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Ricochet Movie Fight Club: Question 22
Last week, we discussed how certain films depict the true-stories unfolding around us. I M Fine won that fight pretty handily. Across the backdrop of national tragedies large and small looms a contemplation of individual mortality, and may have prompted I M Fine to ask What is the most memorable death scene in a film? (Any film genre is eligible, but the one caveat is the death must occur onscreen.) One big Spoiler Alert at the beginning here should suffice for what is to follow.
The Rules:
- Post your answer as a comment. Make it clear that this is your official answer, one per member.
- Defend your answer in the comments and fight it out with other Ricochet member answers for the rest of the week.
- Whoever gets the most likes on their official answer comment (and only that comment) by Friday night wins the fight.
- The winner gets the honor of posting the next question on Saturday.
- In the case of a tie, the member who posted the question will decide the winner.
Notes:
- Only movies will qualify (no TV shows) however films that air on television (BBC films, a stand-alone mini-series) will qualify.
- Your answer can be as off-the-wall or controversial as you’d like. It will be up to you to defend it and win people to your side.
- Fight it out.
Movie Fight Club Questions by Week:
- What is the best film portrayal of a book character? Winner: Charlotte with 18 likes for Alan Rickman’s portrayal of Professor Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies.
- What is the best motion picture comedy of the 21st century? Winner: split decision. In an exemplary display of genuine sportsmanship, Randy Webster conceded the fight to Marjorie Reynolds’ pick Team America: World Police.
- What film provides the most evocative use of location? Winner: Taras with 21 likes for Lawrence of Arabia. Wasn’t even close.
- What is the best film that utilizes or is inspired by a work of William Shakespeare? Winner: Dr. Bastiat with five likes for The Lion King, a film inspired by Hamlet.
- Which movie has the best surprise ending, or unexpected plot twist? Winner: Repmodad with 18 likes for The Sixth Sense.
- What pre-1970s black-and-white movie would be most enjoyed by a modern 18- to 25-year-old audience? Winner: E J Hill with 9 likes for a Casablanca. (He didn’t exactly designate it his official answer, and most of the likes may have been for the modern Casablanca trailer rather than for it as an answer to the question, but nobody seemed to dispute it on those grounds, so that’s how the cookie crumbles.)
- What movie did you go to based on the trailer, only to have felt cheated? (i.e., the trailer was 10x better than the movie?) Winner: Back to back wins by E J Hill with 9 likes for Something to Talk About.
- Name the worst movie portrayal of your profession (where applicable.) Winner: LC with 8 likes for Denise Richards’ Dr. Christmas Jones in The World is Not Enough.
- What is the worst movie that claims to be based or inspired by a true story? Winner: Tex929rr with 16 likes for the, “…terrible acting, and countless deviations from history,” in Pearl Harbor.
- What is your favorite little known movie? Winner: A last-minute rally for Tremors made the difference as Songwriter took the week 10 win!
- What is the best movie that you never want to watch again? Winner:
HitlerCharlotte with 15 likes for Schindler’s List. Sorry, Richard Oshea but Jesus won the real fight.
Week 11.5 Exhibition Match (as a make-up of sorts, since Songwriter didn’t get the week 11 question submitted in time) Name the best movie theme song ever? No winner declared but I’m pretty sure it was I.M. Fine with “Moon River.” - Name the best animated feature-length movie of all time. Winner: I.M. Fine with 10 likes for Pinocchio, and justice for I.M. Fine prevailed.
- What is the worst acting performance in an otherwise good film? Winner: In one of the most brutal fights we’ve seen yet Repmodad fended off a furious 12th-round onslaught by Gary McVey to give Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves the win with 20 likes.
- What is the quintessential American movie? Winner: Miffed White Male pulled off the comeback with 20 likes for The Right Stuff. There was a two-way tie at 19 for second place as well.
- What’s the most entertaining movie set during WWII? Winner: Arahant clearly won with Casablanca’s walloping 30 likes despite the withering onslaught by Sisyphus on the final day.
- What is the best movie love story? Winner: Songwriter with 20 likes for The Princess Bride with 20 likes. Up managed to make a strong showing and Dr. Bastiat is still conducting recounts trying to “find” some uncounted votes.
- What’s the best’ buddy’ movie? Winner: Brian Watt wins with 12 likes for The Man Who Would be King.
- What is the worst movie (not a made-for-TV movie) ever made? Brian Watt joins E.J. Hill as the only other back-to-back winner with 16 likes for Barbarella. Brian will get another crack at it by choosing the week 19 question. Can he make it three?
- What is the most frightening non-bloody film you’ve ever seen? The winner: J D Fitzpatrick with Wait Until Dark, starring the lovely Audrey Hepburn getting terrorized over a doll, sort of.
- Which movie has the best duel? Winner: Split decision between Philo for The Princess Bride and Songwriter for Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The winner as decided by week 19 champion, JD Fitzpatrick, was The Princess Bride.
- Which movie based on a true story is the most accurate depiction of those events? Winner: I M Fine with a runaway victory for Apollo 13 with 27 likes.
I would recommend watching the original theatrical version.
Against the objections of most of the people who worked on the film, director Ridley Scott made changes years later that made the tightly-written storyline no longer make sense, and did great damage to the film’s major themes.
Indeed, in the reworked version, the “Tears in Rain” sequence has lost most of its reason for being there.
Boy howdy, do I agree with that! And Scott’s tampering with the original version allowed him to plant the seed that Deckard was himself a replicant which was used in the mediocre sequel and patently ridiculous when we see how both Leon and Roy can easily manhandle and toss Deckard around like a rag doll…but who in the sequel has now become a replicant with superhero strength. And that’s only one of the problems I have with the director’s cut. I could go on.
I’ve always thought the Deckard replicant thing was too cute by half. I remember seeing the movie when it came out. I wasn’t very impressed. And that certainly wasn’t my take away. As someone who viewed 2001 as the sci fi bar raiser (we’ve come a long way from Forbidden Planet), interesting ideas, but the aesthetics were a turn off. Interestingly, they directly informed the style of Max Headroom, which at least had the benefit of being darkly funny.
Maybe it’s just my own preference, but the idea of Deckard knowing Rachel’s time was limited is a consistent literary theme. Tragic love instead of happily ever after.
Have we now?
Yeah, baby. Yeah!
Oh, sorry…not sure what came over me.
Unfortunately true.
Works either way — except Rachel’s purpose is to test if memory implants obviate the 4-year lifespan. If she dies after 4 years they will never know.
How does one determine the version used? I have access to Amazon Prime’s version. Is that OK? Based on your and @brianwatt’s comments, I want to be sure I don’t watch the wrong version.
My guess would be that the Amazon version is the so-called “final cut”. Which is still a good film, if you’re not too much of a stickler on the story making sense.
Some of the DVD or Blu-ray releases include what they call the international theatrical cut. This is more violent than the version screened in the United States, and one important bit of dialogue is better in the US version.
OK, well, my main objection was to the voiceover in the 1982 theatrical release, as well as the happy ending, but I should take another look. I was fairly young when that version was available on videotape.
OK, I watched it on Amazon. :)
The Raymond Chandler-esque or Dashiel Hammet voiceover IMHO actually is more in keeping with the genre of the film because it’s a film noir detective story shot primarily at night in the seedy sections of a dystopian LA. The scene where Deckard interviews Zora at the nightclub is a direct reference to the rare bookstore scene in The Big Sleep where Bogart pretends to be an effeminate and nerdy rare book collector to get information. Just saying.
@brianwatt — I think you’re right. People unfamiliar with the film noir genre found the narration strange.
Though without it, for the vast majority of viewers, the film becomes little more than a random sequence of ravishing images. That is to say, they have no idea what is going on. (Of course, some moviegoers like that!)
The film plays with the noir genre in interesting ways. For example, there is no clear villain. (The dumbed-down sequel has the replicant maker kill a woman replicant for no reason at all, just to establish his bona fides as a bad guy.) The detective-narrator never solves the mystery of why the replicants came to Earth in the first place. By the end of the film, everyone who knew — or was unlucky enough to find out — is dead.
So kinda like The Big Sleep.
The difference is, in Blade Runner, the audience knows why the replicants were there, even if Rick Deckard doesn’t. The audience gets to watch when Roy Batty confronts his maker.
In The Big Sleep, which was cobbled together out of several unrelated short stories, even author Raymond Chandler admitted he didn’t know who committed one of the murders.
Which brings in the Frankenstein allusion to the story. There is a CoC word that Roy uses when he says to Tyrell, “I want more life, …!” In the original Roy/Tyrell scene that emphatic word begins with an F and ends with a CK that Ridley Scott replaced in the director’s cut to “Father”. The original word has visceral impact and sets a sudden ominous tone implying that Tyrell’s life hangs in the balance depending on what information he was willing to impart to Roy. The revised/dubbed word of “Father” has none of that and becomes just, well silly and pretentious.
Just another one of my problems with the director’s cut. Don’t even get me started on the damn dreamy unicorn scene!
In the original US release as well as early video releases, it’s “father”, delivered with bitter sarcasm.
However, contemporaneous reviews from British publications suggest that the original UK release had it as “f—-er”, which jarred a nervous laugh from audiences but was otherwise meaningless.
Given the paternal tone Dr.Tyrell adopts toward his creation, “father” better expresses Tyrell’s failure to take care of his “children”. For this once, at least, Ridley Scott made the right call.
Nope. Sorry, you’re wrong. I’m not sure where you’re getting this information. I saw the original American release in theaters and it was not ‘father’. In fact, I have both the 1982 US and the 1982 International releases on DVD and just popped the disc into my player that features both and both the 1982 US Theatrical Release and the 1982 International Release on the same disc. I fast-forwarded it to that scene in both versions. In both versions it’s not ‘father’. It’s that other word. In the context that it’s used it’s not meaningless. Roy is smoldering and angry because he knows by this point that both Leon and Zhora have been killed and he hadn’t had the opportunity to get an answer, if there was one, from Tyrell on how to extend his and their lives – so the emphatic f—ker word delivers just the impact that word intends. (In 1982, that word was not so liberally used in movies as it is today). Ridley Scott changes the word and had Rutger Hauer loop in the word ‘father’ for “The Final Cut” version which was made in 2007 and was released in very limited fashion theatrically and was seen more in DVD and Blu-ray format as part of a collector’s box set (the one I have).
@brianwatt — Now that you mention it, I may have reversed the two versions of Blade Runner in my memory. Making the 1982 UK version the one with “father”, and the US, the expletive. What I recollect most clearly is that it was particularly striking and unexpected that the UK reviews and the US reviews should describe different dialogue in the scene.
The expletive version is not consistent with the character of Roy Batty as we see him in the rest of the film, nor with what he is trying to do at the time: ask his maker for a boon.
By calling him father, Roy asserts that Tyrell has a parental responsibility toward him. He reasons with Tyrell and, as hope dies, his dominant emotion is grief, not rage. He embraces his father — and then, embraces him real hard.
In any case, as to whether Ridley Scott made the right call, we can agree to disagree.