>> Speaker 1: It's parts of a whole, it's flashes of brilliance,
it's fracturing space, time, reality and narrative for the sake of the abstract.
It's a montage, and these are our picks for the top 10 best of all time.
[SOUND] Kicking us off at number 10,
we gotta divide up our categories by asking ourselves,
what kind of different things can montages do?
And one of the most obvious answers is that, they can chop a big story up and
tell it very, very fast.
So for our favorite narrative sprints, we like Nikki's rise from Casino,
and Good Fellas Layla clean up.
We like the Hudsucker proxies development of the hula hoop,
Watchmens Alt history introduction and rules of attraction's Euro trip.
But for our pick, we don't think there's one better or
heart string pullinger than Up's look at Carl and Elly's married life.
>> [SOUND] >> Speaker 1: This scene is basically
a simpler version of the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner.
Anyone who doesn't at least moisten in the tear ducts might just be a replicate.
This montage is a treasure of visual storytelling.
Almost very single instant and inch of the frame is filled with relevant detail.
Details that point to the hopes, dreams, quirks, and fears of the characters, and
that recur and change like late motifs.
And then of course is the ending, where every single plant and hand and
detail works against you like an emotional sledge hammer.
It's no wonder it makes our list.
Of course, some montages manage to just be incredibly efficient methods of
joke delivery.
These are montages like Ace Ventura's Dolphin Hunt,
Walley's failed seduction of Evil of Eva and the brilliant montage deconstructions
in Wet Hot American Summer and Team America World Police.
Fight Club's fight picking is hilarious in a movie filled with great montages and
Wes Anderson has a real knock for the job.
We like the Royal Tenenbaums day of mischief on the town, Rushmore's
escalating revenge and our number nine pick, the Introductory Yearbook montage.
[SOUND] The entire sequence is made up of the rye,
straight faced silliness that Anderson does so well.
It's simultaneously childish and adult with each shot a perfectly composed
tableau that speaks volumes to who Max is and how he fits in at school.
His character is a force and his blue jacketed dead pan cheesiness introduces us
to the level of seriousness with which he takes being a Rushmore kid.
The music is awesome, the costuming is as always, perfect,
and even the titling contains a couple punchlines setting us up for
a hilarious movie with a hilarious montage.
[SOUND] One of the things that montage is do best is compress time and
one of the best things about that,
is that they can make gradual change in far more dramatic.
This is given rise to possibly the most popular montage genre of them all,
The training montage.
And as for training montages, where do we begin?
There's Dirty Dancing and The Karate Kid and Batman Begins and Mulan and School
of Rock and Clueless' makeover and Real Genius and the 36 Chambers of the Shaolin.
While we're not always pretentious film snobs picking the artsies fare we can
dig out of the archives, sometimes we gotta go with the obvious answer.
And when it comes to training montages, we've got to give it to the Rocky
franchise and if we're ranking Rocky training montages from worst to best.
We're pretty sure it goes Rocky Balboa, the laughable Rocky 3, Rocky 1, Rocky 2.
We still refuse to mention Rocky 5.
So we're skipping it completely on the way to our number eight pick,
Rocky versus Drago from Rocky 4.
[SOUND] The movie is
literally 31.9% montage by screen time.
And this training montage is basically what happens if you take the 80s, distill
it into a synthi-syrup, throw in a shot of Cold War era jingoism, and serve cold.
We all know it was America's traditional girl work ethic
that allowed us to defeat the Soviets' unfair superior technological resources.
Which is why we picked it for our list.
[SOUND] A good montage can also take a half dozen different storylines and
weave them together,
much more thematically complex than they might have been separately.
Think of Magnolia's opening one montage, or V For Vendetta's domino montage.
Or Kill Your Darlings' sex and drugs and
murder to the soundtrack of Kerouac's dying friend.
They're moving and vast and we love them all.
But for our number seven pick,
we've got to go with with Donnie Darko's Mad World timeline collapse.
[SOUND] It's such a bizarre, nearly
inscrutable movie that leaves almost any first sign that you are wondering, what
the [BLEEP] just happened and yet, this final montage never fails to hit home.
We can see how profound,
how tragic the event is here before we even really know why.
It speaks to the movie's brilliance and what better example is there that it is
far more important to be emotionally fulfilling than to simply tie up a plot
neatly than this meaningful conclusion to a deeply confusing tale.
[SOUND] Sometimes to judge the position of a montage can reveal hidden similarities
and differences by virtue of some good old compare and contrast.
There's nothing like repetition of a common theme to help
illuminate the subtleties and nuances.
Think of Matt Damon versus Leo DiCaprio in the opening montage of The Departed, or
Bill Murray's Suicide from Groundhog Day or Tom Cruise and
Emily Blunt's death symphony from Live Die Repeat, AKA,
the movie formerly known as The Edge of Tomorrow.
And we love what City of God does with the story of the apartment, and
think it's brilliant.
But it's just narrowly edged out by our number six pick,
Cinema Paradiso's final Kissing montage.
[SOUND] Okay, true.
This one takes a little bit of context in order to get it's full impact.
But that doesn't make it not incredibly touching on its own.
In one level, it's a marvelously nostalgic look at love on screen in
all its different shapes and sizes but in terms of its place in the narrative?
It's a love letter and redemption and Joie de vivre and so much more.
It's a fantastic meta-analysis of the power of cinema, romancing us as it
examines romance in a wonderfully intense sequence of passion and love and
it's nearly impossible not to feel something by the end of it.
[SOUND] One
of the most powerful tools of the montage is that of Gestalt.
Given a series of parts, our brain constructs them into a mental whole.
Showing an entire life in a day, a day in an instant.
Boiling a relationship down to a series of moments while simultaneously evoking its
entirety, which is basically what the ending of Annie Hall does or Raging Bull.
Or the Paris memories from Casa Blanca.
Or Margot's sexual history from The Royal Tenenbaums.
It's Emily's childhood.
Out of Sight and Don't Look Now take on the night of romance.
And Loopers transformation from JGL into Bruce Willis.
They all take a process that spans ages and
deliver a best of highlight reel that captures its essence.
However, if we're picking favorites and in turns out we are.
We have to pay our respects to the classic, the groundbreaking,
the gut punching Breakfast Table from Citizen Kane.
>> Speaker 2: It was a marriage just like any other marriage.
>> Speaker 1: Each production element is meticulously inched along its arc in
each of the six stops this scene takes to tell the story of their marriage,
from excited newly weds to icy vestiges of lovers.
The wardrobe, hairstyles, makeup, lighting, staging and
props all perfectly capture the hardening of their hearts and
in the most brilliant touch both actors gradually move away from each other.
Almost imperceptibly, only to be revealed in a final
brilliant camera move that hits home like a sucker punch.
[SOUND] Of course,
not every montage has to boil down.
Some of them boil up.
And what we mean by that is, instead of zooming in, all the varied elements seem
to create a picture of something greater than the sum of its parts.
These are montages like Amélie orgasm scene,
that tries to capture the sexual energy of an entire city
of Manhattan's intra montage that turns its lens on the entirety of New York.
However, when it comes to capturing the Empire City, we think there is no better
than Spike Lee, who does it big with racial epithets in Do the Right Thing and
even better in our number four pick, in the 25th Hour.
>> Speaker 3: Me? [BLEEP] you.
>> Speaker 4: [BLEEP] you and this whole city, and everyone in it.
>> Speaker 1: This montage runs the scope from the universal to the personal,
cutting a course of anger all the way from the surface to the core.
Pointing Ed Norton's rage outward in a nuclear explosion of prejudice until
finally collapsing inwards like a black hole.
It so brilliantly dissects post-nine-eleven angst in New York,
the challenges of its multiculturalism and
the honesty behind a deeply racist character.
Not because he really hates others but because he is scared for himself.
>> Speaker 5: Let an earthquake crumble it,
let the fires rage, let it burn to [BLEEP] ash, and then let the waters rise and
submerge this whole rat infested place.
>> Speaker 4: No, no [BLEEP] you.
Gun they brought me.
>> Speaker 1: Bigger isn't always better, and sometimes a good montage helps us
tune out the noise and appreciate the small moments, focusing us on the poetic
details, the nuances of our surroundings, the rhythm of life.
And this kind of beautiful, abstract montage was best pioneered by Zega Vertoff
in pretty much the entirety of Man With the Movie Camera.
We love others like Lord of Wars Life of a Bullet.
Oliver's post mortem on his childhood from beginners and
our number three pick, I Wish's Poetry in the Details.
There is something we find incredibly peaceful after hours of fast moving plots
and complex messages about simply sitting and
looking at the little beautiful things that we pass by every day.
This montage is a slow breath.
A guided meditation.
A moment of reflection on how complex life really is and
while we're usually constructing thematic big picture of abstract symbols out of
the gestalt of smaller moments, it's nice to be reminded of the little beauties.
We sometimes overlook and throw away in the process.
[SOUND] Closing in on number two, a montage is
also perfect for the fractured, free associative nature of human consciousness.
And in terms of the subjective, you've got all kinds of substance abuse,
like the heroin montage in Train Spotting.
The drunk montage in Lock Stock and the drug montages in Requiem for a Dream.
You also got states of paranoia, like the intro to Apocalypse Now, and
devastating Fantasies, like the fathers monologue from 25th Hour.
However, if we have to pick our favorite mental construct,
it's gotta be Kevin Spacey's life flashing before his eyes in his dying moments
from American Beauty.
>> Speaker 6: I'd always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes
the second before you die.
First of all, that one second isn't a second at all.
It stretches on forever like an ocean of time.
>> Speaker 1: Holy [BLEEP] the impact of this one is astounding with Kevin Spacey's
serene monologue.
Thomas Newman's patient score, Alan Ball's beautiful writing, and
the meticulously planned and gorgeously executed cinematography.
The montage perfectly alternates between the beauty of a life in retrospect,
and the pain of those left behind.
It balances nihilism and meaning, calm with chaos, and
beauty with death in one of the most heart felt sequences ever shot.
And finally at number one we want to talk about something eyes and
sign called Intellectual montage.
This is the montage of ideas.
A montage of theme.
It's a montage of contrast, of placing two things next to each other in order to
force a connection between them and the viewer.
Eisenstein did it best in Strike,
where he inter cut the massacre of workers with the slaughtering of a bull.
Famously payed homage to in apocalypse now with another mention worthy
montage sequence.
There's spring breakers, bizarre Brittany Spears gang banging montage, and
social network's perfect face mash final club montage.
And of course, our pick for number one and
certainly the best montage we've ever seen, Godfather's Baptism montage.
>> Speaker 7: Michael Francis, do you renounce Satan?
[SOUND] I do rennounce him.
>> Speaker 1: This one is just a masterpiece.
Combining birth in Christ to death without him.
Michael's bad faith pledge on his soul to underline how his care to his change.
Really, a parallel isn't with white speed plot movement and
of the demonic organs score.
The difference between intellectual montage and
simultaneous plot is an important distinction here.
Only the murders are moving the story forward.
The baptism itself has little bearing on the actual story.
It's just there for the beauty of the contrast, what it says about the world,
and a little spice.
And what spice it is!
It's overwhelming, overbearing, hypocritical and iconic.
Which is why it's our pick for the best montage of all time.
[SOUND] So what do you think?
We already know we forgot plenty, so drop into the comments to tell us where our
blind spot is, or just let us know if you plain old disagree, and
don't forget to like and subscribe for more, Cinefix movie lists.