re: the scene when she goes home and lies on her bed watching TV
Has anyone else noticed whenever we see people in these
thrillers at home watching TV, it's often some analog-antenna-grainy cartoon, especially a very old one, as if that would keep our interest. In reality, wouldn't the girl be watching something like The Big Bang Theory, with digitized reception issues?
I really liked the movie, though :)
The movie is set in 1980 or something...
shareOh, good point!
But I have seen a lot of movies use this device, which I think is meant to portray a sense of "desolation while at home", or a kind of neutrality to show the character is not comfortable at home, but dealing with major plot issues.
It's almost always some grainy, old cartoon show on TV, which made me think of this pattern.
Thanks for the correction!
Yeah I get what you're saying. It's the same with the killer watching an animal documentation about alligators killing stuff ;)
shareHa ha I just saw that the other day in "The Frozen Ground"! I also remember one from Donnie Brasco when Al Pacino was watching it.
shareI honestly think these scenes are some sort of Illuminati (or whomever) secret message. They're often too out of place to make any sense in the context of the story.
"I said no camels, that's five camels, can't you count?"
Funny you say that, I was watching a documentary the other day about the Donnie Brasco case, and Joe Pistone was saying how he became very close with Sonny Black and how surreal it was when Joe/Donnie used to stay over on Sonny's couch and they would watch cartoons while eating breakfast.
share1983.
shareThe truth is pretty simple:
Those old, grainy cartoons are in the Public Domain, which means film makers get to use them for free.
Here, it was used to show how child-like Cindy still is. A movie like this most likely doesn't have the budget to license a scene of a Disney movie or something similar, so public domain black and white cartoons are the cheap (well, free) alternative. They almost could have used Steamboat Willie or other early Disney cartoons, but Sonny Bono's biggest supporter was Disney and he led the way to some very draconian public domain law changes just to keep Mickey Mouse from being free for all.
Same thing with the animal footage Bob was watching: a lot of animal footage is in the public domain at this point and the voice over narrator we heard, if it wasn't part of the original documentary, could have just been dubbed in by a crew member. Dirt cheap to use.
Somebody finally with some sense. Yes, they are public domain and don't have to pay to use them. It's a way to save a little money when it's not necessary to the plot usually.
shareInterestingly Anchorage has the distinction of having the worlds first 24-hour all-cartoon channel and it started up sometime in the 80's on a UHF station. I think it was the pet project of some local and it showed a lot of public-domain stuff since the guy that ran it probably couldn't afford any of the newer syndicated stuff. It did have a lot of anime though, which was pretty awesome since you couldn't get that kind of stuff anywhere else at the time, and they were showing the whole series of Robotech every single day in perpetual rotation. The guy that ran it would sometimes do promos for Yo-Yo's from the control room sometimes.
I doubt the people who made the film knew about that, but ironically that little cliche'd bit was 100% accurate. If a kid was watching TV in Anchorage in the 80's, he was watching some really old public-domain cartoon on The Cartoon Channel.