Sheppard, McKay, Teyla and Ronon crash-landed ("Shot down by the cast of Braveheart," griped Rodney) in an Alcatrazlike prison located on an island that is a de facto feeding ground for the Wraith. In fact, the whole reason the Wraith left the remainder of Elysia (I'm guessing at the spelling) alone is because the porky, amoral magistrate cut a deal with a hammy Wraith rep who sips blood-colored wine with the phony decadence of somebody who has gorged himself on Anne Rice's oeuvre. Add Donald Pleasance's severed finger, and the plot would have been a complete recycle of Escape from New York (which, incidentally, starred Kurt Russell, the Jack O'Neill of the original silver-screen Stargate, a film that also featured James Spader, who was in Crash with Holly Hunter, whom I saw present a 1996 Golden Globe alongside… wait for it… Kevin Bacon). Not that I'd put severing body parts past Torrell and his thugs. They did
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Question: I recently saw and loved the movie Crash, and was especially intrigued by the way all the stories intersected and converged. Could you possibly give me a list of some other films whose stories are structured in the same way? Answer: I certainly can: First, for the benefit of readers who haven't seen Crash (2005), its structure is one in which multiple narratives are developed simultaneously and overlay or intersect at key points before converging at the end. Unlike ensemble movies in which there's a main plot and a series of subplots, films like this give more or less equal weight to all the story strands and derive a significant part of their thematic power from the apparently random way in which different characters' destinies come together. To my mind, the greatest of all multiple-story narratives is
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