res30stupid

res30stupid t1_jeg06xx wrote

Right.

The Italians couldn't get their hands on enough chocolate during World War II so they bulked it out with hazelnuts. A couple changes to the recipe two decades later and we have Nutella.

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res30stupid t1_jefuvjd wrote

So, I finally got around to playing the original Resident Evil 4 - always had it on my PSN but I really don't do horror games. Currently on 3-1 on Easy mode and...

Can I say that I don't find Ashley to be too annoying? The only really big issue I had with her was the catapults chapter because I hadn't given her any yellow herbs yet and she kept dying in one hit.

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res30stupid t1_jebytyo wrote

And he threatened to kill Christopher Nolan because Jude Law had signed up for The Prestige when Russell wanted him for Huckabees. Law tried to pull out of Russell's film because he needed the higher paycheck (he was going through a nasty divorce at the time and needed the money), then Russell ran into Nolan and put him in a headlock and demanded Law back.

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res30stupid t1_jebrgrk wrote

Murder At The Gallop.

An adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel After The Funeral, Miss Marple ends up stumbling upon a mystery while out collecting for charity when she witnesses a man drop dead right in front of her. When she overhears the dead man's sister at the funeral remark that he was afraid that someone was trying to kill him and later discovers that same woman brutally murdered hours later, she decides to investigate when the entire family gathers again at the reading of the will.

The vast majority of the movie takes place at a hotel in the English countryside and in and around the hotel, where Miss Marple uses the public areas to eavesdrop and discover other such clues that would be useful to the investigation.

If you're willing to check out feature-length TV shows, then also check out ITV's Marple series which has some strong episodes set in hotels.

In The Body In The Library which was also the pilot, Miss Marple ends up getting involved in a murder case when a dead body is dumped in the library of her friend's country manor. Following some investigation to determine her identity, she learns that the victim was a dancing instructor at a seaside hotel, resulting in her staying there to investigate just how in the hell a complete stranger turns up dead several miles away.

In Bertram's Hotel, the entirety of the film takes place at a hotel. When Miss Marple checks into the hotel she becomes embroiled in the investigation when one maid is found murdered on the hotel's roof and another, who has heard of Miss Marple's reputation of helping others, implores her to help. A femme fatale, a nasty inheritance dispute, stolen artwork and a hidden Nazi also complicates things further.

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res30stupid t1_jdsia2o wrote

Similar for me, but with a different movie - The Holiday. Two women who have bad relationships end up swapping houses for Christmas and each others' social circles help them out of their ruts.

I much prefer Iris' story compared to Amanda's, even if I do like her storyline as well. Iris makes friends with an old Hollywood screenwriter who knows all about how stories and outright uses his knowledge of movies to help her recognise her own flaws and strengths.

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res30stupid t1_jd9lxs0 wrote

It's a one-shot character but in the ITV-produced series Agatha Christie's Marple, the killer in "Towards Zero" is a fantastic depiction of a psychopath.

Superficially charming so that those who don't know them, but those who are intimately familiar with them are aware that they are deeply disturbed and would prefer to stay as far away as humany possible if they could. They are very good at looking civilised and cultured, but when they are exposed as the killer, that illusion instantly gives away and it is outright terrifying. And the true motive for the murder is so petty that the only person who knew them truly was also the only one not surprised by it - everyone else couldn't believe it

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res30stupid t1_jd774p6 wrote

> The Spanish version of Dracula is generally considered a superior film thanks to the alternate cast.

It actually goes further than this, actually.

This was right towads the end of the Silent Era, which introduced a rather interesting problem to the whole industry. It was rather easy to sell movies across the entire world without any issue since the story was either conveyed entirely through body language or title cards that could be changed rather easily. But with spoken dialogue, this introduced a language barrier to a lot of their newer productions.

Most movie studios decided to invest in a way of easing the production process for other-language releases. Multiple studios even looked at making multiple versions with casts speaking different languages.

It turned out to not be a good idea, usually having lesser returns just a single-language release or being sub-par compared to the English version due to language barrier issues - usually having the same producer who needed a translator to speak to the other language crews. In fact, Dracula was one of the last movies to involve a dual-language, dual-cast production.

Both the English and the Spanish versions of the film were filmed simultaneously and on the same sets - the difference being that the Spanish crew had to film at night. But a lot of changes were made either by necessity or through different direction.

It appears that the English version had a lot of scenes left on the cutting room floor that were kept in the Spanish film, which was an entire half-an-hour longer. And as James Rolfe - famous for being the Angry Video Game Nerd but also a noted horror movie fan - the Spanish version also includes more scenes from the original novel.

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res30stupid t1_jc8totb wrote

Agatha Christie's Poirot by ITV. I started checking out the books after watching the show, starting with an audiobook of Murder On The Orient Express, narrated by Kenneth Branagh.

Not exactly related to television, but you can tell that Branagh incorporated a lot more of the book into the movie than is immediately apparent, which I have to give the man credit for. Hearing his reading the book sounds almost like an early concept sketch for the entire film, from how he does a deep and gravelly voice for Ratchett to how near-identically he sounds to Josh Gad's MacQueen. They even manage to sneak in a reference to how Poirot managed to get onto the train as well and made it into an extra reference to Poirot loving Charles Dickens (if you didn't catch it, he >!caught onto the existence of a fake extra passenger because Hector MacQueen unknowingly referenced a Charles Dickens story; in the story he references, Mrs Harris isn't a real person but someone constantly referenced by another person so they can tell tall tales!<).

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res30stupid t1_ja7q5cl wrote

Exclusive for a dub of a show, but the original DiC production of Sailor Moon ended up suffering a loss of quality rather rapidly with even the original English dub's voice actors outright stating that they agreed with fans that the dub was completely rubbish. In fact, the show's second voice actress for Setsuna/Trisha/Sailor Pluto, Susan Aceron, even said that it was a mistake that she was cast to be in that series at all.

There's actually a known and stated reason for this, however, as given by Roland Parliament who was the voice of Umino/Melvin and the show's second ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement) director in his autobiography Sailor Moon Reflections.

In short, the first voice of Sailor Moon, Tracey Moore, was also the show's first ADR director but was so heavily overworked that she suffered from burnout and quit thirteen episodes into the show's production (episodes 1-11, 15 and 21), so when she quit she was replaced with Roland.

They tried to keep her in the role by replacing her as ADR director with castmates who had smaller roles in the show. But because of clashes with a producer at Optimum Productions, Nicole Thuault who also heavily clashed with Moore while she was the ADR director, Parliament was fired from the role as ADR director as well as his replacement John Stocker, who played Rei's grandfather in the dub.

When Optimum completed their original recording sessions for the show, DiC decided to stop licensing the show and left them stranded. But Cartoon Network and YTV wanted more episodes dubbed so they paid for it themselves and ordered the adaptations directly. All 77 remaining episodes... in four months. Optimum couldn't get most of the original cast for a number of reasons - some of the voice actors hated the conditions and refused to come back while at least one of them outright couldn't due to being on maternity leave.

After this, Thuault decided that she might as well take on the role as the show's ADR director instead. This was despite the fact that despite being a producer on the show's English dub, she didn't fucking speak English and in fact needed a translator on-site to help her communicate with the cast and crew. By the way, did I mention that Optimum was based out of Ontario?

So, the ADR director wasn't able to properly quality control the recording, they had to adapt 77 episodes of the show in four months and most of the original cast was gone. They only had four hours to record each episode and took were only allowed to do two takes for each scene/episode and decided to use the one that wasn't shit. Quality dropped immensely, the seasons adapted were widely hated until the entire series was re-dubbed by Viz and it proved to be such an old shame that the DiC dub will never be rereleased again.

And for added hilarity, when they were doing the translation of the scripts into English, because of a stupid term of the contract that they were using, they weren't adapting the original Japanese scripts of the show but the earlier French dub produced in Paris.

Oh, and here's something funny I wanted to bring up as well. They had to make some changes to the show to appease US censors, mainly because the show could actually get somewhat violent for US audiences. One pair of junior high school students were expressly a pair of lesbians in the original Japanese version which was turned into them being cousins in the English dub... but they didn't fully remove all of the pretext, so it made them look like teenage incestuous lesbians instead.

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res30stupid t1_ja6m9gf wrote

Oh, yeah. This is a great way of hiding things and encoding information that only a few people will know.

For example, the BBC was an important part of the war effort since their song selection would convey secret messages to the troops, spies or POWs in Europe who knew the code. For example, the BBC would deliver secret codes in their broadcasts including letting allies know that they were about to launch a major offensive into Europe.

> The document below, from the BBC’s written archives, [sic: link to PDF] shows the unusually long list of code messages to the French Resistance broadcast on the night of 5 June 1944. It was the eve of D-Day, and the small pencilled cross next to the ninth message, indicates that it was this phrase in particular – ‘Berce mon Coeur d’une langueur monotone’ – that signalled the invasion was about to begin:

D-DAY CODES

They would also use music and other means of broadcasting information into Europe, which actually tended to go horribly wrong because it was kept secret from the general staff of the BBC that they were doing it.

The BBC had a special producer credited for song selections when it was meant to be for the Polish resistance under the name of Peter Peterkin, because the Polish news broadcast was kept short just to deliver important updates via code of musical selection.

But notes from within the BBC at that time complain about about how sometimes these vitally important updates weren't delivered because the records just weren't played because the person meant to play them didn't know they were vitally important to the war effort and ignored the given tracklist; other times, they put the recording on and it was the wrong side of the vinyl.

Interesting thing to note as well is that the BBC actually started their European news outlets this way - they would natively translate news stories and broadcast them into European languages in order to get free information out there that couldn't be supressed by the enemy. To their credit, they actually reported on their own losses in the war to intise the enemy to listen in, so that when the tides of the war turned it would actually demoralise the enemy more later on.

In the Horrible Histories book The Woeful Second World War, one woman was actually reported to the secret police because of the BBC. She was having her radio repaired after it broke down and just so happened to have overheard a news broadcast about how the son of her neighbour, believed dead in a failed military operation, was actually caught and turned over to a Prisoner of War camp. When she happily informed her neighbour about this, she was immediately arrested.

That neighbour was a cunt, wasn't she?

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res30stupid t1_j9zwj5x wrote

Funny little detail, but the lead actress in Final Destination 2 was completely fine with being in such a violent, fucked-up horror film because as a Mormon, she was only upset if they were to ask her to swear.

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res30stupid t1_j9zw4aj wrote

Related to this, the original Ratchet & Clank was released as T for Teen because while the game was aimed closer to younger fans, the dirty jokes meant that the game was just unsuitable for younger players in the regular E for Everyone (5 and up) category. As a result, the ESRB invented the E-10 age rating which was used for the sequels.

Also, the PEGI release of Kingdom Hearts was rated for 7+, with one of the content warnings on the back of the case being a massive spider denoting the game had intense horror elements.

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res30stupid t1_j9w4bfh wrote

This is what Agatha Christie's stories and their adaptations so good. The murder usually only happens at the end of the first act or halfway through the novel, where we get a good look at how the victim interacted with the suspects to get an understanding as to why they would want the victim dead.

A great example of this is the film version of Evil Under The Sun, where Poirot is asked to go in holiday to help confront a suspected jewel thief and along the way, we see the victim interacting with the other characters and it's made clear that nearly everyone has a reason to want her dead. She's only murdered halfway through the film, with the first half revealing;

  • She jilted her ex-fiancé to go off and marry another man, stealing a million-dollar diamond from him in the process;
  • She's secretly brought the man she's cheating on her newlywed husband with on her honeymoon;
  • She's rubbing it into the face of her affair's own wife;
  • She's a truly wicked stepmother;
  • She's screwed her publicist out of thousands by refusing to sign off on the release of a book;
  • She bailed on a major Broadway production and got it cancelled three weeks into a six-month contract, leaving her bosses broke;
  • She may have ruined a rival actress' career and is currently married to the man the other actress is in love with.

Edit: Also, fun fact - the victim in that film, Arlena Marshall, was played by Diana Rigg AKA Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones.

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res30stupid t1_j9nzyfu wrote

To be fair, the Bond films did a lot of post-production dubbing of all the actors, which can be pretty noticable in the first film Dr No because they used only a handful of actors for the voiced dialog.

All but two women who were important to the plot were voiced by the same woman and a few male voices were reused as well; you'll notice that when Bond and a roadworker are overlooking the crash site from when the Three Blind Mice tried to kill Bond, he's got the same voice as Quarrel.

This actually ended up fucking up a BBC show, actually. They cast Adolfo Celi due to his role in Thunderball, but they didn't know he was dubbed over by a voice-actor because his English was near-incomprehensible.

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res30stupid t1_j6fwaxf wrote

Reply to comment by pwrof3 in Simple Questions Sunday! by AutoModerator

I've seen a lot of comparisons between the tw0 - haven't played the original, so here's what I've seen so far;

  • Isaac is changed up a bit. In the original, he had no voice lines at all and was mostly silent... save the pained grunts and screams. Here, he speaks a lot and reacts more with the world.
  • Characters are changed up a good bit as well, but not by much. The other members of the Kellion are a lot nicer and don't devolve into infighting that much compared to the original. One crewmember's death is completely different; not that much of a spoiler since in the original, he was just killed in the Necromorphs' intro - now, she (yes, emphasis on different gender) just lives a few minutes longer before being killed off in a different enemy type intro.
  • Weapon upgrades were completely reworked, bringing them closer to later entries. There is one unique thing - you need to buy additional weapon upgrades to fully unlock upgrade maps.
  • Space walks were changed as well, letting you use the jetpack from the second game onward.
  • A much hated mission objective was completely changed, which some let's players like Jacksepticeye stated was for the better.
  • There's much more exploration in the game now, letting the player freely return to past areas to explore for upgrade materials and supplies. The game also offers sidequests as well, again for unlocking vital supplies.

There are also new unlockables to the game as well. If you beat the game on the hardest difficulty (same as hard mode, but you're only allowed one save slot and dying deletes your file), you'll unlock the infinite-ammo super weapon from Dead Space 2 for use in later playthroughs. >!Yes, the foam finger returns.!< Also, the hardest difficulty adds a special objective to gather collectables to unlock a new ending.

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res30stupid t1_j6fttsx wrote

CSI, where they discuss and research some highly weird and unusual murder methods. They had an on-call medical examiner to help with research and to determine if it was possible. In fact, the assistant medical examiner was played by the show's main consultant because they liked him and offered him the role as a good way to keep him on-set.

Everything on the show is plausible and fatal - even the ludicrously overpowered gun that shoots a hundred bullets at once to liquify the victim in Miami. That's a real gun design.

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res30stupid t1_j6fsl6a wrote

In Breaking Bad, Tyrus Kitt was stated to be a new hire for Gus' group who was assigned to monitor Walt after Victor's death. This made it seem like he was rather green to Gus' organisation.

This was changed in Better Call Saul, where it's revealed that he was working for Gus for years and was good friends with Victor. This changed the dynamic in the original show, where his frosty attitude towards Walt and Jesse is now due to his suspecting they had something to do with his death and blaming them for it.

Also in Breaking Bad, Saul's legal degree says he graduated from University of American Samoa in 1984, while in Better Call Saul, it's stated that Jimmy only became a lawyer relatively recently in the era where cellphones were already rather common. This would meant that the earlier degree is definitely fake... helped by the fact that you need to be a legal resident of American Samoa in order to be admitted to that university.

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