Question: Was the whale in the night scene in the raft an illusion? I only ask because it faded away instead of going under the water. Is this intentional or just bad special effects? Thanks.
Answered questions about specific movies, TV shows and more
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Question: Does anyone know Maleficent's raven's name?
Question: In the scene where Hellboy breaks Johann Krauss' suit in the locker room, Johann walks away in his "gaseous" shape, merrily singing a song in German. What song is that, and what does its lyrics mean?
Answer: It's not an existing song - at least I never heard it, and I'm a pretty old German - but he sings about finding himself a cute little nurse.
Question: If the 21 game is still played in casinos, there could be hundreds of geniuses who can count and cheat the system as shown in the film. Is this a possibility, or have casinos adopted extra security measures or something?
Answer: Casinos have always looked out for people counting cards, even before the real events that inspired this movie.
Answer: Yes, most casinos have now upgraded to the automated card shufflers, which constantly shuffle the cards after each deal, so there is no way that counting cards would be possible.
Question: Near the beginning of the movie, Fletcher can't lie and tries saying the word that sounds like "sight-ull". Why can't he say "Settle"? Just saying "Settle!" is a command or suggestion. It isn't telling a lie about something.
Answer: Because the underlying reason the parties would settle is a lie. He knows that settling the case is not really the right thing to do.
Question: When the Joker tells Batman that he'll have to break his one rule (not killing anyone) is he referring to the choice he'll have to make with Harvey and Rachel, or is he foreshadowing Harvey's death at the hands of Batman. Also on that note, since Batman did kill Harvey, does that mean the Joker did win over Batman?
Answer: He's obviously referring to the choice that Batman has to make - even the Joker, at that point, can't predict how things are going to turn out with Harvey. He's telling Batman that he's going to have to choose to let somebody die in order to save the other. Second part is kinda iffy - Bruce isn't intentionally choosing to kill Harvey, which was the point the Joker was making earlier, about forcing Bruce to consciously choose to let somebody die. He's doing what he has to to save Gordon's son; Harvey's death is a by-product of that, rather than a deliberate decision on Bruce's part. The fall that Harvey took wasn't so far that he couldn't potentially have survived - Bruce did what he had to do to save the boy and left Harvey, somewhat appropriately, in the hands of fate. Harvey's death leaves Bruce in a pretty dark place, but it's probably not reasonable to say that the Joker actually turned him to the dark side, as it were.
Question: What kind of necktie knot does Bond use and how do you do one?
Answer: A Windsor Knot, and go here to see how: http://www.tie-a-tie.net/windsor.html.
Question: When the Joker burns his half of the money, why didn't any of his own henchmen stop/subdue him and/or pillage the money for themselves? Piles of cash that high (even if it only consists of $1.00 Bills) shows that the cash amount would be substantially high (a few hundred million to say the least).
Answer: Given the Joker's tendency towards extreme and somewhat random violence, killing abruptly and on a whim, it would be a brave henchman who tried to interfere with his plans. It's also established that many of the Joker's henchmen are recruited from among the mentally unstable inmates of Arkham Asylum, so money may well be not as great a priority to them as it would be to your average mob henchman. Finally, as you mention in your submission, the Joker specifically states that he's only burning half of the money that he took from Lau. That still leaves plenty of money to go around among his crew - if the boss wants to burn his half share, that's his business.
Someone stated on another question, and I believe it to be accurate - Joker is burning his half of the money...which is the bottom half of the money stack. The top half is the Mobs money, but that is obviously going to burn too and that is why the other mob leader objects. Joker says he doesn't need money, cause the things he likes are cheap. Still, I don't think any of the joker's henchmen are going to be brave enough to try and stop him.
Question: What exactly happens in the opening? I'm assuming Blofeld is the one Bond kills, but what was the point of it? Was it just to answer the question about what happened to him? And why was his face not shown?
Answer: The producers of the film had a falling out with Kevin McClory, who had the rights to the character of Blofeld. They decided to kill off Blofeld to show McClory that the films could manage fine without the character. Obviously, without McClory's permission they couldn't go so far as to say that the guy in the wheelchair is actually Blofeld, otherwise they'd get into legal bother, so they just left it to fans to assume that's who it is.
Question: Originally, the plan was to kill Richard himself rather than his wife in order to keep him quiet about Provasic causing liver damage. But wouldn't Devlin MacGregor eventually have had to deal with the side effects anyway, especially when the wrongful death lawsuits began pouring in? I know some suspension of disbelief is required, but this still seems like a stretch.
Answer: Not really. If anybody raises a wrongful death lawsuit against them, Devlin MacGregor's high-priced lawyers can just point to their battery of "successful" test results to show that no side-effects occurred during their comprehensive testing. If they then dig deeper into the case, then, lo and behold, it's revealed that the tests were all faked, with the fake results signed off on by Dr Alexander Lentz, who was, rather conveniently, tragically killed in a car accident. It would be easy to cast Lentz as the villain, faking the test results for his own reasons, which gets Devlin MacGregor off the hook. In all probability, the original idea was to frame Kimble for the fraudulent testing - with Kimble killed in a "burglary gone wrong", he could easily be used as a scapegoat. When things went awry and Kimble's wife was killed instead, this gave them the perfect angle to completely discredit Kimble, taking him out of the equation, and they switched to a replacement plan of using Lentz as their scapegoat, forging his signature on the test results and arranging the car accident that killed him.
Question: At the end when the pick-up truck drives away, there is an angel on the back flap of it, similar to the angel in the garden of the house where Tom Hanks delivers the parcel. Are we to assume that the parcel belongs to the woman in the pick-up, and that this is significant in some way?
Answer: It's the same women. It's a little complicated. The angel wings are a recurring plot device to show that the parcel Tom Hanks just delivered to the ranch belongs to the woman (who is an artist) in the truck, which also has the wings painted on the tailgate. There are also metal wing wind sculptures in her yard. The wings are her artist's "logo." As Hanks stands in the crossroads deciding where to go, his looking back in the direction that she just drove off implies he will go back to her house, probably to let her know that her package gave him hope while he was on the island that he could someday deliver that package, and possibly to restart his life with her (she is pretty, after all). She was married to the guy in Russia who she was sending packages to, but he was cheating on her. If you notice the gateway over the entrance to her property where another package was delivered at the beginning of the movie, both her name and her husband's were on the overhead ironwork, as well as the angel wings. At the end, his name has since been removed, indicating she is now single.
Answer: The Angel wings are an important symbolic thread that run throughout the move. They appear in several scenes. They represent love/hope/salvation. We first see them in a seemingly unrelated scene at the pretty redhead artist's ranch when she is still married to the cheater dude. She sends him the wings on a package but the package is not important. Rather the Wings on the package are important. She intended the wings to go to her cheating husband but instead they went to Chuck. Chuck preserves the wings. He caresses the wings. Later we see that he has drawn dozens of the same wings on the inside of his cave wall. On the raft, he takes only Wilson and the Wings which he carefully wraps in leaves. When finally delivering them home, Chuck writes "this package saved my life" when he means hope/love/salvation have saved his life. The wings have make the exact same journey as Chuck. They have finally returned to the redhead and bought Chuck with them.
Nailed it! My thoughts exactly I just needed confirmation that all of this was reasonable to assume. Thank you.
Answer: The package that Mrs. Peterson sends to her husband in Russia contains divorce papers. The winged package that Tom Hanks' character saves as an unfinished task represents his desire to eventually deliver. He opens all the other packages and finds a few useful items. And the package sent by Mrs. Peterson, he uses to motivate himself to make that delivery. He only took bare essentials on the raft when he leaves the island. This package is essential to him. For some reason, he does not deliver the package to the destination to which it was addressed, but instead takes it back to the original sender. It helps close the loop in a way that could not have been done if he just delivered to the original destination 5 years late.
Question: I read on a website that one difference in the ending from the book is that Kathy is arrested. Can someone tell me if the ending in the book is much different from the film and what exactly is Kathy arrested for?
Chosen answer: In the book, when Behrani learns that his son has died at the hospital, his grief turns into rage at Lester and Kathy. He returns to the house. He finds Kathy there and strangles her. Believing she is dead, he puts on his uniform, then suffocates his wife, who is sleeping in the bedroom. Then he suffocates himself. Kathy revives and finds their bodies. Both she and Lester are arrested. As they await trial, Kathy, who is in jail, has been pretending that she is unable to speak since Behrani attempted to strangle her. She mimes a request for a cigarette.
Question: In the hospital scene, where the Joker has the gun to his head and Harvey Dent flips the coin, apparently it was heads because the Joker didn't get killed. But what if it landed on tails? Would the Joker just let himself get killed?
Answer: Yep. He's betting everything, including his own life, on the flip of a coin. He's already won, he's already dragged Harvey down from being Gotham City's great white hope for justice to being a man who's willing to kill on the flip of a coin. The Joker puts the gun in Harvey's hand and places it against his own forehead where he couldn't possibly get away if Harvey chose to pull the trigger - he knows full well what he's risking. But he's already proved his point, that anybody can fall from grace - if it takes his own death to push Harvey deeper into madness, then that's fine with him, because he's already won. If he lives, so much the better, but he's prepared to put his fate in the hands of random probability, into the hands of the chaos that he worships. That said...he's also holding the hammer back on the revolver, so even if the trigger was pulled the gun wouldn't fire. So he's not risking that much...
Question: Don gets a call from the French verifying that the blind samples Don sent confirming their virus and the AIDS virus were the same. Don goes around the CDC office and tells everybody that the French also had the AIDS virus. This causes everybody to cheer. Why would the French having the virus make everybody cheer?
Chosen answer: It represents a breakthrough in the case - a lead to the original source of the virus, as many of the patients being treated in France were either African or had spent time there. Up until that point, the origin of the virus was a mystery - with the knowledge that the French were treating the same virus, it gave them vital information in backtracking where the virus originated. It also proved that AIDS was a worldwide phenomenon of epidemic proportions, something that a number of agencies had been reluctant to accept up to that point.
This is not an accurate answer. When they say the French had the virus, they don't mean patients with the virus. They mean the French successfully found the virus in blood, which is a necessary step in determining that aids is caused by an infectious agent and the first step in coming up with medication. The French had patients with the virus since about the same time as the us.
Question: When the little girl in the read coat goes inside to hide during the liquidation of the ghetto, she goes under a bed. Why isn't her coat red anymore?
Answer: It's open to interpretation because it was a directorial decision. But the technique was a way to direct the audience's eye towards what Schindler was observing during the chaotic outdoor scenes. Once the girl's inside, the shot is no longer from his perspective since Schindler can't see her anymore, so the red was no longer necessary.
Question: What's with the President when he meets Dr. Okun, he acts like the doctor smells a lot or something?
Answer: What President Whitmore is reacting to is Dr. Okun's rather eccentric look, to put it mildly - his long hair, out-of-style pants and eyeglasses, etc... Even Dr. Okun comments that they don't get out much.
Question: Is the outbreak supposed to be all over Britain or is it just in London?
Answer: The TV at the end of the film (showing clips from various channels) seem to suggest that it's a world wide outbreak (a japanese gameshow using zombies and the news story of an American kid who killed his zombie family are shown).
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Answer: I noticed this too. He is really seeing a whale. This scene shows what is coming as a whale wakes him up in time to see the ship. As for the special effects, that is still up in the air.
manthabeat ★
The whale is he's guided salvation to being rescued when the cargo ship goes past waking him up with water sprays.