Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Philip Seymour Hoffman in SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008)

Do not watch the attached clip until you see the movie. I repeat: see the movie first. Ironic though it may seem given the title of this movie, this scene cannot stand for the whole expericne of Synecdoche, New York. Actually, that's sort of the point of the movie: the little moments of life can never replace the whole of experience. In the above scene, which is the last in the movie, the end is nigh, all is in tatters, and it's too late for new realizations. I find the scene almost unbearably poignant, which is quite the magic trick, considering all of the weird, unsettling elements the run through the scene. And yet: always the tears. (HC)

Kevin Spacey in L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997)

The murder of Spacey's Jack Vincennes in Curtis Hanson's adaptation of James Ellroy's '50s-set police procedural is designed to be the single greatest shock in a movie full of them, and a low point in the audience's capacity to hope for a bearable outcome: if a guy this smart could walk right into his killer's kitchen with his guard down, what hope is there that the lugs he leaves behind will be able to crack the case? Spacey does it full justice, running the gamut from dismay to despair to dark-humored self-amusement at having been played, all in about half a minute, while letting the light drain from his eyes as if he'd been able to borrow God's personal dimmer. If Spacey has done little since he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, at least in terms of his choice of movie roles (except give audiences reason to think that he might be far less smart than advertised), let no one doubt that the man has chops. (PN)

Jeff Daniels in SPEED (1994) & Denis Leary in GUNMEN (1994)

Speed is as nifty as high concept gets, a pretty much perfect wind-up toy movie, but it does have one, almost jarring moment of pure, deep feeling: the moment when Daniels, the best actor in the cast by a fair margin, triggers the explosive device that he immediately realizes is going to kill him, and just stands there, trying to be ready for what he knows is coming and can't prevent. Amusingly, the noisy, rolling junkyard that is the Mario Van Peebles-Christopher Lambert flick Gunmen, which came out a few months earlier, includes a scene that, while kind of dandy on its own, gains weight when seen as a pre-emptive parody of the Jeff Daniels scene. Gunmen's chief villain, played by Denis Leary, whose constant flow of exasperated, blustering complaints and insults makes it seem as if he's throwing peanut shells at the screen even as he himself is in the movie, barges into a cabin, throws open the door, and eyeballs the bomb that's set to go off in a second. "Well," he says, choosing his famous last words carefully, "fuck me!" (PN)

Paul Reubens in BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1992)

Words fail me. (PN)

Shelley Winters in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955)

It's safe to say that the ten minutes captured in the clip above constitute a snapshot of one of the worst marriages in cinema. I'm sure Shelley Winters' Willa Harper would have gladly traded her union for the relatively sane one in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? First, her new husband, the preacher-ish Harry Powell lets her know in no uncertain terms that there will be no canoodling in this marriage. Then there's how her kids claim that Powell is constantly trying to threaten them into revealing where her no-good murdering thief of a first husband hid the money he stole from the bank. And her boss up at the store, Icey Spoon (!!!), who pushed her into this marriage, is always sticking her nose in as if nothing's wrong. Then, when she realizes the truth about Powell, she's too far gone to even attempt to defend herself. Her final resting place (starting at around 3:25 in the clip below) illustrates just how tragic a role that life has chosen for her. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Eight & Nine

Contributors: Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Finding Amanda"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

One function of film festivals is to provide a home for movies made by well-placed industry insiders who are under the mistaken impression that we're waiting to see what they'll do when they "stretch." Festivals give them a chance to show off their little art projects to a receptive or at least indulgent audience, including fellow insiders and aspirants to insiderdom who will at least make a big show of getting the in-jokes. ("That gross, disgusting security guard character--do you think it was supposed to be Harvey!?") Finding Amanda was written and directed by Peter Tolan, who wrote Analyze This, co-wrote America's Sweethearts, worked on various TV series (Murphy Brown), and is the creator and co-producer of Rescue Me, a crime against humanity that is sometimes miscategorized as a TV show. His new movie stars Matthew Broderick, whose opportunities for leading movie roles are contracting as his neck expands, as a once-promising TV writer who smashed his career up on the shoals of a triumvirate of addictions (drugs, booze, and gambling) and has now managed to crawl back to a job writing a third-rate sitcom. (The at-work scenes come complete with a self-deprecating cameo appearance by Ed Begley, Jr.) The plot kicks into gear when Broderick, whose control over his gambling jones turns out to be notional at best, finds out that his niece Amanda (Elizabeth Rice) is down in Las Vegas turning tricks for drug money. Broderick's long-suffering wife (Maura Tierney) has just discovered a wad of betting slips that he inexplicably stuffed into the glove compartment of their car after spending an afternoon at the track, so since the time he had set aside to work on his marriage has just been freed up, he decides to swing over to Vegas and persuade Amanda of the joys of rehab.

Casting Broderick in a role like this--a variant of the kind of wild-man character that Tolan has been writing for Denis Leary on TV--is a bigger gamble than some of the bets made in Vegas by people who were last seen being escorted out to the desert by men shaped like monster trucks. I don't guess there's any hard and fast rule that states that an out-of-control thrillseeker with an addictive personality can't also be a finicky little dweeb with an unearned sense of entitlement, but who would want to watch such a creature? The best of Broderick's recent movies--Election, which, come to think of it, wasn't really all that recent--exploited his movie past by suggesting that fifteen-odd years of wear and tear had turned Ferris Bueller into his old arch-nemesis, the high school principal. Finding Amanda takes advantage of his stage background as Neil Simon's youthful alter ego, if you can call that an advantage. His comedy-writer character trudges through the movie spitting out a steady stream of unfunny, mechanical one-liners and sorry excuses for smart-ass remarks. If this is a deliberate method of showing what years of self-abuse have done to the guy's talent, the fact remains that it's the audience that's stuck listening to them. Finding Amanda never gets enough of a handle on its unlikable hero--it's not clear whether he's meant to be as big an unrepentant asshole as he seems to be, or even whether he really cares about the niece or just wants a chance to go on a Vegas spree while telling himself that he's on a quest. Most of the best work in the movie is done by people, like Tierney, whose roles are so small that its as if they were pressed into service after dropping by the set because they heard the catering was really good. Steve Coogan turns up for a couple of scenes as a casino manager who describes one of Broderick's past indiscretions as "a minor non-event," and that's about the most accurate self-description that Finding Amanda could hope for.

The Screengrab : denis leary

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Seven)

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Finding Amanda"