“Fezzik, do you hear that? That is the sound of ultimate suffering.” – Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride.
Granted, this is one of the most strangest ways to resolve an issue (rewind everything back so it didn’t happen to begin with, without any paradoxes whatsoever), but it’s the reaction to Lois’ death that I like about this. As a kid, that scream made me jump, because it sounded like Superman lost just about everything. I honestly would have liked to know what Reeve thought of to get that scream out. I recently showed this to my cousin who liked it too. The spinning around the planet was cool (though a little much), and is something I come back to once in a while.
For some reason the CG-animated film Despicable Me has been replaying in my head all afternoon and night. Most of the scenes looping in my mind focuses on the youngest girl, Agnes. Whether she’s exclaiming “Three Sleepy Kittens!” or passing out from holding her breath the film just won’t leave my head. The one scene I really love from Despicable Me involves Gru taking the girls to the carnival fair.
Agnes, of course, ends up having the scene I remember best in this entire sequence. She sees one of those stuffed unicorn toys at a booth and she just has to have it because it’s so fluffy that she could die. The carnival barker ends up trying to cheat the girls from winning the fluffy unicorn, but thanks to Gru and one of his weaponized inventions Agnes wins her unicorn and my ice-cold heart.
All I can say about this scene that I love is: “IT’S SO FLUFFY!!!”
While bored out of my mind this early Monday morning (no work due to the Memorial Day holiday) I do what I usually do to try and get out of it: I surf YouTube. Doing this sometimes alleviates my boredom and sometimes it doesn’t. This time around it did as I came across a scene from a film that has to be one of my all-time favorites. An all-time favorite film and scene both.
The scene I came across is one of the earliest sequences in David Cronenberg’s seminal sci-fi work, Scanners. It stars Michael Ironside in the film’s villanous role as Darryl Revok. In this scene we don’t know he’s the heavy. We suspect something to be off about him, but we can’t put a finger on it. It’s during the unfolding of this short scene that we finally realize that Revok is not what he seems to be as the unfortunate “scanner” expert next to him begins to feel the depths of Revok’s ability. A feeling that soon turns to pain and then finally the explosive result.
I think I was nine years-old when I first saw this scene and to say that it left an indelible mark on me would be an understatement. I was still too young to truly appreciate Cronenberg as a filmmaker then, but years later when I saw this again when film started to become more than just entertainment for me was when I saw just how much a genius the man was. This scene helped put me on what would turn out to be an ongoing love affair of all things Cronenberg.
Also, for those who don’t know, Michael Ironside also ends up voicing that iconic video character Sam Fisher from the Splinter Cell franchise.
With the release of Kenneth Branagh’s Thor (love the film or not) there should be a new interest from younger film fans to know more about what Branagh has done in the past. I pretty much grew up watching his films and made me rediscover and love Shakespeare once more. His grasp of the the Bard’s work has always been both respectful to traditions, but also with an eye and ear towards the common man of this era. He made Shakespeare film adaptations a must-see during the 1990’s.
The latest “Scenes I Love” comes from his very first film and was released in 1989. The film I speak of is his film adaptation of Henry V. I remember clearly the first time I saw this film. It was during my sophomore year in high school and it was during a school field trip arranged by my English teach to see this film at the local arthouse theater. I was still young and didn’t care much for the plays of Shakespeare (as did most of my classmates), but once the light dimmed and the film began I was hooked.
The scene I still consider my favorite from this film is Branagh in the role of King Henry V (he starred, wrote and directed the film) giving the speech on St. Crispin’s Day to his gathered troops as they prepare themselves for the upcoming battle (the Battle of Agincourt) against a numerically superior French force. This speech I didn’t understand half of what was being said but the way Branagh handled this monologue made it easy to understand the meaning even if the words themselves were lost.
I still get chills whenever I watch this scene and would more than be willing to take up arms against the French once it was over.
