“I want the truth!”
“You can’t handle the truth!!”
Yeah, people make jokes about it now, but that was a powerful bit of filmmaking.
ROTK: The thing that gets me about “My friends . . . you bow to no one” is the tiniest thing: that little sigh/exhale after he says it. As if to say, “Silly hobbits, you don’t even understand the magnitude of what you did.”
Well, that could be just about any samurai movie, but it sounds like Sanjuro (the sequel to Yojimbo). IIRC both movies ended with a face-off between the two samurai, but only Sanjuro had the “blood flying all over the place from the slash.” (And I love that scene, because it manages to be just bad-ass cool and comical at the same time; you could just imagine someone standing off-camera with a garden hose filled with fake blood and his thumb over the opening.)
Damn, this was the first one I was going to mention. It’s not just that her performance of the song is so powerful, it’s the whole scene, everything leading up to that. The MC does a whole monologue telling you that it’s all an illusion, that none of this is real. And even after all that, and you see and hear the emotion in the song and how it’s affecting Betty and Rita and you’re starting to cry along with them. And then they pull the rug out from under you and show you that it was all just an illusion, and it’s still a surprise.
And another one from Return of the King: when there’s an earthquake, the forces of Mordor are building up around Minas Morgul (right?), and the Witch-King flies to the front of the gate, and the blast of energy shoots out of the top of the tower with an enormous shockwave. Everything about that scene was just so perfectly done and so powerful.
Not breath taking, but a scene that explains the characters almost perfectly:
GWTW
Rhett and Scarlett are strolling down the street with their new born baby in a stroller. People pass them by and make comments on the lovely day or the coot bebby or simply say a greeting. Scarlett beams at them all with the perfect face of a loving mother/wife/friend. As soon as each person passes by, though, she frowns or scowls or sneers. Out of everyone’s sight, of course, except Rhett.
An almost perfect insight to their characters inner feelings.
I’d love to talk with you about the flaws of that film, a movie that could have been just so much more. 
My scenes comes from Kill Bill 1. The first is the two-minute long tracking shot that follows Uma, the restaurant owners, and Sophie Fatale on their way to and past the bathroom at the House of Blue Leaves.
The second is right after the Green Hornet theme sequence, when the Bride pulls up to a red light and looks to her left, seeing Sophie Fatale on her cell phone. The Bride focuses in on Sophie’s mouth and has a flashback to the massacre…
Hit, she is flung back and in midflight the frame freezes and silence is broken by a cellphone tone, the first 8 notes from Burns’ “Auld Lang Syne”. Time resumes, and the Bride lands on the floor, glancing over at Sophie, laughing at something said on the other side of the phone call.
Returning to the present, the Bride, overcome with memory, rushes away without even checking the oncoming traffic.
The reason why I like that scene is that the first eight notes of Auld Lang Syne is for “Should auld acquaintance be forgot.” The Bride, still recovering from a four-year coma, forgot that Sophie was at the massacre until she accidentally saw Sophie on the phone on the streets of Tokyo. It is a really subtle piece of work, and easily the best use of a cellphone tone ever.
For use of stunts/special effects, the entire freeway schene from Matrix 2 is something really special. The rest of the movie was so-so but the freeway stunts were amazing
Have we mentioned the crane chase scene from T3?
Two scenes from Russian Ark: the meeting of the Persian ambassador with the Tsar’ and Tsaritsa, and the ball at the end. Both of these scenes are just incredible in their technical details, their scope, the number of actors in them, the fact that they were done in one take, and their display of the absolute splendor and opulence of the Russian Empire.
The scene near the end of Andrei Rublev, where the gigantic bell that Boriska has made is going to be rung for the first time, because of the incredible anticipation on everybody’s part: the workers’, who have spent weeks building the thing; Boriska, who has directed the effort even though he doesn’t know a thing about bellmaking, and if it doesn’t ring then he’s toast; and Rublev, who has been following their progress and has faith in the boy. And after all their hard work, and them being clueless about what they were doing, it rings.
Al Hirt, Flight of the Bumblebee. Which was the theme music for The Green Hornet, which is why Tarantino used it.
In The Piano when Holly Hunter gets her finger chopped off by Sam Neill and she just slumps in the mud like a deflated hot air balloon. The look on her face, IMHO, was all she needed to express without words her despair and surrender. She won the Oscar for that scene alone in my book.
A couple from Apocalypse Now… the Do Long Bridge scene and the helicopter (Flight of the Valkyries) attack.
Brazil… the arrest of Harry Buttle at the beginning of the movie.
Agreed. I tear up just thinking about it, actually.
For me, some really powerful, poignant scenes come from Persuasion with Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds. So much is done in that movie without dialogue – as when Anne sits before the mirror looking at herself, all this pain in her face, because Frederick said she had “changed so much he would not have known her again.” Devastating yet powerful. That movie is nearly perfect in its details – Anne’s gripping the chair when she sees Frederick again, his appeal to her when Louisa falls, everything.
Mrs. Furthur
:smack:
I kept waiting for you to continue.
The Sopranos
Spoilers!
Last season, the second half of Long Term Parking when Adrianna got whacked had me emotional for hours.