Muriel Award: Best Cinematic Moment
Our winner wasn’t my number one pick. It was, however, my number two pick. It was a lot of voters’ number two pick. A good many scenes got lauded over it on individual ballots. And yet here it is, king of the roost. And it absolutely fucking deserves it. I can’t watch this scene without crying, and I can’t even think about it without misting up.“Death is really nothing new to children’s entertainment. As far back as the Brothers Grimm, tales ostensibly designed for youngsters have taken as their themes mortality and violence and other such unpleasantries. Certainly Disney has built a bit of a reputation for its expansive graveyard of dead or disappeared parents and children. Even Pixar got in on it back when they killed off poor Nemo’s mommy. But with the exception of Toy Story 2, which tackles the transience of happiness and love with a deeply unsettling seriousness (and is still Pixar’s best film, and no, I’m not backing down on that), can I think of a so-called “kid’s movie” that handles these issues with the grace, beauty, and adult sophistication of Up’s marriage montage. I can’t speak for Up’s child-aged viewers, who I suspect aren’t really capable of connecting with the suite of emotions stirred up by the sequence, but it’s hard to argue with the mass of stone-faced adults it has reduced to quivering sobs. Here’s one just for the grown-ups.
Up, yet another in Pixar’s long line of inventive, gorgeous, funny, clever, humbly profound, etc., etc., animated flicks, may ultimately not be one of their absolute top-tier works; its third act, with all those wacky set pieces, gets a little too repetitively manic for my tastes. But for its first thirty minutes, the thing’s a goddamn masterpiece. It opens with young wannabe explorer Carl Fredricksen (who will spend most of the movie as an old man with Ed Asner’s wizened voice) watching a documentary on his favorite explorer, then leaving the theater and meeting Ellie, a talkative, similarly adventuresome young girl. “You don’t talk much,” Ellie tells Carl. “I like that.”
And then begins the single finest bit of cinema in 2009, a completely wordless montage that follows Carl and Ellie from adolescent love to marriage to Ellie’s tragic death (between this and WALL-E’s stunning Earth-set opening, Pixar have proven themselves masters of silent storytelling). Over the course of just fifteen sublime minutes, director Pete Docter evokes the blush of young romance and its deepening into the mutual respect of marital love; the excitement of planning for the future and the disappointment when life inevitably gets in the way of those plans; the agony of Ellie’s inability to conceive a child; the pain not just of losing someone you love but of watching them fade slowly from vitality to death; and, through it all, the simple grace and beauty of the love that makes all that awful shit worth bearing. It’s an entire movie’s worth of stories, themes, and emotions—an entire movie’s worth of life—told in a shorter time-span than a single episode of television, and all purely through the expressive visual power of the cinema. It doesn’t talk much. I love that.” - Matt Noller
But wait…. there’s more! Here are some other scenes that played well in Peoria, if Peoria were a town that had nothing but Muriel voters in it. (Note that I’m excluding any scenes from Inglourious Basterds, ‘cause YouTube hates it and you’ve all seen it anyway. Also, if MD’A is reading this (which he likely isn’t)… I apologize for jacking a couple of your vids, but there was nowhere else to turn. I’ll take them down if you prefer.)
The sniper duel, The Hurt Locker
The conversation, Hunger.
Untitled from Daniel Gemko on Vimeo.
The Goy’s Teeth, A Serious Man.“Night Shift,” 35 Shots of Rum
Untitled from Daniel Gemko on Vimeo.
The parking garage, Drag Me to Hell.Dream wedding, You, The Living.
GUGGENHEIM!!!!!, The International.
Fucking iguanas, The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans.
What is it that chaos does again?, Antichrist.
And lastly…. HOW THE CRAP AM I THE ONLY PERSON TO VOTE FOR THIS SCENE I MEAN FUCKING A REALLY! LOOK AT IT AND BASK IN ITS PURE FUCKING DERANGED BEAUTY GODDAMMIT!
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