Perfect Song, Perfect Scene #9

Opening Credits, Jackie Brown (1997): "Across 110th Street" by Bobby Womack

Painful Moments in Movie History #2: The Fireplace Scene

Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen

Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, 2002

Director: 

George Lucas

Writers: 

George Lucas, Jonathan Hales

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INTERIOR: NABOO LAKE RETREAT, LODGE, FIREPLACE ALCOVE - TWILIGHT

A fire blazes in the open hearth. PADMÉ and ANAKIN are sitting in front of it, gazing into the flames.

ANAKIN:
From the moment I met you, all those years ago, not a day has gone by when I haven't thought of you. And now that I'm with you again, I'm in agony. The closer I get to you, the worse it gets. The thought of not being with you- I can't breathe. I'm haunted by the kiss that you should never have given me. My heart is beating, hoping that kiss will not become a scar. You are in my very soul, tormenting me. What can I do? I will do anything that you ask...

Silence. The logs flame in the hearth. PADMÉ meets his eye, then looks away.

Short Cuts: "Ya, You Know It's a Radisson So It's Pretty Good"

Fargo (1996). Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen; written by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen; starring Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi, John Carroll Lynch, Peter Stormare, and Harve Presnell.

Painful Moments in Movie History #1: The Animal Cracker Scene

Armageddon, 1998

Director: 

Michael Bay

Writers: 

Jonathan Hensleigh, J.J. Abrams, Tony Gilroy, Shane Salerno

______________________________

A.J.:
You know  what I was thinking?

Grace Stamper:
What?

A.J.:
I really don't think that the animal cracker qualifies as a cracker.

Grace Stamper:
Why?

A.J.:
Well cause it's sweet, which to me suggests cookie, and, you know, I mean putting cheese on something is sort of a defining characteristic of what makes a cracker a cracker. I don't know why I thought of that, I just...

Grace Stamper:
Baby, you have such sweet pillow talk.

A.J.:
I got like a little animal cracker, Discovery Channel thing happening right here. (affects Australian accent) Watch the gazelle as he grazes through the open plains. Now, look as the cheetah approaches. Watch as he stalks his prey. Now the gazelle is a little spooked. He could head north, to the ample sustenance provided by the mountainous peaks above. Or, he could go south. The gazelle now faces mans most perilous question: north...or, south...way down under. Tune in next week.

Grace Stamper:
Baby? Do you think it's possible that anyone else in the world is doing this very same thing at this very same moment?

A.J.:
I hope so. Otherwise what the hell are we trying to save?

Short Cuts: "So is Pregnancy if You Don't Have a License"

Demolition Man (1993). Directed by Marco Brambilla; written by Joel Silver and Howard Kazanjian; starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, Benjamin Bratt, Rob Schneider, Bob Gunton, Denis Leary, and Jack Black.

Short Cuts: "Mathletes Don't Wear Body Art Like That"

Along Came Polly (2004). Written and directed by John Hamburg; starring Ben Stiller, Jennifer Aniston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Hank Azaria, Debra Messing, and Alex Baldwin.

Best of 2009: Part 2

Read the Best of 2009: Part 1

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The Best Scenes of 2009:

...2009 didn't have many memorable films, but it had some memorable scenes...

1. Tavern tango, Inglourious Basterds. As much as I find myself disgusted by Quentin Tarantino's public persona, I have to admit the guy can write a scene like almost no screenwriter of his generation. In the scene of the year (one of many great ones in this movie; though ultimately I found the parts greater than the sum), QT ratcheted the tension off the charts as curious characters attempted to converse cryptically in multiple languages. The payoff didn't do much for me, but the suspenseful build-up to it was unforgettable. (Read a note from editor Sally Menke about this scene here.)

 

2. Expedition in the "Hallelujah Mountains", Avatar. In a movie featuring the most photorealistic CGI ever seen on (digital) film, this otherworldly scene was the one that really blew me away - even in 2D. Jake and the other Na'vi warriors jumped across, ran between, and climbed on meticulously designed floating mountains. Only James Cameron could have the audacity to winkingly write a line like "You should see your faces" (by Michelle Rodriguez in an earlier scene) - and then back it up with visuals like this.

Short Cuts: "Make Work Your Favorite"

Elf (2003). Directed by Jon Favreau; written by David Berenbaum; starring Will Ferrell, Zooey Deschanel, Bob Newhart, Ed Asner, James Caan, Faizon Love, Mary Steenburgen, and Peter Dinklage.

Although I personally find it only chuckle-inducing, I've accepted that Elf has, in the span of only six years, become a Christmas comedy classic for the new millennium. I can't believe how many people talk about this movie each December, but then The Christmas Story never did much for me either, so go figure.

Elf is one of the few Will Ferrell movies in which I don't find him very funny, but some of the reserved supporting cast performances complement his over-the-top geekiness really well. Exhibit A (above) is one of my favorite scenes, with Faizon Love giving one of the best incredulously blank stares in years. I find it a lot funnier than Ferrell's hysterics, but that's just me.

Anyway, I don't mean to be a grinch - enjoy Elf, A Christmas Story, or whatever other holiday movies you might watch around this time of year. I'll be traveling and offline for the next week, but I have a couple of posts in the pipeline that will go up before I get back. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours!

Short Cuts: "...Breakfast the Night Before..."

City Slickers (1991). Directed by Ron Underwood; written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel; starring Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, Bruno Kirby, Jack Palance, Jake Gyllenhaal, Patricia Wettig, and Helen Slater.

Short Cuts: "I'm Bloody Ibiza!"

About a Boy (2002). Directed by Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz; written by Peter Hedges, Chris Weitz, and Paul Weitz, based on the novel by Nick Hornby; starring Hugh Grant, Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, and Rachel Weisz.

Theater Seens: Jurassic Park

If my memory serves me correctly, Jurassic Park was the first movie I saw in a movie theater three times. I've done so with a few movies since (School of Rock being one of them), but I'd never done it before that summer of 1993. For a 12-year old boy it offered a veritable trifecta of awesomeness: 1.) child characters that I could relate to during the fun moments and feel braver and older than in the scary moments; 2.) John Williams' majestic score (just listen to that thing, chills from the first note of the prelude!) for which I would soon be learning to play exhilarating timpani rhythm in the percussion section of my middle school band, and 3.) action-packed adventure, complete with real, living dinosaurs.

It wasn't that the dinosaurs just looked real, it was that they were real, at least for a few moments in my mind. Reflecting back on this movie, I am convinced it was one of the three movies released in the 1990's that changed cinematic visual effects forever, the other two being James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgement Day and James Cameron's Titanic. (As I mentioned in the 2009 movie forecast, I'm hopeful that Cameron will once again deliver an unprecedented sight with Avatar; no, I will not watch a trailer.)

The visual effects in Jurassic Park were so awe-inspiring that they weren't even shown in the trailers - a strategy that studios would be wise to consider to help build word of mouth advertising these days. Interesting to consider, isn't it - a massive budget and not even a money shot to get people excited? In the teaser trailer you saw in late 1992, and in the theatrical trailer that whet your appetite prior to the film's June 1993 release, you didn't see a single dinosaur. Watch them below- just a glimpse of T-Rex's foot, a silhouette, snout and claw of a Velociraptor, the back of a Triceratops, and side view of the head of a Brontosaurus (or maybe it's a Brachiosaurus; my elementary school education is fading), but never a full-on dino shot. The theatrical version might have been the best trailer of the decade in that sense that it showed a lot of facial reactions, but no sense of what these characters were reacting to.

Short Cuts: "Then We'll Have to Look After Ourselves"

Lord of the Flies (1963). Directed by Peter Brook; written by Peter Brook, adapted from the novel by William Golding; starring James Aubrey, Tom Chapin, Hugh Edwards, Roger Elwin, and Tom Gaman.

Short Cuts: "The Door Is Always Open...To My Office"

The Apartment (196o). Directed by Billy Wilder; written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond; starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred McMurray.

On-Screen Violence: Absorbed or Ignored?

Filmmaking irony - the movie about nonviolence features more disturbing violence...

A few months ago I was flipping channels when I came across Ridley Scott's suffocatingly macho Black Hawk Down. I came in right after one of the shootouts on the streets of Mogadishu, and the American soldiers were collecting their dead and wounded. One of the soldiers was severed in half, another was simply in pieces - a helmet here, a blown-off hand on the ground there. Scott took his sweet time focusing in on these bloody casualties of war, no doubt attempting to make us experience a soldier's horror as we gobbled our popcorn and slurped our soda.

It didn't work, at least for me. I hardly reacted while watching these scenes, and I certainly didn't cringe in the same way that I remembered cringing when I saw it in the theater. Why wasn't I bothered by this graphic, based-on-true-life violence in Black Hawk Down? I didn't know, and it was an odd realization.

Flash forward a couple of months, and I'm watching CNN just after the Iranian presidential election results are announced. I follow the story for a couple of days (as I'd recently seen Letters to the President) and, as the protests begin heating up, I see a brief news flash about a protester being shot and killed in the street. This fact doesn't faze me (it happens frequently in many countries), but yet I'm drawn to the significance of it happening in Iran at this time and under the heavy load of state censorship.

Fatefully curious, I go online to read more about what happened (it was still breaking news at the time), and in literally no time at all I find myself almost accidentally watching a video that will over the course of the next few weeks be played repeatedly around the world. Many of you may have now seen it - the death of Neda Agha-Soltan. (The photo used here is from the comprehensive Wikipedia page about the incident, the simple existence of which proves how bizarre of a future is in store for us with cell phone videos and YouTube.)

Because the story was not yet well known and the video not yet widely seen, I really didn't know what I was watching in the first few seconds. Eventually, and ultimately, I have to consider Neda's death the most disturbing footage I've seen since watching the live destruction of the WTC towers on 9/11. Considering the saturation of "torture porn" movies, beheading videos, "Faces of Death" and otherwise increasingly violent video games and movies in the last seven years, some of you might find my statement outrageous. But in fact I've gone to great lengths to avoid all of that stuff, so seeing this video and knowing it was real (as opposed to United 93, which was nearly as unbearable but still ultimately fake), well it shook me to the core.

I felt ill for a couple of days. I couldn't sleep for fear that I was going to have graphic nightmares. The scene replayed in my head over and over and over and over: Felled by a high-caliber shot to her heart, Neda lands on her back in a state of shock. The people around her immediately try to stop the bleeding from her upper chest, but they're clearly no match for a cardiovascular system in chaos. As her brain function diminishes, Neda's eyes go cock-eyed in every direction before rolling back into her head, just as hot, dark crimson blood uncontrollably pours from her nose, mouth, and eventually eyes. In a matter of seconds, she is gone, the screams around her lost to silence.

Just thinking about this again has me disturbed, and I had to make that photo of her deliberately small because I still can't stand to look at it.

Why did this video, which is so much less graphic than so many movies I see on a regular basis, completely wreck me? The obvious answer is that it's real footage, and not fake blood on a set with a director who's just ordered another take before breaking for lunch. No, there's one take, and that's an actual live human, and her life is literally pouring out of her body as I watch. And that deeply disturbs me.

But I don't feel like it's that simple, and in the month or so since seeing the video I've been much more curious about and aware of my reactions to violence on screen. For example, if it looks real, does it really make it harder to watch? If the director wants to make it look "really" real but it ends up looking fake (Black Hawk Down, recently Public Enemies), does it make it easier to watch? If the violence is inflicted on people I don't know or care about, does it make it easier to watch? What about women and children? Am I entertained by shootouts and explosions, or do I simply tolerate them? Surely if there was a gunfight in the hallway of my apartment, or a car bomb explosion on my street, I wouldn't consider it "awesome". Right?

I haven't really gained any clear insights from these questions over the last month, but one clue, or maybe just another confusing addition, came just the other day. Flipping through channels again, I landed on Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, and the scene in which more than 1,000 Indians are violently gunned down during, ironically, a non-violent protest against the Brits. It was horrifying to see men, women, and children massacred, but this being 1982, the death was not visually graphic, at least in the blood-spatteringly way that it would be if it were made in 2009 (indeed, Gandhi was rated PG). Yet despite the lack of gore, body parts, and blood-soaked corpses, I found myself actually more disturbed by the Gandhi shootout than by the Black Hawk Down bloodbath.

There are all kinds of possible explanations for this, and maybe I'll consider them here at another time. This post was really just a spontaneous reaction to the trifecta of the Neda video and those two movie scenes that I saw in the last couple of months. I guess it was my attempt at simply beginning to process how I may or may not have been sensitized or desensitized by violence on screen throughout the course of my life. I would hope that most people have the same thoughts from time to time; if you have any insights feel free to share them.

Perfect Song, Perfect Scene #6

[Originally this post was going to be my only tribute to Michael Jackson, as it features one of the best, if not the most recent, uses of his songs in a movie. A secondary choice, and I'm completely serious, would be "Will You Be There" over the closing credits of Free Willy. Anyway, I'd rather not remember why I saw 13 Going on 30 in the theater, but I will never forget the ear-to-ear grin I had on my face throughout this scene as I resisted the urge to actually get up out of my seat and start dancing, as is always the case when MJ comes on.]

Party for Poise Magazine, 13 Going on 30 (2004): "Thriller" by Michael Jackson

Short Cuts: "Haooo - Hup!" (Drill Captain Command)

A Few Good Men (1992). Directed by Rob Reiner; written by Aaron Sorkin; starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kevin Pollack, Kevin Bacon, J.T. Walsh, Kiefer Sutherland, Christopher Guest, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Noah Wyle.

Short Cuts: "Idn' That a Daisy?"

Tombstone (1993). Directed by George P. Cosmatos; written by Kevin Jarre; starring Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Powers Boothe, Michael Biehn, Charlton Heston, Jason Priestley, Thomas Haden Church, Billy Bob Thornton, Dany Delany, Stephen Lang, Joanna Pacula, John Corbett, and Billy Zane.

(apologies, you'll have to turn your volume up to hear this one well)

Short Cuts: "Baby Fish Mouth! Baby Fish Mouth!"

When Harry Met Sally (1989). Directed by Rob Reiner; written by Nora Ephron; starring Billy Crystal, Meg Ryan, Carrie Fisher, Bruno Kirby, Steven Ford, and Lisa Jane Persky.

Perfect Song, Perfect Scene #5

Opening Credits, Brown Sugar (2002): "Act Too (Love of My Life)" by The Roots

Best of 2008: Part 2

Read Best of 2008: Part 1
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The Best Scenes of 2008:

...they made the movie, and then some...

1. Philippe Petit defies gravity, Man on Wire - Almost certainly the most breathtaking scene of the year, a video clip here would just be wrong. It can only experienced once for the first time - and that deserves to be in a theater.

2. Andrew Garfield trips on E, Boy A - In one scene, two incredible things simultaneously occur: Andrew Garfield's career jumps another level, and the emotional blood of an entire movie pours out on screen.

3. Underwater tracking shot, Encounters at the End of the World - Uncut and unbelievable, this was more out of this world than "at the end of the world". I can't speak for what the experience would be like on a computer screen or TV, but in a silent theater and with those haunting Gregorian chants setting the pace, this was a trip.


4. Young Jamal goes all the way, Slumdog Millionaire - In a movie where bursts of emotion and adrenaline came every 2-3 minutes, this was the one that set the tone for the duration. You could smell the pure...exhilaration emanating from the screen.


5. Suspicious spies exchange cryptic proverbs, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies - If you speak French you'll find this a lot funnier than the rest of us. If you don't, just know this was one of the high comedic moments of 2008, in a movie that went surprisingly unnoticed. Heads up for the sequel on the way!

6. Sabotage at the swimming pool, Let the Right One In - Unfortunately I can't find a visual for this one, but that might be for the best anyway, and those who have seen the movie surely have it stuck in their head already. One of the best final scenes in years.

7. WALL*E's outer space journey, WALL*E - I found a clip of this scene but it was in such bad quality that I didn't want to taint it in anyone's mind. WALL*E's curious and carefree trip made space look like a playground where you can glide through the stars and fly by the sun without a worry in the world - literally.


8. Kimberly Roberts rapping "Amazing", Trouble the Water - Spontaneously, from the heart, a woman who's been through unimaginable distress shows us the meaning of true strength. If Hurricane Katrina could have been talked down into submission, Roberts would have been the person to call.

9. Time-lapse shot of Yangtze river rising, Up the Yangtze - In less than a minute, a history is lost and a culture forever changed. Equal parts hypnotizing and horrifying, this was the scene you hoped you'd never have to see.


10. Fred Knittle sings "Fix You", Young @ Heart - After losing his singing partner on a major duet, Knittle went solo to deliver a heartfelt, rueful rendition of Coldplay's hit song. The bittersweet irony of the lyrics stung the soul. Knittle passed away this New Year's Day, but not before leaving an unforgettable legacy.

(watch a higher-quality, unembeddable version here)

Honorable Mentions:

Chad confronts Osborne in the car, Burn After Reading
Juan Antonio makes The Pitch, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
War strategy session, W.
David Paskowicz sings through the camera at his father, Surfwise
Philip rides his bicycle blind, Reprise

Motorcycle chase, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Ray confronts tourists on the park bench, In Bruges
Walt shares a meal next door, Gran Torino
Visit to Henry Waxman's office, Bigger, Stronger, Faster*
Benjamin learns to walk, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Most Forgettable Movies of 2008:
...I know I saw these, but that certainty is fading - fast...

The Bank Job
Bottle Shock
Brick Lane
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Elegy
Flash of Genius
Hamlet 2
Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
The Incredible Hulk
Jar City
Roman de Gare
Run Fatboy Run
Semi-Pro
Smart People
Son of Rambow
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
Traitor

The Best Endings/Final Frames of 2008:
...now that's how you end a movie...

Silent Light
Chop Shop
Ballast
The Wrestler
Let the Right One In
The Dark Knight
Slumdog Millionaire (and end credits)
Quid Pro Quo
Bigger, Stronger, Faster*
Tropic Thunder (best end credits)

The Worst Movies I Saw In 2008:
...it's better not to ask "why?", but to just move on and try to forget...

Jumper
Changeling
Step Brothers
Redbelt
21
Nobel Son
Blindness
Bottle Shock
Where In the World Is Osama Bin Laden?


And THE worst - everybody's #1 with a bullet:

The Happening


...to be continued...