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eye_of_a_catFunniest Movie Moment:
Toy Story. Yes, shush. All pretenses to great levels of sophistication went out of the window when I got a Buzz Lightyear action figure for Christmas a few years ago.
Woody: You are a toy! You're not the real Buzz Lightyear, you're an action figure! You are a child's plaything!
Buzz: You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity. Farewell.
Most Intense Movie Moment:
If we're going for 'scariest', then I can't watch - literally cannot watch, have to walk out of the room during - the scene in Stand By Me when the boys are being chased by a train. Trains don't scare me in any other context, and I have no idea what bothers me so much about that one. Second, the scene in Don't Look Now when Donald Sutherland catches up with the little figure in the red raincoat. Otherwise, I don't think many things in films do scare me any more; I was a devout X-Files follower (co-founder of my school's 'Mulder and Mulder's Hair Appreciation Society', aged 14) for too long, my academic work has centred on Scary Stuff for the past few years, and I think somewhere along the line I just got jaded, which is a shame.
Non-scary: The scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, when McMurphy returns from electroshock therapy for the final time. Maybe 'non-scary' isn't really appropriate, since although it's not frightening in an edge-of-the-seat way, it's utterly terrifying on its own level.
Also, the first time I saw The Empire Strikes Back, I didn't know Luke Skywalker was Darth Vader's son and was still young enough to scream "No!" at the screen.
Most Heart-Wrenching Movie Moment:
The scene which should have been the last one of The Shawshank Redemption. Red's last words, after setting off to Mexico to look for Andy: "I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake him by the hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it is in my dreams. I hope."
The film ruins the impact of this, IMHO, by showing Andy and Red meeting up again in Zihuatenejo, which is so not the point. The important thing isn't that Andy escaped from prison; it's that Red, for the first time in his life, has hope. Although it's a pretty heart-wrenching film all round, this moment wins for making all Andy's suffering before it (which was itself well-handled and non-gratuitous - learn, Mel) worthwhile.
Best Dance Number in a Movie:
I blame every single teenage sleepover party I ever went to for this one: Dirty Dancing, after the "Nobody puts Baby in a corner!" line.
Best Adaptation of a Classic Work:
I like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, which does a very nice combination of keeping dialogue mostly intact and transposing the action to a completely different setting. (I especially loved some of the minor details - the prince being replaced by "so-and-so Prince, Chief of Police" in particular.) However, Clueless wins, for managing to be sweet enough to make Jane Austen's 'a heroine no-one but myself will much like' as likeable as Emma is in the novel and for being the only romantic comedy which doesn't make me roll my eyes.
Favorite Bond Moment: Revoke my citizenship, do what you must, but I don't actually like Bond films all that much. Either every scene with Judi Dench as M, or Q in Tomorrow Never Dies. (Bond has just discovered how to use the phone-operated car, and zooms it about at ninety miles an hour before bringing it to a screeching stop inches away from hitting both of them. Q, deeply unimpressed: "Grow up, 007.")
Greatest Martial Arts Moment:I know nothing about martial arts, and therefore I'm interpreting this one as 'fight scene', in which case the duel from The Phantom Menace (yes, shut up, I like the prequels, and 80% of the Star Wars fans should stop grumbling that Star Wars isn't as good as it was when they were eleven, thank you) wins. The lightsaber duels in the original three films were okay, but here you get the impression that the people involved seriously want to hurt each other, and it's much more effective for it.
And applying the meme to books:
Funniest moment:
When I was about thirteen, and sulking at something of great importance to thirteen-year-olds, my dad gave me Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat to read and dared me to get to the end without laughing. He won. This is the three men in question trying to open a tin of food when they've forgotten to bring a knife (we're pre-can openers here):
Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought it down. It was George's straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter's evening, when the pipes are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time. Harris got off with merely a flesh wound. After that, I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand. We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry - but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it. There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead.
Honourable mentions to every other word in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens. In particular, every scene with Aziraphale and Crowley, who completely steal the page.
Most Intense Moment: Understood as 'scary', this still goes to the moment in Lord of the Rings when Pippin drops a pebble down the well while the Fellowship is in Moria. You know something very bad is going to happen in Moria, but for a moment, there, it seems like they've almost got away with staying unheard - and then they hear a hammer, tapping, far below them. When I was ten, I used to scare myself stupid reading this with a torch under the covers.
Otherwise, Tolkien still wins: Maglor throwing the last Silmaril into the sea.
Most Heart-Wrenching:
Maybe Maglor should've been put here instead. Hmm. Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, told from the perspective of a murdered teenager, came as close as books ever come (for I have a heart of cold, solid steel, and am English) to making me cry, although I can't pinpoint a specific moment. Simon's death in Lord of the Flies upset me horribly the first time I read it. And in George R. Stewart's wonderful postapocalyptic novel Earth Abides, the final chapter is told from the viewpoint of the survivor who spent his life trying to rebuild civilisation, now very old and unsure of what's happening, half-worshipped and half-bullied by the younger men in his tribe, looking at what's left of San Francisco just before he dies.
And the other questions don't really apply to books, so I'll just leave it there.
Toy Story. Yes, shush. All pretenses to great levels of sophistication went out of the window when I got a Buzz Lightyear action figure for Christmas a few years ago.
Woody: You are a toy! You're not the real Buzz Lightyear, you're an action figure! You are a child's plaything!
Buzz: You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity. Farewell.
Most Intense Movie Moment:
If we're going for 'scariest', then I can't watch - literally cannot watch, have to walk out of the room during - the scene in Stand By Me when the boys are being chased by a train. Trains don't scare me in any other context, and I have no idea what bothers me so much about that one. Second, the scene in Don't Look Now when Donald Sutherland catches up with the little figure in the red raincoat. Otherwise, I don't think many things in films do scare me any more; I was a devout X-Files follower (co-founder of my school's 'Mulder and Mulder's Hair Appreciation Society', aged 14) for too long, my academic work has centred on Scary Stuff for the past few years, and I think somewhere along the line I just got jaded, which is a shame.
Non-scary: The scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, when McMurphy returns from electroshock therapy for the final time. Maybe 'non-scary' isn't really appropriate, since although it's not frightening in an edge-of-the-seat way, it's utterly terrifying on its own level.
Also, the first time I saw The Empire Strikes Back, I didn't know Luke Skywalker was Darth Vader's son and was still young enough to scream "No!" at the screen.
Most Heart-Wrenching Movie Moment:
The scene which should have been the last one of The Shawshank Redemption. Red's last words, after setting off to Mexico to look for Andy: "I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake him by the hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it is in my dreams. I hope."
The film ruins the impact of this, IMHO, by showing Andy and Red meeting up again in Zihuatenejo, which is so not the point. The important thing isn't that Andy escaped from prison; it's that Red, for the first time in his life, has hope. Although it's a pretty heart-wrenching film all round, this moment wins for making all Andy's suffering before it (which was itself well-handled and non-gratuitous - learn, Mel) worthwhile.
Best Dance Number in a Movie:
I blame every single teenage sleepover party I ever went to for this one: Dirty Dancing, after the "Nobody puts Baby in a corner!" line.
Best Adaptation of a Classic Work:
I like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, which does a very nice combination of keeping dialogue mostly intact and transposing the action to a completely different setting. (I especially loved some of the minor details - the prince being replaced by "so-and-so Prince, Chief of Police" in particular.) However, Clueless wins, for managing to be sweet enough to make Jane Austen's 'a heroine no-one but myself will much like' as likeable as Emma is in the novel and for being the only romantic comedy which doesn't make me roll my eyes.
Favorite Bond Moment: Revoke my citizenship, do what you must, but I don't actually like Bond films all that much. Either every scene with Judi Dench as M, or Q in Tomorrow Never Dies. (Bond has just discovered how to use the phone-operated car, and zooms it about at ninety miles an hour before bringing it to a screeching stop inches away from hitting both of them. Q, deeply unimpressed: "Grow up, 007.")
Greatest Martial Arts Moment:I know nothing about martial arts, and therefore I'm interpreting this one as 'fight scene', in which case the duel from The Phantom Menace (yes, shut up, I like the prequels, and 80% of the Star Wars fans should stop grumbling that Star Wars isn't as good as it was when they were eleven, thank you) wins. The lightsaber duels in the original three films were okay, but here you get the impression that the people involved seriously want to hurt each other, and it's much more effective for it.
And applying the meme to books:
Funniest moment:
When I was about thirteen, and sulking at something of great importance to thirteen-year-olds, my dad gave me Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat to read and dared me to get to the end without laughing. He won. This is the three men in question trying to open a tin of food when they've forgotten to bring a knife (we're pre-can openers here):
Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought it down. It was George's straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter's evening, when the pipes are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time. Harris got off with merely a flesh wound. After that, I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand. We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry - but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it. There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead.
Honourable mentions to every other word in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens. In particular, every scene with Aziraphale and Crowley, who completely steal the page.
Most Intense Moment: Understood as 'scary', this still goes to the moment in Lord of the Rings when Pippin drops a pebble down the well while the Fellowship is in Moria. You know something very bad is going to happen in Moria, but for a moment, there, it seems like they've almost got away with staying unheard - and then they hear a hammer, tapping, far below them. When I was ten, I used to scare myself stupid reading this with a torch under the covers.
Otherwise, Tolkien still wins: Maglor throwing the last Silmaril into the sea.
Most Heart-Wrenching:
Maybe Maglor should've been put here instead. Hmm. Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, told from the perspective of a murdered teenager, came as close as books ever come (for I have a heart of cold, solid steel, and am English) to making me cry, although I can't pinpoint a specific moment. Simon's death in Lord of the Flies upset me horribly the first time I read it. And in George R. Stewart's wonderful postapocalyptic novel Earth Abides, the final chapter is told from the viewpoint of the survivor who spent his life trying to rebuild civilisation, now very old and unsure of what's happening, half-worshipped and half-bullied by the younger men in his tribe, looking at what's left of San Francisco just before he dies.
And the other questions don't really apply to books, so I'll just leave it there.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-27 06:27 pm (UTC)Re: "I am your father" - say, I'm curious. In the audio commentary to RotJ, Lucas mentions that he put the scene with Yoda confirming to Luke that Vader is Anakin Skywalker and his father there partly because child psychologist had told him the kids would just to into denial over the ESB revelation between movies, and would assume Vader was lying. Now me, I was 12 or so, and it was a very intense moment, but my reaction wasn't "No!" but "Wow - that makes so much sense!". It never occured to me that Vader might have been lying (don't know why, because as the villain I suppose he could have, in terms of movie rules). After the shock had settled and before RotJ came out, did you think it was the truth, or that he was lying?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-27 07:03 pm (UTC)There are far too few of us.
By the end of the film, I was pretty sure he was telling the truth. I didn't believe him when he first said it, but it was Luke's reaction, I think, that changed my mind - he didn't go into the outright denial of "ha ha, you haven't fooled me!" that I'd have expected from a hero if Vader had been lying.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-30 11:59 am (UTC)Three Men in a Boat is always going to be the funniest book I know. Connie Willis wrote a book which is sort of related called To Say Nothing of the Dog which comes a close second. I have read both far too many times.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-30 08:14 pm (UTC)