Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Academy Award acceptance speech (1997)
Although not technically in a movie, I feel this moment should count. We’ve all seen at least one Oscar telecast in our lives, so we’re all pretty familiar with the notion that award recipients are only given a finite amount of time to give acceptance speeches on stage. The directors of the telecasts typically give the recipients a countdown clock, and, when the clock runs out, a gentle musical nudge to indicate they are to leave the stage. Cube Gooding, Jr., however, who won an Oscar for his role in 1996’s Jerry Maguire, was too ecstatic to abide by these rules. He famously continued to thank people and laugh and cry, long after the insidious usher-out musical cue had begun, ranting and yelling and refusing to leave the stage. He was clearly so happy, the Academy let him have his say. It’s rare to see that much enthusiasm from an Oscar winner. It was a great moment.
The play-within-a-play from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. several, 1909 -1999)
One of Shakespeare’s most accessible and celebrated comedies, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a fanciful tale of jilted lovers lost in the woods, and the mischievous fairies who would cast love spells on them all. Needless to say, there are several romantic mix-ups, and all kinds of sexual chicanery. Something you may notice about the play, though, is that the story (about the lovers finding one another) essentially wraps up right at the end of the fourth act, leaving us with an entire act to go. The fifth act, then, follows the celebratory marriage of not one but three couples, and the reception thereof. We then see a play-within-a-play (the result of a subplot) performed in its entirety. This inner play is a serious drama of lost love and suicide, played for laughs by its incompetent and blustering troupe. What better way to nail down a fanciful woodland sex comedy than to tack on a complete miniature farce that would play as a fine little comedy in itself? Its inclusion was Shakespeare clearly just having some more fun with an already fun play. What a celebration.
The underground rave from The Matrix Reloaded (dir. Wachowski Starship, 2003)
The first Matrixfilm came out in 1999, and rattled a lot of zeitgeists with its original special effects andTwilight-Zone-like story. The film followed a group of underground humans as they waged a secret battle with insidious machines who were, as it turns out, feeding reality (and all our sense data) directly into our brains. The film’s end saw the humans escaping from their digital captors, but we never actually got to see how they reacted from their long-planned escape. Cut to the film’s 2003 maligned sequel The Matrix Reloaded, we finally see where the escaped humans have been living (in a vast underground cave complex), and how they like to unwind after a long day of battle malevolent machines: mainly by having energetic multi-culti, drug-laced, half-naked dance orgies. This scene comes partway through a sequel, but I think it should count at the drunken celebration party that was intended for the original film. Imagine if the first film ended with this scene. It would have been a different movie, sure, but… how fun!
The dance number in The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi (dir. “Beat” Takeshi Kitano, 2003)
Ever since the early 1960s, Japan has produced a very long string of movies to feature a character named Zatoichi, a blind swordsman whose senses were so adept, he could easily best his sighted opponents in swordfights. He wandered the landscape working as a masseuse, and often protecting women in danger. He was a noble soul and a funny guy. In 2003, “Beat” Takeshi Kitano paid homage to the Zatoichi films of old by starring himself in a new version of the character. That this new version is pretty similar to the older films is a credit to Kitano’s fealty. A bizarre twist, though, was that the film, eventually becoming so energetic, eventually had to break into dance. After Zatoichi had bested the bad guys and rescued all the damsels, the cast assembled on a large wooden stage – seemingly independent from the action of the film that just played – and enacted an enormous tap dance sequence. For no other reason than to celebrate the triumphs. Old and young, dead or alive, all the characters danced.
James Bond “gets busy” (almost all the James Bond movies)
James Bond, you Lothario. We are all familiar with James Bond and his notorious ease with which he beds multiple women. Yes, he is also known for traveling to exotic locations, breaking apart international crime rings, and stopping evil geniuses bend on world domination/destruction, but his character would not be complete without the heaping scoops of sex appeal that he often has oozing out of his nice European suits. In several of his 23 canonical feature films, Bond will not only kill the bad guy and save the girl, but will often celebrate by bedding down with the girl he saved right then and there! Yes, often he can’t even make it to a sleazy motel room. James Bond has sealed the deal on a floating chunk of a wrecked submarine, inside his own submarine, on a raft being towed by a British ship, and, perhaps most notably, in zero gravity as his ship plummets to Earth. The explosion offered the audience catharsis, but James Bond’s additional (and regular) celebration nookie…well, that’s a whole different kind of release.
