Welcome to our last week of blogging everyone! This semester has gone pretty quick overall! For this last week I chose not to see a new release. 42 came out this weekend and although it was met with praise, I just wasn’t in the mood for a prejudice-fighting baseball movie. I am sure I will get around to seeing it, but it didn’t grab me this week. Instead I watched Blood Diamond, which I hadn’t previously seen. The film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, follows a South African mercenary and a Mende fisherman as their lives become intertwined over a rare and highly coveted pink diamond. The movie also explores the illegal diamond trade and civil war in Sierra Leone. Overall, the movie was excellent. DiCaprio played an almost anti-hero that you liked, pitied, and hated at the same time. The movie also did a phenomenal job at portraying the atrocities committed over these blood diamonds. The movie will most definitely make you think twice about the jewelry you buy or wear. I highly recommend this film!
Well in keeping with the spirit of obscure movie facts, I’ve found some last facts to share with you all! Hopefully you like them this week!
1. In The Godfather, John Marley’s scream in the horse head scene was quite real. He wasn’t told that a real horse’s head, which was obtained from a dog food company, was going to be used in the scene and so he naturally freaked.
2. In The Wizard of Oz. Toto the dog was payed $125 a week while Judy Garland was payed $500 a week.
3. In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest in order to get an actual surprised reaction from Orlando Bloom, the small kissing scene between Jack Sparrow and Elizabeth Swann was cut out of his script.
4. While filming Notorious, Alfred Hitchcock came under CIA surveillance for his use of uranium as a plot element.
5. King Kong was Adolf Hitler’s favorite movie. He frequently played the movie in his free time.
6. Casino Royale was the first James Bond movie approved by the Chinese government and censors.
7. Originally “movies” didn’t refer to films, but to the people who made them. It was originally used with disdain by Hollywood locals who were opposed to the Easterners moving into their town.
8. The American Human Association objected to the scene in Shawshank Redemption where Brooks feeds a maggot to his pet crow. The AHA said the scene was too cruel to the maggot, so one that died of natural causes was forced to be used instead.
9. During filming of the 1931 film Viking, twenty seven people died, including the director and cinematographer, when a ship they were shooting from exploded off the coast of Newfoundland.
10. 124 midgets were hired to play in The Wizard of Oz. During filming, one of the midgets fell into the toilet and was trapped there until someone finally found him hours later.
I love reading all your movie facts! It’s pretty cool that the actors in movies aren’t always acting, because they’re actually taken by surprise sometimes. The Pirates of the Caribbean movies are my favorite so the fact about Orlando Bloom not knowing about Jack and Elizabeth’s kiss is pretty interesting!
As a huge baseball fan, I was really hoping from the first few sentences of your passion blog that you were going to see “42”! I have been wanted to see it badly for the few days that it has been out and it would have been cool to have a fellow student’s opinions on it before going. Jackie Robinson is one of my heroes and I think he is a very inspirational and interesting person. But, I also appreciated your review of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Blood Diamonds, the movie that you did see! While it doesn’t seem exactly like my type of movie, it is always good to be informed on what is going on culturally in our society, so thank you for enlightening me with the interesting facts!
My favorite fact was the one with Jack Sparrow; he’s always been great in those movies as well. I actually did an English video project on blood diamonds this year, based off the movie Blood Diamond. The movie sheds light on a problem that really plagued African Nations and Leo outdid himself again in this movie.
I have never even heard of the movie Blood Diamond before, but if Leonardo DiCaprio plays in it then I am all in for seeing it! Haha! In all seriousness though, the plot sounds very intriguing and I think it would be an awesome movie to see. As far as your facts go, they get me every week. Some of the facts are so funny and so interesting to learn about!
I love these movie facts! Espcially the one where the midget fell into the toilet and no one found him for hours, very funny. What I don’t understnading is why the American Human Association thought it was too cruel to feed the maggot to the crow when they naturally eat them anyway.
I’ve actually seen Blood Diamond and I thought it was a very powerful movie. There is so much going on in the world that we never know about. I also always love your facts. Its crazy that Judy Garland was only paid $500 a week for Wizard of Oz, which is still wildly successful, when actors and actresses now-a-days are paid multi-millions.
These are some interesting facts! I had no idea that the dog in The Wizard of Oz got paid so much. Great post!