Favourite questions and answers from the 4th quarter of 2014

Question

As the year 2014 has ended and as done 3 months ago, I'd once again ask the community for their favourite questions and answers from the past quarter. So let's see what great and interesting questions and answers the end of the year had to offer.

Please link to your favorite questions and answers which were created from October 1st 2014 through December 31st 2014.

Since we currently get ~950/1600 questions/answers per quarter, here are some data queries to help with the decision making process:

• Questions with most votes from 4th quarter of 2014
• Questions with most views from 4th quarter of 2014
• Answers with most votes from 4th quarter of 2014

But those are really just hints, feel free to mention any question or answer you really enjoyed. Also don't hesitate to mention questions and answers you posted yourself but which you think didn't get the apreciation they deserved.

Answer 1

So I've skimmed over the last quarter of questions to look for the posts I'd deem good and diverse examples, be it by personal interest, quality, informativity or just originality. This is neither an exhaustive list, as there have been many good questions and answers, nor ordered in any way. And of course this is entirely my own opinion.

Questions:

• Is Nolan citing Borges?

  Now of course Interstellar can't be missing from this list. Being as straight-to-the-point and unambiguous as it was, it IMHO shines more on the answer front, but there also were some interesting and great questions about it, like this one about the literary influence for a remarkable scene. Being the illiterate I am, I had admittedly never heard about this short story, let alone its author, but this question (and my enthusiasm for the corresponding movie) made me delve into it.

• Connection between Interstellar and 'Flora's Letter'?

  And yet another intriguing question about Interstellar, focussing on a rather inconspicuous aspect of a movie, one that's often ignored as irrelevant and of temporary nature. But this is an excellent question about the working title of a movie, and the only one of this kind we have on the site.

• Agents of Shield: looking for clues for its impact

  Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is an interesting instance in the TV landscape as it is directly sharing continuity with a corresponding movie franchise (whose cross-movie shared continuity is already quite remarkable on its own). Therefore, a question exploring the nature of this shared continuity and the actual significance of the supposedly less important TV spinoff is also quite unique and definitely interesting. (Add to this that this question had to fight a little for its survival.)

• Has the Matrix canon or the Wachowskis ever suggested that the machines' co-dependence on humans is psychosocial instead of energy based?

  Now that's what I call a Matrix-question. Don't just ask about what you think to be a plot-hole, but make something more out of it, like a question for hints about a possible further layer in the at the first view supposedly obvious human-machine relationship.

• Why did Kubrick avoid a direct explanation to "Clockwork orange"'s meaning?

  And last but not least (well, not even last either) a rather "classic" question about a famously puzzling director and one of his most famous movies. I have admittedly never seen the movie in full yet (yeah, flag this as offensive if you want), but you don't really need to have seen it to find this question interesting and appreciate it along with its answers.

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Answers:

• What are the analogies/homages to Western Cinema in Breaking Bad?

  After finally having catched up on what I have to agree as being one of modern TV's definite highlights in the course of 1-2 weeks I loved to distill this answer, no matter if some of the references might range from obvious to insanely far-fetched. (And if you're acquainted with the site's history, you know the question itself had a, mildly put, hard birth.)

• Why didn't Walter White consume his own product?

  While the question could be answered quite obviously (as a feeled 15 equal Scarface answers did), this answer goes out of its way to provide insights why this wouldn't have been in the spirit of the show and its intended character portrayal, by articulating an observation I also found remarkable, that for a show about producing drugs it is interestingly so much not about drugs at all.

• Why does the score not match the movie's atmosphere?

  I had this question on my radar for a long time and always wanted to write an answer to it, since it's a very interesting one and various sources on the net make a good answer quite possible here. But I'm glad someone else finally took the chance to give an exhaustive answer I'd probably never have found the time for, and which I couldn't have worded any better anyway.

• What's with Interstellar's strange sound mixing?

  An excellent answer about an aspect of the movie I wouldn't have guessed to be so well thought-through and which I'd nearly not dared to ask about at all. This nearly made we want to visit the cinema for a 3rd time (and I would have, hadn't it stopped showing the original version).

• What's the distinct color grading in David Fincher's movies?

  While this answer isn't too much more than the compilation of a bunch of easy google results, it was nervertheless big fun to compose it and delve into the matter of a quite remarkable and recognizable color grading style. And the result is an IMHO diverse look at it, even if far from exhaustive and probably only the first step in a more extensive analysis of Fincher's style.

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Honorable Mentions:

• https://movies.stackexchange.com/q/27331/49

  This question might be phrased a bit fuzzy or overgeneralizing and was likely closed for this reason. But as a fan of movies set in the Southern US this seemed to me an excellent question to delve into the background of the genre of Southern Gothic and the depiction of modern day Southern US in movies and TV. I've not yet made a major effort in rephrasing it (though, I think it would work in its current form already) or meta-discussing it, but this is definitely very high in my long list of to be revi(s/v)ed closed/deleted questions. Reopen this and kill some ID/trivia/plot-hole stuff in exchange.

• Why the Robots were like this?

  Given that the robots were such a remarkably great feature of this movie to me and the fact that they were quite different from usual robot depictions, this is quite an obvious and interesting question. But the main reason that makes this a great example are the rather diverse answers it generated, tackling the problem from different viewpoints, but with the results partially overlapping again at the end. That's what multiple answers are for.

• How come the events of Terminator didn't change the future, but the events of Terminator 2 did?

  This question is an excellent observation that never ocurred to me before about a quite severe difference in approaches to time travel of two movies even though they're sequels from the same director/screenwriter. And for this insight it deserves an honorable mention, even if the likely answer is just "the filmmakers didn't put that much thought into this distinction".

• What are the methods of including a character's thoughts in an audiovisual medium?

  While this is quite a list question, it is nevertheless an interesting and canonical question about story-telling. And while the question as well as its existing answers might still be far from excellent and exhaustive, it yet gives an acceptable example for a good list question hopefully encouraging rather explanative answers than simple examples.

• _{Escape velocity to leave the water planet in the movie Interstellar}

  _{Well, that's technically an invalid item, since it's a question from a totally different site, but it was born out of the discussion to a related question here. While neither this question nor the one that inspired it were of an exceptionally high interest to me, it still was a fun challenge to delve into checking the physical properties of a friggin fictional planet and a nice way to spend my sunday evening (even if someone with higher mathematical/physical skills could probably have answered it in a fraction of the time and with fewer errors). And for being a cross-site question relation to a site we usually don't have much overlap with, it deserves an honorable mention.}

Answer 2

Thanks for the initiative & list, Napoleon. Adding a couple I liked:

• Andrew Martin's illuminating answer about a seemingly strange practice in Psycho and in older movies in general.

• The approved answer regarding Beth's final words in The Walking Dead by System Down, who probably understood them better than the actual show runners. :D

Honorable Mention

• This question about the Terminator's erratic behavior that could've been a classic case of 'because it's in the script' actually resulted in an interesting discussion and provided some reasonable explanations.