Questions about specific movies, TV shows and more

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Question: In the scene where the children are singing 'So long, Farewell', Kurt sings in a very high voice 'goodbye'. Is he really singing this or is someone else singing this?

peach

Chosen answer: Darleen Carr - the younger sister of Charmian Carr, who played Liesl - sang that line, according to Charmian's autobiography "Forever Liesl".

Jeff Swanson

Question: Forgive me, I haven't read the books yet. Do they explain how new Hogwarts students are able stop going to regular school in the Muggle "world"? It seems unlikely that several children, year after year, could suddenly miss school at age eleven (when they start going to Hogwarts) without the Muggles noticing.

Answer: In the UK, the age of eleven marks the point where children leave primary school and move on to secondary school. They do not all go together; children from a single primary school will end up separating and going to several different secondary schools located in their general area or even further afield in some cases. As such, the age of eleven is a very good point for children to surreptitiously drop out of their local system to attend Hogwarts, which could be explained to Muggle relatives and friends as a boarding school or other special educational facility without touching on its true nature. Hogwarts draws its pupils from all over the country, with only a hundred or so per school year. Given that a large proportion of these will be the children of wizarding families, who are generally home-schooled, then we're likely only talking about at most one or two children from any given area, which would be highly unlikely to be noticed. In the event that somebody does somehow pick up on it, it would be a relatively simple matter for the Ministry of Magic to make them forget all about it.

Tailkinker

Question: There is a piece of music that you can hear for just a split second when Mr. Blond is tuning through the radio stations looking for K. Billy's super sounds of the 70s (right before he tortures the cop). The exact same piece of music is also heard for a split second in Kill Bill Vol 2 when the camera is looking down on the bride's body in the church. What song is this piece of music from?

Question: When John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mother, Reese then becomes Connor's father, how could John Connor be the same person he is if a different man's sperm produced him?

dan coakley..

Chosen answer: The whole thing's a paradox, which, as time travel doesn't exist, we have no way to determine how it would work out in reality, and thus any movie dealing with time travel can make up its own rules. Effectively an infinite loop has been set up - Sarah gives birth to John, John grows up, meets Kyle, sends Kyle back to meet Sarah, they make love, Sarah gives birth to John and so on and so on. There may have been an original father to John at the beginning, but he was supplanted in the loop by Kyle and thus, in the timeline the film presents, the John who sent Kyle back is the one fathered by Kyle himself. Alternatively, maybe John Connor wasn't the original resistance leader, that some other leader sent Kyle back the first time, leading to the birth of John Connor, who then became the resistance leader instead; thus Kyle has always been John's father. This is the nature of a paradox, that there are things about the situation that don't necessarily seem to fit together, but they somehow come about anyway. The detail can be debated ad infinitum, but no concrete conclusion can be drawn, because that's just how this works.

Tailkinker

Chosen answer: Kyle was. It's a paradox, an infinite loop; Kyle goes back, fathers a son who later meets the younger Kyle and sends him back to father a son who later meets the younger Kyle... etc. etc. There are no hard and fast rules governing this sort of thing, so there doesn't necessarily have to have been an original father who kicked the whole thing off before being supplanted by Kyle. Or maybe there was. Or maybe there was originally a different resistance leader who sent Kyle back, leading to the birth of John who became resistance leader instead. This sort of thing can be debated until the cows come home, but ultimately the only answer is "it's a paradox".

Tailkinker

Chosen answer: It's simply a term used for the police detectives who specialise in tracking down and "retiring" replicants. The origin of the phrase is not given in the movie. In reality, Hampton Fancher, who wrote the first draft of the script, encountered the term as the title of a movie that was never made, that centred around a supplier of illegal medical equipment. He and Ridley Scott liked the phrase so much that they acquired the rights to use it for their movie.

Tailkinker

Chosen answer: It's explained in the original "The Terminator" - Kyle Reese volunteers to be sent back to the 80s to protect John's mother Sarah, before John is born. They get romantically involved and he fathers John in that time period.

Jon Sandys

Question: Approximately what year is the film set? The adamantium would place it after the Origins film (which I believe to be set circa 1979) in which he loses most if not all of his memories. This begs the question, how is it that he remembers WWII and the atomic bomb?

Answer: The chronology of the X-Men film series is, to put it mildly, somewhat screwed up. The first movie was released in 2000 and is described in an on-screen caption as being set in "The not too distant future", which isn't the most helpful statement, could be two years, could be ten years, who knows. The Wolverine is set about two years after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, which is in turn about a year after the events of the first movie, so think about "the not too distant future", whatever that means, and add about three years onto that. This does mean that, yes, it is indeed set some decades after the events of the Origins movie, during which he lost his memories. It is, however, also set after a period during which he worked with Professor Xavier to regain some of his memories. It could therefore be suggested that Logan remembering his experience at Nagasaki represents that they had at least a partial success in recovering some of his memories.

Tailkinker

Chosen answer: Tarantino is big on tribute to older films and filming techniques, hence the projection-style background.

Captain Defenestrator

Question: The scene where Maria and the children sing 'The Lonely Goatherd', there is a girl singing: 'One little girl in a pale pink coat heard' and 'She yodeled back to the lonely goatheard' (nearly at the end, the second time this is in the song). Who is singing here: Brigitta or Louisa?

peach

Chosen answer: This line occurs 2:15 into the song. We see the singer is Brigitta (dark hair), played by Angela Cartwright, and not blonde Louisa, played by Heather Menzies.

kuffpah

They stated 'the second time' which implies the time that the verse is sang by the 'goat' family. In which case you can't see who is singing. You can only see who sings it the first time these words were spoken.

Question: In the scene where the Surprise is becalmed, at the very start as the camera zooms out it shows that the ship is flying a line of signal flags. What is the message that they are trying to send? I tried looking it up, but I didn't have any luck.

Answer: The signals that were contemporary to the setting of the film were Sir Admiral Home Popham's "Telegraphic Signals or Marine Vocabulary." However, it appears that there is no clear signal actually being sent. For reference see Nelson's signal of "England expects that every man will do his duty" during the Battle of Trafalgar. By Pope's coding, one is supposed to signal in groups of hoisted flags, beginning with a red/white diagonal signaling the start of a message, and a blue/yellow diagonal signaling the end. Individual flags stand for numerals and the groups of numerals match phrases or letters within Pope's codings. For example a lone "3" signal represents the letter "C" while a set of signals sending "416" stand for variations of "Instruct-ed-ing-ion-s." The best I can make from the film (the yellow colors of the flags appear to be washed out due to post-processing), is that they begin a signal then send "392" ended with a "substitute" flag. Possibly standing for "impossible-ility" while the section on the Main seems to indicate "602" or "part-ed-ing-ition" without a "Finished" flag. For reference here is a link to a scanned original copy of the 1803 Edition of the Codes: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433008120291;view=1up;seq=1 And a link to a PDF that has the 1806 version with drawings of the flags: http://3decks.pbworks.com/f/Admiral%2520Home%2520Popham%2520Telegraph%2520signal%2520book%2520Final%2520edition.pdf.

Chosen answer: He dislocated them. You see Rick try to relocate the fingers later on.

Casual Person

Question: What effect did they use to get the actors' eyes to glow, revealing they are replicants?

Quantom X

Chosen answer: A two-way mirror at a 45 degree angle in front of the camera with the camera pointing at the see-through side. A light was shone at the reflective side and reflected into the actor's eyes on the optical axis of the lens.

Sierra1

Question: Why did Roy kiss his his maker just before killing him? Same-sex kisses on screen were far more unusual at the time the film was made, so the filmmakers presumably did it for a reason. What is that reason? And why, in the context of the plot, did Roy kiss him then kill him?

Quantom X

Chosen answer: He's kissing his father, thanking him for what life he has, before punishing him for making it so short.

Captain Defenestrator

Question: When Don Rafael was in the prison, why did he want to know which of the prisoners was the original Zorro?

Answer: He wanted to know if he was still alive.

MasterOfAll

Chosen answer: A Band Apart is Tarantino's production company. It uses the Reservoir Dogs characters as a logo because it was Tarantino's debut movie.

rswarrior

Answer: A Band Apart could also be a reference or tribute to Jean-Luc Godard's film Bande à part.

Question: In the scene where the raptor tries to break in and Lex is on the computer, Grant and Ellie holds the door to block the raptor, Lex is on the computer, and Tim is looking over her doing nothing. Ellie keeps trying to get the gun with her foot. Is there a reason I'm missing where she couldn't have just asked Tim to run and get the gun for her?

cilan

Chosen answer: In the extremely high stress of the moment, it didn't occur to anyone. Your mental faculties tend to shut down under that kind of pressure.

Phixius

Answer: I wouldn't want a kid to handle a gun in any way, even if they were just handing it to me; they could accidentally set it off. Maybe that thought entered her mind.

Question: In the nightclub scene, Tony goes into the bathroom with a girl and they begin making out. it's obvious they are about to have sex. The movie cuts to a different moment in a montage for a moment, then back to Tony and the girl. Suddenly he is jumping up from between her legs and screaming and runs out of the bathroom really quick. What was that all about?

Quantom X

Question: Back in the old show and first movie, the Joes had a catchphrase battle cry where they all simply yelled out "Yo Joe!" But this was not used at all in this movie, and it was used just once in the first one by Heavy Duty. Why was this signature battle cry omitted from the new movies?

Quantom X

Chosen answer: It is just the decision of the writers to not put "Yo Joe!" in the script. They've not explained their reasoning.

Casual Person

Question: When the revelation is made about how Storm Shadow was framed for the murder of Hard Master, did the leader then already know it was Zartan and made the accusations to coax a statement from Storm, or did they really not know yet? Then entire scene felt rushed, and like they figured out what happened and who did it too quickly.

Quantom X

Chosen answer: The Blind Master says to Storm, "You will tell us Cobra's endgame or die by the same sword you once used to kill our master" near the start of this scene, meaning they really did not know that Zartan killed the Hard Master.

Casual Person

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