I just thought about the scene in Children of Men where the ex-midwife described the first realizations of world-wide infertility. A very sad moment both in her recollection and in her retelling.
I came in to mention this movie. As I recall,
[spoiler]Roth is telling his gangster pals his “amusing anecdote” about what went wrong on his drug deal, when he stumbled across the cops and the dog in the bathroom. This is all made up to give him gangster cred. But we see the scene he’s describing. One of the characters in Roth’s anecdote is a cop, who is telling an “amusing anecdote” of his own, about him pulling over the guy who won’t keep his hands on the wheel. That story is really vivid (“Buddy, I’m gonna shoot you in the face …” and the “real sexy Asian bitch” and so on) even though we don’t see the pulling-over scene.
So, inside Roth’s completely made up story (that we do see), is a guy telling a story (which we don’t see). [/spoiler]
That was one of my favorite parts in the movie.
Right director (Neil LaBute), wrong movie. It was Your Friends and Neighbors.
Pulp Fiction: Christopher Walken’s monologue about his and Bruce Willis’ father’s experience in a Vietnam POW camp, and where he put the watch.
Sorry – I’d been wondering if I screwed that up.
That was a great scene and great imagery. As a bonus, it was related as a flashback from when Butch was a kid. .
Same movie, just after the near rape in the dungeon, this exchange paints a very vivid image of what will happen with no need to show it.
[after Butch saves Marsellus from rapists]
Butch: You okay?
Marsellus: Naw man. I’m pretty fuckin’ far from okay.
Butch: What now?
Marsellus: What now? Let me tell you what now. I’ma call a coupla hard, pipe-hittin’ niggers, who’ll go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch. You hear me talkin’, hillbilly boy? I ain’t through with you by a damn sight. I’ma get medieval on your ass.
Butch: I meant what now between me and you?
Marsellus: Oh, that what now. I tell you what now between me and you. There is no me and you. Not no more.
Jim
My favorite is My Dinner With Andre. It’s Wallace Shawn (better known as Vinzzini) and Andre Gregory (better known as… I don’t know, I think of him as Andre) having dinner in a restaraunt in New York and talking about things. Andre paints these incredibly vivid pictures with words of these fantastic things that he’s seen and done and after you’re done watching you have this vague feeling that you saw it all on the screen. Of course, you haven’t seen anything but Andre and Wally munching away at dinner.
I saw this a few years ago at a screening with both Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory and afterwards they talked about the movie and with the audience. It was amazing. Both of them have a very strong presence and, between the movie and the question and answers, did a two man show that lasted almost three and a half hours. There was a script but it was edited out of real conversations that the two had had and it shows.
Here’s an excerpt of the Q&A:
Q: Um… Andre, I was wondering how much of the stories you tell are–
Andre: All of them.
Q: --true?
A: It’s all true.
Q: Buried alive?
A: Really happened.
Q: Thank you.
Tenebras
In Smoke, Harvey Keitel’s character tells a marvelous story about visiting an old woman on Christmas day, intending to return the wallet of her grandson. He tells it wonderfully, and the camera rarely leaves his face during the story. It’s just like listening to someone tell a story in real life – you watch the teller’s face while picturing what they describe. Neat.
Now, it turns out the movie does show this story (sans sound, but with a Tom Waits song playing) during the closing credits, so you do see it, but in a way that just underscores how well the story was told.
Am I mistaken in assuming that the guy actually WAS raped? I thought it was pretty obvious by his reaction.
ETA: WIKI supports this interpretation.
I assumed that, as well.
They showed the rape. The other poster just meant that they didn’t show Marsellus’s revenge on the “hillbilly” guys who raped him. It was going to be bad, though.
Yeah, that definitely leaves one with a bad and vivid mental image.
My favorite one:
In one of the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker Naked Gun movies, where they show every sight gag, no matter how contrived or silly, there’s one where Frank Drebbin (Leslie Nielsen) goes into a restaurant and asks the waiter for “The Strongest thing you’ve got”. Out come a couple of really over-muscled guys. Frank changes his mind “Just give me a Black Russian.”
The waiter turns to the camera, looks the viewer straight in the eye, and shakes his head, unlistakeably saying by that gesture “We coulda dressed up a black guy in a Russian outfit, but you’ve already figured this one out, and there’s no way we’re gonna actually do it.”
If we can include television shows, in the Firefly episode “War Stories” Zoe tells a fairly graphic and short story about trench warfare, starving soldiers, apples, and very small pressure-sensitive grenades that go “pop”. Basically, she was explaining why she and Mal, both veterans of the Unification War, habitually slice their apples before eating them.
Another good example from TV is from Due South, a Canadian buddy-cop show from the mid-90’s. In the episode “The Deal”, Detective Vecchio tells Constable Fraser about an incident when he was a kid where the school bully (who would later become a local Mafia boss) smashed a kid’s face against the pavement with a basketball over and over again for losing a basketball game while the kid looked to Vecchio for help, while Vecchio looked on passively.
I never heard of the that movie, sounds interesting from the wiki article.
Thanks