Are you feeling like everything has just passed you by?
Do you feel like the world has just changed too much?
Don’t worry!
The Easter Beagle has returned!
I still believe that, someday, Charlie Brown will get an Easter egg. And he’ll also kick that football and he’ll talk to the little redheaded girl and he’ll even finish War and Peace. And I definitely still believe that Linus will see The Great Pumpkin! I still believe in them and, even more importantly, I still believe in the Easter Beagle.
Today, we wish a happy birthday to actor Hayden Christensen.
This scene that I love comes from the 2003 film Shattered Glass, in which Christensen played real-life journalist and fabulist Stephen Glass. In this wonderfully-acted scene, Glass’s (fake) reporting is challenged by another media outlet and Glass scrambles to keep his deception from being uncovered.
Since both Eric Roberts and James Woods are celebrating a birthday today, it seems only appropriate that today’s scene of the day should feature both of them. In this scene from 1994’s The Specialist, Woods, Roberts, and Rod Steiger all compete to see who can steal a relatively simple conversational scene.
Seeing as how I raved about this film and James Caan’s performance earlier this week, it only seems appropriate that today’s scene that I love should come from 1981’s Thief. Here is the famous diner scene, featuring Caan and Tuesday Weld. Caan later said that he considered this to be the best acting he had ever done.
“I’ve seen horrors… horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that… but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces… seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it… I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.”
My latest “Scenes I Love” Monologue Edition comes courtesy of the great Marlon Brando as Col. Kurtz from Francis For Coppola’s magnus opus, Apocalypse Now.
The scene is the Kurtz monologue describing the horror he has seen and how it has shaped his thought process and concept on how to fight the enemies he has been tasked to fight and also condemned for the methods he has used to achieve results.
Shot and framed with Brando’s face half in shadows as he describes how the horrors he has seen and committed is just a reflection of the war they’re fighting and how emotions and judgment from those who have not experience and committed such horrors is the path to defeat.
Brando’s time in front of the camera is not very much in the whole runtime of the film, but from beginning to end his shadowy presence looms over everyone and this 5-minute monologue becomes the exclamation mark that succinctly explains the entire theme of the film: “In an insane world, the mad men are the ones who are sane”.
Today would have been the 101st birthday of character actor Philip Stone. While Stone appeared in a lot of films, he’ll probably always be best-remembered for his subtly menacing turn as the ghostly Grady in 1980’s The Shining. Here he is, having a conversation with Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) and letting him know that he’s always been caretaker.
(Fair warning to those who may not have seen this scene before or who perhaps have forgotten about it, Grady does use a racial slur at one point. It’s a moment that’s true to his villainous character, even if it’s a bit jarring to hear today.)
SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS (1954) is one of the great musicals of all time! And Howard Keel was also Ms. Ellie’s man after Jock died in DALLAS. That’s a hell of a career!
For today’s scene that I love, we have Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse dancing in the Broadway Melody sequence from Stanley Donen‘s 1952 masterpiece, Singin’ in the Rain!
Rest in peace, the great character actor Nicky Katt. The details are still sketchy but it’s being reported that he passed away at the age of 54.
Katt was a child actor who transitioned into adult roles. He appeared in a lot of movies but I’ll always remember him as Clint, the absolutely terrifying bully in 1993’s Dazed and Confused. Here he is, scaring the heck out of poor Adam Goldberg.
(For a while, there were plans for a Dazed and Confused sequel in which Clint reformed and became a respected businessman while Adam Goldberg’s Mike went insane as he continued to obsess on that fight back in 1976.)
Through the Shattered Lens 