Russian Roulette scene from The Deer Hunter
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Category Archives: Best Scenes
Deadwood kidney stone scene
Back in 2005 I posted a link to a clip from the HBO series, Deadwood. In this episode Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) is sick as a dog from a kidney stone. So sick he cannot speak. Doc Cochran is about to surgically remove the stone (which could kill Al) but at the last minute, they opt to let Al try to pass the stone, with help from Johnny, Dan and Trixie.
Bonus clip: I’m thinking of putting this on my answering machine (6 seconds)
Excellent interview with David Milch (The New Language of the Old West)
Go-Chip scene from Wild Palms
In the 1993 TV mini-series, Wild Palms, Senator Anton Kreutzer (Robert Loggia) has the Go-Chip implanted and uploads his consciousness to the Net. Immortality! Unfortunately, the IT guys were running Vista on the server. But that’s a damned fine looking smoking jacket.
Five Easy Pieces
Bridge scene from Sorcerer
If you haven’t seen Sorcerer, I highly recommend it. Directed by William Friedkin and starring Roy Scheider. Another good scene from earlier in the film.
Tarzan the Ape Man (Pygmy scene)
When I came home for lunch yesterday, Barb was watching the Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). The original Johnny Weissmuller/Maureen O’Sullivan classic. I grew up on Tarzan movies. I came in on the scene where Jane and her father had been captured by pygmies who took them back to the village where they planned to drop them in a pit with a giant ape. This clip runs about 2:50.
If I could rent a time machine for just a few days, I’d go back to the filming of this movie, specifically to those breaks in filming when all the little people were standing around, waiting for their next scene. Everyone in costume with bones stuck in their pygmy wigs.
“Have you heard about this Wizard of Oz project? Word is they need a bunch of us to play Munchkins.”
“What the fuck is a munchkin?”
Howard Beale: “I don’t have to tell you things are bad”
I love the movie Network. I went back to a post in September of 2006 to review the prophetic words of Paddy Chayefsky:
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s no one anywhere that seems to know what to do with us. Now into it. We know the air is unfit to breathe, our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in a house as slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller and all we say is, “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, and TV, and my steel belted radials and I won’t say anything.”
Well I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crying in the streets. All I know is first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being. God Dammit, my life has value.”
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” I want you to get up right now. Get up. Go to your windows, open your windows, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Things have got to change my friends. You’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open your window, stick your head out and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
“Hello, pussy”
That’s how Lou Gossett addresses David Caruso’s character before choking him into submission in An Officer and A Gentleman (1982). Later in the movie, Caruso has to be rescued from the bottom of the pool in a training exercise. Caruso is an acquired taste but I always found him one of the baddest dudes on the little screen. It hurt me to see him get humiliated.
But this post was going to be about Debra Winger, who made a bunch of bad movies but was really good in two: AOAAG and Urban Cowboy. And she was sort of okay in Black Widow.
I know squat about Hollywood but have to believe she had bad management. Her deep-throated sexiness and more-than-adequate acting chops should have taken her farther.
And for your comment hounds, how about the best drill instructors (or non-coms) in military movies? R. Lee Ermey from Full Metal Jacket? Adolph Caesar from A Soldiar’s Story? Tom Berenger from Platoon?
Why ‘not’ work for the NSA?
Good Will Hunting is ten years old, but this scene seems as fresh as today’s news:
NSA Guy: The question isn’t… why should you work for the NSA… the question is…why shouldn’t you?
Will Hunting: Why shouldn’t I work for the NSA? That’s a tough one. But I’ll take a shot.
Say I’m working at the NSA and somebody puts a code on my desk. Something no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it.
I’m real happy with myself because I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East and once they had that location they bomb the village where the rebels are hiding… fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with get killed.
Now the politicians are saying, oh, send in the Marines to secure the area ’cause they don’t give a damn…it won’t be their kid over there getting shot, just like it wasn’t them when their number got called cause they were off on a tour in the National Guard.
It’ll be some kid from Southie over there taking shrapnel in the ass who comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from and the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job ’cause they’ll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks.
Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price and of course the oil companies use a little skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain’t helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon.
They’re taking their sweet time bringing the oil back, of course maybe they even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fucking play slalom with the ice bergs.
It ain’t too long till he hits one…spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic .
So now my buddy’s out of work, he can’t afford to drive, so he’s walking fucking job interviews, which sucks because the shrapnel in his ass is giving him chronic hemorrhoids, and meanwhile he starving ’cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only Blue Plate Special they’re serving is North Atlantic Scrod with Quaker State.
So what did I think?
I’m holding out for something better.
I figure while I’m at it… why not shoot my buddy…take his job…give it to his sworn enemy…hike up gas prices…bomb a village…club a baby seal… hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard. I can be elected president.
What is really amazing to me is that gasoline today –at my local pump– is very close to $2.50/gallon. Nothing close to that when GWH was filmed, let alone written. Interesting, no? If I could ask Matt Damon and Ben Affleck just one question, it would be… tell me how you came to write that scene.
Reminds me of this post from 2004.
NETWORK: “Television is not the truth…”
“When the 12th largest company in the world controls the most awesome propaganda force in the whole goddamned world….” This scene from the movie Network (1976) is the reason the Academy gave Peter Finch the Best Actor award posthumously. The “Mad Prophet of the Airways” rants how it was, is, and always will be.
It’s gratifying to see that others remember this film and recognize its relevance in 2006.