Good Scene / Bad Scene

Good: 'Vertigo' (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

There's a camera movement that shows in a very neat way someone's complex emotional change. Det. John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart) is deeply disturbed and grieving for his dead lover when he meets a woman (Kim Novak) who reminds him of her. He starts to recover his lost love through this woman and he convinces her to dress and look like his dead lover. It's a slightly perverted act. There's a fantastic scene when she comes out of the hotel bathroom, she's transformed, they hug and he feels that he's recovered his dead lover. This is shown in one camera movement that goes round the embracing couple and as it does the room is transformed into the one where he last embraced his dead lover. The hotel decoration merges into an outhouse where they kissed minutes before she died. Then the camera carries on moving round and the room becomes the hotel again and he's kissing his new lover. Hitchcock's circular camera motion illustrates a person trying to recover his past and how he's only living for the past. It's the emotion of not accepting loss.

Bad: 'Thelma and Louise' (Ridley Scott, 1991)

I loathe this film – which surprises me because I like Ridley Scott very much – because there's no humanity in how it pitches the sexes against each other. It's a story about two best friends (Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, above) who go on a road-trip together and commit a crime and become fugitives along the way. The worst scene is when they are laughing at a foul-mouthed truck driver and, after meeting him three times on the road, they crack and end up blowing up his truck. I don't like the extreme machismo of their behaviour – and I wouldn't if I saw a film and two men acted this way either. It's ugly and unintelligent. Furthermore it's untruthful because the women's machismo is played under the guise of fighting for their independence and feminism. They don't succeed in making a feminist statement, merely vengeance against men.