Top 10 Memorable Scenes Of 2016
Along with great films comes sometimes ever greater scenes. This year I broke down 10 of my favorite. These are all my personal favorite and are on this list because I haven’t stopped thinking about them since I saw them in the dark room with the giant shining light where I do my worship. These scenes are Heaven and film is God.
10. Morris From America (Car Ride) Of all the films I saw this year, Morris From America was one of the best surprises. Chad Hartigan’s coming of age tale about a young American boy growing up in Germany with his single father played brilliantly by Craig Robinson is the perfect examination of the loneliness of growing up and being grown up. In a key scene from the film Morris, played by Markees Christmas, has gone out of town with some new friends and gets stranded when he no longer wants to follow the group and starts getting taunted. His father has to come pick him up and the car ride in which Robinsons character explains to Morris all about his own loneliness and sense of sadness with being out of place in Germany is a beautiful revelation for both characters. It’s one of the best things Craig Robinson has done. The sadness and loneliness that we all feel but never can convey is brought out wonderfully in this conversation. As children we assume our parents could never understand our loneliness and as parents we aren’t sure how to connect with our kids but this scene shows that conversations can move mountains and break down barriers.
9. American Honey ( Star Grows Up) American Honey is like if Andrea Arnold was able to capture the wild excitement and the unstable emotional state of the youth of America. Throughout the film you follow Star, played by newcomer Sasha Lane, who is a young Midwestern girl who isn’t exactly living the best life. She and her younger siblings dig through trash cans for food while she also deals with sexual advances from her absent mothers boyfriend. It’s a situation you want her to get out of but what way out is there? Star comes across a van of misfits and lowlifes lead by king rat tail, Shia LaBeouf as Jake in an unusually good performance, who go door to door selling magazines. Star joins this merry band of arm pit stains and sets off on a literal journey to self discovery. The final scene displays the group dancing around a camp fire like some tribe of young stoners who worship Rihanna and it’s a mesmerizing site. Jake and Star and the rest of the group dance around the fire and sing songs as if it’s their most natural state. Jake pulls Star to the side and hands her a little turtle. Throughout the film Jake has been giving Star gifts but it’s mostly to disguise the fact that he’s really taking more away from her. The mind games he plays with himself and her are leaving Star emotionally confused and scarred. She takes the turtle and sets it back in the lake and even taking a dip in it herself. The scene plays like a baptism of sorts, allowing Star to let go of the childish games and relationships and start to become herself, whatever that may be.The scene doesn’t guarantee that Stars life gets better or that she even learned what she needed to from her interactions with Jake and the rest of the crew but it shows one persons internal growth in a masterful way.
8. Swiss Army Man (One Last Fart)
Throughout Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s brilliant Swiss Army Man you are subjected to Daniel Radcliffe as a farting corpse named Manny and Paul Dano as the miserable loser Hank who finds his body washed up on the shore of a random island he choose to kill him self on. After Hank uses Manny as a speed boat he ends up in the wilderness with the need to survive and the only way he can is with the help of Manny and his many uses. He can chop wood and shot bullets out of his mouth and everything else like some ummm… Multi Purpose Dude?…. NO! Like a Swiss Army Man! Throughout the film Hank displays an unhealthy obsession with a female character named Sarah, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, we only see in flashbacks or pictures. You come to find out that, even though he has a picture of her as his screen saver, Hank has actually never talked to her and has been too scared and shy to really function as a socially expectable human being. When we get to the end and Hank ends up in Sarah’s backyard and finally on a beach where he’s already been outed as an obsessive stalker he lets out a fart and declares very proudly it was him who farted and in a lesser film Sarah’s reaction would be one of Joy and maybe she would have even entertained dating him seeing that as his self discovery but not in this film. Sarah and her husband a long with the rest of the crowd gathered on the beach watch in horror and never excuse the behavior. It throws the whole idea of all you have to do is be yourself and you’ll get the girl right out the fucking window. Sarah and the audience know Hank has a problem and regardless of how whimsical and cute it is, it’s a problem and he needs help and she or any woman of your dreams for that matter isn’t the answer and shouldn’t be forced to be your savior. Hank is off but he’s growing and watching Manny smile and fart his way up the ocean waves as everyone watches in disgust and horror and Hank,who stares and smiles knowing he saved a life,was one of the funniest and heartbreaking moments I’ve seen all year.
7. The VVitch ( Unholy bond with Black Phillip)
Robert Eggers delivered one of the best horror films to come out in a long time. A slow burn of a film that deals with a family living out in the woods in 1630s New England. The family is cast out of their community and forced to live out in the woods where an evil presence lurks. The Witch is about liberation. It’s about freeing yourself from the shackles of society with all their religion and rules for how one should act. It is especially a tale of liberation concerning Anya Taylor-Joy’s character Thomasin. She’s carried down by the weight of her responsibilities within her family. A role she didn’t ask for but is expected of her since she is a growing young woman. She must watch after the kids and clean the house and cook and do all the things her families religion and society has assigned to her. Throughout the film an evil lurks in the woods in the form of a witch. You know you’re in for some fucked up shit when the film starts with a naked lady cutting open a baby and bathing in its blood. You don’t see all the gory details but you get the feeling that living out in the woods in New England during the 1630s was a pretty stupid idea. The scene I want to talk about is the ending of the film. An ending that pretty much will make or break what you thought of the film up to that point. The ending in which Thomasin pledges an alliance with Black Phillip, the goat who Thomasins younger siblings claim to be the Devil earlier in the film and Thomasin brushes it off, and follows him into the woods to find a camp fire of witches laughing and screaming until all at once they start to lift towards the sky in what is one of the best visual representations of liberation I’ve seen. Now, I’m not saying this movie got me to denounce God and start worshipping the Devil but it did.
6. Jackie ( Assassination Scene )
Pablo Larrain has knocked the biopic on its head with this amazing psychological horror film and Natalie Portman gives the performance of her career playing Jacqueline Kennedy in her most vulnerable and fragile moments. The key scene in question is the sun in which this film revolves around. The assassination scene could have been done in a very exploitive and classless way in the hands of a lesser film maker. The fact that we can actually see footage of the event only adds to pressure surrounding the scene. We all pretty much have watched the film footage. It’s morbid and violent and chaotic and it satisfies the worst of our voyeuristic tendencies. This could have been done in a way that glorifies the scene as some action set piece head shot but Larrain films the scene with a real heavy grace, dropping you in the car with a loud BANG! we are chaos and panic and we’ve landed right on Jackie and you feel as she pushes and struggles with us as we tear through the scene like a bullet creating uncertainty and dread. Every awkward movement and confused look is captured perfectly in this scene and it’s like we are seeing it for the first time and really feeling the weight of it.
5. La La Land ( Traffic Jam )
The opening scene of Damien Chazelle’s spectacular film La La Land is pretty much the opening scene to your life if you live in LA. Being stuck in traffic is hell but almost everyone of those people, honking and shouting, are here because they have a dream and trying to successfully realize that dream can make life one huge traffic jam. This glorious musical sequence is made all the more spectacular by being done in what is made to look like one unbroken long take that slips and glides up down the 105 as morning commuters dance and sing as if though Los Angeles is the casting director for Hollywoods latest big budget musical. They don’t make them like this anymore and Chazelle makes the case that as long as you know what you’re doing and you have a passion for film musicals can still be relevant and fresh but still remind us of the optimism and joy of early Hollywood. The scene encompasses everything about the film. Ambition, talent, and guts. You gotta have them to make it in La La Land and you gotta have them to think you can open a film like La La Land with a musical number as ambitious as this.
4. Captain America : Civil War ( Airport Scene )
The Russo Brothers snuck into my brain and unlocked my comic book geek dreams and wildest fantasies and used that collective knowledge to create not only one of the greatest superhero films of all time but one of the all time greatest superhero film scenes ever put on screen. I can write pages and pages about this scene and every little detail that was done correctly and with such care that it made me cry but I am just going to remind you that Spider Man is the best he’s ever been on screen in his brief moments in this film. Ant- Man and Paul Rudd as Ant Man is the superhero we didn’t know we needed. HE FUCKING TURNS INTO GIANT MAN! Just go watch the scene. As a matter of fact I’m going to stop typing and you should stop reading and just GO WATCH CIVIL WAR NOW!
3. Moonlight ( End of act 1/ Closing Shot )
What can I say about Moonlight that hasn’t already been said? It’s considered one of the best films of the year and for a very good reason. This beautiful film about self discovery and connection in a world that doesn’t give you a chance to do either of those things for yourself is a master class in subtle filmmaking. Barry Jenkins creates a giant effect with small intimate moments and although he is the cook it is his main ingredients that really bring this dish together. All the actors playing the 3 stages of Chiron’s life are pitch perfect and are supported by an array of brilliant performances. One of those performances belongs to Mahershala Ali, who plays Juan the drug dealer, and gives one of the best performances of the year. The scene in question puts us at Juans home where he lives with his girlfriend, played by Janelle Monae, and it’s the end of act one. We’ve just experienced Juan coming across a young Chiron ,who was being bullied and chased by older kids, and eventually forming a bond. This bond allows young Chiron to not have to go home to his crack addict mother, played by a fantastic Naomie Harris, and use Juans place as a safe haven from her addiction and verbal abuse but what Chiron doesn’t know is that Juan is where his mother gets the drugs that are sending her and his life spinning out of control. In an emotional gut punch of a scene young Chiron walks up to Juan who is sitting at his kitchen table and asks him if he is the one who sells drugs to his mother. What follows is one of the most heartbreaking exchanges I’ve ever seen on film and Mahershala Ali as Juan quietly figuring out in his head what to tell Chiron and eventually telling him the truth is an automatic Oscar in my opinion. Juan’s reluctance to tell Chiron and his eventual feelings of disappointment and anger towards himself are all shown in Ali’s eyes and body language. He never goes for the big scene and makes it larger than life because of it.
2. The Lobster ( David picks up on the Heartless woman while biscuit woman dies on the floor next to them )
In Yorgos Lanthimo’s brilliant relationship satire we follow David, played by Colin Farrell, as he is forced to live in a hotel for 45 days because he is single and being single is outlawed and in order to avoid being turned into an animal after 45 days he must find a partner and create a relationship with them in the hotel. Sounds like every other fucking day, am I right? In this brilliant comedy our characters find love with each other by finding certain traits that each can relate to. For example, a young woman has constant nose bleeds and instead of trying to win her over with a personality, another character decides to bang his head or stab a sharp object into his nose in order to give the impression that he also has constant nose bleeds and wins her over. It’s the perfect metaphor for the way people court each other and try to win each other over with surface and artificial things like being into the same bands or having the same fashion sense. In this key scene David decides he needs to find a partner soon and that he will also need to fake something in order to find her. David finds himself being attracted to The Heartless Woman, played by Angeliki Papoulia who was also in the directors previous film Dogtooth, who is given that nickname because she is mean and has no heart. The scene that really brought this film together and makes it stand out above the rest is a scene where one of the hotel guests has just jumped out of a window in an attempt to kill herself. She lays on the floor all crippled and screaming in pain when David sees this as an opportunity to try and court the heartless woman, he walks up behind her as she sits in a hot tub not very far from the attempted suicide and say’s out loud how he hopes that the lady will die soon so that she stops screaming because it’s really disturbing his day and with that heartless statement he gets a glance from the heartless woman and from there they are a couple. It’s doomed from the start and he knows it but with the pressure on us everyday to find a partner we are willing to go against ourselves to please others and even willing to complain about a dying woman’s screams. It’s hilarious and heartbreaking and dark in ways that give me joy beyond comprehension.
1. Green Room ( Patrick Stewart vs. Anton Yelchin )
Jeremy Saulnier’s punk rock horror film Green Room stands above the rest this year when it comes to thrills and twists you never see coming. It’s a master class in suspense and tension. This isn’t some free for all shoot ‘em up stab 'em frenzy, it’s a calculated cat and mouse game that requires our characters to think before acting. A punk rock band has just witnessed a murder in the green room of the venue they just played that just so happens to be run by a menacing skinhead gang. The bands bassist, played by the late and talented Anton Yelchin, was able to dial the cops on his cell phone before it’s grabbed from his hands and this creates a problem for both parties. Now that the band has seen what they saw the venue can’t exactly let them go but after having the cops called on the venue they can’t exactly just straight up murder these kids so they have to figure something out and they get their help in the form of their quiet but menacing leader Darcy, played by a brilliant Patrick Stewart, who figures out a way to get rid of the band and save face. At this point our band is locked up in the green room holding one of the skinheads hostage while they have his gun and figure out how the hell to get out of there. One punk suggests shooting his way out but this isn’t that movie and our characters know that they could have more guns on the other side and at this point the band believes the cops are on their way to the venue. Enter Darcy who shows up to clean the mess by promising that they will let the band go without harming them as long as they hand over the gun and the person they have in the room safely but the band as well as the audience knows that isn’t the case and it isn’t going to be that simple. What follows is one of the most tense stand offs in cinema history. It’s Anton Yelchin trying to figure out if he should unlock the door and hand over the gun to Patrick Stewart on the other side but it’s a back and forth that has both actors matching wit and verbally trying to knock the other out. It isn’t until the end of the scene that we get a burst of violence and chaos but leading up to that is a strategy game that leaves you at the edge of your seat and asking yourself “ What the fuck would I do in a situation like this?” and then showing you there is no right or wrong answer and you can’t always just go into action hero mode because the situation calls for it. For the most part you just die.
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