6 Terrible Plans in Movies That Just Sort of Work Out. #3. Children of Men -- The Activists Shoot Up a Car With Their Last Hope Inside In 2027, women can no longer have children, England is a militarized police state and humanity is royally fucked. Theo Faron (Clive Owen), who doesn't give much of a fuck about any of that, is hired by a group of freedom fighters led by his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore) to smuggle a refugee named Kee, who is the first woman to get pregnant in 10 years.
The plan is to get Kee to some scientists so they can do tests on her and, hopefully, figure out how to get some damn babies born again. As Theo, Kee, Julian and her second-in-command, Luke, drive to the group's hideout, a surprise gang of hooligans bombards them with Molotov cocktails and shoots Julian through the windshield, killing her. Thus depriving the group of their leader and the movie of 85 percent of its star power.
Why It Was a Stupid Plan: Did we mention that Luke himself was in the car when it was attacked? "Make sure you don't hit me. . #2. "Sorry. Daniel Day-Lewis: The Butcher, Oil Taker, 13th Amendment Maker. Daniel Day-Lewis , an actor who usually portrays his characters with bombastic furor, finds a softer voice as Lincoln, in Steven Spielberg’s new period film, now in theaters. Yes, it’s ironic that the character he played in Gangs of New York hated President Lincoln but it is far more interesting to take a deeper look at how the Oscar winner prepares for such epic roles, through his mind, body and now, most notably, his voice. 10 years ago, Martin Scorsese’s period drama brought us the violent Bill the Butcher, played by Day-Lewis.
Bill led the Know Nothing party, which opposed immigration to America and despised President Lincoln for his efforts to unite the people. President Lincoln loathed the Know Nothing movement and shared his thoughts in a letter dated August 24, 1855. While Day-Lewis doesn’t like to reveal too much about his work, he does admit in this interview with The Independent , the role of Bill was very tough on him. “The legacy of his writing was hugely important. 6 Iconic Movie Scenes That Happened by Accident.
When filmmakers talk about "the magic of cinema," we assume that they're talking about the medium's ability to transport us into fantastical worlds of wonder and imagination, or some sappy shit like that. What they really mean is that, like in any job, accidents tend to happen when they're shooting a movie ... and sometimes those accidents turn out to be far better than what the director originally had in mind and are left in the film. #6. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy -- Viggo Mortensen's Pain Was Real What Was Supposed to Happen: Viggo Mortensen was a last-minute replacement to play Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is kind of amazing considering that it's arguably the most important role.
He pulled off the "risking life and limb to save the hobbits" thing like a champ, partially because he wasn't always acting. For example, he actually murdered dozens of people over the course of those films. The Happy Accident: But hey, who needs toes? "Yes. . #5. Drunk extras. . #4. 5 Awesome Movie Robots with Inexcusable Design Flaws. Fictional technology is fascinating in the sense that on one hand, it's pure wish fulfillment -- the writers can create the most awesome devices imaginable and don't have to worry about technical limitations or feasibility. But on the other hand, so much of it is almost laughably flawed. Take movie robots, for instance. They can think and love and perform amazing feats, and every kid wants one. Yet if they were built and sold by a real company, they'd be yanked from the market within minutes due to their glaring design oversights. For instance ... #5. The T-1000 in Terminator 2 truly has no weak point (in fact, we're not sure where its crucial circuitry even could be, let alone where it might be).
So in Terminator 3, the evil robot must be even more hardcore terror-awesome than the T-1000, right? "I'm here to kill John C- why are you laughing? " What we got instead was the T-X, a machine utterly inferior to the T-1000 in every conceivable way. Yeah, that's much, much better. #4. . #3. 6 Insane Stereotypes That Movies Can't Seem to Get Over. We've talked before about how some negative stereotypes from the past are, somehow, still showing up in today's movies, and even in recent video games. But those are our grandfathers' prejudices, just in a modern form, like an old man cursing at an Asian nurse with a megaphone (that's why we don't visit, Grandpa). It turns out there are other, more subtle ways that Hollywood has been enforcing wrongheaded ideas right under our noses, and sometimes in our favorite films. Like ... #6. In Hollywood movies, Africa is a shitty place to be.
Fort Burntodeath. ... ... and Africa gets ... naked dudes brandishing spears? "No, don't stop, keep poking it until it's all the way down! " Apparently, this barren land is the closest thing the aliens could find to a major population center in Africa. We're not sure why they even had a title card telling us the location; this is all we needed to see. Contrary to popular belief, Africa's chief export is not lead. So What's the Deal? #5. . #4. 7 Movies That Put Insane Detail into Stuff You Never Noticed. We've mentioned before how film directors occasionally go a little bit crazy when it comes to certain minor details, including ones that 99 percent of the audience are never even going to see.
A horrifying amount of time and work go into things that will be forever unnoticed by everyone except a few members of the crew. So let's again take a moment to appreciate the awesomely obsessive ... #7. The Lord of the Rings: Each Piece of Armor Has a Backstory For any sci-fi or fantasy film, it's one thing to make the clothing and equipment look authentic onscreen, and another to add layers of detail that are physically impossible to notice, even if each frame of the movie is examined with a magnifying glass. For instance, in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, when you watched the massive Battle of Helm's Deep and the tens of thousands of bad guys storming the fortress, did you notice the handcrafted chain mail they were wearing? What's that? KropserkelEven that codpiece is Orc-accurate. . #6. 6 Crucial Movie Scenes That Never Made it Out of the Script. There's a saying in Hollywood: "Cut what you love.
" No, it's not about cocaine. It means that it doesn't matter how expensive, beautiful or awesome a scene is -- if you can cut it and still have the movie make sense, then cut it. It's actually pretty common for perfectly good scenes to end up on the cutting room floor simply to shave a few minutes off the total running time or speed up the pace of the movie. Of course, sometimes the movie doesn't make sense without that crucial deleted scene, but we just didn't notice it. Like in ... #6. We've mentioned before how Quentin Tarantino's Hitler-killing epic Inglourious Basterds ties the entire Tarantinoverse together like a fine carpet, but one mystery still remains: Why the hell is the title misspelled?
If that's the case, then he probably shouldn't have put the answer right there in the script, where we can see it. Getty"Alright, it's Marsellus Wallace's soul. The Missing Scene: Note the spelling of "basterd. " To which Donny replies: #5. . #4. 5 True Stories Cut from Movies for Being Too Unrealistic. As we've repeatedly pointed out, in Hollywood the words "Based on a True Story" are usually just a code for "Vaguely Resembling a True Story, but Mostly Bullshit. " Sometimes, the filmmakers feel like they have to lie and make up stuff to make the story more interesting -- but it turns out that other times, they actually have to cut stuff that really happened because it's all so awesome that no one would believe it. Here are some mind-blowing moments from real life that Hollywood decided were too fantastic, even for their movies. #5. Public Enemies -- John Dillinger Didn't Take Three People Hostage With a Wooden Gun ...
He Took 17 The Scene: About halfway through Public Enemies, a biopic of Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger (played by Johnny Depp), Dillinger manages to break himself out of jail by whittling a chunk of wood into a shape resembling a pistol, painting it black with shoe polish and then taking three guards hostage as he raided their weapons stores.
The Reality: #4. . #3. 6 Absurd Movie Plots You Won't Believe Are Based on Reality. We spend so much time here debunking silly things we see in fiction that it's easy to forget how truly ridiculous real life is in comparison. Even the silliest, most implausible characters or plots from action movies have come true. Not often, mind you, but they do happen. We're talking about things like ... #6. Badass Adventurer Scientists Indiana Jones movies, The Mummy movies, The Da Vinci Code movies, those Nicholas Cage movies that basically rip off The Da Vinci Code -- they all feature ridiculous but popular characters: university professors who throw away their mortarboards and "research" history by punching it right in the goddamn face. "Before you start killing everyone, would you mind fact-checking my thesis on Ancient Egyptian religion?
" Nobody believes it's really like this, or at least we hope not. But It Has Happened ... Wikipedia"I try to carry at least one thing that could impale a Nazi at all times. " thedispersalofdarwin"You're my next hat. " #5. Daily MailPictured: Minions. 6 Stupid Gun Myths Everyone Believes (Thanks to Movies) Hollywood wants you dead. We said it. We don't know why. We don't know what they could possibly gain from it, but it's true all the same. Hollywood has been teaching you lessons about guns for decades and decades. Hollywood wants you to build your entire understanding of guns based on the gun tropes they parade in all of their movies.
That's right. Dead wrong. #6. Most of you probably don't own guns, but you all have a pretty good idea of just how dangerous they can be. Or that famous scene from True Lies where Jamie Lee Curtis drops a MAC-10 down a staircase and murders half a Guantanamo worth of enemy combatants. The Geneva Conventions don't say shit about unmanned weapons. Alas, for the screenwriters of the world, modern firearms do not fire when dropped just a little bit. GettyAnd thus the great sport of Gun Toss was born. If anything, the Hollywood-concocted myth about guns firing on impact inspires us to be even dumber with guns. . #5. But that plastic gun never materialized.
. #4. 6 Mind Blowing Special Effects You Won't Believe Aren't CGI. Computer generated images are like the foam sets of the present era: 20 years from now, people are going to laugh their asses off at the fact that this stuff looked even remotely real to us. That's why, as we've mentioned before, there are still filmmakers doing special effects the old-fashioned way -- even if the results are so impressive that you'd never know it's not CGI. There's CGI in Cracked's new Adventures in Jedi School mini-series, but the humor is all a practical effect. #6.
Inception -- The Dream Collapsing Inception is one of those movies that could have easily gotten away with doing every single special effect in CGI, because it's full of so many insane moments that we assume half the things in it are computer generated anyway (for example, there's no evidence that Ken Watanabe is a real person). Water: Leonardo DiCaprio's Natural Enemy Since 1997. "Finally, I can pee in public and no one will know! " Meanwhile, four exceptionally heavy sleepers rest inside a flying van. #5. . #4. 5 Great Movie Scenes Made Possible by Reckless Endangerment.
Sometimes, the only way to capture a truly horrifying and brutal moment on film is to horrify and brutalize the actors, as happens surprisingly often. Yes, even in the age of computer effects and entire sequences shot in front of a green screen with tennis balls, there is still no substitute for gross neglect of human safety. #5. Inglourious Basterds: The Actors Almost Burn in the Theater Fire SPOILERS: In the climax of Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino's narrative veers off course from historical fiction and gives the audience a more cathartic and hyper-violent Hitler death than the boring old suicide in a bunker we're all used to. Specifically, some Nazi-killing Jews shoot him in the face hundreds of times with machine guns while a theater burns to the ground around them.
"Thank God we shot him before the fire killed him! " Ironically, shooting the assassination of Hitler nearly killed the two actors (Eli Roth and Omar Doom) who were supposed to be doing the assassinating. . #4. . #3. 7 Movie Plot Holes You Didn't Notice Due to Editing (Pt. 2) The magic of editing means that in just seconds, a movie character can go from attending a party in a tuxedo to being fully dressed in Batman gear by merely cutting from one shot to the next. Movies would suck without this -- nobody wants films to waste time showing Bruce Wayne tediously lacing up his boots and applying the talcum powder that lets him get the rubber mask over his cheeks. But as we've shown you before, even great movies abuse this power by building key plot points around utterly impossible events hidden by clever edits.
Once you start to notice this sort of thing, it's kind of hard to stop asking questions like ... #7. After being shot in the head by David Carradine, the Bride is left lying in a coma for four years, until she suddenly wakes up just in time to bite a rapist's face off. Pictured. She then uses a doorjamb to brain Buck, the skeezy orderly who had been pimping out her comatose body, and steals his keys.
Cut To: "Hey, this isn't where we store these. " #6. . #5. . #4. 6 Movie Plots Made Possible By Ridiculous Understaffing. "Now, wait a minute Cracked.com," you're probably saying out loud to yourself as you read this, in between sips of your chai mocha latte, "you've really fucked up this time. We all saw the inside of the Death Star, and that thing was crammed full of storm troopers, Imperial bureaucrats, janitors and lunchroom workers. In fact, there were so many people in there that anyone who blew it up would probably be tormented with a paralyzing guilt for the rest of their life, rendering them a vegetable.
" The thing is, the Death Star was full of ground troops, which would be extremely handy if the Death Star came equipped with landing gear. Unfortunately, the Rebellion decided to launch an attack in outer space. The Staff: One part space station, one part death ray and one part floating Epcott Center, the Death Star was the crown jewel of the Emperor's armada.
But you still can't get past the fact that ground troops are absolutely useless when you're fighting in outer space. That shit was personal. 6 Happy Movie Endings That Actually Ruin the Hero's Life. If there's one thing Hollywood loves more than a happy ending, it's a happy ending that accidentally screws over the hero. As we've told you before, lots of movies that end with the main characters smiling and hugging their loved ones secretly imply that most of those people will end up dead, destitute or just plain miserable 15 minutes later. In fact, this happens so often that we should probably just strike the word "accidentally" -- this has to be on purpose. Otherwise, how do you explain ... #6. The "Happy" Ending: The plot of The Dark Knight Rises would take us five entire articles to summarize, so we're just gonna skip to the end (SPOILERS!)
Clearly a reference to Robin Williams, who nearly played the Riddler. For a while it looks to the audience like Wayne really died, but in the last scene, his faithful butler, Alfred, is in a restaurant in Florence and sees him sitting there with Catwoman, in reference to a conversation they'd had earlier. But After the Movie's Over ... #5. . #4. 5 Movies Made Possible by Characters Who Suck at Their Job. 8 Movies Made Possible by Incompetent Background Characters. 6 Movie Mysteries the Characters Should've Solved Way Sooner. 5 Film Franchises Based on One Character's Stupid Decision.