine is because it hasn't happened yet and it has entered a corruption in the universe. With that in mind the key difference from the start of the film to the end is that Donnie managed to send the engine through the wormhole as opposed to the engine entering the corruption at the start of the film.

Lummie

Question: Recently I watched the movie with commentary of amongst others Carrie Fisher. I noticed that she didn't have any comment about the scene where Harrison Ford puts his hand on her breast. Did she ever made a comment about that in a magazine or in an interview? Did Harrison Ford?

Answer: Coincidentally, in the time since this question was first posted, Carrie Fisher revealed that she and Harrison Ford were having an affair. While this may not necessarily have anything to do with the incident asked in the question, it adds the possibility that mentioning it would have been too close to an uncomfortable subject she hadn't yet admitted.

TonyPH

Answer: I've never seen anything on the subject. Seriously, though, why would either of them comment on the incident? It was an on-set slip-up that made it into the film, nothing more than that and, to be blunt, hardly unusual. In all likelihood, neither really remembers the incident among the many slip-ups that both have undoubtedly experienced in their lengthy careers.

Tailkinker

Question: After John releases the hostages, we see the woman Rosa go to a police car. When she is asked to comment on John, she calls him a good man and then starts talking in Spanish. I can catch that she calls someone crazy, but I can't understand any of the rest. What is it that she's saying?

Answer: She says, "John Q is a good man. He is unlike the other jerk that hits his wife in the face."

Question: After Larry says to Nicky "wanna slice it up?" it cuts to a shot in the park. In the background there is a sign that we only see the bottom half of. The part of the sign that we can see says "house". What does the top half say? I know it doesn't show it in the movie but I have a feeling this is a NY landmark and it's been eating at me for days.

Answer: It is the "Essex House"

Dedderbot

Question: In the scene right after Jack hustles Rose into the Gymnasium, she is at tea with her mother and some other women, looking at a little girl. As she stares, her face and the background seem to turn very luminescent, like a painting. Is it just me, or did they film it in a certain way or do something in post-production to make it look like that?

Answer: In the special edition DVD, they actually made a scale model of the room in question and filmed the actors against a green screen. The lighting of the shot didn't match up correctly with the footage of the scale model.

Answer: The "if only you has come to me sooner" was in reference to the bridesmaids dresses. Not the little girl and the etiquette part.

Answer: It's probably showing 1) that Rose is detaching from the present into her own thoughts, and 2) that she's envisaging the type of narrow and straitjacketed life this naturally vivacious and innocent little girl is going to have to get used to, which brings her back to thinking of the life she will be stuck in if she marries Cal, thus changing her mind about it. She wants to be free to express joy and to laugh, dance wildly, travel on the wind, run, climb, swim - everything she won't be able to do if she marries Cal. I don't think the little girl is the daughter of the woman, because you can hear the woman saying to her: 'If only you'd come to me sooner!' when the little girl makes mistakes of etiquette. This implies to me that the little girl has changed guardians for some reason, and in doing so, has gone up in class. Rose realises, where the little girl does not yet, what kind of life this little girl has unknowingly just been aportioned, and how, if the upper classes had their way, children would never get the opportunity to just be children (this is the implication of 'if only you'd come to me sooner'). The encroaching loss of that little girl's right to express the spirit of a child reminds her of Jack's warning that Rose will likewise die if she doesn't break free, because the fire that he loves about her will, sooner or later, burn out.

Question: At the end of "Mortal Kombat Conquest," Shoug Tsung and Kitana get killed, but in "Mortal Kombat 1," they are alive, and I was wondering about that.

Answer: Two explinations are possible: 1) Because the show was cancelled, we never got to see a later episode when they were presumably brought back to life; or 2) the show takes place out of continuity with the film series. Both explainations are perfectly valid.

Answer: The unproduced second season was going to show everyone being brought back to life by the elder gods. But the series was cancelled due to higher-than-expected production costs.

TedStixon

Show generally

Question: There's an episode in which Elliott is staying at JD's and they're not going out, but he comes into the bathroom and carries her to the bed and they take each other's clothes off (she's wearing red underwear). At the end, Elliott says, "Merry Christmas," and the camera pans over a Christms tree with presents underneath it. I want to know the name of this episode, and more importantly the name/artist of the song playing over this whole end bit. Thanks.

Answer: The episode in question is My Monster from season two. The song played over the final scene is Dreaming Of You by The Coral from their 2002 self-titled album.

pinkwafer

Question: Did the mutants always have a class system or was this just for the movie? I'm curious because at the meeting we are told Pyro is above a class 3 and the girl that has the speed and ability to find mutants is under a class 3. Shouldn't she be rated higher than Pyro since she has two powers and he only has one?

Answer: There is a classification system in the comics, although precise details have never been spelled out. Omega-level is considered the most powerful, allocated only to those with effectively unlimited potential and thus is the equivalent of the Class Five mentioned in the film. The next most powerful are classified as Alpha-level, followed by Beta and so forth. Other ranks apparently exist - Jean Grey's nephew and niece, both latent mutants, were referred to as being classified as Epsilon-Delta, which may be the lowest level, reserved for mutants whose abilities have not yet manifested. The number of powers is not necessarily an indication of level; what matters more is the level at which those powers function. Callisto, despite having two powers to Pyro's one, may operate at a generally lower level and thus be ranked lower. Alternatively, it is suggested in the novelisation of the film that Callisto simply wasn't including herself when she stated that there wasn't anybody else higher than a class three present.

Tailkinker

Question: What is the name of the Language Omouri speaks? It's never identified in the movie.

Answer: According to the script, it's Swahili.

Sierra1

Answer: Her name was Jenny when she was the Blonde and Jamie as the brunette.

Dedderbot

Answer: They never use an M14. The nearly always use a Ruger Mini 14, a totally different weapon.

stiiggy

Answer: The machine guns primarily used were M60's or M60D's. Although there were a lot of sub-machine guns used too, like the Mac-10. For some reason other answers are talking about rifles used in the show.

Bishop73

For the reason is because most people don't know the difference between an automatic rifle, a sub-machine gun, and a machine gun. I.e. Die Hard "Ho-ho-ho now we have a machine gun" - actually a HK MP5K. M60D's are for helicopter door gunners. I suspect you mean an M60E3, with the pistol foregrip.

stiiggy

You suspect wrong. I did mean M60D since they were seen being used as helicopter door guns.

Bishop73

Only in the stock footage in the intro though.

lionhead

Yes, because the question was asking what machine guns were used, but didn't cite a specific episode or anything, so I was being thorough.

Bishop73

The question is what machine guns were used by the A-team. Not that one.

lionhead

So you think the question was what machine gun was used by the A-Team but not by the A-Team?

Bishop73

No. The A-Team never used the M60D anywhere in the series, you only see it in the stock footage of the intro. And the question was what machine guns the A-team used.

lionhead

Which is stock footage of the A-Team.

Bishop73

That is most definitely not the A-team in the helicopter, they are just showing footage from the Vietnam war.

lionhead

Answer: Mostly M-14's. Occaisionally M-16's or Ingram Model 10's. http://world.guns.ru/smg/smg00-e.htm.

Grumpy Scot

They are not M-14s, that is a full automatic military rifle used during the early part of the Vietnam War as a replacement for the M1 Garand. It has much the same appearance as the M1 except with a magazine instead of a top-loading en-bloc 8 rd clip. The rifles used by the team are Ruger Mini-14s, chambered for .223. An M-14 is NATO 5.56.

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