Best all-time movie moments

Cafe Society
81

Open spoilers ahead about Roger Rabbit and ET. You have been warned.

We (the family) were driving to see Momma’s family up in New Jersey one Thanksgiving. Our six year-old was in the back with a little DVD video player, so Daddy fired up a couple of favorites from when he was younger.

The first was Roger Rabbit. Oops! There’s a lot of innuendo in this one… might be a while before we pull it off the shelf again. :o (Iconic Movie Moment: Roger taking a drink).

Well, the next was ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, which she adored from the get-go. She was all happy and “look, momma” and excited about ET. Momma was sitting beside her.

So we’re driving up I-81 through Harrisburg and I hear GASP! “What’s wrong with ET? Oh no!” “He’s going to be OK, isn’t he?” “No!” … comments like that throughout the sickness/army scene.

Then ET dies. My little girl is highly upset, her hands clenched around the DVD player, holding it tightly (she has it in her lap this entire time). “This is a bad movie! This is a BAD movie!”

“Sophie, do you want to stop?”

“No!”

So ET comes back to life. And she is thrilled, her emotional high as deep and meaningful as her low of 2 minutes earlier. And it’s back to the “Look, momma”'s and “Awwwwwww!”'s, and Sophie is happy, cheering Eliot and ET on as they escaped the “astronaut guys”, flying up in the air on their bikes, landing in front of the spaceship.

“Momma? What’s happening? ET isn’t leaving is he? I don’t want him to go!” And she was upset again, but not nearly as upset as earlier.

I’ll… be… right… here.

The spaceship flies off, the music swells, and the credits start to roll. Sophie does two things:

  1. Refuses to turn off the credits, watching them the whole way through.
  2. When they are done, and the DVD is at the menu, she looks up…

“Can I see it again?”

So she did, but after a long talk about the movie and what she saw, and What It All Meant. We pulled into a hotel and hooked the DVD player up to the TV so she could see it “big screen”.

ET was the movie for the next two weeks.

82

+1

I will also add James Dean in Giant towards the end making a fool of himself and eventually falling down and that is so heart wrenching, and ugh. I don’t even like to think about it. May as well toss him in the street with that toy from Rebel Without A Cause. What a great looking man.

83

The moment when the band leader looks to Rick, who hesitates a moment and then gives his head a tiny little itty-bitty nod.

That’s the moment Rick returns to the world, and no actor could have played it better than Bogie.

84

I think I am the first to mention the pivotal scene from Sophie’s Choice

85

The opening from the film Where Eagles Dare.
The movie shows a beautiful Junkers Ju 52 tri-engine airplane in winter camouflage flying over the Alps mountains to really cool military martial music.

86

My very favorite scene from my very favorite movie: A Tale of Two Cities, 1935, Ronald Colman (Sydney Carton) and Elizabeth Allan (Lucie Manette). They are sitting in her garden talking. He has been in love with her since the moment he saw her in court, as he defended her friend Charles Darnay.

She confides in him that she is in love. He looks up and you can just barely see him catch his breath as for a fraction of a second he dares to hope. The light has barely come into his eyes when she goes on to say that she is going to be married. And he exhales “Charles Darnay” and you can see the light go out and the hope goes away forever.

This whole thing takes less than 30 seconds but it should have won Ronald Colman an Oscar right there. Instead he had to wait another 13 years.

87

J. Park: The dinosaur fanatic, who has had nothing but bones all his life, sees his first live one, and it turns to look at him!

Witness for the Prosecution: “Damn you! Damn you!”