Breaking Emotions Blogathon Week #4 - Hate & Love

Blogathons are awesome. They're a great way for film bloggers to stumble upon sites that they may not have come across before and they're always fun to tackle. Lucky for me then, that I recently discovered a brand new blogathon titled 'Breaking Emotions' on the Mettel Ray site. Each week, bloggers are asked to pick three movie scenes that best sum up a particular emotion for them. Last week, the two emotions chosen were 'smiles' and 'thrills'. Today, for the last week, we're tackling 'hate' and 'love'. To find out more about the blogathon, click here and to see which scenes I've chosen, read on after the jump. Go on. You know you wanna!

First up for the final week of the blogathon is the emotion 'hate'. That's a pretty strong word right there but then cinema does of course evoke extreme reactions, both positive and negative. Often, it's just as fun moaning about terrible films as it is recommending the best so with that in mind, I hope you enjoy my three selections. 

1) As a huge Marvel fan, I approached Spiderman 3 with so much excitement but I was nowhere near prepared for how horrendously awful that film was, especially after the success of Spiderman 2. Too many villains, cheesy set pieces, wooden dialogue; the list of crimes against humanity are almost too many to count but my most hated scene from the entire film occurs when Peter Parker is corrupted by the alien symbiote, turning our friendly neighbourhood hero into ... an emo. Words cannot express how much I hated this pathetic and cringeworthy development. 

2) Many people hated Antichrist for its controversial and arguably needless subject matter but personally, I'm a firm believer in the importance of challenging, difficult cinema. For me though, Antichrist was just a ridiculous pretentious mess that tried its utmost to shock and surprise in the most 'artistic' way possible. Unfortunately, Lars Von Trier clearly confused art with crap, which can be best summed up by the opening scene where the main couple have sex in slow-motion as their son plummets to his death, all set to beautiful orchestral music shot in black and white. Far too many cliches all rolled into one. Damn you Von Trier! I was actually looking forward to this one!

3) M Night Shyamalan has taken a lot of flack over the years and yes, much of this is due to his wasted potential, but the real reason he's so firmly disliked is just that his films are so damn awful these days. The Happening is the best example of this. I could set up an entire blogathon based purely around reasons why The Happening is bad but my most hated moment from the film is when Mark Wahlberg and his fellow survivors all try to outrun the wind. The wind. Somehow. Words cannot... oh just watch it already and judge for yourself.

Mettel Ray decided to finish the blogathon with the most pure and uplifting emotion of all, love. While that sure is a great idea, the problem with that is trying to whittle down all of cinema into just your three best scenes. The task is pretty much impossible to complete definitively and I'm sure I'll think of better choices in a couple of days but alas, that will probably always be the case. Here then are my final three selections for the Breaking Emotions blogathon. Hope you like them!  

1) It should be pretty obvious to anyone who's visited this blog more than once that I'm a ginormous super hero fan, so it felt natural to select a scene from one of the awesome Marvel films but which one? For me, X-Men 2 represented the pinnacle of the genre for many years, as the opening scene which features Nightcrawler in the White House is the first time I really felt that the comics I loved growing up had finally been done justice. That entire fight is expertly shot by Bryan Singer and just left me gobsmacked throughout. 

2) As the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock's rather large shadow will loom over cinema for decades to come and rightfully so. The best of his films are timeless examples of cinematic perfection but which one contains his best scene? My personal favourite comes from one of Hitchcock's later offerings, The Birds, which features some of the most tense moments in film history. My favourite scene occurs when Tippi Hedren notices more and more crows gathering in the playground until that final reveal shows hows much danger she's really in. Yes, I'm aware love doesn't even remotely feature in this scene but the entire build up is genuinely chilling stuff which could have easily become corny or embarrassing in the wrong hands and I just love it.

3) My final selection for the emotion 'love' and indeed this entire blogathon is from the Disney classic that brought the entire studio back to life. I am of course talking about The Little Mermaid, one of the greatest animated films of all time. But which scene should I pick? Poor Unfortunate Souls is incredible and the climatic battle at the end of the movie is seriously epic but there can only be one moment for me and that is when Ariel reprises her signature song, Part of Your World, as she longs after Prince Eric. Sounds cheesy on paper but as a kid watching this film, I was completely swept away in the moment.   

So there we have it. The Breaking Emotions Blogathon has been lots of fun so I must give a big thank you to Mettel Ray for organising the whole thing. I hope you've enjoyed reading my selections and I look forward to seeing what everyone else has come up with. Don't forget to let me know in the comments box below if you can think of any scenes that you would have chosen to represent 'Hate' or 'Love' instead. Also, remember to come back here every Friday to read another edition of Film School Friday, where readers can learn important and hopefully funny advice taken from the world of films. Thanks!