It’s the weekend of the Oscars — happening Sunday, 24 February — so we decided that this week’s #bottomrightcorner should be about memorable music and moments in film. It’s a selection of songs, so engrained in pop culture through the films they featured in, that they’re sometimes impossible to listen to without a mental cinema reel spinning in your brain. Here are some of our favourite motion picture scenes of the last 40 years — some are sparklingly cheerful, some shockingly macabre and some hauntingly sad — but all of them lastingly powerful.
Almost Famous – ‘Tiny Dancer’ – Elton John
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William Miller: I have to go home.
Penny Lane: You are home.
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Reservoir Dogs – ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ – Stealers Wheel
Image: thewhitenoise.co.uk
Mr. Blonde: Listen kid, I’m not gonna bullshit you, all right? I don’t give a good fuck what you know, or don’t know, but I’m gonna torture you anyway, regardless. Not to get information. It’s amusing, to me, to torture a cop. You can say anything you want cause I’ve heard it all before. All you can do is pray for a quick death, which you ain’t gonna get.
[He removes his razor]
Mr. Blonde: You ever listen to K-Billy’s ‘Super Sounds of the Seventies’ weekend? It’s my personal favorite.
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Romeo + Juliet – ‘Kissing You’ – Des’ree
Image: glass-of-wine.blogspot.com
Romeo: If I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle sin is this. My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Juliet: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, which mannerly devotion shows in this. For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers, too?
Juliet: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
Romeo: Well, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do. They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
Juliet: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
Romeo: Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.
Romeo: [They kiss] Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.
Juliet: Then have my lips the sin that they have took?
Romeo: Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again.
Juliet: [they kiss again] You kiss by the book.
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The Graduate – ‘Mrs.Robinson’ – Simon and Garfunkel
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Mr. Braddock: Ben, what are you doing?
Benjamin: Well, I would say that I’m just drifting. Here in the pool.
Mr. Braddock: Why?
Benjamin: Well, it’s very comfortable just to drift here.
Mr. Braddock: Have you thought about graduate school?
Benjamin: No.
Mr. Braddock: Would you mind telling me then what those four years of college were for? What was the point of all that hard work?
Benjamin: You got me.
Click here for a video from The Graduate.
Four Rooms – ‘Vertigogo’ – Combustible Edison
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[Leo is timing Chester for the 60 seconds he has to explain to Ted about the whole situation]
Leo: Begin.
Chester: Okay, Ted, pay attention here. I’m going to make two piles on the bar. One pile which is yours. And another pile which *could* be yours. And what you have to realize is we’re gonna do this thing one way… or the other. Whether it’s *you* who holds the axe or a Mexican maid or some bum we yank off the street.
Norman: [about the money on the bar] You could buy a whole lot of soup with that pile.
Chester: Shh! I’m the closer here. All right, I’m a little me – um, I’ve lost count. How much is on the bar here?
Group: Six hundred.
Chester: Okay, Ted, do you know how long it takes the average American to count to 600?
Ted the Bellhop: [Thinks for a bit]
Angela: It’s a rhetorical question, Ted.
Ted the Bellhop: No, sir.
Chester: About one minute less than it takes to count to 700. Now Ted, a person’s life is filled with a zillion little experiences. Some which are insignificant, have no meaning, and, you know, you forget them. Others which you remember for the rest of your natural life. Now, since what we’re proposing here is so unusual, so outside the norm, this is a good bet that is going to be one of those incidents that sticks. So, since you’re gonna be stuck remembering this for the rest of your life, you have to decide what that memory will be. So, Ted, are you going to remember for the next 40 years, give or take a decade, that you *refused* a $1000 for one second’s worth of work? Or that you *made* $1000 for one second’s worth of work?
Leo: Time!
Chester: So, Ted, what’s it gonna be?
Ted the Bellhop: Okay
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Desperado – ‘El Mariachi’ – Los Lobos
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El Mariachi: You know, it’s easier to pull the trigger than play guitar. Easier to destroy than to create.
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Trainspotting – ‘Perfect Day’ – Lou Reed
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Mark ‘Rent-boy’ Renton: I don’t feel the sickness yet, but it’s in the post. That’s for sure. I’m in the junkie limbo at the moment. Too ill to sleep. Too tired to stay awake, but the sickness is on its way. Sweat, chills, nausea. Pain and craving. A need like nothing else I’ve ever known will soon take hold of me. It’s on its way.
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Donnie Darko – ‘Killing Moon’ – Echo & the Bunnymen
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Donnie: [matter-of-factly] First of all, Papa Smurf didn’t create Smurfette. Gargamel did. She was sent in as Gargamel’s evil spy with the intention of destroying the Smurf village. But the overwhelming goodness of the Smurf way of life transformed her. And as for the whole gang-bang scenario — It just couldn’t happen. Smurfs are asexual. They don’t even have reproductive organs under those little white pants. That’s what’s so illogical, you know, about being a Smurf. What’s the point of living… if you don’t have a dick?
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Mullholland Drive – ‘Llorando’ – Rebekah del Rio
Image: guardian.co.uk
[At the club Silencio]
Bondar: No hay banda! There is no band! Il n’est pas de orquestra! This is all… a tape-recording. No hay banda! And yet we hear a band. If we want to hear a clarinette… listen.
Bondar: [the sounds responding to his every hand motion] Un trombon ‘à coulisse’. Un trombon ‘con sordina’. Sient le son du trombon in sourdine. Hear le son… and mute it… drop it. It’s all recorded. No hay banda! It’s all a tape. Il n’est pas de orquestra. It is… an illusion!
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Pulp Fiction – ‘Flowers on the Wall’ – The Statler Brothers
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Fabienne: Whose motorcycle is this?
Butch: It’s a chopper, baby.
Fabienne: Whose chopper is this?
Butch: Zed’s.
Fabienne: Who’s Zed?
Butch: Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.
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Stand by Me – ‘Stand by Me’ – Ben E. King
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Gordie: Alright, alright, Mickey’s a mouse, Donald’s a duck, Pluto’s a dog. What’s Goofy?
Vern: If I could only have one food for the rest of my life? That’s easy-Pez. Cherry-flavored Pez. No question about it.
Teddy: Goofy’s a dog. He’s definitely a dog.
Gordie: I knew the $64,000 question was fixed. There’s no way anybody could know that much about opera!
Chris: He can’t be a dog. He drives a car and wears a hat.
Gordie: Wagon Train’s a really cool show, but did you notice they never get anywhere? They just keep wagon training.
Vern: Oh, God. That’s weird. What the hell is Goofy?
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Dazed and Confused – ‘School’s Out’ – Alice Cooper
Image: justcomedies.com
Mrs. Kramer, Mitch’s Mother: Have you been drinking?
Mitch: No
[falls on bed and can’t even take off both boots]
Mrs. Kramer, Mitch’s Mother: Are you drunk?
Mitch: [clearly drunk] Psshh
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Words by Christine Hogg
Images: lyriquediscorde.wordpress.com, glass-of-wine.blogspot.com, oblogquenaoestavala.blogspot.com, reggiobeetle.tumblr.com , thewhitenoise.co.uk, fogsmoviereviews.com, theamericanradioshow.com, wn.com, justcomedies.com, baal-ammon.livejournal.com, www.fanpop.com, cotygeek.com, eclecticuniv3rse.tumblr.com
