Friday, 29th July 2005.

Roman soldiers do wear watches (but where do they get the batteries?)

Film-related questions that have been bothering me.

The Wizard of Oz
What exactly happened after the narrative of this film had ended? Disregarding the appalling Return to Oz, we're led to believe that the whole sequence was a dream that took place inside the mind of hopeless romantic Dorothy, presumably to make her appreciate the value of both her home and the farm hands, who work their way inside the fantasy in the form of the scarecrow et al. The psychosis has its desired effect, but the Miss Gulch story is left unresolved - her witchy doppelganger may have come to a watery end, but given that all the other characters are very much present and correct, what are we to make of Miss Gulch's plans to destroy Toto the dog?

Boiler Room
Are we really supposed to believe that Seth is able to back up his entire hard drive onto a single floppy disk? I know that it enables him to carry it discreetly out of the office, and that they seemed to be using little more than simple DOS-based programs, but this really is too much (in more than one contextual application). Two theories spring to mind: either the 'C' drive refers to a smaller network partition that didn't contain much information, or these guys know something about compression that we don't (and something we really ought to be told). A zip disk would at least have been feasible.

Citizen Kane
If the film centres around Kane's famous last words, surely a bigger enigma than that of 'Rosebud' is the fact that he's alone when he delivers the line. Unless the servants were listening at the door, absolutely no one hears him say it - so why all the hullabaloo?

Grease
Why did nobody bat an eyelid when the car suddenly took off and flew? How come they just stood there and waved, and not one of the science students thought to jump up and down and shout "Holy shit, dude! A flying car!". And more to the point, if the car flew after they'd souped it up, why didn't they use this new technology to win at Thunder Road?

Revenge of the Sith
If the Jedi are supposed to be powerful, wise and vastly knowledgeable, how come not one of them was able to figure out that a) Palpatine was the Sith lord, b) Anakin and Padme were not only romantically involved, but married and living in a house together, and c) that Jar Jar Binks should have been drowned at birth?

Total Recall
Never mind the whole is-it-a-dream-or-not cliff-hanger; what I want to know is what on *earth* made Arnie ditch Sharon Stone for that ugly brunette freedom fighter?

Back To The Future II
If old Biff stole the time machine, used it to go back to the past and then changed it, it follows that the future that he returned to would be the new version of the future that he'd created when he gave the almanac to his younger self. This means that the future would have simultaneously transformed around Marty and Einstein and Doc Brown - rendering their adventure impossible, because the Doc would never have got to invent the time machine (having been committed to a mental hospital in the alternative future) and would never have hooked up with Marty. This in turn means that Biff would never have got to steal the time machine and create the alternative future in the first place. The very fact that this doesn't happen - that the paradox that would have unravelled the space time continuum and destroyed the entire universe never occurs - is indicative of the perspective of the film: we must always see things from Marty's point of view, which is why the whole scene makes no logical sense at all. That's unless, of course, Biff's sudden heart attack when he gets out of the Delorean (and which, in a deleted scene, shows him winking out of existence) means that he'll have suddenly appeared in an alternative reality that he will have created, allowing both realities to co-exist side by side, whilst simultaneously only allowing Marty and the Doc access to one of them, and oh damn I've gone cross-eyed.

The Matrix: Reloaded
It's a big temple, and the tribal rave scene contains a hundred thousand people. How on earth did they all manage to find their shoes afterwards?