April 27, 2004

Great Moments, Volume 1

I don't know what's possessing me to post this, but what the hell. Maybe it's the painkillers talking.

I've always wanted to have a site where I could just post movie "moments" that I love. You know, a scene, a line of dialogue, a gag...I'd be able to post the scene in question and talk about why I love it so much.

Yeah...turns out that's incredibly illegal.

But there are still certain points of certain movies that stick with me. And this is one of them, from "Adaptation."

Some set-up...Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) goes to a seminar, against his better judgement, hosted by Robert McKee (Brian Cox). The seminar is on screenwriting, and Kaufman is so desperate he's willing to do whatever it takes to help him finish this one project he's working on.

But, he's not wild about McKee. Charlie thinks that McKee's version of how to do things doesn't reflect real life. And he finally gets up the nerve to ask him...what if you want to write something where nothing much happens and there's no conflict...you know, like in real life. And McKee hits him with the following:

"Well first of all, if you write a screenplay without conflict, you'll bore your audience to tears. And secondly...nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day! There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else! Every fucking day, someone, somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People find love, people lose it. For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life. And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it. I don't have any bloody use for it!"

Fantastic writing. Cynical? Sure. Pessimistic? Absolutely. But this monologue, along with Cox's brilliant delivery, gets me every single time.