Category: selected scenes

Selected Scenes: The Long Good Friday

A spoiler-heavy multi-scene film analysis & review.

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Allow me to be a peg self-righteous for one moment, much like the aggrandizing protagonist of this week’s Selected Scenes, Harold Shand (played by the inimitable Bob Hoskins). Really, I should be writing a review for every movie I watch, at this point. There really is no excuse, especially if it’s something that I’ve been looking forward to watching. If it’s your garden-variety Netflix this-or-that then I get it: I’m maybe only looking at a couple of paragraphs (which wouldn’t sum-up to much more than the usual “I hate it, I hate their model, I hate everything” sort-of diatribe you’ve all read before), and then I need to find a way to get screenshots or (God-forbid) draw something, because this is the Internet and you need a flash screen to get people’s attention, as much as a wall-of-text is criminally-fascinating.

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Selected Scenes: The Angels’ Melancholia

A spoiler-heavy multi-scene film analysis & review.

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Hmm. Another shot of a woman peeing. She pees standing up at a sit-down toilet, pees on the floor, and pees on a dead guy’s face. Sometimes she poops, too: often at the same time as Number 1, lit sultrily by a bonfire where our protagonists are burning the disemboweled corpse of one of their own. Characters stick their fingers in each other’s holes and you are guaranteed a money-shot of their shit-stained fingers after, too. “Oh, well there’s that” I thought to myself as another disturbing image passed my view while I sat on my couch, high and alone at 10 PM on my Friday night.

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Selected Scenes: M

A spoiler-heavy single-scene film review & analysis.

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In the last “Selected Scenes”, I noted that The Canterbury Tales the Book was a staple of modern courses in English. To set the stage for today’s edition (and it’s a doozy), here is the exact quote presented pedantically and unsarcastically:

“…the final shot of the crowd paying tribute could be interpreted as the common public, approving of Chaucer’s work as much as the artist himself. And they did: The Canterbury Tales the Book has been a staple of Middle English literature in Universities everywhere, obscenity-be-damned.”

I don’t think anyone will debate me on this but it did have me thinking. One of the first things you learn as an essay writer is to cite your sources: produce a bibliography to that academic specification we all remember from high school (start with the last name of the author and follow the format, tabbing the second line, etcetera) and make sure that you can prove something before you say something. I never cited any “official” sources that said Canterbury Tales was taught in English courses: it’s just something I know. Isn’t that why quote-unquote “classics” are given that designation? Because they have risen above anonymity and in to the social pantheon of common parlance?

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Selected Scenes: The Canterbury Tales

A spoiler-heavy multi-scene film review & analysis.

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The late, great, Italian multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini wasn’t always about doom and gloom and the dark side of the human condition. His trio of films dubbed the “Trilogy of Life”, adapted from three prolific tomes of short stories, is as light and airy as your garden-variety Italian sex romp: something the filmmaker specifically hated hearing. But it’s true, and that’s not to fault it! His “Canterbury Tales” adaptation is wedged between his cinematic depictions of The Decameron and One Thousand and One Nights, respectively, and his detached filmmaking style lends itself nicely to the non-streamlined essence of the picture.

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Selected Scenes: The Bone Collector

Spoiler Alert!

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Lincoln Rhyme is a living legend among the NYPD elite, and it’s a wonder he’s still living. The brilliant homicide detective-slash-criminologist has written the book – several in fact – on investigating crime, but since a tragic accident left him quadriplegic and bed-ridden he has lost the will to live. How can he do what he was born to when, along with being isolated, his colleagues think he’s more of a washed-up celebrity then the force of nature he was? A new serial killer is prowling the streets. When Rhyme is consulted on the crime scene photos, he sees a way to work from home: by letting the photographer, rookie Amelia Donaghy, be his eyes-and-ears on the ground. With his almost-supernatural ability to deduce and the cop’s instincts she inherited from her father, the duo grind the case out together but not quickly enough to save this murderer’s victims from the tauntingly-complex time-sensitive contraptions he has them hooked up to. Rhyme and Donaghy find out the killer is using a crime novel as his template and with the last murder in the book completed, he turns his attention to Rhyme. Turns out, the killer is not only one of Rhyme’s medical orderlies but a corrupt ex-cop who Lincoln slandered in one of his true-crime books, who was then “used as a human toilet” in prison and released with a taste for elaborately-plotted vengeance. How will Lincoln get himself out of this jam? Can he count on the new friends he made along the way? Will their kindness inspire a new joie-de-vivre in this crippled husk of a man? Am I digging for character depth too deeply in a movie where the lead actor got to lie down on a bed for ninety-nine percent of the time?

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