Question: When Harry finds Eliot tied up, he removes the tape and tells him that the kidnappers have been caught. Why did Eliot confess to being the actual mastermind behind the kidnapping? Harry had no idea it was Eliot behind it all so he could have gotten away with it if he didn't say anything.
raywest
28th Dec 2018
Who's Harry Crumb? (1989)
28th Dec 2018
Cape Fear (1991)
Question: So how exactly did Max Cady slip past Kersec's security system and get into the house? Did he kill the maid outside and then just walk in disguised as her?
Answer: He snuck in during the day and hid, before Kersec's teddy bear security system was set up. Sam Bowden realises this when he wakes from a nightmare. Its how he was able to poison the dog which hadnt been let outside. Max Cady killed the maid in the pantry with the same piano wire he later attacks Kersec with.
Answer: Kersec suspected that Cady might attempt to break into the Bowden house if he thought it was empty. His plan was for Cady to break in and then be shot dead as an intruder. He likely lessened the security to allow Cady to break in. Cady killed and then impersonated the housekeeper to get in.
I like your answer but I'm a little confused by the "lessened the security" part. If I'm not mistaken, every possible point of entry into the house at least from the ground floor was connected to the bear via the fishing line, so Kersec would know if a point of entry was disturbed by the bear moving. Where would Kersec lessen the security from that standpoint, especially since his setup was supposed to be foolproof?
Kersec wanted Cady to be able to break in so that there would be a plausible reason to shoot him dead. The idea is to make it look like his death was a result of self defense. I'm only speculating that Kersec made it easier for Cady to break in into the house. Being as it was his security system, he would know how to make it possible for Cady to get in.
28th Dec 2018
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)
Question: I can't remember if this is covered in the books, but at the start of this movie, the Dursleys are seen packing up and leaving (because Harry has turned or is about to turn 17 so they can't protect him anymore), but since they've always not wanted to get involved with the magical world side of things (Petunia hating Lily for being a witch, Vernon not wanting Harry to be happy or going to Hogwarts etc), why would they just pack up and leave on Harry's word that they can't protect him anymore by living with him because of what will happen when he turns 17? Was it all explained to them in the letter Dumbledore left with baby Harry in the "Philosopher's Stone" about how Harry had to live with them until he was 17, and that Lily and James had been killed by this powerful person who they needed to protect Harry from or was it another way?
Answer: This is better explained in the books. The Durselys did not wish to leave their home, but the Ministry of Magic convinced them it was imperative that they vacate the house or else risk being killed by Voldemort. He would target them simply because they were Harry's relatives. The Ministry arranged to move and hide them until Voldemort could be defeated. Aunt Petunia hated the wizarding world, but she knew what Voldemort could do to her family once Harry's magical protection lapsed on his 17th birthday.
27th Dec 2018
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Question: Towards the end when George is at the bridge looking to jump in to kill himself it's snowing. However, after Clarence shows him what the world would have been like without him, he runs back to the bridge and it is not snowing. George is then begging Clarence to let him live again, and just like that it starts snowing just as it was when George was looking to jump in and kill himself. What did George's life have to do with changing the weather?
Answer: It's just a cinematography thing. It's snowing in the real world, the weather is clear in the alternate world. When the snow resumes, it shows us that he's returned to his real life.
Very good answer.
27th Dec 2018
Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995)
27th Dec 2018
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
Question: Why were Harry and Hermione messing with Ron when they got back to the hospital wing?
Answer: Because they were just having a bit of fun at Ron's expense. After saving Sirius and Buckbeak and going through a rather harrowing ordeal, they can now relax and enjoy themselves. The levity provides an "end point" to the main story, indicating to the audience that it has reached its conclusion.
27th Dec 2018
Cinderella (1950)
Question: How did Cinderella's father die?
21st Dec 2018
Geronimo (1962)
Question: When the jug was hit, how did the bullet not hit the horse behind it?
Answer: In reality, the bullet probably would have hit the horse, injuring it. Movies tend to gloss over details like that to serve and simplify the plot. Older movies particularly fudged reality, assuming audiences would not notice or care. It is also possible that the bullet was somehow deflected or broke up upon impact.
30th Sep 2018
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
Question: Who is Maisey a clone of? I know her 'mother' died in a car crash but when she asked if her mother visited the park a long time ago, Lockwood answered with "a long time ago" and the camera pans out to a model of the original park.
Answer: Masie is a clone of Benjamin Lockwood's daughter. Benjamin's daughter did die in a car accident and when that happened, he wanted to clone her. But John Hammond was against the idea of cloning humans (which is why the partnership broke up). Once John Hammond died, Benjamin went ahead and cloned his daughter. Only, because of the amount of time that passed and his age, Benjamin tells people Masie is his granddaughter and the cover story is Masie's mother died in a car accident, which is why he's raising her. However, I do not know if Benjamin's actual daughter was also named Masie or if that's a new name. I got the impression that Benjamin's actual daughter died at a young age, and since he wanted to clone her right away, he kept the fact that his young daughter died a secret. So as far as most people knew, Benjamin's daughter grew up and had a child and then Benjamin tells people his (adult) daughter died in a car accident.
I think what they mean is if she was a character from the original movies somehow.
His daughter was not an earlier character in the other films. Lockwood is just reflecting on his late daughter, who he loved and misses. Like John Hammond's grandchildren, Lockwood's daughter likely visited the park at some point. His glancing at the original Jurassic Park model seems to be a reference to the cloning procedure that produced Maisie.
In the original movies, no, she's not a character (at least what I can recall). Benjamin Lockwood doesn't even appear in any of the original Jurassic Park trilogy films (I'm not familiar with the books enough to know if any Lockwoods appear in those stories though). In "Fallen Kingdom" it's implied Lockwood's daughter visited the island where Jurassic Park was built, meaning she would have done so prior to the events of the first "Jurassic Park" film.
3rd Dec 2018
Gravity (2013)
Question: On the Russian vessel, shortly after Ryan boards via the airlock, there's a readout in English concerning oxygen. Shouldn't the readout, and indeed virtually everything on that ship, be written in Russian?
Answer: The International Space Station is serviced and manned by representatives from several countries. It stands to reason that because of this, instructions for spacecraft and equipment would be printed in several languages. As the movie shows, in the case of an emergency it would not make sense to have spacecraft and equipment be effectively "locked out" to those who don't speak a particular language when that problem can be easily solved by printing instructions in multiple languages.
3rd Dec 2018
Ghost (1990)
Question: After the subway ghost shows Sam how to move things, he gets angry at Sam's question about his death, making him kick a cigarette dispenser. After kicking the dispenser, why does the subway ghost suddenly not recognize Sam?
Answer: The subway ghost was a paranoid schizophrenic who committed suicide by throwing himself in front of the train. As a ghost, he still has extreme mood swings that range from denial to grief to anger and even violence, and he apparently suffers short-term memory loss, as well.
The subway ghost told Sam that somebody had pushed him.
As I said, the subway ghost was a paranoid schizophrenic who is in denial. He insists that he was pushed; but his odd insistence implies that he actually committed suicide.
1st Dec 2018
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
Question: Why is everyone talking about the volcano making all the dinosaurs extinct? This technology has now existed for years and years - there would be backups, other clones, other labs. The plot of this movie seems to hang on the idea that when this island is destroyed all dinosaurs that have ever existed or might ever exist will be gone forever. Yes it's still no small thing for a lot of animals to be wiped out by a volcano, but people are acting like it's of much greater significance than that.
Answer: It had appeared that InGen, the company that developed the dinosaurs, had abandoned all of their research on the island when it was evacuated three years prior. They have, of course, been extremely secretive about just what they were doing, and were able to move much of their technology off-site without the world knowing about it, as there would be much controversy and obstruction to them creating more dangerous dinosaurs. It is assumed that anything that was left behind on the island is now being destroyed in the volcano. Of course, this is all a bit of a stretch story wise, but it is contrived in order to make the plot work for the movie. This is called suspension of disbelief.
27th Nov 2018
Midway (1976)
Question: How accurately does the movie portray the Battle of Midway?
Answer: This is from Wikipedia: "Later studies by Japanese and American military historians call into question key scenes, like the dive-bombing attack that crippled the first Japanese carrier, the Akagi. In the movie, American pilots report, "They've got bombs all over their flight deck! We caught 'em flat-footed! No fighters and a deck full of bombs!" As Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully write in "Shattered Sword" (2005), aerial photography from the battle showed nearly empty decks. In addition, Japanese carriers loaded armament onto planes below the flight deck, unlike American carriers (as depicted earlier in the film). The fact that a closed hangar full of armaments was hit by bombs made damage to Akagi more devastating than if planes, torpedoes and bombs were on an open deck."
28th Nov 2018
Dr. No (1962)
27th Nov 2018
Herbie Rides Again (1974)
Question: Why are Jim (Dean Jones), Carol (Michelle Lee) and Tennessee (Buddy Hackett) not back for this sequel?
27th Nov 2018
Star Wars (1977)
Question: When Obi-Wan tells Luke about Darth Vader murdering his father, Luke doesn't seem to have heard of Vader before. But he knows about the rebellion and wants to go to the Imperial Academy (so he can defect later). Shouldn't he know who Vader is?
Answer: Not necessarily. The Empire is infamous, but that doesn't mean everyone will know who their higher-ups are. I know who the Ku Klux Klan are, but I couldn't tell you who their leaders are.
This. Or possibly, Luke knows who Vader is but just doesn't comment while Obi-wan is talking.
Answer: For most of his early life, Luke lived a simple, rustic life. His aunt and uncle knew his parentage and no doubt suppressed information about the Empire from him. Luke is naive and still has a limited and generalized knowledge of the rebellion, most of which was gleaned from talking to friends. He has little awareness of who the key players are.
Answer: Remember that Luke was hidden on Tatooine as a baby, and Obiwan also went into hiding there, presumably as a protector to keep Luke's very existence a secret from Darth Vader. It could be that Obiwan remotely exercised Jedi mind-tricks on Luke throughout his young life to block any curiosity about Vader.
27th Nov 2018
Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends (1984)
Question: Most of the characters on this show are male. Why is that?
Answer: Female characters in literature, movies, television, etc. are commonly and historically less prevalent than male ones. It's an inherit gender bias that continues to exist within male-dominated industries. This same bias exists against characters of color and other orientations.
It's also a really old show that would've been fairly male run.
27th Nov 2018
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)
Question: If Voldemort is now controlling the Ministry of Magic, why does Dolores Umbridge have a position there? In Order of the Phoenix, she refused to believe that he had returned. I wonder why he didn't kill her for opposing him.
Answer: Umbridge was an opportunistic collaborator, and once Voldemort took power, she became complicit in order to advance her own career. She never opposed Voldemort, she, like many others, simply believed he had been killed years before.
She never opposed Voldemort because she was allied with him.
Answer: She refused to acknowledge it openly, that doesn't mean she didn't believe it, or hope for it.
She knew that he returned, but was allied with him all along.
27th Nov 2018
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)
Question: How did Riddle know that the people the Basilisk was petrifying were muggle born? It sounds to me like Ginny was his best shot at knowing, but how could she know?
Answer: It's easy to tell which students are Muggle-born. They have little knowledge of the wizarding world and need special training, their parents are not wizards, and Hogwarts, being a small community, makes it easy to know everyone's background. Ginny would have little problem identifying which students Riddle should target.
27th Nov 2018
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)
Question: Harry having the resurrection stone makes the ending make sense if that is the way that he survives/comes back from death when Voldemort kills him. But he drops the stone after talking to his dead loved ones. How does Harry survive if, as Dumbledore says, he HAS to die to kill Voldemort? Pretending to be dead shouldn't work, so he must actually die, right? (02:13:00)
Answer: The Resurrection Stone never had nothing to do with Harry surviving Voldemort's curse at the end. He survived because he carried one of Voldemort's horcruxes inside him, and that is what protected him. Dumbledore's prediction was wrong because he did not know until much later that Harry was one of Voldemort's horcruxes. Voldemort also did not know this, having accidentally creating it when he attempted to kill Harry when he was an infant.
That's not right either. Harry survived because Voldemort made the mistake of using Harry's blood in the potion he used to resurrect himself in Goblet of Fire, believing it would make him stronger, failing to realise that he was preserving the protection of Harry's mother's sacrifice within his own body, thus tethering Harry to life. It has nothing to do with the Resurrection Stone or the Horcrux within Harry.
Join the mailing list
Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.
Answer: Eliot mistakenly believed that Harry had figured out what his part was in the kidnapping, and, exasperated by Harry's dumb luck, Eliot stupidly confessed. He was then arrested.
raywest ★