The last 40 minutes or so of Sleuth were the best. The movie itself is incredible- one setting and two actors, and excellent repartee.
Fargo
“I’m not gonna debate you Jerry. I’m not gonna sit here and fucking debate you.”
" . . . and that would be your partner in the woodchipper."
Resevoir Dogs
“Dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick.”
“How many dicks is that ?”
“A lot.”
“Are you gonna bark all day little doggy, or are you gonna bite ?”
Pulp Fiction
“You blew the motherfuckers head off, and and I’m back here on brain detail.”
“What does a $5 milkshake taste like ?”
cervaise
dead again is one of my all time favs. watching everyone “get it” at the end.
alessan
i believe that france and poland had a “war of words” so very long ago… france got all the vowels, poland all the consonants.
i usually go to a large urban theatr for blockbusters. at matrix when neo died, about 30 people yelled,“oh no he didn’t.” there was quite a bit of stomping and hooting when he revived.
i just love audience participation.
I think I posted this in another thread, but one of my favorite movie moments was seeing “Blue Chips” – an admittedly forgettable movie, unless you saw it in a packed theater in Champaign, IL and the audience treated any on-screen appearance of Bobby Knight as if he was there in person. We screamed and threw things. It was great.
I’m also an advocate of seeing Trek movies on the opening weekend, despite not being that big of a fan. I forget which one it was, but Christian Slater had a cameo, and somebody up front stood up and yelled at the screen, “What the f**k! Get the hell out of my movie!” Turned out to be a friend of mine.
My fave in Eraserhead is the scene at dinner with his girlfriend’s folks 
“My arm used to hurt, so i rubbed it for 2 hours a day… then it went completely numb!”
I wish I had it on video to watch again.
Your right that originally they were supposed to fight each other with swords, but wrong on why they didn’t. Due to them filming in the desert, high heat, and other things, Indy had a case of the runs. When it came time to shoot that scene, he just wanted to get it over with and back in his trailer. So they changed it to him pulling his gun and shooting, not expecting it to go over as big as it did.
Found that out in the Bathroom Reader I think. Great set of books.
Damn straight. It’s one of my favorite movies no one’s ever heard of. Except the Dopers, of course.
Without a doubt, Fight Club. I saw it opening night, a day before a huge move that I was increadibly stressed about, and it was exactly what I needed. “I am Jack’s Smirking Revenge.” “You are not a unique and individual snowflake.” “His name was Robert Paulsen.” And the Pixies at the end. DAMN, I love that movie.
Watching Schindler’s List in the theaters was intense. I walked out in tears (I NEVER cry at movies. This is one of two times in my life it has happened,) feeling like I had bonded with the rest of the audience just by watching it.
From Tremors…the two nitwits (Val and Earl) have just discovered that the entire valley is slowly being eaten up. Quote: “We decided to leave Perfection Valley just one damn day too late”.
From Flash Gordon (the cool one with the Queen soundtrack)(Admit it, you liked it)…
I was about 13 and seeing it at a late show. Flash is about to be executed by Ming the merciless and he’s stripped to his space BVDs (leather, oddly enough) and Aura, Mings daughter, turns to Ming and says:
Aura: “Don’t kill him father. I want him.”
Ming: “And what would your Prince Barin say?”
Aura: “I can handle Barin”
At which point someone in the audience yelled:
“AND ABOUT THREE OR FOUR OTHERS!!!”
Killed us all right there. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
The infamous hair-gel scene in There’s Something About Mary"
I’m fond of that scene in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” where the camera shows a stretch of empty road and you hear the theme to Star Wars playing…
After a few seconds, you see this BIG F*CKING SHADOW and you then see a car come down from the top of the camera shot. It lands on the road and you see the two parking attendant guys with goofy expressions on their face, joyriding the sports car.
The entire Homecoming Parade in Animal House deserves mention, as does the scene where John Belushi listens to Steven Bishop singing, gets that expression on his face, rips the guitar out of Bishop’s hands, smashes the crap out of it, and hands it back to him:
“Sorry.”
MSK
I never even thought of that. Though now that I have, I would have to say that there were a couple of scenes in There’s Something About Mary that I remember even more. Specifically the scenes with Warren beating the crap out of people when they touched his ears. I was almost literally rolling on the theater floor when he did the wrestling moves on Ben Stiller (and dropped him through the coffee table).
Okay, I’m too young to have gone to see the Star Wars movies when they originally came out (the first one is a year older than me), but I’d seen them all on video a hundred times. So during my freshman year of college, my friend and I ditched class to go see Evita. I don’t even remember the movie…I remember the trailer. There was a little TV screen with a battlescene from A New Hope, and a voice said something to the effect of “For twenty years, we’ve been watching it like this…now you’ll have a chance to watch it like THIS!” And the TV screen expanded, and there we were, watching Star Wars on a movie screen! My friend and I were practically bouncing out of our seats, we were so excited. We made a pact to go see all three on the opening nights of the reissue, together.
We had a good time for all three, but seeing Empire Strikes Back was by far the most awesome. We went to the midnight showing, people turned out in costume, had lightsaber fights in the street, it was great. Every time a new character came onscreen, we cheered maniacally. We all shrieked when Leia kissed Luke. It was, without a doubt, the best couple hours I have ever spent in a movie theater. The insane joy in the audience was palpable.
Another good experience: same year, a friend in my dorm rented The Exorcist, and about ten of us watched in in the dorm lounge for the first time. We started off laughing and goofing off, but the mood grew visibly darker as the movie progressed, and by the time it was over, at about 2 am, none of us wanted to go to bed. We just sat there, too scared to go alone into a dark dorm room.
Shirley - The “bad dates” scene is from Raiders, not Temple of Doom. I recently watched Temple; there is a nice reference to the swordsman scene from Raiders, with two swordsman, when Indy reaches for his gun and can’t find it.
tradesilicon - That would be Jude Law supplying good genetic material for Ethan Hawke in Gattaca. Law was one of only three men on my “who would you switch teams for” list.
Some of my favorite moments:
Return of the Jedi - I liked the Death Star explosion better in this one than in the first, because you get to see it in daylight from the moon. Space explosions are always against a black sky, and this was a good change.
The Crow - After killing one of the bad guys, Eric Draven drops a match and a huge outline of the crow gradually appears in flames. Too cool.
Contact - When the first machine is destroyed; this was a well-done destruction scene, not just some big, typical fireball explosion.
Wayne’s World - Everyone I’ve ever watched this with jams to the Bohemian Rhapsody scene in the Pacer.
Billy Madison - Billy reading his Valentines, especially the one from the principal. Yeah, I know it’s Adam Sandler, but this scene always cracks me up, no matter how many times I’ve seen it.
I’d also heard that as a reason for changing the scene, with the additional info that Spielberg agreed to it so they can wrap up the expensive location filming 3 days early.
Me and my buddies were watching Hard Target (Jean Claude van Damme; directed by John Woo). At one scene in the movie, Jean is riding a motorcycle, and is playing chicken with a van full of bad guys. He stands up on the motorcycle, basically surfing it. As the cycle crashes into the van, he flips over the vehicles, and lands on his feet.
My friend commented “Let’s see…-4 for balancing on a vehicle, -2 to hit for dodging bullets,-5 on my acrobatics roll and breakfall to land safely…I can do it!” Ever since, we’ve used the quote “What are my minuses?” to refer to any patently impossible stunt in a movie.
One of my favorite movie lines ever came from a cheesy X-rated flick called “Flesh Gordon” that I saw when I had just turned 18. The heroes have just landed on the planet Porno when they step out of their phallic space ship. The scientist takes a few purposeful strides away from the ship, takes a deep breath, exhales, and declares:[ul]“Good! There’s oxygen on this planet!”[/ul]
~~Baloo
But first, an editorial hijack: you younger guysandgals need to see some older movies!
That said, here are 3 random favorites of mine:
From a recent movie:
Saving Private Ryan – The flick is PACKED with boffo moments… how about that Lincoln letter [probably written by John Hay, but who cares], or the silent scene of the collapsing mother, or 90% of the battle scenes? But one of the moments I love best goes by subtley and quick with absolutely no overt shock value or even action. It’s all in the writing. It takes place when Tom Hanks and his men finally find Ryan. The men have imagined him to be unworthy of all the hardship they’ve endured to find him, so when he resists returning with them they get pissed. “You know, two men died trying to find you,” Ryan is told. To which Ryan says: “What were their names?” At that moment you realize that Ryan was worth saving.
From a not-so-recent movie:
The Empire Strikes Back – (Hope I’ve got the right flick here… I liked the SW movies, but they’re all a bit of a blur to me.) The battle scene with the snow walkers! Damn, I LOVE those snow walkers! They are the most awesome, inspired, scariest things to come out of the whole SW business. (Got a little 6" plastic snow walker toy in my bathroom to cheer me up each a.m.)
From an old movie:
Flight of the Phoenix – (I hesitate to include this because, if you haven’t seen it, it will spoil some of the surprise.) Background: An assortment of men crash-land in the desert with no apparent hope of rescue. One of the men – who is an aircraft designer – convinces the others that the wreckage can be canabalized to make a smaller, airworthy plane, so they set about rebuilding a new plane. After episodes of deceit, rivalry, madness, and, of course, endless thirst, the plane is nearly done.
Here’s the scene: Jimmy Stewart (pilot), Peter Finch (designer) and Richard Attenborough (co-pilot) are casually chatting. Gradually Stewart and Attenborough (and we) begin to realize something is not right with Finch. Turns out he is not a real aircraft designer… he’s a toy airplane designer! He’s never built anything bigger than a couple of feet long. (He casually shrugs off Jimmy Stewart’s rage with the line “I assure you, Mr. Townes, the principles are precisely the same.”)
I take it you read Dave Barry…
I recently got to see Pulp Fiction on the big screen (at my university) for the first time…one of the biggest audience laughing sessions I can recall was during the conversation before entering the apartment near the beginning (the foot massage discussion). I think my favorite moment in the entire movie is the 15 seconds or so at the very end when Vincent and Jules are walking out of the coffee shop.
The biggest audience reaction I ever remember was when Deep Impact was shown on campus (bad movie, but hey, it’s only $1). When they mentioned that the astronaut killed out on the comet had gone to my school, the roar was deafening for about 20 seconds (these things happen when you go to what you consider an underrated, relatively unknown school).
I’ve had two great things happen to me at the movies, neither of which actually involved a movie. The first was when I was watching “the Matrix” for the THIRD time with a friend. We were in an AMC theater, where they show a little sequence that ends by showing “Silence Is Golden” opn the screen. The theater was relatively empty (it was a weekday matinee) and some girl down front was talking loudly enough to be heard throughout the theater, even after this notice was flashed. About thirty seconds later, someone from the back yelled “Silence is golden, bitch!” and she shut up. It was awesome!
The second greatest moment was a trailer, the best one I will probably ever see, for “Titan A.E.” It used that Creed song “Higher” and the music matched the visuals like nothering I’d ever seen before. If only the movie had been as great as this trailer. I’ve never seen this particular trailer before or since, even for the same movie.
The movie moment that got to me the most personally was the first 15 minutes of “Saving Private Ryan.”