FILM 1986: THE BREAK-UP

FILM 1986: THE BREAK-UP

TRIVIA: Vince Vaughn's parents have bit roles in the movie. His mother plays a tourist and his father plays Jennifer Aniston's father.

Vince Vaughn gained 26 pounds for the role. Vaughn was reported to have gained weight as a result of his recent decision to quit smoking.

In the opening scene at Wrigley Field, Jon Favreau makes a reference to going to "Wiener Circle" to have hot dogs after the game. Wiener Circle is a hot dog stand famous for the staff yelling and cursing at customers when they order. If the customer does not return the favor, they do not take your order. Generally, though, this only happens late at night on the weekends.

Toward the end, Vince Vaughn uses his favorite line when he tells the passengers on his tour boat about getting hopped up and making some bad decisions. He uses the same line at the beginning of his role in The Wedding Crashers.

Jennifer Aniston's character Brooke gets a "Telly Savalas" wax job during the movie. In real life, Savalas was Aniston's godfather.

This is the fourth time Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau have been in a movie together (after Swingers (1996), Made (2001), and Rudy (1993)).

John Michael Higgins plays a member of an acapella group called the Tone Rangers in this movie. Several years later, he goes on to play an acapella competition commentator in the movies Pitch Perfect and Pitch Perfect 2.

Second film starring Vince Vaughn and Vincent D'Onofrio, the first one was " The Cell" (2000)

FILM 1676: SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING

TRIVIA: The scene in which Peter, through sheer force of will, lifts the machinery pinning him down after The Vulture forces the structure to collapse on him, is a nod to a scene in The Amazing Spider-Man #33, in which he does the same thing. The panels in the comic are considered by many to be some of the most iconic in Spider-Man's history.

Jennifer Connelly voices the Spider-Man computer Karen. Her husband Paul Bettany had voiced the Iron Man computer J.A.R.V.I.S. She was also cast, because of her appearance in the John Hughes produced Career Opportunities (1991). "Homecoming" pays homage to Hughes' high school films, and casting Connelly was done as a tribute to his career. Connelly was also previously cast as Elizabeth "Betty" Ross in Hulk (2003).

In an interview from 2013, while promoting his upcoming film, How I Live Now (2013), Tom Holland was asked by a reporter what kind of role he might want to try next. When Holland replied, saying a project with action and humor would be of interest to him, the reporter asked if he would ever like to play a superhero. "Maybe Spider-Man, in ten years time," answered Holland. "The reboot of the reboot, if they do that."

Tom Holland is the youngest actor (at nineteen) to be cast as Peter Parker. His predecessors, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, were twenty-five and twenty-six, respectively, when they were cast.

The filmmakers have stated that this movie takes inspiration on John Hughes' comedies from the 1980s about teens and high school. One of John Hughes' films, Weird Science (1985), features a young Robert Downey, Jr. who plays Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Michelle's (Zendaya's) literary tastes contain subtle allusions to either the plot or spiders. At one point, she is seen reading "Of Human Bondage" by W. Somerset Maugham. In that novel, the protagonist is an orphan living with his aunt and uncle. Later, she is reading "Invitation To A Beheading" by Vladimir Nabokov. In that novel, a condemned man awaits his execution, accompanied only by a spider in his cell. Finally, during the Washington Monument scene, she is wearing a Sylvia Plath t-shirt. Plath wrote a poem called "Spider", and used spiders as images in other poems.

In The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), Andrew Garfield can be seen wearing a Ramones shirt. In this movie, "Blitzkreig Bop" by the Ramones is featured. The Ramones famously covered the original Spider-Man theme song, as a hidden bonus track on their "¡Adios Amigos!" album. "Adios" was their final album, and their hidden bonus track "Spider-Man" was the last song on their last original album.

When the science team arrives at the hotel in Washington, D.C., one of the members comments on the size of it. Flash Thompson (Tony Revolori), comments that he has seen bigger. He may have been referring to his time spent as Zero at The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).

John Francis Daley, who co-wrote the screenplay, and Martin Starr, who played Mr. Harrington, were in the television series Freaks and Geeks (1999). Daley also appeared as F.B.I. Special Agent Sweets, on Bones (2005).

FILM 1297: CHEF

TRIVIA: Jon Favreau did his own cooking by training with food truck chef Roy Choi. Choi sent Favreau to a week of intensive French culinary schooling, where Favreau sharpened his knife skills and learned how to make sauces. "I brought him into the kitchen, and he just kind of fit in," Choi recalls. "I threw him a couple tests, like a case of chives, or a case of onions, or peel two cases of avocados. Just to see where his mind and his situation and his abilities were and how interested he was in these things. He just attacked them. He really became a part of it."

The short scene with Carl and Percy in the cinema features the audio from Iron Man's repulsor rays, as a nod to Jon Favreau's previous work with the Iron Man films.

Promotional events centering on the fictional Cubano-serving El Jefe proved so popular that Favreau and L.A.-based chef Roy Choi who consulted on the film, have opened a series of pop-up restaurants and announced that they are thinking about making the track permanent.

Oliver Platt's brother is a prominent food critic in the New York metropolitan area and has invited Oliver on some of his restaurant visits.

Towards the end of the film, the El Jefe truck is seen at a nighttime food-truck event, along with many of L.A.'s most popular food trucks. This is an actual event in Venice called "First Fridays." For a brief moment, you can see Chef Roy Choi's Kogi truck, the food truck that started the whole gourmet-food-truck craze.