HOME |
RSS | 
All I know about the 2004 time travel film Primer is that it’s very confusing. That was made clear in an xkcd plot graph that we linked (Primer is at the bottom right). Although the movie covers only five days, there are nine timelines, according to this graph at Unreality magazine (which you can enlarge at the link). Does this clear things up? Link
You may be familiar with Claus von Stauffenberg, who conspired to kill Hitler with a bomb and whose plot was the basis for the Tom Cruise film Valkyrie. But do you know about the many other attempts on Hitler’s life? One involved Georg Elser, who worked alone for a year on a plan to destroy the Fuhrer, with a bomb planted in a beer hall.
While Elser was in the bierkeller he noted the stone pillar just behind the speaker’s dais; it supported a substantial balcony along one wall. His rough calculations suggested that a large bomb placed within the pillar would bring down the balcony and bury both the Führer and a number of his chief supporters. The question was how to conceal a device sufficiently powerful to do the job within a piece of solid stonework.
Here again Elser proved to have precisely the qualities needed for the job. Knowing that he had a year to prepare, he went to work methodically, obtaining a low-paying job in an arms factory and taking whatever opportunities presented themselves to smuggle 110 pounds of high explosives out of the plant. A temporary job in a quarry supplied him with dynamite and a quantity of high-capacity detonators. In the evenings, he returned to his apartment and worked on designs for a sophisticated time bomb.
When the bomb finally went off, it killed eight people and injured 64 others -but Hitler was not one of them . Read the whole story at Past Imperfect. Link
We all suspected that George Lucas didn’t really have his stories written in advance when it turned out that Luke Skywalker’s love interest was (spoiler alert!) his sister. That kind of thing happens more often than you think in movies and TV. For example, you’d expect with a TV show like 24, the story of the entire season would be planned -after all, it’s supposed to be 24 consecutive hours of action! But no…
Early in Season 6 they had a nuclear bomb going off in Los Angeles and killing at least 12,000 people … only to be forgotten a few episodes later. That is, a few hours later. In the world of 24, America gets over an attack four times the size of 9/11 before the emergency response even gets fully under way. Did the writers really plan it that way?
To quote writer David Fury, they were just “winging it.” He says that worked out fine because they got good ratings doing it: “In the early seasons of 24, [the writers tried] to map out stories and arc out stories [beforehand] a little bit more than they did, say, in seasons four and five, and four and five turned out to be two of most successful seasons.”
Making up plots as you go along tends to happen more in shows that unexpectedly become hits -as if the writers were pretty sure they wouldn’t have to write too many episodes. There are more examples in this surprisingly SFW article at Cracked. Link -via The Daily What
Have you ever watched a movie end “happily ever after” and later thought, “Hey, what about…?” Lots of major movies hope you will just let those ragged plot lines go, and we do most of the time. Saturday Night Live once made an alternate ending to It’s a Wonderful Life because Mr. Potter received no comeuppance in the film. And I’ve often wondered about The Wizard of Oz, which is featured in this article from Cracked:
If you haven’t seen The Wizard of Oz in a long time and are relying on a vague childhood memory of it, you probably don’t remember exactly why Dorothy got sucked into a tornado and transported to the magical land of Oz. The whole reason she wound up in that predicament is that her little black terrier, Toto, had bitten an annoying townsperson named Almira Gulch. Gulch then goes out and gets a sheriff’s order to have the dog put down.
Isn’t it time someone made an alternate ending resolving the fate of Toto? Read about more such movies at Cracked. Link
As one of millions of people who like the new Batman franchise, and can’t wait for Christopher Nolan to make part III, I must admit this song makes some valid criticisms regarding The Dark Knight. (via io9).
