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The dog days of August are always a slow time for Academy Awards discussion and news ... the last of the summer films is being released, and the really big Oscar contenders won't be released for a few weeks yet ... in a couple of weeks, I will forecast some Oscar contenders based on advance buzz for the films coming out this fall and winter, but for now (as I relax on vacation), here are some more sequences I have selected from film history as the most memorable of all time ...
Chaplin doing the Oceana Roll dance with the rolls from THE GOLD RUSH (1925) --- In this endearing classic sequence from one of the greatest silent film comedies ever made, the immortal Charlie Chaplin imagines himself entertaining beautiful women on New Year's Eve by stabbing a couple of forks into a couple of rolls and performing the Oceana Roll, a dance of the rolls. Chaplin's choreography of the rolls is brilliant, contributing to some great laughs as well. Bone tossed into air by ape, quick cut to spaceship from 2001 : A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) --- This sequence is indeed a film classic. It also must rank as the most amount of time that passes between edits -- usually when an edit is made, or a dissolve or fade, time passes and we move on to a new sequence. But this sequence from 2001 shows the passage of some 4 million years in one quick cut. 2001 begins with a sequence called THE DAWN OF MAN, and we see what the earth's early inhabitants must have been like before they evolved into man -- it's the age of the apes. Once they discover tools and weapons and seem to amass intelligence for the first time, one ape flings a bone into the air -- the camera follows it as it spirals upward, and just as it is about to come back down, there is a quick cut to a spaceship drifting in space, millions of years later. And in one quick cut, all of the growth, development, and accomplishment of human evolution and achievement has been cut to a second -- seemingly saying that nothing really significant has happened in between those times, the new time being the year 2001 and man is soon to make second contact with a mysterious monolith which will guide its destiny once more. |
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