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(There's also badassery at the very beginning of that YouTube video, when Izzard tells a front-row heckler "Just shut up, will you. I know people have heckled, but I will kill you." Netflix is streaming a bunch of his old stand-up specials. I'm loving it. He does his Darth Vader bits in "Dress to Kill" and at the end of "Circle," I believe.)
"You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill."
Apocalypse Now, Brando and Martin Sheen. I love how epic a diss that is, and how the exchange sums up both the characters and the story's central conflict. Legend has it that Brando, who was being a nightmare on set, is the one who came up with that errand boy/grocery clerks stuff. Which kind of amazing considering his general incoherence at that time.
I've been wanting to throw this topic out there for a while.
My friend is writing his dissertation on depictions of badassery in fiction. That got me thinking about how much I love badass lines.
So what's your favorite badass lines and/or dialogue from motion pictures?
Suggested Guidelines * It can be famous or less well-known * Quote it accurately (more or less) * If you feel context matters, briefly explain * Give us a pithy explanation of why you like it
(That last one might help keep things conversational rather than merely list-y.)
Urban Dictionary has a lot to say about what "badass" means. Abide by whatever it means to you. Search your heart.
Quiz Show (1994) - Ralph Fiennes, Rob Morrow, John Turturro - dir. by Robert Redford Ah the good ol' days, when someone doing a bad Boston accent in a movie was still novel. Rob Morrow isn't a bad actor, just a little short on charisma. This movie belongs to the supporting players anyway. Turturro's character, a geeky Brooklyn brainiac named Herb Stempel, cracks me up every time. You've even got Hank Azaria and Mira Sorvino in there (she was kind of becoming a thing then). At the end, Redford presents the story's resolution as if it had simply been a Faustian morality play, but it's more potent as an essay on social class and 50s-era antisemitism. The film, which dramatizes actual events, makes the savvy storytelling move of structuring it as a kind of detective story, one obsessed man trying to unravel a conspiracy. It'd been a while. I'd forgotten how much I actually liked this movie.
The Hunter (2011) Willem Dafoe, Frances O'Connor, Sam Neil Dir. by Daniel Nettheim (Currently streaming on Netflix)
I caught this Aussie movie when it came to the states about a year and a half ago, knowing only that it starred Dafoe. I liked it pretty well, and soon forgot about it. The Netflix description for this movie is insufficient. It basically says that a hunter gets hired by a military biotech firm to kill and collect tissue and blood samples of the elusive Tasmanian tiger. Which is absolutely accurate. But that's more the macguffin than What the Story's About. I found it actually pretty interesting and mostly well-executed. Various story threads get woven together fairly well, the characters' behavior generally makes sense, and Dafoe kills it (Sam Neill kind of phones it in). There's a couple really great scenes—
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one of which entails Dafoe wearing another man's garage coveralls and playing with that (deceased) man's kids outside. It's a miracle that the movie makes this set of circumstances seem utterly reasonable rather than contrived. The dead dude's troubled, heavily sedated widow then sees this scene from behind, thinks it's her actually-still-alive husband returned, and embraces Dafoe lovingly before finally realizing it's actually this dude she's never met and not her husband. The scene plays without dialogue, and is deftly set up to make it seem as plausible as something like that could seem. I realize now that I dialed the film up on Netflix last night mostly so I could see that scene again. Good stuff. The Use of Springsteen's "I'm On Fire" is a bit on the nose, but I forgive that since that's one of Springsteen's songs I actually really like.
Not a great movie, but a nice surprise that night at the theater and something I enjoyed re-watching.
Ya, when I say cut it down, I don't mean changing the whole idea and meaning. Malick is a very spiritual guy, and I don't mind the "we'll all be reunited one day" stuff. It doesn't push any specific theology at all, nor does some form of afterlife imply a god-figure pulling the strings. The best thing about the movie is the way it suggests that either a creator doesn't exist, or if he does, he doesn't give a fuck about you as he's kinda busy creating and shaping the universe and all of space-time.
That's interesting. Like you, I didn't think it was flogging a specific theology, per se. But there were some Christian commentators (Andrew Sullivan is one) who took TTOL as an explicitly Christian tract. I didn't get that exactly, but they make a good case.
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The family in the film is Christian. (White people, in Texas, in the 50s. Pitt plays church organ. Chastain spins baby around, points to the sky and says "That's where God lives"—doubtful she's referring to Thor. And people have argued that the parents are stand-ins for Christian figureheads, the stern Old Testament father, the merciful mother, something like that.) But then, like you say, you could go either way with it. The sandy afterlife could even be pure poetry, not an an actual afterlife. In the end, I kind of do read the film as implying that some kind of God, some intelligence force, maybe an imperfect one, cares about humankind enough to give us this cool-ass beach.
Remove that beach stuff at the end, re-order a scene or two, and there it is, basically. It goes from saying "Humans are really quite special [I didn't see any dinosaurs on that heavenly beach], and even in a chaotic universe we will re-unite after death in an idealized form" to saying "Humans are just another organism in the biosphere. All we have is this life and each other. There's nothing stopping a giant space rock from killing the Earth, and your kid brother could suddenly die. So seize the day (or something like that)."
So, if you turn it into the exact opposite movie than what the creator intended, it becomes something you like
Haha. You got me.
Honestly, it's not that I wish TM would have made "my" movie. I'm glad he made his movie. It's that the first half of his movie signaled that it might go in a particular direction, one I'd have dug more than the direction it eventually went in. So there was a let-down effect. That's not even a proper critique—it's just what my experience with the film was. To be sure, most people who liked TTOL would think my version sucked balls.
That's true. You really could fan-edit TTOL into the movie some of us thought it was shaping up to be. All the raw materials are there. The scant dialogue makes it easier.
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Remove that beach stuff at the end, re-order a scene or two, and there it is, basically. It goes from saying "Humans are really quite special [I didn't see any dinosaurs on that heavenly beach], and even in a chaotic universe we will re-unite after death in an idealized form" to saying "Humans are just another organism in the biosphere. All we have is this life and each other. There's nothing stopping a giant space rock from killing the Earth, and your kid brother could suddenly die. So seize the day (or something like that)."
I wasn't totally on board with TM's last movie, To the Wonder, but it's apparent message didn't bug me as much. It's much more of a "Life's crazy and perplexing. Yet, you know, somehow there is fleeting beauty/bliss/love [or whatever]" kind of theme. (The movie also proves that a Carhartt jacket can be sexy if Rachel MacAdams is wearing it.)
That would be closer to the Herzog version of the story. Now there's a filmmaker who takes many of the same ideas as Malick and explores them in complex and interesting ways.
Yeah, it's like he explores the same territory Malick does but without buffing out the messiness of real life. Malick's movies can feel like airy, guided meditations on how we'd like to imagine the world looks (always magic hour, ever a pleasant breeze); Herzog's best movies are more like demonstrations of how bittersweet and/or tragic life is. Herzog contends that nature is actually kind of a bitch.
I sound like I'm a Malick hater. I'm not. I'm down with Badlands and Days of Heaven. And there's stuff in The Tree of Life that I quite enjoy. What irks me is that he gets lauded as if he's the cinematic equivalent of Kierkegaard when he's closer to the equivalent of Deepak Chopra. TTOL film resonated with a lot of people for the exact reasons I bitch about. Lots of people share (or are on some level sympathetic to) the film's assertions about life/death/the cosmos. That's cool. They're poised to have a transcendent experience with it. I'm not the ideal audience for TTOL, is all.
I'm not in love with Terry Malick either. He doesn't lack talent—he's got a good eye, and I actually dig Badlands—he's just not as thoughtful as advertised. What he's actually saying in his movies is often banal. The Tree of Life (while I think parts of it are pretty cool) bugs the shit out of me for that reason. It gets treated like it's this uniquely astute treatise on our place in the cosmos, but it all seems pretty trite to me. (Admittedly, part of it is that I simply don't like the movie's ethos of "Hey, if your relationships in life are less-than-ideal, don't trip. That suffering was part of a larger master plan, and it'll all get sorted in the afterlife, where everything's perfect." What made that really sting for me is, when I initially saw TTOL, the first half of the movie—dinosaurs keeling over and such—got me excited that maybe Malick was heading toward almost the exact opposite sentiment. I.e., the universe doesn't care about us, so we should jolly well care about each other. Which is not exactly where Malick ends up.)
I admit, I was actually waiting for something to pop up in the thread before I recorded. I'll lay my lines down presently and get it to you tomorrow, aural. Please accept this emoticon as a sign of good faith:
I prefer to think of Good Will Hunting as an elaborate prequel that chronicles Dr. Erik Selvig's stint as an award-winning mathematician before he migrated to the Marvel universe and started monkeying with that damn tesseract.
Silver Linings Playbook is a horrific piece of shit that should have been pumped full of in sulfuric acid In Utero.
I thought it was rather overrated myself. Some of the performances were good. The screenplay seemed basically good (it was adapted from a novel that I have not read), but the nominations for direction David O. Russell received kind of baffle me. Also somewhat baffling to me was all the kudos the film received for being a realistic depiction of mental illness. Seemed more like a slightly romanticized depiction of mental illness.
Also, there is one from Phantom Menace where Dorkman describes Obi-Wan's role as "standing around and wait." The whole scene of Obi-Wan saying it was a trap and not to do that caused Teague to laugh hysterically.
Teague asks the panel something like "What's Obi-Wan's character in this movie — what's he do?" and Michael says "To stand there and watch!" Yeah, good call. Gotta pull that one.
If anyone's working with the Revenge of the Sith episode, maybe pull the part where Dorkman says something like [in Anakin's voice] "Okay, well I guess I'm down with your genocide then. But you better give me an army because I can only really kill kids."
Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith Dorkman's legendary belt-buckle rant (2:20:15-2:22:09)
Oh my yes. That was the first thing I thought of. It might be the greatest two minutes of audio ever.
Not sure if these have been mentioned yet:
* Dorkman's dramatic reading of Leigh Bracket's original cave scene from Empire. Teague says "This reads like Dark Helmet."
* Also from that episode: a little moment where the original story treatment gets discussed, and Trey says "Father-in-law — Han has a father-in-law?" [He gets told that indeed this was the case] "Huh... no one will be seated when Han speaks to his father-in-law..."
* Going along with that — an edited-together stretch of Trey's "No one will be seated" moments would make my frickin' day. Cloe says it on The Dark Crystal episode, too.
* I hope you guys at least consider including the anti-moon-landing-hoaxers rant from the Apollo 13 episode ("Kill yourself now! If you're within the sound of my voice: Kill. Yourself. Now."). It's might sound extreme to newcomers, but it could be edited so that the context is clear.
It's a really, really great choice of charity, guys. I will absolutely give some of my money.
I assume Teague will be spend all 24 hours of the telethon doing a Jerry Lewis impression. (Special performances by Ben Vereen, Bernadette Peters, Rich Little?)
If you're in a charitable mood, you can kinda see how people might make the "irregardless" mistake, since it sounds like "irrespective," which is an actual word that means something like "regardless."
Here's one of my favorites: people who want to use the word "bias" but have no clue how to inflect it for what they're trying to say. And so they write stuff like "You are totally bias in your opinions! Eat shit & die biatch!" Visit your local YouTube comment thread to see that one in action.
It's a little-known fact, but that's exactly how Noah Webster rose to prominence — on his knees, between the dumpster and the freight entrance, gettin' it done.
The Girl Who Kicked a Hornet's Nest has nothing to do with a child engaging in violent acts of animal cruelty.
Paradise Lost has nothing to do with the work of John Milton.
Milk is not an expose on the dairy industry. It's just the story of some dude who got shot by Josh Brolin.
The Man with the Golden Arm is not a spin-off sequel about C-3PO's short-lived career in professional arm wrestling. Inexplicably, it's just a film about Frank Sinatra shooting heroin back in the day.
And much to my chagrin, Friends in Your Head is not a network of podcasts chronicling my daily hallucinations. It's about sharks or something.
