I don't think monologues in film get much better than "Pulp Fiction's" Golden Watch.
What is your favorite monologue from a film?
Well said. Someone had to have sat in a room and decided that the audience was too emotionally stupid to understand.
The rumor has always been that Ridley Scott didn't want voiceover so he directed Harrison Ford to do a really shitty job. The truth is a little more interesting. Blade Runner scripts have always had VO in them. I've read three versions and they've always had voiceover. The production was problematic as hell, though, and between finishing production and finishing post-production the project went through three different producers. There exists one voiceover directed by Ridley Scott of dialog written by David Peebles (who wrote most of the draft of BR that was shot, as well as Unforgiven). The first new producer hated it and. There exists one voiceover that the producer liked, dialog written by a guy who didn't like sci fi and was basically a buddy of the producer. It tested really badly, Ridley Scott hated it, and eventually the producer bailed. Then a second producer came on board and wanted a whole 'nuther try. Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford, sick of all this bullshit, did their take really badly to force the production into using their original voiceover (or going with no voiceover at all, a direction Ridley Scott was favoring). They tested it without voiceover and didn't like the results, so they tested it with the awful voiceover and it was less terrible, and they rushed the film out because holy shit it was bleeding cash. It's easy to point the finger at bad producers with no vision. It's hard to remember that The Ladd Company nearly went bankrupt Bladerunner was so expensive. It was in theaters next to E.T. and cost a lot more. Blade Runner was the most expensive film released in 1982 and if they didn't get it out it would have been a total accounting loss.
I cannot lie. Maybe it's not the best monologue but it was so surprising, the movie is so surprising. Jean-Claude must have one of the biggest Rotten Tomatoes point spreads for a leading man, a giant ass 83 point spread. JCVD was the 83. It's a strange and surprisingly decent film with heart. I don't know that can recommend watching the monologue if didn't put the work in to get to the point it happens, it might lose most of it's emotional weight. Maybe ThatFanficGuy can say a few things about the film, I know it touched him as well. It's got a lot of heart and it's like nothing I've seen before.
Only that it's a truly beautiful film. It's a life story unlike so many of the flicks Hollywood tosses out every year. You may know that I have trouble with empathy; this film brought me to tears and made me rethink what the hell am I doing with my life. Definitely watch the film whole, not just the monologue. It gives the speech important context.
Thank you for this. That was beautiful. I had no idea...
Or at least take a few minutes and watch the opening take. Watch it with decent sound, because that's Baby Huey "Hard Times" one of his greatest songs. My roommates were trying to get me to watch this thing and I wanted no part of it. Bloodsport was decent but most JCVD movies are turd piles. My buddies girl friend was even insisting that I watch it, that it would be different from any other JCVD movie I'd ever seen. I'm not a guy who backs down or changes my mind all that often but they wore my ass down. Cue the film and this is the opening of the totally different Van-Damm film? WTF are you guys trying to sell me, well at leas the music is waaayy better than average, and then the real film starts and you go somewhere else.
Ed Norton's Rant in 25th Hour: (seriously NSFW)
Oh wow, now there's a movie I had forgotten about. Great pick.
It's crazy, I know, but so much of my childhood lessons came from the karate kid. This monolog about decisiveness and focus has stuck with me over the years in a very substantial way. I literally referenced it when talking to a business partner only a few days ago:
Also No Country For Old Men, but a different monologue. Pure poetry. I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman; father too. Me and him was sheriffs at the same time; him up in Plano and me out here. I think he's pretty proud of that. I know I was. Some of the old time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lotta folks find that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough'd never carried one; that's the younger Jim. Gaston Boykins wouldn't wear one up in Comanche County. I always liked to hear about the oldtimers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can't help but compare yourself against the oldtimers. Can't help but wonder how they would have operated these times. There was this boy I sent to the 'lectric chair at Huntsville Hill here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killt a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it. Told me that he'd been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. "Be there in about fifteen minutes". I don't know what to make of that. I sure don't. The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."
Holy shit. That's a tough call if you're meaning for someone to weigh in on the better of the two. So different. One is about the beginning of life, in a way. The other is about the end. I am very familiar with the Cinema Paradiso scene. I love it. I really enjoyed No Country For Old Men, but only saw it once. That's a hell of a scene. So well acted. The sound of the clock ticking away in the background is less than subtle, but still... pretty amazing.
You can't have one without the other, I don't think. Everyone rightfully hypes Javier Bardem's performance in No Country For Old Men, but Tommy Lee Jones put in an amazing performance too.
Strip away all the video. All the audio. All the cinematography. All the acting. And this is still some powerful, evocative, and effective writing: My life fades the vision dims. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos ruined dreams this wasted land. But most of all, I remember the Road Warrior the man we called Max. To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time when the world was powered by the black fuel and the deserts sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel they were nothing. They'd built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked but nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled the cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men. On the roads it was a white-line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay ordinary men were battered and smashed. Men like Max the warrior Max. In the roar of an engine, he lost everything and became a shell of a man a burnt out, desolate man a man haunted by the demons of his past. A man who wandered out into the wasteland. And it was here in this blighted place that he learned to live again.
The movie Smoke is pretty much just a series of amazing monologues. "The weight of smoke" is a particularly nice one, and this actually links to a playlist of several of the amazing monologues in the film: And, if you didn't know, the actors who made Smoke liked being on set so much, that they kept filming even after shooting was done for the day. By the end of filming they had actually shot a whole 'nother film. They called it, Blue in the Face.
This watch. Indeed, that's the first that came to mind. Here's another great one. You look so beautiful and peaceful. You almost look dead.
This is gonna be a weird one... Harry Dean Stanton and Natassia Kinski in Paris, TX: Thirteen and a half minutes long... the backstory is that the people HDS is talking about, is actually a description of the two of them, 10 years ago. (He refers to himself in the third person as he tells the story.) Kinski is a sex worker, and HDS is a john who comes in to watch her strip, etc. (This is how we got our rocks off before the Internet, kids.) Jump to 10:20 to see some really cool cinematography, where the two of them decide to drop the ruse they are "just strangers", and face each other through the one-way glass, for the first time, in a decade.
The Shawshank Redemption is one of my greats. Otis Redding's last parole hearing.