Jerry Coyne provides links to film clips that show the 100 best movie quotes of all time. Can you guess which one is #1?
Here’s the first twenty.
Rather than quibble with the list or its rankings (after all, these were done by some anonymous person and reflect just his or her opinions), I found it fun to watch all the clips and note how many I had seen.
Hair is an important issue in the black community, getting way beyond the level of attention that people of other ethnicities give it. I first became aware of this fact a long time ago back in Sri Lanka as a student when I first read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964). As a young man of the streets, he adopted the then common practice of ‘conking’ (straightening his hair) and he vividly describes his first experience. As he became radicalized he decided that this attempt to adopt the hair styling of white people was a symbol of how much black people had internalized their sense of inferiority and subservience and he went back to his natural look. The 1960’s was probably the high point of black acceptance of their natural hair. Nowadays it seems like the black community, especially women, has gone back to accepting straight hair and to even see it as desirable. One wonders what Malcolm X would have thought about this development.
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I like to watch film trailers. They usually serve the intended purpose, which is to tell me whether I want to see the film or not.
What I do not understand is when I borrow a DVD of a film and they show the trailer of the very same film before the film begins. What is the point? Presumably film makers make trailers to persuade people to watch the film. Surely if I have gone to the trouble of borrowing the film, inserted it into the player, and sat back in my chair, it is pretty clear that I have committed myself to watching it. I don’t need any more persuading.
This practice is especially senseless with modern trailers that seem to practically give away the entire plot. If you see it a long time before the actual film, you likely forget all but a few moments and so no harm is done. But watching a trailer just before seeing the film is bound to ruin the experience.
Just last weekend, it was even worse. I sat down to watch the film The Man Who Would be King (1975) and not only did they start with the trailer, they even had a “The making of…” type documentary before the film, with interviews with the stars and director discussing the characters and script, showing how the scenes were set up, and so on. I like such documentaries in general but only after I have seen a film. Seeing it before would ruin the suspension of belief needed to enjoy films.
I of course immediately skip past the trailer and documentaries as I am sure almost everyone else must be doing. So why do some film companies do this? Does anyone have any ideas as to what could be the reasoning behind such a practice?
British director Lindsay Anderson produced a trilogy that began with If… (1968), continued with O Lucky Man (1973), and ended with Britannia Hospital (1982). Anderson’s films were surreal and took swipes at all the stupidity and hypocrisy of society. No one was spared: politicians, clergy, business, trade unions, scientists, education, all were targeted with biting class-based satire.
That great British character actor Graham Crowden plays a mad scientist Professor Millar who was introduced in O Lucky Man, a wonderful, sprawling, surreal film with the best sound track ever (by rocker Alan Price). The role was expanded in the final film from which this scene is taken.
A scene from the new film Casino Jack about lobbyist Jack Abramov, in which the filmmakers cleverly use a moment’s fantasizing by the title character to reveal the real corruption in government. Too bad it doesn’t happen in real life.
Kevin Spacey is a wonderful actor and although I haven’t seen the film, I hope that after a long time he has a role worthy of him. Here’s the trailer.
I just saw the comedy Clockwise starring John Cleese. Here’s the trailer:
Cleese is one of my favorite actors and here he is playing a role that is perfectly suited for him, that of an authority figure frustrated when things don’t go the way he wants them to, as in this scene from Life of Brian
His character Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers is another example of his manic comedic touch.
In the film Clockwise he plays a punctuality-obsessed, super-organized principal of a school invited to give the most important speech of his career to an elite organization of school principals. He starts out in the morning to take a three-hour train ride to give the speech but due to a misunderstanding he misses his train. The entire film is about his efforts to find alternative ways to get to his destination on time, with every plan ending in disaster.
This is a role that is tailor-made for Cleese and so you would think I really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I found the film to be only mildly amusing. I think the problem may lie with me and not the film itself. I don’t enjoy comedies in which the premise is someone trying desperately to achieve some important goal and being thwarted every step of the way. This is why, for example, I did not like Ben Stiller’s Meet the Parents, because you knew from the beginning that the film would be about how he would fail in every effort to please his future in-laws.
There are two reasons for my lukewarm response to such comedies. One is that if the main character is sympathetic, I want the person to achieve his or her goal and be successful and having their hopes repeatedly dashed makes me feel sorry for them rather than want to laugh at their plight. The second is that I tend to plan things somewhat carefully and usually have a backup plan in case things go wrong. When things fall apart, I tend to stay calm, analyze the situation, examine the alternatives, and select the best rather than panic and grab wildly at the first option that presents itself, the way that the characters in these kinds of films do. So while I can enjoy this set up in a short sketch comedy, in full-length features I tend to get annoyed with people for repeatedly acting so stupid and that spoils the fun for me.
In an interview in the extras section of the DVD, Cleese makes an interesting observation about a difference between British and American humor audiences that may explain why Clockwise was not a success in its American release. He says that he thinks that the British find absurd situations funny in themselves (which is why farces are so popular over there) while Americans seem to require actual jokes and wisecracks to make them laugh. He may have a point.
Apparently the German film about the female pope may get a US release soon. Here’s the trailer (thanks to reader Norm).
It’s been a couple of decades since I watched a James Bond film. I saw almost all of the Sean Connery originals, then a couple of the Roger Moore versions, and then gave up on the franchise, thus missing out on what George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan added to this iconic figure of cold war fiction.
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You have to grant writers-directors-producers Joel and Ethan Coen one thing: they make interesting films. Not for them the formulaic, genre-tailored approach to filmmaking. Not for them endless sequels to hits or even to follow up a hit film with one similar in style. Each film seems to go off in a different direction from the previous one and stands alone. They take risks and for that quality alone one has to respect them.
Having said all that, the results are a mixed bag and I cannot say that I have enjoyed all the films that I have seen of their oeuvre: Raising Arizona (1987), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), Burn After Reading (2008), and A Serious Man (2009).
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