Regretful Film Reviews

It's the new year in my part of the world. And what's more, we are starting with a clean slate (metaphysically speaking). This refreshing cycle makes it possible to access a higher state of consciousness -- which we immediately put to work by building an outdoor thatched-roof hut. Glass of havdalah wine in hand, we head outside following 26 hours of no food and drink, to start work with power tools.

It seems appropriate to stop focusing on negativity for once. Instead of roasting another movie that did everything wrong, I am going to talk about a few that did something right. (Don't worry, we'll be back to the harsh stuff next week.) Hence, the most memorable moments in cinema...

Pretty daring, huh? Obviously what follows is a subjective list of the film moments that were most memorable to me. This is based on no survey, although you are free to suggest your own. And I am not even claiming they were great moments. These were the moments that stuck in my mind for some reason, for a long time, and in some cases had a profound effect on my aesthetic. I cannot always say exactly why. But these are moments when, in my opinion, a filmmaker was doing something right. Something amazingly right. Something that makes me glad I sat through the whole film.

You might notice a trend or two. The sometimes skewed nature of the choices is just due to the selection of movies that I have and have not seen. One more thing: most of this is from memory, so there may be a few factual errors.

Here they are, in no particular order.

• Mark Walberg (as Eddie Adams/Dirk Diggler) slowly realises he really needs to get out of his current path in life, while waiting in a dealer's living room for a bag of fake heroin to be bought, in Boogie Nights.
  
  
• Elinor Dashwood (Emma Thompson) discovers her mistake about Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant)'s marital status in Sense and Sensibility.
  
  
• Tom Cruise (as Frank T.J. Mackey) holds the telephone on which Philip Seymour Hoffman (as Phil Parma) has managed to call him, and hesitating to talk to his father ,in Magnolia.
  
  
• Warden Samuel Norton (Bob Gunton) opens up Andy Dufresne's (Tim Robbins) Bible in Shawshank Redemption.
  
  
• Gérard Depardieu, as Cyrano de Bergerac, composes a sonnet while sword-fighting in Jean-Paul Rappeneau's film named for that character.
  
  
• Robin Williams goes back into the crumbling house with his wife Annabella Sciorra in What Dreams May Come.
  
  
• Jean Réno taking the NY subway after his day job in Léon (a.k.a. The Professional)
  
  
• Jacques Mayol (Jean-Marc Barr)'s underwater dream in Le Grand Bleu.
  
  
• Sean Connery eating steak in The Hunt for Red October (and calmly stating, "Personally, I give us... one chance in three").
  
  
• Neo getting up off the floor in The Matrix.
  
  
• "The Frog" Jean-Baptiste (Cris Campion) and Princess María-Dolores de la Jenya de la Calde (Charlotte Lewis) floating apart in separate boats at the end of Roman Polanski's Pirates.
  
  
• Mel Gibson realising his daughter's glasses of water are not such a nuisance, in Signs.
  
  
• Depardieu, as Christopher Columbus, beginning to dictate his memoirs to his son in 1492. ("I remember...", he says, and drops of ink fall from his son's pen.)
  
  
• Marcel Proust (Marcello Mazzarella)'s face liquifing, from sobreity to grief, in Le Temps Retrouvé.
  
  
• Mandy Patinkin declaring "My Name is Inigo Montoya", in The Princess Bride. Oh, and the Cliffs of Insanity.
  
  
• Jenny (Robin Wright Penn) throwing rocks at her childhood home in Forrest Gump.
  
  
• Tom Hanks losing Wilson in Cast Away.
  
  
• Depardieu, (again) playing a piano solo in Green Card.
  
  
• Braveheart (Mel Gibson, again) gets a chance to recant, and instead cries out "Freedom".
  
  
• André Ziman's wife Elise sings "I'm in Heaven" to her husband, along with the radio, in Claude Lelouche's Les Misérables.
  
  
• Wind in His Hair shouts to Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner) from a ledge above, as the latter leaves the tribe.
  
  
• Val Kilmer, as Doc Holliday, showing up at a duel with a marshall's badge, in Tombstone. ("I'm your huckleberry.")
  
  
• Bill Murray, in What about Bob?, cheerfully continuing to take Richard Dreyfus' advice as metaphor, after being tied with ropes to a chair in the forest.
  
  
• Jim Carrey, in the Truman Show, starting to suspect something.
  
  
• Kiefer Sutherland (as Dr. Daniel Schreber) refreshing a few childhood memories for Rufus Sewell (as John Murdoch), in Dark City.
  
  
• Bill Murray filming his whisky advert "with intensity", in Lost in Translation.
  
  
• Robert Duvall arguing with God in The Apostle.
  
  
• Winona Ryder writing furiously in her journal, in Heathers.
  
  
• Charles Berling (Grégoire) riding his horse across the French plains in Ridicule.
  
  
• Audrey Tautou leading the blind man across the block in Paris, in le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain.
  
  
• The Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil (Glenn Close), explaining to Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont (John Malkovich), how she trained herself to hide her feelings by stabbing herself with a fork under the table, in Dangerous Liaisons.
  
  
• Tom Hulce as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, dictating his Requiem mass to F. Murray Abraham (Antonio Salieri).
  
  
• Steve Martin and John Candy think the drivers who are in the opposite lane on the highway cannot possibly know which way they are going ("Thank you!") (Planes, Trains, and Automobiles).
  
  
• Robin Williams (again), telling Matt Damon "It's not your fault", in Good Will Hunting.
  
  
• Steve Buscemi's opening narrative in Desperado.
  

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