The final episode of Angel.
Illyria: Would you like me to lie to you now?
Wesley: Yes.
I agree 100%. That scene always impresses me.
I’ve actually heard that was the case; that they were doing the damndest to ‘break’ each other. Tim almost destroyed Harvey on a regular basis, and it was -so- fun to watch!
Last night I caught a rerun of the Law Order:SVU guest starring Chad Lowe. The scene at the end of the interrogation (I’m a dirty, diiiirty boy) and that last scene with Margot Kidder (I told her I wasn’t a little boy anymore). That was some damn fine acting!
One of my favorite scenes in a movie EVER, it’s not just the acting but everything going on at the same time. I’ll put it in spoilers. Normally I wouldn’t worry about spoiling a 12 year old movie, but no one deserves to have The Usual Suspects spoiled.
The scene where Kevin Spacey is walking away from the police station and his foot straightens out I get shivers watching it.
I supposed that’s not a “small scene” as requested by the OP. For a small scene that an actor nails, there was about a thousand of those by Bryan Cranston in Malcolm in the Middle.
There’s this one scene in Munich, where Eric Bana [del]why did I just write banana as his last name?[/del] 's character Avner is sitting alone in his hotel room. He’s been working as an assassin for the Israeli government to kill members of Black September, a Palestinian terrorist group responsible for the Munich deaths.
So, he’s just killed several people, he’s stressed-out and increasingly paranoid, conflicted about his mission, haunted by guilt, exhausted, and basically at the very end of his tether. He calls his wife back in Brooklyn; she’s holding their baby daughter, and gives her the phone to ‘speak to her papa’. After a moment or two, the baby makes a gurgling noise.
And Avner’s face just crumples, and he starts crying without a sound, and he has to pinch himself on the arm to be able to talk to the baby, and it’s one of the most heartbreaking moments I’ve ever seen.
Eric Bana’s got way more chops than he gets to display in Troy or** Lucky You**.
Hardly surprising considering it was Alec Guinness, but the scene near the end of Hitler: the Last Ten Days when the title character finally stops deluding himself that the turnaround is on its way and Germany will prevail and accepts that he’s never leaving that bunker alive (he crashes the model of Germania he’s positioning) is fantastic.
I was given season 2 of Rome for Christmas and just got around to watching it this weekend. Damn.
Having written my undergraduate thesis on Augustus, being a major fan of Colleen McCollough’s mammoth Masters of Rome series, and having watched I, Claudius more than a dozen times through, I was well aware of some of the historical plot twists long before they happened in the show. That certainly did not stop the writers from throwing some brutal curve balls into the mix.
One thing caught me completely by surprise, and much to my delight. In the scene where Octavian brings his new fiancee to “meet” his family, he effectively tosses a firebomb into the seething powder keg of Julii household politics. Despite being a physically frail specimen of manhood, he musters sufficient chutzpah to banish Antony – not only from his mother’s bedroom – not only from the family home – but from Italy entirely. And without getting his skull bashed in in the process. He then, to all effect, imprisons his mother and sister to prevent them from embarrassing him any further. Devastated, Octavia turns to her brother’s doe-eyed fiancee and, sweeping from the room, says “congratulations. You’re marrying a monster.” After this shocking spectacle, the uncontested Master of the House regards his bride-to-be for a reaction. The pretty, demure young thing, having not spoken a word throughout the scene, picks up a roasted bird from the banquet table and tears into it with a curious gleam in her eye – a two-second look that suggests a hitherto uncultivated but definitely aroused sense of predatory glee.
I positively shuddered.
Ah yes, a fantastic moment. The actress’s name is Alice Henley.
The Herzog version of Nosferatu. The scene where Harker cuts his finger. And Kinski, as Dracula, tries to turn away - and then SWOOP!
He can’t stop himself.
Regards,
Shodan
Harry Potter, After Prof Umbridge says “Tell them I mean them no harm”
“I’m sorry, Professor, but I must not tell lies”
Pretty much everything about Imelda Stanton’s performance in HP was dead on- she was the “sweetest” and most evil villain on screen in years, total psychopath. Of course she’s been on the red carpet before but I was still disappointed she didn’t get an Oscar nomination for this performance.
On the first season of BETTY there was an actress named Octavia Spencer (from Montgomery AL [where I now live] though I don’t know her unfortunately). She played a demented immigration case worker and she was B-R-I-L-L-I-A-N-T both as a comedic and as a dramatic actress. It would have been easy to play the character just for laughs but she also showed you the desperate/pitiful side of the character.
Anyway, her “DO ME LIKE MARIAH!” scene was one of the funniest I’ve ever seen. (Hell, she stole a scene she wasn’t even in- it was a phone call from her character and even though she wasn’t seen just knowing how she’d have played it was fantastic.)
A great movie all around, but the dialog-less ending to Big Night with Tony Shaloub (Primo), Stanley Tucci (Secondo), and Marc Anthony. The brothers, Primo and Secondo, had a big fight the night before, and yet you could feel their love for each other the next morning. That’s the way men apologize and make up. No words necessary.
And she becomes fearful not because she knows who he is, but because of what he is. She doesn’t know him as The Operative, she just senses he’s a completely amoral monster who’s not there to enjoy some time with a Companion.
I’m going to mention Giovanni Ribisi in The Gift. In a vastly underrated movie, he stands out, playing a deeply troubled young man being “counseled” by Cate Blanchett’s character. I am thinking of one scene in particular when he confronts the abusive thug played by Keanu Reeves who is threatening Cate Blanchett’s character’s children. Reeves’s character pulls a gun and Ribisi steps toward him and the gun, so that the barrel of the gun is against his forehead and screams, “Do it! PLEASE!” I remember literally gasping out loud, because he completely nailed the anguish and despair of someone in the grips of a mental illness and unable to take action to end their own torment.
Well, these aren’t exactly small scenes, but I feel compelled to mention them:
In Return of the Dragon: During the climactic fight between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris, there is a brief pause in the fighting. Neither actor says a word, but you know exactly what both characters are thinking.
In Born on the Fourth of July: Tom Cruise’s character accidentally kills one of his own comrades in a “friendly fire” incident. When he gets back to the USA, he seeks out the victim’s parents and starts to tell them how their son died. As he tells the story, the father (who is a veteran himself) realizes where the story is going, and says, “You don’t have to tell us this.”
How I Met Your Mother, Season 1, second to last episode of the season, Milk. Ted finds out that the matchmaking service he joined about 15 episodes earlier finally found a match for him, indeed a nearly perfect match for him. He is on his way to his first blind date with this perfect woman, and as he is about to go inside to meet his date, he imagines what his wedding day could be like with this woman (he has some serious long-term plans).
The only problem is, the only thing he can think of is looking into the audience of the church and seeing Robin (played by Cobie Smulders), who he knows at this point has strong feelings for him. The camera cuts away from Ted and his bride-imminently-to-be and focuses in on Robin, in the front row, slowly losing a battle to avoid crying. The transition from happy smile to tears is downright heartbreaking.
Then again, I generally consider How I Met Your Mother to be an evil, heartwarming, hilarious and downright emotionally manipulative show and now that the Writer’s Strike seems to be over, I can hope to have Season 3 finished and released on DVD some time before I die so I can find out who the hell their mother turns out to be.
OK, I came in to post that very scene.
Here are a couple of teasers from the scene from the IMDB:
In season five of 24 there is a scene where Kim’s new boyfriend is trying to challenge Jack’s authority over Kim and Jack gets increasingly upset with the challenge.
Kiefer Sutherland manages to give one look during the scene where it seems certain that Kim’s new boyfriend will be added to Jack’s excessive body count (or at least tortured), but doesn’t because Jack reins himself in.
This one occurred to me last night as I lay weeping into my pillow. It’s from a movie that’s been around for a long time and so I’ll just be obscure instead of spoilering, just in case someone hasn’t seen it.
In the movie Momento there is a scene with one of the characters in a nursing home or possibly a mental institution. The narrator is explaining that this character can’t remember anyone so he responds to everyone who approaches him as though they were a close friend because they might be. The character on screen is going through this process and the look on his face is so… positive, so beaming and yet the narration is deadpan and the scene is very sad, especially as this character realizes the person walking past doesn’t know him and then responds to the next passerby the same way.
I’m not sure it’s the actor who nails the scene because I think the casting is right on, but it makes me a little misty just writing about it.