Category One - Most Bad-Ass Tough Guy or Gal Scene
How to weigh the quality of the scene vs. how bad-ass (?) the character is? What exactly is “bad-ass”? A couple different takes on it presented in the submissions.
First I’m going to indulge myself with some picks of my own.
There were three Quentin Tarantino picks here; from three different movies.
Pulp Fiction was used and it was not this scene:
it was also not the Bad Mother Fucker scene
True Romance was selected, but it was not this scene:
I was legit surprised no one picked this scene:
I might have picked this:
(see my mule don’t like people laughin’. Gets the crazy idea you’re laughing an him.)
In last place getting 1 pt @cassette with the decapitation board room scene from Kill Bill
Lucy Liu is indeed quite the bad-ass here and I’ve gone to YouTube just to see this scene on more than one occasion. It’s very bad-ass. The reason for the last place finish is that it’s not that great a scene movie-wise imo, so it’s losing points on that front. It’s cartoonish in a bad way. The dialogue is kinda bad or mediocre at best.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but next is 5th place and 2pts.
@JohnnyTruant
So this is a very good scene and it’s very well done and Albert Finney is indeed quite the bad-ass here. There’s really nothing wrong here, it’s artful, well-directed, everything about it is a solid B+. I’d take a little C- here and there for an A+ moment.
With 4th place, earning 3pts is another QT scene. This scene is very good and I’ve watched it many times. It’s probably not as good a scene as either of the two ahead of it though and in the cool to badass spectrum that I’m making up right now, this skews a little more towards cool and away from badass.
In a tie for 2nd and 3d place, which I guess gets 4.5 pts for each is @DodgerIrish and @beetlejuice with the hallway scene from Old Boy. This is possibly the baddest ass of the scenes. It’s very well done and makes an impossible fight look almost possible and not cartoonish. The direction - the idea o opening up the hall and leaving the wall to your imagination is a very good balance of something that has you noticing the art of how the movie is made without taking you out of the scene.
The Walrus here, with 6 points, comes from @King_of_NY. What is it to be badass? Fighting real good? Superman or The Hulk could win (“Puny God” might have been a decent entry). In this scene the bad-ass in question is just someone being cool in a really bad situation. I think it’s less bad-ass than some of the other entrants maybe, but that’s where the scene quality comes in. This is an A+ moment. One of the finest scenes in all the QT movies. Dennis Hopper just absolutely nails this. Chrisopher Walken does as well. There’s nothing going on here that doesn’t add to scene.
The writer pisses me off in this movie though. I get that Clint is trying to get us to see things through the eyes of a regular person, but 1 - the character and actor are the weakest parts of this movie and 2 - quit fucking putting the camera on this guy in the most important scene in the movie!!!
Let me clarify that, I mostly mean of the last 25 years of stuff and what he directed, I don’t think I’ve seen anything he directed before The Unforgiven.
Well, he didn’t direct all his movies and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is one of the best movies ever. High Plains Drifter was great. Hang 'Em High was very good. The other two Sergio Leone movies were good. Where Eagles Dare was really good. Two Mules for Sister Sara was good. Escape from Alcatraz was good. The Gauntlet was ok. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was good. Kelly’s Heroes was fucking great. Joe Kidd was pretty good.
But, A Perfect World was good, Mystic River was great, Million Dollar Baby was very good, Letters from Iwo Jima was very good, Absolute Power Ok. The Outlaw Josey Wales was awesome.
