Greatest movie scenes ever # 33

It's a pity that Master P's book from a few years back was a "you can make it if you try!" type affair rather than an in-depth breakdown of the central tenets of the No Limit Soldier philosophy back in the 90s because I've often found the sentiments he expressed in his music back then are so applicable in life for us caucasians too. For instance..

Master P ft. Mystikal & Silkk - Always Look A Man In The Eyes When You Kill Him



Ayo, Amy Irving - I know John Cassavetes was the one who urged Scorsese to break out from the exploitation flick cul-de-sac and make Mean Streets and that he'd just whipped up his own masterpiece in the form of The Killing Of A Chinese Book a couple of years earlier, but his evil intelligence-operative character in Brian De Palma & Frank Yablan's The Fury is a playa hater who won't let you ball with them telekinetic powers of yours so you gon' do as P says on this one, post-haste, shawdy :



(Needless to say, if you've never seen The Fury and harbour a desire to ever watch it then it's probably best not to click the play button on this.)

As far as 70s De Palma flicks go, it has to be said that the self-billed "supernatural thriller" The Fury is no Carrie, Sisters, or Phantom Of The Paradise since it's a more convoluted retread of the former leaden with mismatched elements from the traditional spy movie, but it's an interesting overlapping of genres which is worth suffering any incoherencies and shoehorning in narrative sub-plots for the above finale - obviously a precursor to that scene in Scanners - with its grand guignol multi-camera angle shot (done in 1 take, I believe) of Cassavetes's comeuppance, the sorta ethereal Irving being the perfect choice in the role of the post-Sissy Spacek confused teenage girl with paranormal abilities who inadvertently makes anyone who touches her bleed from their eyes, Cassavetes with his arm in a black sling which immediately gives him the duplicitous air of a Bond villain the moment he steps on screen, some heavily stylized Hitchcockian set-pieces you'd expect from our Brian, the magnificent John Williams composed scoring performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, a cast which also included Kirk Douglas as an ex CIA agent trying to rescue his son from the clutches of his old colleague-turned-enemy Cassavetes's agency, and early appearances by an 18 year old Daryl Hannah, Dennis Franz, and, ever so briefly, James Belushi.

As far as hallmark De Palma set pieces go, the operatic slo-mo sequence where Irving escapes the psychiatric treatment centre with a little help from Snodgrass and Douglas set to an evocative Williams composition is the other genuinely remarkable scene the movie has to offer. Man, oafish British gangster/football hooligan movies really did ruin the art of slow-motion :



All in all, a fair few bull's-eyes hit for a movie so flawed, including Amy and the young Daryl Hannah in bikinis at one point, and I've finally found an oppurtnity to post Always Look A Man In The Eyes When You Kill Him (a great song that sounded out of place as a new bonus cut on the 1997 reissue of P's The Ghetto's Trying To Kill Me album when it replaced 1 of the 3 King George songs from the original 1994 press which were removed from the reissue due to legal issues stemming from George leaving No Limit) so everybody wins here.