In the course of my movie watching, I often catch myself falling for the pitfalls of misattribution. Other times I discover continuity holes, missed opportunities or potential connections. These are their stories.
• For the entirety of Room, I thought the actor playing Jack was female, and that the character of Jack was also in fact a female. Old Nick had wanted his child to be a boy, and so he named the kid the masculine-sounding Jack. Brie Larson’s character went along with this, pretending she was a boy, in order to protect her daughter. As the credits rolled and reported that Jacob Tremblay evidently portrays Jack, it occurred to me that I had manufactured the rather significant plot detail to give a new layer of meaning to the situation. #confessions
• I pressed play on my computer to watch the film Nymphomaniac. In the first twenty minutes there were a lot of very interesting scenes, with the musical score is so high in the mix that the dialogue is mostly inaudible, and the viewer is made to fill in the words. It’s an interesting decision by director Lars von Trier, but I commend his originality and focus on assembling the story myself. It’s an interesting technique, one I’d considered but never seen actually executed, until I realized that, along with the video player, pressing the play button also launched my music player. Boards of Canada‘s “Geogaddi” was playing at the same time as the movie, and I was clueless to what was actually happening on screen. #mixedup
• There’s a scene in 1995’s Hackers where the main guy does some serious hacking, which leads to Bunk from The Wire’s phone number showing up in an online personal ad, leading to Bunk’s character getting bombarded with solicitations. Now I’m no hacker, but he could have just placed a personal ad containing Bunk’s number. #hacked
• John Candy’s character in Planes, Trains and Automobiles is the same person as Candy’s character in Home Alone, as he is stranded somewhere and trying to get back to Chicago on a bus, and is also a younger version of his character in Cool Runnings, having said the line “after this I want to go to Jamaica”. #candyappeal
• In Love and Mercy, at 1:50:20, Elizabeth Banks’s character acts like Brian Wilson jumped out in front of her car, but he was at a pretty well defined crosswalk, so maybe she’s the one with the paranoid schizophrenia. Dr. Landy should get on that. #beachedboy