One of my faves has to be Tom Hanks’s Jimmie Dugan going off on a rant in A League of their Own
Jimmy Dugan: Evelyn, could you come here for a second? Which team do you play for?
Evelyn Gardner: Well, I’m a Peach.
Jimmy Dugan: Well I was just wonderin’ why you would throw home when we got a two-run lead! You let the tying run get on second base and we lost the lead because of you! Start using your head. That’s the lump that’s three feet above your ass!
[Evelyn starts to cry.]
Jimmy Dugan: Are you crying? Are you crying? ARE YOU CRYING? There’s no crying, there’s no crying in baseball! Rogers Hornsby was my manager, and he called me a talking pile of pigshit! And that was when my parents drove all the way down from Michigan to see me play the game! And did I cry? NO! NO! And do you know why?
Evelyn Gardner: No, no, no.
Jimmy Dugan: Because there’s no crying in baseball!
God, he nailed this role. It was like he was channeling Billy Martin or Sparky Lyle or something.
There have been some great ones listed. Here are a few more…
** Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate**
Let me give you a little inside information about God. God likes to watch. He’s a prankster. Think about it. He gives man INSTINCTS! He gives you this extraordinary gift, and then what does He do, I swear for His own amusement, his own private, cosmic gag reel, He sets the rules in opposition. It’s the goof of all time. Look but don’t touch. Touch, but don’t taste! Taste, don’t swallow. Ahaha! And when you’re jumpin’ from one foot to the next, what is he doing? He’s laughin’ His sick, fuckin’ ass off. He’s a tight-ass! He’s a sadist! He’s an absentee landlord. Worship THAT? NEVER! *
and…
in ** Any Given Sunday **
You find out life’s this game of inches, so is football. Because in either game – life or football – the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it. One half second too slow, too fast and you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team we fight for that inch. On this team we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when add up all those inches, that’s gonna make the fucking difference between winning and losing! Between living and dying! *
** Sally Field
Eye For An Eye **
And you can’t catch him! You can’t punish him! You can’t protect anyone else! You’re completely USELESS *
** Donald Sutherland
A Time To Kill **
Hero my ass. Do you think the world needed me beating cops heads on that picket line. I was needed here. In that courtroom. And I let them push me, I gave them an excuse to kick me out and now I can never plead a case in there again. But you can. You’re an attorney. Be proud. You job is to find justice no matter how well she may hide herself from you. So you go on in there and you do your job. *
** Mel Gibson
Ransom **
You kill him, you kill yourself, you motherfucker! GIVE ME BACK MY SON!!
Sorry, I don’t remember all of it.
** Michael Douglas
Wall Street **
The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works.
and…
You see that building? I bought that building ten years ago. My first real estate deal. Sold it two years later, made an $800,000 profit. It was better than sex. At the time I thought that was all the money in the world. Now it’s a day’s pay
A Few Good Men when Tom Cruise realizes Demi Moore has not prepped the farm boy defendent, and that he wasn’t even in the room when the order was given to administer a Code Red. She tells him to put Jack Nicholson on the stand and get him to admit it.
He goes off on this beautiful rant about how he will be court martialed for playing “Should We, or Should We Not, Take the Advice of the Galatically Stupid!”
I have an M.D. from Harvard, I am board certified in cardio-thoracic medicine and trauma surgery, I have been awarded citations from seven different medical boards in New England, and I am never, ever sick at sea. So I ask you; when someone goes into that chapel and they fall on their knees and they pray to God that their wife doesn’t miscarry or that their daughter doesn’t bleed to death or that their mother doesn’t suffer acute neural trama from postoperative shock, who do you think they’re praying to? Now, go ahead and read your Bible, Dennis, and you go to your church, and, with any luck, you might win the annual raffle, but if you’re looking for God, he was in operating room number two on November 17, and he doesn’t like to be second guessed. You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God.
OK, so its probably not THE best rant ever. But Mr and I saw the movie at the cinema here in Japan, and we were the only ones laughing at this scene. It didn’t seem to translate into Japanese quite as well. The entire audience was looking at us as if to say “WTF?”
The only thing unfortunate about this thread is that TV isn’t included. But that’s beside the point. I mostly dropped in to give you this one that someone mentioned earlier:
“A career? I’ve thought about this quite a bit sir and I would have to say considering what’s waiting out there for me, I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed or buy anything sold or processed or repair anything sold, bought or processed as a career. I don’t want to do that. My father’s in the army. He wants me to join, but I can’t work for that corporation, so what I’ve been doing lately is kick-boxing, which is a new sport…as far as career longevity, I don’t really know. I can’t figure it all out tonight, sir, so I’m just gonna hang with your daughter.”
–John Cusack as Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything
Cusack as Martin Blank (Grosse Pointe Blank) also has a good mini-rant about going to his high school reunion:
I just honestly don’t know what I have in common with those people anymore. I mean, or with anyone, really. I mean, they all have husbands and wives and children and houses and dogs and, you know, they’ve all made themselves a part of something and they can talk about what they do, and what am I going to say? “I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork… How have you been?”
Melvin Udall: Never, never, interrupt me, okay? Not if there’s a fire, not even if you hear the sound of a thud from my home and one week later there’s a smell coming from there that can only be a decaying human body and you have to hold a hanky to your face because the stench is so thick that you think you’re going to faint. Even then, don’t come knocking. Or, if it’s election night, and you’re excited and you wanna celebrate because some fudgepacker that you date has been elected the first queer president of the United States and he’s going to have you down to Camp David, and you want someone to share the moment with. Even then, don’t knock. Not on this door. Not for ANY
Gregory Peck has some great rants in the old war film “12 O’Clock High”. He plays a tough general who takes over a hard luck B-17 group in Europe.
At one point he berates an MP for not checking his ID upon entering the base, and concludes his remarks with, “And another thing. If you, or anyone else on this base passes me up again without saluting, even if I’m a block away… you’ll wonder what fell on you.”
Later he gives a tremendous dressing down to cowardly B-17 commander which concludes with this: “I want you to pain this name on your ship - ‘Leper Colony’. And in it you’re going to get every deadbeat in the group. Every man with a penchant for head colds. If there’s a bombadier who can’t hit his plate with his fork, you get him! If there’s a navigator who can’t find the men’s room, you get him! Because you rate 'em!”
Great film. They don’t make them like that anymore.
JFK is one (one of many) of my favorite films, this is Dean Andrews (performed the profusely sweating John Candy) speaking to Jim Garrison:
Later…in that same movie, the Garrisons fight and Jim goes off thusly:
Then this gem (excerpted) by David Ferrie (insanely performed by Mr. Am-A-Clown, Joe Pesci) answering Garrison’s question about “so who killed the president”:
Boy, come to think of it, there are a lot of rants in that movie…