Best Rants Ever!!: from the movies

Cafe Society
21

Jack Nicolson’s “You can’t handle the truth” rant from A Few Good Men.

Michale Bolton’s Michale Bolton rant fron Office Space: “Why do I have to change my name!!?? He’s the one that SUCKS!!”

But the best rant ever has to be every line spoken by Sgt Hartman in Full Metal Jacket:

"Who said that? Who the fuck said that? Who’s the slimy communist shit twinkle-toed cocksucker who just signed his own death warrant?

Jesus Christ Pyle, don’t try too hard. If God would have wanted you up there he would have miracled your ass up there, wouldn’t he?

Were you born worthless, or did you have to work at it?

I bet you’re the kind of guy that would fuck a person in the ass and not even have the god damned common courtesy to give him a reach around.

Private Pyle, I’m gonna give you three seconds, exactly three fuckin’ seconds, to wipe that stupid lookin’ grin off your face or I will gouge out your eyeballs and skull fuck you!

Bullshit! It looks to me like the best part of you ran down the crack of your mama’s ass and ended up as a brown stain on the mattress.

What is your major malfunction, numbnuts? Didn’t Mommy and Daddy show you enough attention when you were a child?

Pyle, you had best unfuck yourself and start shitting me Tiffany cufflinks or I will definitely fuck you up!

Pyle, you climb obstacles like old people fuck!

You will give your rifle a girl’s name because this is the only pussy you people are going to get. Your days of finger-banging ol’ Mary J. Rottencrotch through her pretty pink panties are over!"

22

“Because, sometimes…life is like a mop. Sometimes, it gets all full of dirt, and bugs, and crud. But you gotta rinse it out. You gotta get down here, and ring it out. And sometimes, sometimes life sticks to the floor so bad, you gotta, you gotta get down on the floor with a toothbrush, and you gotta scrub. But sometimes, life just doesn’t want to come off the floor, but you can’t give up. No, you gotta stand up and run to the windows and say '**Hey! These Floors are Dirty as Hell, and I’M NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!”

The greatest motivational call to action ever produced on film. it’s been a while since I’ve seen UHF, so it’s a little paraphrased, but you get the idea.

23

Bluto: What? Over? Did you say “over”? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!

24

The cigarette smoking man in The X Files - “life is like a box of chocolates, a cheap, perfunctory gift…”

I sure wish I could quote it exactly.

25

Hey! I found it, with a little help from my Google.

CIGARETTE-SMOKING MAN: Life… is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. You’re stuck with this undefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there’s nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while, there’s a peanut butter cup, or an English toffee. But they’re gone too fast, the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-crunching nuts, and if you’re desperate enough to eat those, all you’ve got left is a… is an empty box… filled with useless, brown paper wrappers.

26

Crash Davis in Bull Durham: “Well, I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.”

27

Another good one – Matt Damon explaining why he blew his job interview with the NSA in Good Will Hunting:

28

Bill Murray, in Meatballs:

It Just Doesn’t Matter, because all the good-looking girls will still go out with the guys from Camp Mohawk, because THEY’RE THE ONES WITH ALL THE MONEY!!!

29

Here’s the whole quote…

(Cigarette Smoking Man)

30

Julianne Moore in Magnolia when the pharmacy questioned her.
http://us.imdb.com/Quotes?0175880

31

Billie Burke’s downright operatic “the Ferncliffes aren’t coming to dinner!” rant from Dinner at Eight. I have seen revival-house audiences burst into applause at that one.

Just from memory:

“Oh, you’ve got a headache, and you’re not feeling well. You think you’ve got problems? I’ve had the most ghastly day anyone ever had! Rickey in jail and Gustav dying for all I know, and that Vance woman coming in, and no aspic for dinner—I had to send for crabmeat. Crabmeat! And now, on top of everything else—the Ferncliffes aren’t coming to dinner. They call at this hour, the miserable cockneys, and say they’re going to Florida. Florida! Nobody goes to Florida at this time of year! And that leaves me with eight people for dinner—eight people isn’t a dinner! Who am I going to get at this hour? And you come to me with your miserable little . . . You don’t know what trouble is! Either of you!”

Brilliant.

32

I just knew that was going to be your answer, Eve. It does put her in a decidedly different light as compared to her role as Glenda the Good Witch, doesn’t it?

33

Don’t know if this qualifies as a rant, but the warning/tirade/speech given in alternating sentences by the MacManus brothers in Boondock Saints always gives me the chills:

I think Clerks is nothing but one long rant, with Randall having the best ones.

34

Hard to top that quote from Good Will Hunting.

Half of Ed Harris’ early performance in Knightriders is ranting. Here he explains that he’s not going to offer a bribe to a corrupt small-town police chief: “We’re not paying. We’re not paying this rat-pile heap of dogshit a goddamned cent!”

35

I gotta go with co-winners on this one, both previously mentioned.

First, Steve Martin in Planes, Trains and Automobiles:

Second, Al Pacino in …And Justice For All:

36

A true classic double rant and IMHO simply the best scene out of any movie ever: the scene in True Romance where Vincenzo (Christopher Walken) tortures Cliff (Dennis Hopper) for information. Vincenzo has just broken Cliff’s nose and sliced open his hand.

COCCOTTI
Sicilians are great liars. The best in the world. I’m a Sicilian. And my old man was the world heavyweight champion of Sicilian liars. And from growin’ up with him I learned the pantomime. Now there are seventeen different things a guy can do when he lies to give him away. A guy has seventeen pantomimes. A woman’s got twenty, but a guy’s got seventeen.
And if you know ‘em like ya know your own face, they beat lie detectors to hell. What we got here is a little game of show and tell. You don’t wanna show me nothin’. But you’re tellin’ me everything. Now I know you know where they are. So tell me, before I do some damage you won’t walk away from.

*The awful pain in Cliff’s hand is being replaced by the awful pain in his heart.
He looks deep into Coccotti’s eyes. *

CLIFF
Could I have one of those Chesterfields now?

COCCOTTI
Sure.

Coccotti leans over and hands him a smoke.

CLIFF
Got a match?

Cliff reaches into his pocket and pulls out a lighter.

CLIFF
Oh, don’t bother. I got one.
(he lights the cigarette)
So you’re a Sicilian, huh?

COCCOTTI
(intensly)
Uh-huh.

CLIFF
You know I read a lot. Especially things that have to do with history. I find that shit fascinating. In fact, I don’t know if you know this or not, Sicilians were spawned by niggers.

All the men stop what they were doing and look at Cliff, except for Tooth-pic Vic who doesn’t speak English and so isn’t insulted. Coccotti can’t believe what he’s hearing.

COCCOTTI
Come again?

CLIFF
It’s a fact. Sicilians have nigger blood pumpin’ through their hearts. If you don’t believe me, look it up. You see, hundreds and hundreds of years ago the Moors conquered Sicily. And Moors are niggers. Way back then, Sicilians were like the wops in northern Italy. Blond hair, blue eyes. But, once the Moors moved in there, they changed the whole country. They did
so much fuckin’ with the Sicilian women, they changed the blood-line for ever, from blond hair and blue eyes to black hair and dark skin. I find it absolutely amazing to think that to this day, hundreds of years later, Sicilians still carry that nigger gene. I’m just quotin’ history. It’s a fact. It’s written. Your ancestors were niggers. Your great, great, great, great, great-
grandmother was fucked by a nigger, and had a half-nigger kid. That is a fact. Now tell me, am I lyin’?

37

Oneof my favorites is by Jon Voigt,as a vicious murderer, in Runaway Train where he opines about the thin line that seperates civilized man from the animals to Eric Roberts, both are escaped criminals on a runaway train. I have always meant to transcribe it, but haven’t gotten around to it. It is something like this.

Roberts mentions something about robbing a bank when he gets home.

Voigt: “Bullshit, you ain’t gonna do that. You know what you’re gonna do? You’re gonna go home and you’re gonna get a job, whatever crappy little job an ex-con like yourself can get. You listening to me!! You’re gonna get a job and when you’re there late one night and you’re mopping the floor your boss will come over and tells you you missed a spot. You want to take his face and smash it in, but you don’t. You know what you’re going to do, you’re going to get on your hands and knees and scrub that little spot of floor until it is shiney clean. And if you can do that, if you can do that, then you could be the President of General Motors, you could run large corporations or be President of the United States, if you could do that.”

Roberts: “Ah, man I could never do that shit!”

Voigt: “More’s the pits, son, more’s the pit.”

Roberts: “Could you do that?”

Voigt: “I wish I could.”

38

Pretty much anything John Goodman says in The Big Lebowski. And also from the same film, Lebowski’s rant at The Dude when they first meet, after the nihilists pee on The Dude’s rug:

39

Steve Buscemi at the beginning of Reservoir Dogs, explaining why he doesn’t tip.

Al Pacino at the end of Scent of a Woman.

40

Clerks, indeed.

And of course the classic:

God that movie rocks. :smiley: