2016 Year in Review: Part Four


Best Scene Involving Urine


Malcolm McDowell pees in Caligula, Hoggle pees in Labyrinth, Nicholson pees spectacularly in About Schmidt, and Javier Bardem spends the majority of Biutiful pissing blood. The most touching scene involving peeing was a sequence at the end of The Fundamentals of Caring although it couldn’t quite save that movie or inspire me to buy Slim Jims.

Best Drug Scene

Two good ones! Jackie Gleason’s trip in Skidoo and Ron Perlman’s in Moonwalking were both great drug trip sequences.

Most Magical Movie Moments of the Year

These are all scenes that really help define why I watch movies, moments of perfection and wonder and beauty that just make me want to keep coming back for more.

There are several movie parodies in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl that I just loved. And from the same movie, there’s a scene where Nick Offerman watches Aguirre while laughing.


In Ink, there’s this great scene with rhythmic urban perpetual motion that made that entire movie worth the watch.

Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday was a big disappointment, but watching Pee-Wee entertaining Amish people with a balloon is one of the best things I’ve seen in my adult life. Here it is:

Watch that and tell me it's not the greatest thing you've ever seen! 

There’s a scene in The Visit--a almost-good dark comedy-thriller--where characters play Yahtzee that makes me laugh just thinking about it.


The opening long shot of Spectre maneuvering through the Day of the Dead celebrations is pretty magical.

Petit stepping on that wire in the underrated The Walk and Tom Hanks getting ready to leap from what might be the same spot in Mazes and Monsters while announcing, “I have spells” are two World Trade Center related moments.


Watching that guy after his injection in Maniac

The “fuck ‘em” ending of Secret Honor

The appearance of the Globolinks with blooping and bleeping Moog synth music


Godzilla scooting on his tail to kick Megalon


The wild explosion of pop culture imagery in the animated Belladonna of Sadness

A guy on a motorcycle slashing up demons in a movie theater in Demons

Throat cam with a headless woman bite attack in Cemetery Man

The moonwalk in Moonwalkers, maybe the funniest thing I saw all year

Deniro’s goofy first appearance in Mean Streets

The paintbrush juggling sequence in Parade

Best Scene Involving a Mirror

For inexplicable reasons, I continue keeping track of stuff like this. It makes me wonder what the heck I’m doing with my life.

Drawings from vampires in What We Do in the Shadows
Prince practicing ventriloquism


Claudia making faces in L’Avventura
Bette Davis rehearsing in Baby Jane
Selma Hayak showing off her underwear in Everly
Shelley Winters telling herself, “You are an ugly bitch!”
Paul Rudd amping himself up for some sex in Wanderlust
Veronika Voss applying lipstick
A brief scene in Billy Liar
Keanu Reeves telling us “It’s cold” in The Matrix

The winner is Nicolas Cage checking out his fucked-up ear in Dying of the Light because of there’s a Nicolas Cage mirror scene, he wins automatically.

This is from a different movie, not Dying of the Light

Best Food-Related Scene

No, those animated food movies I suffered through don’t win. The winner is obviously The Turin Horse with the multitude of scenes where we get to see the characters eat potatoes. Second place would be Troy in The Final Sacrifice. “Food!”

Best Action Sequence

Ninja chess match of Heroes of the East, although honestly, almost all of the action sequences in that are really good. Highly recommended if you like martial arts movies.
Lady Snowblood doing her thing in the snow


“How frickin’ awesome was that, huh?” line after Statham’s arm-cleaving scene. Actually, most of Crank could fit here. It’s one giant action sequence.


Forced dentistry with monks at the end of Eight Diagram Pole Fighter
Deadpool breaking things on that iron X-Man guy whose name I can’t recall--Colossus?
Deadpool counting down his bullets in the opening fight scene
The fight scene in The Revenant. No, not the bear part. The first part.
Yen vs. Zhang in Ip Man 3


Statham removing a bomb from the bottom of his car in Transporter 2
The airport fight scene in that Captain America movie
Radcliffe as a fart-propelled jet ski in Swiss Army Man
The dizzying climax of Why Don’t You Play in Hell
Donnie Yen taking out storm troopers in Rogue One
That museum scene in Dressed to Kill, so exquisitely choreographed

But the winner is watching Vader, angry after not being able to finish his bath time, go completely Sith-shit bananas at the end of Rogue One. I think I peed a little.

No, not the scene with the bad punning. 

Best Death Scene

The General’s falling down the stairs in The Ladykillers
Brad Pitt with that goofy grin in the closet in Burn After Reading, because the Coens sure know how to kill characters
Swastika ceiling fan decapitation in Shreck, a scene which made absolutely no sense at all but was still spectacular
A female little person blowing up in The Tin Drum
Hackman’s backflip when shot in the head in Quick and the Dead after the sunlight stabs through a wound in his abdomen
A death-by-television in Def by Temptation while Ronald Reagan stands and watches

Oh, I have to pick a winner. We’ll go with Hackman for this one.


Best Martial Arts Movie

Heroes of the East gets the edge over Eight Diagram Pole Fighter or the ultra-weird The Boxer’s Omen


Best Animated Movie

The Peanuts Movie, The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, Anomalisa, Chronopolis, The Penguins of Madagascar, and Cat Soup were all pretty good. I want to give this award to Zootopia for being so ballsy, but Belladonna of Sadness blew me away. So it wins.


Best Silent Movie

Another year goes by where I don’t watch nearly as many silent movies as I should. I think I watched more Jason Statham movies than silent movies, and that’s a travesty. Dr. Mabuse narrowly beats the sweet Lonesome here.


Best Horror Movie

It Follows, a movie recommended by Cory. It also had the scariest moment of the year, one featuring lurking.

Best Musical

The purely delightful weirdness of Help, Help, the Globolinks barely beats out the manic good time offered by Tokyo Tribe.

Best Documentary

In the Basement, Fastball, Medium Cool (only sort of a documentary), and Don’t Look Back are all great, but the best one was the only one that had Bob Dylan acting like a complete prick.


Best Nicolas Cage Moment

In Dying of the Light, he wears that aforementioned goofy hat, has a freak-out when he’s not allowed to smoke (“Jesus!”) and then blames jet lag, and smells a plant randomly in a moment that I’m sure was improvised.

In Guarding Tess, he assaults a chair.

And in Trapped in Paradise, he has trouble locating an accent, gets great lines like “So quiet down, my little one, and call me daaaaaad,” sports some gnarly shades, conducts a goddamn robbery complete with leg kicks, sings a couple times, and said, “Let me do the crackin’ and you do the jackin’,” something I might want etched on my tombstone.

The best Cage moment is when he’s so in-the-zone and so in-character in Trapped in Paradise, that he just latches onto a word--key--and starts belting out what comes naturally.


Best One-and-Done Performance

This is for the director or actor who bursts onto the scene, has one moment of glory in which he or she apparently accomplishes every professional goal he or she set, and then does nothing else. There were lots of really good candidates this year.

There was Daniel March and John Overby, both playing mentally-challenged characters in The Warrior and the Sorceress

There was Carl Denham, the director of Shreck

Brandon Gaines, who kicked up a storm in Superfights and then did nothing else

The great Seamus O’Brien from Blood Sucking Freaks


Mariella Oliveri in The Tin Drum

I believe I omitted her from Billy Curtis nominations. That was no intentional!

George Wilkosz, the kid in The Natural

Marta Estirado, the writer of Frankie in Blunderland

Robert Gaffney, who directed nothing but Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster

Toby Froud, the baby from Labyrinth

Bruce J. Mitchell, so deserving as Zap Rowsdower but who is not winning this because he’s winning something else

James Bond III, the writer/director of Def by Temptation

The winner is Carlo Battisti from Umberto D in what is maybe one of the best one-and-done performances of all time.


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