Cakebug Tranch

I don't know, man, I'm getting plenty of meat out of 'Body Parts'.

Yeah, I think this is a bummer. Here's the cached wikipedia edit: the strikethrough section was the part that was cut. This was removed by reason of 'unsourced opinion' which I guess is fair enough, but I'd be curious to know whether that opinion was written by a fan or someone connected with the film. The summary is already flagged for being too detailed, which suggests either a superfan or someone who knows the plot intimately (like the screenwriter). Plenty of edits have happened on the Body Parts wiki this week, which is absolutely thanks to the HDTGM episode. The undisputed highlight is the editing of the phrase 'finger-bangs' into 'pleasures': http://imgur.com/a/RYYPR

I think you're right on that - I think the mother theory is someone stretching to understand why this particular death-row inmate is so intrinsic to this experiment. I mean, if a serial killer's limbs will take the skills the serial killer had and will meld with the skills the recipient has - we should assume that Remo Lacey's artistic talent is solely responsible for the paintings that are made, and not that Charlie Fletcher was also a talented artist, or that Charlie was a kickass basketball player in between murders - then why not try the experiment on someone with something to add to society? A genius concert pianist's arms grafted to a regular person might carry on that pianist's talent after they've died, right? Or a visionary stock market trader's limbs might help people absorb their insight and ability? There must be a hundred better candidates for this surgery than Charlie Fletcher. This is why I think that people are trying to make the link between the doctor and the killer, because she must have an ulterior motive - which is heightened by the fact that she is present when Charlie has his accident. The only thing I can think of is that the doctor and the killer WERE mother and son in an early draft of the screenplay, before it was cast. After they had their cast and after shooting and editing, that fact got lost in the shuffle or was actively cut because it feels a bridge too far. It's not impossible that the Wikipedia article was written by someone with prior knowledge of an earlier draft, and if there was a director's cut of this movie that fact might emerge, although I really don't think it fits for all the reasons already examined. And while we're here - the doctor clearly didn't know that Charlie's limbs were going to go crazy and that his personality would be in the limbs. Once this became clear, WHY didn't the doctor double down on her Nobel Prize application by bringing Bill and the others back for more testing? This is clearly an astonishing medical breakthrough, that personalities can be transmitted through limbs. But no, she treats Bill like he's crazy and has already moved on to transplanting heads. She literally tells Bill that 'transplanting arms is so last season' and who cares that Bill's arm has a mind of its own. I think the world would be fascinated to know this fact, and she just blows it off.

There's no way that Iron Fist isn't mentioned in some way in the minisode.

I don't know where else to post this, so totally off topic. But guys, I'm working on a new digital edition of an Elizabethan play which includes going through the Oxford English Dictionary for period definitions. So, I was working on the word 'Tragedia', and found this: http://imgur.com/a/7tBY3 Look at the author of the last sample quotation. What's happened to you, OED? You used to be cool.

Good news, after you watch 'Rent', you can catch the sequel on YouTube...

Just bustin' your chops. I think we all assumed Tom was a man at one stage or another. For some reason...

Pssst! ;)

HOLY SHIT how had I never seen this before? I mean, I've seen 'Trading Places', but as a huge Blues Brothers fan, I have absolutely no memory of this moment of Frank Oz recreating Jake's release bit. Awesome. Thanks, man.

Okay, I've been thinking a lot about body proportions. Should I share? Sure! When Charlie Fletcher is brought in to the hospital for his execution - a point that's bizarre enough on its own but I think it was covered enough in the live show - we see his head removed, before montaging over to see Bill Cruishank rocking his new arm, which we know was harvested from this other guy's body. Fine. That's the concept of our film. Until we meet Brad Dourif as Remo Lacey, our artist, and Peter Murnik as Mark Draper, our basketball player. Both of them have Charlie's other three limbs. Fine. I have discussed elsewhere just how many months and years of rehab would be required to allow these limb recipients to even have a rudimentary use of those new limbs, let alone being able to fling kids around or have the hops to dunk a basketball. We should probably assume that Mark Draper wasn't able to dunk before he got his new legs, but now he can because Charlie was a kickass baller when he wasn't randomly murdering prison guards, right? What's bothered me about this is how relatively seamlessly Charlie's limbs fit on these other guys' bodies. If you see images of people with limb transplants, there's nearly always a major join where it has been attached, with lots of scar tissue, fluid, and often pigmentation differences between the skin. Sometimes, the arm is slightly larger or smaller than the recipient's body, which means a noticeable difference visually. Here's a kind of graphic image of a double arm transplant recipient: But, in Body Parts, aside from some superficial scarring, there is no real difference between the new arm and the old body - which is obviously because Jeff Fahey's arm has been made up to look like a donor arm. This gets mostly interesting once you start considering proportions. Jeff Fahey is 6'0 tall, and the images of John Walsh, who plays Charlie Fletcher, suggests he's the same size or a little bigger (there's no data on this that I can see, but looking at his next to Jeff Fahey (see here http://imgur.com/a/eVAAz) I would assume maybe the same or a little higher). BUT. Brad Dourif (The Artist) is 5'9. AND Peter Murnik (the Basketballer) is SIX FOOT FIVE. So, if you add the arm of a six foot tall man to the body of a 5'9 man, you will see a noticeable difference in the lengths of his arm. More to the point, if you add the legs of a six foot man to a 6'5 man's body, they will be comically short, particularly since Charlie takes Mark Draper's entire lower half when he reclaims his legs. The obvious example to point to here is Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, which sketches out the ideal proportions of the human body: The radius of the circle around Da Vinci's man points to the correct proportions between torso and limbs, which would be seriously out of whack putting a too-long arm on a 5'9 artist or too-short legs on a 6'5 basketball player. And as this 2010 scientific study has suggested, "leg length and proportion are important in the perception of human beauty, which is often considered a sign of health and fertility." Mark Draper not only looks normal to everyone around him, but his SHORTER legs make him MORE able to perform feats like dunk a basketball. Given that this character has likely lived most of his life on his 6'5 guy legs, only to lose them both, the adjustment to these stubby little serial killer legs would be arduous and would almost certainly result in less coordination, not more. The same goes for Remo Lacey, who would have to deal with a lop-sided set of arms: and given that he's using his left hand to paint (which means he lost his dominant arm and would have to relearn how to use it), the proportions there would be considerable too. We have plenty of artists on this forum: I'd be interested in knowing about arm and leg proportions when drawing the human form. There are lots of guides online and most seem to suggest that they are dependent on torso length. What happens when too-short legs are put on a longer body? Would we need to do what this Russian model did, by spending thousands of dollars on leg-lengthening surgery? http://www.dailymail...ng-catwalk.html

Ahhh! So many mixed feelings! Nice pick, I think we'll have plenty to talk about...

Relax, Taylor. No need to get all worked up. Change your shirt. And, y'know, rather than getting all excited about stinky Odor's punch, worry more about his throws...

^ That gif portrays seriously one of the happiest moments of my adult life. I watched it live on TV with my kids and we we went fuckin' bananas.

Tossin' you up soft balls like

Bah! I quit! I'm going to go watch Orphan Black! ETA - as I say, with no sarcasm at all, I'll watch whatever comes. I trust you all.

(that pause is Cameron furiously finding clips of all the other songs in That Thing You Do!) ETA - LOLLLLLL

I'm just not sure I get what the outer limit is then. Because 'That Thing You Do' (which I like a lot, BTW) has only one song, really. So how's it a musical? And Walk Hard is a parody of I Walk the Line and has a Doors-themed poster, so that's a biopic surely!

That Thing You Do is ESSENTIALLY a biopic. If we do that, we have to do Walk Hard.

Okay, so how about 'Wayne's World' (with the cover of The Sweet's 'Ballroom Blitz') or 'The Doors' (with all the Doors music)? Are those musicals?

Oh yeah, right on. Oh, and I forgot about 'Candy Man' and 'Golden Ticket' and all that. Scratch that example. Strike my post from the record, let's do everything and all. ETA - hey, no fair, posting those other videos as I was conceding your point.

Yeah, I'm not sure - if we start nominating movies that have a couple of memorable songs (American Tail, That Thing You Do!) it's less 'Musical Mondays' and more like 'Movies with Music Mondays'. All of the movies we've had so far have been classically-defined musicals in that they use music to move the plot along. I think it's good to push things a bit but you should be able to justify your choice within the definition of 'Musical Mondays'. A lot of animated movies have music, but they're not exactly musicals. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory have the Oompa-Loompa songs, but I don't think any of us would nominate that as a musical. I'm more than happy to watch whatever, but something like 'American Tail' which has a couple of incidental songs feels like a bit of a stretch to me. I mean, I know we did Beauty and the Beast, but we could easily fill every slot from now on with Disney movies because they're all built to have some kind of musical element, even if it's something like Moana where there could arguably have been a couple more songs, or Zootopia where that one Shakira song comes in a few times. I like doing musicals rather than movies with music, but as I say, I'll watch whatever.

As I was watching 'Body Parts', I kept getting glimpses of familiar-looking areas in the backgrounds, of what is (I think) supposed to be Westchester County and environs. My suspicions were confirmed when Charlie Fletcher crashes his car in front of the famous Canary Restaurant, a crappy diner that is long-closed but popular with location scouts, for movies shot here in Toronto (it's the restaurant Matthew Perry goes to in the horrid 'Two to Tango' in order to eat poisoned food, so sad is he over Neve Campbell). Here's a still of Charlie crashing his car in front of the Canary: http://imgur.com/a/NrCeo More to the point, when Bill escapes Detective Hat and goes to confront Mom Doctor at the hospital, he gets out of his car on Hoskin Avenue in the middle of the University of Toronto campus, mails a letter, then proceeds into a foreboding concrete building, as screencapped here: http://imgur.com/a/piRbY That's no hospital, that's Robarts Library, the University of Toronto's flagship and the biggest in Canada. It's constructed in the brutalist style, is meant to look like a turkey/peacock, and a long-held rumour was that engineers who constructed it did not take into account the weight of the books the foundation would need to support, so it's gradually sinking. That's mostly an urban legend I think. Robarts is used as an external location often in film: it's even in an episode of 'Friends' as another hospital and it's a prison in the Resident Evil films (http://torontoist.co...t-evil-sequels/). I wrote my entire PhD thesis in the college directly across the road from where Bill mails his letter, and borrowed most of my books from that library. I didn't see any dismembered corpses on life support in there though... ETA: googling "Toronto Movie Body Parts" leads to a distressing number of stories about the east Toronto porn actor who killed and ate some of his boyfriend, then mailed parts of his anatomy to politicians across the country. That guy's in jail now.