It’s time to indulge in a guilty pleasure… a little top ten action! To be fair, this list has been very cleverly done and you will find it quite informative. So it is not nearly as guilty watching some of the stuff you can get over at WatchMojo.
We have all seen them play out in our favourite films haven’t we? The director teases out the introduction of one of the protagonists: a glance here, and hint there. Until finally, boom – there they are, larger than life.
Well the team at CineFix recently released a pretty great top ten collection of the best movie character reveals, and it’s 15-minutes you won’t be disappointed you watched.
** Spoiler alerts a head… though if you haven’t already seen this after twenty years, shame on you. **
It was one of the most numbing thrillers of the mid-90’s… And if you didn’t immediately think of Se7en after reading that sentence, then you really missed out on something special!
After a fairly tried-and-true series of murder-somethings throughout the 80’s, Hollywood screenwriters really started toying with audiences by switching it up in the 90’s. Misery served as the decade opener – but it was really The Silence of the Lambs that announced things had gone to a whole new thrilling level – becoming one of the few thrillers to receive a wide array of Oscar’s, including Best Picture1.
By the time 1995’s Se7en rolled around, few thought that the thriller would turn out to be any good. Especially coming from by a first-time screenwriter and a director who had cut his teeth on music videos – and then had bombed in his “contribution” to the Aliens franchise. But the film wasn’t just good. It became a modern genre classic. And that, in no small part, came down to this very scene… a scene that Brad Pitt (among others) had to fight New Line Cinemas to keep in the film. In EW, Pitt was quoted as saying,
“With Se7en, I said, “I will do it on one condition – the head stays in the box. Put in the contract that the head stays in the box.” Actually, there was a second thing, too: “He’s got to shoot the killer in the end. He doesn’t do the ‘right’ thing, he does the thing of passion.” Those two things are in the contract. Cut to: Se7en has been put together, and they’ve tested it. They go, “You know, he would be much more heroic if he didn’t shoot John Doe – and it’s too unsettling with the head in the box. We think maybe if it was the dog’s head in the box…” “
And so today, in honour of it’s twentieth birthday – it is with great pleasure that I am sharing this excellent Video Essay by the CineFlix team – Se7en’s “Box Scene” – Art of the Scene:
Waiting 2B Scene 