Well, the classic has to be Obi-Wan vs. Darth Maul in Phantom Menace.
That one is so striking it wakes me up(has to) every time I see that movie.
The final scene on the stairs oustide the opera in Godfather III is good too. I really believed Michael was getting it, then when it was his daughter it really worked. The silence, the scream…just perfect. Otherwise, that movie sucked.
I concur… except the Mugatu brainwashing sequnce I think tops it by just a bit.
Cloris Leechman’s scene in the horrible chick flick “Hanging Up”.
She’s the estranged mother of the three sisters and Meg Ryan goes to see her. Leechman’s line about motherhood and how it just didn’t “take” is the best and most honest moment in the film. The rest of the movie I shit on.
Most people agree that “Daredevil” was utter garbage… I actually kind of liked a lot of it… but there is one scene that anyone should be able to agree is the best example of super heroics put in a real world context. After a night of battling bad guys Daredevil comes home… takes a shower where we see that after only being a super hero for a few months that his body is horribly scarred, he removes a loose tooth in the shower, he goes to the medicine cabinet and takes out a handful of painkillers and then as he gets into his isolation chamber bed he can hear all the sirens and screams and gunshots of the city… and he just has to let it go and get some sleep. It’s a fricking wonderfully done scene.
**Fantastic Four ** was a throughly mediocre movie (sigh), but the montage where Johnny Storm fills the sleeping Thing’s hand with shaving cream and then tricks him into swatting away a fly made me laugh out loud.
Natalie Portman’s scene in Cold Mountain. After putting up with the rest of that bland and moderately misandrist pile of garbage, I felt about even on my time & money spent.
The teaser sequence in Moonraker, in which James Bond is pushed out of an airplane without a parachute. He angles his body to free-fall to catch up to the pilot, who had bailed with one, and wrestles the 'chute off of that guy and straps it on, just before Jaws catches up to him…
Okay, the centrifugal force test chamber scene is also pretty cool.
The opening sequences of Joe Versus The Volcano with Tom Hanks in his soul-sucking work environment. “I know he can get the job, but can he do the job.” bzzzt…bzzzzzzzt
I don’t consider the movie God-awful, more flawed-but-watchable:
In Empire of the Sun there is sequence near the beginning that takes place during WWII, with the Japanese army marching into Shanghai, and the protagonist (a young boy) gets separated from his parents, then later tries several times to surrender to the Japanese but is essentially ignored. The sequence is alternately terrifying and surreally funny. The rest of the movie is OK but IMHO doesn’t quite live up to this.
Teen Wolf was abysmal in practically every one of its frames, except for two things:
The scene where Michael J. Fox tries to hide his transformation from his father, only to discover his father is a werewolf, too.
Every single line of dialog by Jay Tarses. I’m certain that Tarses (a writer for “The Bob Newhart Show,” and later creator of “Buffalo Bill” and “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd”) wrote all his own dialog. It’s too funny and is clearly not the utter dreck that the rest of the movie is.
I’m tempted to say Pippin’s rendition of Bilbo’s walkign song in “Return of the King.” However, I cannot, as I am not prepared to admit that I ever wasted my time on that movie. In fact I’m not prepared to admit the movie exists to have wasted time on;I prefer to think that Peter Jackson died in in inexplicable meteor-related accident moments after delivering the theatrical cut of The Two Towers to New Line, and that all the film that had been shot for the third movie was destroyed with him.