Today’s scene that I love comes from 1975’s Tommy. Based on The Who’s rock opera and directed by Ken Russell, Tommy featured several actors who weren’t necessarily known as singers. Oliver Reed is the most obvious example.
And then there’s Jack Nicholson! Jack’s role is pretty small. He’s the therapist who examines Tommy and who eye flirts with Ann-Margaret. And, of course, he gets his check.
In order to celebrate San Jacinto Day, here’s one of my favorite scenes from Richard Linklater’s 1993 Texas film, Dazed and Confused. Not only does this montage introduce the viewer to the suburban Texas nightlife of 1976 but it’s also perfectly set to War’s Low Rider.
And, of course, it also features that classic line, “It’d be a lot cooler if you did.”
THE BIG BULLET is known for a handful of awesome action sequences, but one of the reasons I enjoy the film is the way the Hong Kong “Emergency Unit” works together to solve some fairly simple cases as well. Enjoy this scene where Sergeant Bill Chu (Lau Ching-Wan) sees right through the lies of a bitter employee.
Today’s scene that I love comes to use from an underground 1965 film called Vinyl! This film, believe it or not, was actually an adaptation of the novel A Clockwork Orange, one that was filmed six years before the better-known Stanley Kubrick version.
In this scene below, Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick dance to Nowhere to Run by Martha and The Vandellas. Malanga is playing the role that would later be made famous by Malcom McDowell. Edie is playing …. well, Edie is basically playing herself. No one smoked a cigarette with as much style as Edie Sedgwick.
Watching her in this scene, it’s sad to think that, in just six years (and at the same time that Stanley Kubrick was releasing his version of A Clockwork Orange), Edie Sedgwick would die at the age of 28. Like all of us, she deserved much better than what the world was willing to give her.
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”.
Through the Shattered Lens