[QUOTE=Johnny Hildo]
Worst: any one of those shitty romantic comedy dressing room clothes-changing montages, usually set to the tune of “Brown-Eyed Girl” or some other treacly song.
It goes like this:
Girl undergoing a makeover tries on an outfit that’s not quite right. Person with her shakes their head. Girl goes back inside. Curtain closes. Curtain opens and this time Girl is wearing something even more wacky! Another head shake. Curtain closes. Curtain open again and this time Girl is wearing the Wackiest Outfit in the History of the Goddamn Universe! BIG head shake. Curtain closes. Curtain opens again and Girl is wearing something sensible and flattering. End montage. There, you’ve just watched four minutes of worthless filler. :rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]
One of my favorites is the palace coup montage from The Scarlett Empress.
I also love any montage where people are building stuff, improvising, working with hardware, and getting ready for a fight. Example: Arney preparing to get it on with the big scary alien in Predator.
The Sweetest Thing, you forgot the part in that montage where the Wacky Gay Friend puts on a wacky outfit and gets a head shake from both girls. (Always near the end of the montage.)
I love the time passing montage from Notting Hill. I don’t see how it could have been done in one take, just presented as one. Several characters in the movie come through at different points in different costume. Then there’s the woman that gets progressively more pregnant and has a baby at the end. There’s no way that could have been one take unless I’m missunderstanding what you mean by one take.
[QUOTE=Miss Woodhouse]
…I love the time passing montage from Notting Hill. I don’t see how it could have been done in one take, just presented as one. Several characters in the movie come through at different points in different costume. Then there’s the woman that gets progressively more pregnant and has a baby at the end. There’s no way that could have been one take unless I’m missunderstanding what you mean by one take.
[/QUOTE]
I agree. It’s very deftly edited, and Hugh Grant walks past in the foreground while the seasons pass behind him, but it wasn’t one continuous take, IIRC.
[QUOTE=Millit the Frail]
The one that sticks in my head is the “Head Over Heels” scene from Donnie Darko, right when the kids get off the bus to go to school. You see almost all of the major characters, some completely absurd stuff happening, and a whole lot of ominous foreshadowing. Something about that movie’s portrayal of the 1980s is just really creepy, and that scene was incredible for me.
[/QUOTE]
I commented when I first saw that movie that one scene would make a great stand along video for the song. Also, the climax of the movie to the cover of “Mad World”.
I’ll second the tournament scene from Karate Kid. Classic. Along with the aforemetnioned montages from Rocky III & IV. Decent montage in the most recent one, but not as good.
Nice, rom-com style romantic montage in The Naked Gun, and Farelly brothers have done some funny ones.
At the end of Part I or II from Spike Lee’s Katrina “Requiem”, there’s a montage mostly comprised of dead bodies, some floating. I forget what was playing, maybe a jazzy dearth, but it was moving.
[QUOTE=MaxTheVool] Worst:
Various episodes of Lost have had ridiculously corny montages, in which the music swells and the people on the island, always well-lit and well-groomed in their cutely rustic but not actually threatening surroundings, enjoy each other’s company, and revel in the newfound emotional growth they’ve experienced yada yada yada. Maybe it’s not that they’re so awful, as that they were so frequent for a while.
[/QUOTE] Lost had a funny end-of-episode montage in one of the first episodes. They went in for the montage of everyone settling in to life on the island, with some pop song playing in the background. As we see a shot of Hurley sitting on the beach listening to his CD player, the music stutters and stops unexpectedly. Hurley looks at his CD player and says, “Damn.”
Obviously the batteries had run out, and he had no way of getting more.
