Best Use Of Multiple Weapons In An Action Sequence: Chow Yun-Fat, Hard Boiled
Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch showed that violence could be visual poetry, but Peckinpah acolyte John Woo turned it into slow-motion ballet, with Chow Yun-Fat's often two-fisted handgun blasts setting off exploding squibs and doves a-plenty. But no single moment in the Woo-Chow collaboration was as iconic as the opening action sequence in 1992's Hard Boiled, which peaks with Chow sliding down the staircase banister with both guns blazing. With those few gloriously extended seconds, the "Cinema Of Cool" had officially arrived.
Runner-up: Bruce Campbell, Evil Dead II
After Campbell fires up the chainsaw custom-fit for his severed right hand, his first course of action before battling the undead is to lop off the barrel of his "boomstick." ("Groovy.") In the climactic confrontation, the chainsaw does much of the handiwork, but the shotgun provides an answer to that stingy beheaded demon that threatens to swallow his soul: "Swallow this."
Best Movie Featuring Full-Frontal Harvey Keitel Nudity: Bad Lieutenant
Abel Ferrara's provocative 1992 drama provided Keitel with his richest role to date, as a hopelessly corrupt, gambling, junkie cop whose spiritual reawakening begins when he looks into the case of a nun's defilement at the hands of local thugs. But before he crawls back to the light, Keitel engages in debauchery, including a scene in which he drowns himself in Stoli, dances with a half-naked bondage girl and her creepy androgynous boyfriend, and stumbles around completely naked, arms at his sides, making Stooge-like crying noises.
Runner-up: The Piano
Not a year later, full-frontal Harvey returned in Jane Campion's Palme D'Or-winning period romance as a masculine plantation worker who has no need for the suffocating garments of high society. This time, his love handles represent an authentic expression of the natural world. Seriously.
Best Cinematic Reason To Move To Canada: The Parallax View
Before he addressed Watergate directly with All The President's Men, director Alan J. Pakula hinted in this 1974 thriller—much more ominously—that America's government is an ever-present, malevolent force that can operate apart from democracy and cannot be stopped. As Warren Beatty tries to infiltrate a secret organization behind a political assassination, he discovers a wide-reaching, conspiratorial, vaguely "patriotic" cabal that functions without oversight and with enough power to squelch the poor suckers like himself who try to expose it. To date, it remains the most frightening film about how Big Brother is already watching us.
Runner-up: Delta Farce
Just knowing that there are enough people in America to support the redneck comic stylings of Larry The Cable Guy through prominent stand-up gigs and two non-cable-maintenance-call-related motion pictures is reason enough to reconsider the charms of Saskatchewan. But plopping Larry and his buddies in a wartime farce where they mistake Mexico for Iraq sets a new benchmark for cultural insensitivity.
Best Movie About The Turbulent Lives Of American Stewardesses: Come Fly With Me
The "flight attendants travel the globe in search of romance" formula reached its campy peak with this fizzy, faux-sophisticated 1963 melodrama, in which cynical stew Dolores Hart schools newbie Pamela Tiffin on which passengers and pilots are cool to fool around with, and which are a one-way ticket to nowhere. From the sumptuous widescreen cinematography—recording the airports of many lands—to the pillowy morality play that brings all its heroines to a reasonably happy place by the end credits, Come Fly With Me is as breezy as the back end of a jet engine.
Runner-up: Flight Angels
One of the progenitors of this formula, this 1940 comedy featured Jane Wyman—later to star in the sublime stewardess romance Three Guys Named Mike—as one of a set of air hostesses showing off their serving skills to future husbands.
Best Delightfully Awful Anthony Hopkins Performance: Legends Of The Fall
Shortly after Jonathan Demme and Merchant-Ivory Productions helped elevate Hopkins from also-ran Shakespearean to "greatest actor of his generation," the veteran thespian capitalized on his industry heat by starring in almost any movie that would let him chew the scenery. In the preposterous potboiler Legends Of The Fall, Hopkins plays the patriarch of a ranching family; as his health fails, his looming presence in his sons' lives shrinks until he's just grabbing their arms, staring wild-eyed into their faces, and grunting incoherent instructions in a Popeye voice.
Runner-up: The Road To Wellville
Released the same year as Legends Of The Fall, Wellville has Hopkins as health guru John Kellogg, pushing cereal on his patients and analyzing their stool samples, while boasting in a ludicrous patrician accent that his own daily excretions are "gigantic, with no more odor than a hot biscuit."
Best Oddball Legion Of Super-Heroes Superhero: Bouncing Boy
Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel was assigned to write Superboy stories when he returned to DC Comics at the end of the '50s, which meant he got to apply his fevered imagination to the 30th-century superhero team that had just been added to Superboy's regular cast of characters. One of his weirdest additions was Bouncing Boy, blessed with the power of "super-bouncing," which he used by expanding his body into a big, round ball, and then, well… bouncing. Sometimes he bounced on bad guys. Sometimes he bounced up high to scout around. Mostly he just bounced in the background of crowded panels, reminding readers that yes, Bouncing Boy was still a Legionnaire.
Runner-up: Matter-Eater Lad
Another Siegel creation, Matter-Eater Lad was capable of consuming anything. Which came in handy roughly never.
Best Dirty Prince Song: "Let's Pretend We're Married"
Prince began playing with eroticism in pop music early in his career, with relatively coy singles like "Soft And Wet" and "I Wanna Be Your Lover." Once he dropped all pretense of double-entendre with the 1980 album Dirty Mind, the sky was the limit. Prince rarely got much raunchier than in "Let's Pretend We're Married," an ecstatic updating of The Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice" in which the singer wants his girlfriend to play at being a grown-up so he can "fuck the taste out of [her] mouth." A last-second appeal to Christian spirituality doesn't wash off the stain of the previous seven minutes of technopop pornography.
Runner-up: "Head" This track from Dirty Mind is also a wedding song of a kind, in which a bride-to-be has a life-changing bout of oral sex with His Royal Badness.
Best Sesame Street Letter Song: "Would You Like To Buy An O?"
Hard to say what's better about this slinky little song: the way the guy with a coat full of Os sidles up to Ernie like a pusher on a playground, or the way Ernie noisily overreacts to his pitch. ("It'll cost you just a nickel." "A NICKEL?!!") Or how about the way the O salesman all but forces his product on Ernie at the end, singing, "Just buy the O and take it home tonight—don't ask any questions!" Thus, a whole generation learned that if some strange person on the street offers you something, you take it.
Runner-up: "The National Association Of W Lovers"
In which Ernie's roommate Bert lectures to a convention hall full of W buffs about the special properties of their favorite letter. Without it, "a fine word like 'waffle' would turn out just awful."
« Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next »
- Comments