Then the total shift for Season 4:
Lennier , “It was the year of fire…”
Zack , “the year of destruction…”
G’kar , “the year we took back what was ours.”
Lyta , “It was the year of rebirth…”
Vir , “the year of great sadness…”
Marcus , “the year of pain…”
Delenn , “and the year of joy.”
Londo , “It was a new age.”
Franklin , “It was the end of history.”
Ivanova , “It was the year everything changed.”
Garibaldi , “The year is 2261. The place:”
Sheridan , “Babylon 5.”
“The Fugitive. A QM production… starring David Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble, an innocent victim of blind justice, falsely convicted for the murder of his wife, reprieved by Fate when a train wreck freed him en route to the death house, freed him to hide in lonely desperation; to change his identity, to toil at many jobs; freed him to search for a one-armed man he saw leave the scene of the crime; freed him to run before the relentless pursuit of the police lieutenant obsessed with his capture.”
While we’re thinking of Quinn Martin"
“The Invaders: alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: the Earth. Their purpose: to make it their world. David Vincent has seen them. For him, it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found. It began with a closed deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy. Now, David Vincent knows that the Invaders are here, that they have taken human form. Somehow, he must convince a disbelieving world, that the nightmare has already begun…”
Here’s two:
“My name is H.I. McDunnogh. Call me Hi”
Oh, I think I know a secret about you now!
No doubt.
Mean Streets
You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.
was going to be my vote as well.
With Roger Deakins giving us the visual and Tommy Lee Jones the laconic drawl it sets the tone of the flim perfectly. There are obvious similarities with Sam Elliot’s monologue in TBL but this matter-of-fact delivery is in service of a whole other nature.
“said he knew he was going to hell, be there in about 15 minutes. I don’t know what to make of that”
Yes! Not strictly speaking a monologue, but the whole 11 minute opening gets my vote.
That and B5 Season 3.
Raising Arizona again, for me, then.
That night I had a dream. I dreamt I was as light as the ether- a floating spirit visiting things to come… …If not Arizona, then a land not too far away. Where all parents are strong and wise and capable and all children are happy and beloved. I don’t know. Maybe it was Utah.
How about the best monologue in the middle?
@Stanislaus’ mention of Powell and Pressburger reminded me of Anton Wolbrook’s great speech in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
This must be one of the very best monologues ever in the middle of a movie, delivered by an exceptional actor:
It’s all the more exceptional because the movie was made in 1943, and it has such a sympathetic, intelligent and good German character.
X-Men:
Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward.
The closing monologue from Jones is more perplexing but just as powerful. Direct from McCarthy’s book, if I’m not mistaken. That dude can write.
Agreed, it is a great film all round. Is the opening monologue direct from the book as well? It sounds like it might be but given the brother’s love for that style of writing themselves it is very much in their wheelhouse as well.
The book opens with a monologue from Sheriff Bell, but it’s longer than the movie’s and says a lot more about the killer who was executed. It has some of the same lines, though, including the “soul at hazard” line.
I’ve long thought this had to be one of the Coens’ easiest scripts. McCarthy wrote everything they needed; all they had to do was whittle it down.
One of my favorite shows as a kid, seaQuest DSV:
The 21st century. Mankind has colonized the last unexplored region on earth, the ocean. As captain of the seaQuest and its crew, we are its guardians, for beneath the surface lies the future.
Pretty good whittling I think!
The same may be true of “True Grit” in that they stuck far more closely to the ornate language of the book than the John Wayne version did.
There is a quality to The Coen’s dialogue that is distinctive but hard to pin down. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are drawn to works that already have some of that quality in there.
Out of Africa:
I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up; near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.