Category Archives: Best Scenes
Deadwood kidney stone scene
Back in 2005 I posted a link to a clip from the HBO series, Deadwood. In this episode Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) is sick as a dog from a kidney stone. So sick he cannot speak. Doc Cochran is about to surgically remove the stone (which could kill Al) but at the last minute, they opt to let Al try to pass the stone, with help from Johnny, Dan and Trixie.
Bonus clip: I’m thinking of putting this on my answering machine (6 seconds)
Excellent interview with David Milch (The New Language of the Old West)
Go-Chip scene from Wild Palms
In the 1993 TV mini-series, Wild Palms, Senator Anton Kreutzer (Robert Loggia) has the Go-Chip implanted and uploads his consciousness to the Net. Immortality! Unfortunately, the IT guys were running Vista on the server. But that’s a damned fine looking smoking jacket.
Losing is a disease
Losing is a disease… as contagious as polio.
Losing is a disease… as contagious as syphilis.
Losing is a disease… as contagious as bubonic plague…
…attacking one… but infecting all.
But curable.
Now, I want you to imagine… you are on a ship at sea…
Gently rocking.
Gently rocking.
Gently rocking.
–The Natural (YouTube)
Five Easy Pieces
Bridge scene from Sorcerer
If you haven’t seen Sorcerer, I highly recommend it. Directed by William Friedkin and starring Roy Scheider. Another good scene from earlier in the film.
Tarzan the Ape Man (Pygmy scene)
When I came home for lunch yesterday, Barb was watching the Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). The original Johnny Weissmuller/Maureen O’Sullivan classic. I grew up on Tarzan movies. I came in on the scene where Jane and her father had been captured by pygmies who took them back to the village where they planned to drop them in a pit with a giant ape. This clip runs about 2:50.
If I could rent a time machine for just a few days, I’d go back to the filming of this movie, specifically to those breaks in filming when all the little people were standing around, waiting for their next scene. Everyone in costume with bones stuck in their pygmy wigs.
“Have you heard about this Wizard of Oz project? Word is they need a bunch of us to play Munchkins.”
“What the fuck is a munchkin?”
Howard Beale: “I don’t have to tell you things are bad”
I love the movie Network. I went back to a post in September of 2006 to review the prophetic words of Paddy Chayefsky:
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s no one anywhere that seems to know what to do with us. Now into it. We know the air is unfit to breathe, our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in a house as slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller and all we say is, “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, and TV, and my steel belted radials and I won’t say anything.”
Well I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crying in the streets. All I know is first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being. God Dammit, my life has value.”
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” I want you to get up right now. Get up. Go to your windows, open your windows, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Things have got to change my friends. You’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open your window, stick your head out and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Googling “white boy day”
One of my earliest posts (2/18/02) was a gush about the 1993 film True Romance. I titled the post: “It Ain’t White Boy Day Is It?” …one of many great lines in the movie.
Of the 3,000+ posts here at smays.com, that one still gets the most comments. But I’m more proud of the fact that this post is the #1 Google search result for “white boy day.”
Out of how many results, you ask? Put quotation marks around the phrase: 5,490. No quotation marks: 9,880,000. This is why we blog.
“Hello, pussy”
That’s how Lou Gossett addresses David Caruso’s character before choking him into submission in An Officer and A Gentleman (1982). Later in the movie, Caruso has to be rescued from the bottom of the pool in a training exercise. Caruso is an acquired taste but I always found him one of the baddest dudes on the little screen. It hurt me to see him get humiliated.
But this post was going to be about Debra Winger, who made a bunch of bad movies but was really good in two: AOAAG and Urban Cowboy. And she was sort of okay in Black Widow.
I know squat about Hollywood but have to believe she had bad management. Her deep-throated sexiness and more-than-adequate acting chops should have taken her farther.
And for your comment hounds, how about the best drill instructors (or non-coms) in military movies? R. Lee Ermey from Full Metal Jacket? Adolph Caesar from A Soldiar’s Story? Tom Berenger from Platoon?