This is that moment where a character grabs the hand of another character in extremis. Usually this is punctuated by the line, “Grab my hand” or “Take my hand”…or both…but the actual line doesn’t have to be said for this topic.
Tom Chick
3. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
2. Jaws
Cliffhanger
Dingus
3. Iron Man 3
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Guardians of the Galaxy
What are your favorite grab-my-hand moments in movies? Listen to the podcast to hear Dingus read some listener picks and put a podcaster of some renown in the pokey.
Also, please send in your choices for the next topic to [email protected]. This is a weird week for the show, so if you do have ideas for the next topic, or thoughts about the next movie we are seeing, please send them in by Friday, July 22, at 9pm PST.
But since Kelly picked Brody taking Quint’s hand, I figured I could bring up Quint taking Hooper’s hands.
It’s cued up a little before the actual hand grabbing because I love the sheepshank bit. And I misspoke on the podcast. The phrase that confused me as a kid wasn’t “blue collar”, which I would eventually learn from a Richard Pryor movie. The phrase was “working class hero”. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean.
Anyway, I got thrown into prison for that one, too!
Edit: Found the video clip. My favorite “grab my hand” scene, seeing as it includes that great transition followed by the classic double entendre closing shot.
I don’t see why! It’s a great hand grab. “You have city hands, Mr. Hooper, you been counting money all your life.” Spielberg frames a cool shot of their hands clasped with Brody looking helpless in the background. If the Finn/Rey thing is legit, then so is the Quint/Hooper thing; the only difference is Hooper doesn’t make a big deal out of it. :) But they’re both actual, bona-fide, honest-to-goodness hand grabs, so I don’t understand the objection.
But I’m sure there’s some really old legal precedent that you don’t have to understand a law to break it. Like, really old. Like King John v Magna Carta, or something. So here I am, doing my time.
I found Tom’s attempts to play rules lawyer around the phrasing of “take my hand” to be particularly cute when thinking back to the previous week’s “gun acquisition” boondoggle. @tomchick, if you meant “buying guns”, you should have said that.
At some point, when you’ve put enough people in jail, you have to take a look at whether the laws are serving their intended purpose.
Well, I thought I set it up pretty well both when I introduced the topic and when we did the actual 3x3. And it wasn’t “buying guns” specifically because I knew Dingus and I would probably pick Blue Ruin, which has two really good scenes in which buying isn’t involved. Furthermore, there isn’t any actual buying in The Rover.
But I apparently didn’t set it up well enough, given that some people were choosing guns being snatched out of people’s hands. Let me guess: one of those was yours? :) In which case, I think you’ve got about another week in jail. Are you gonna eat that cornbread?
I am a free man by dint of abstention. But that was just an abuse of language. At one point you were trying to make a distinction between “getting” a gun and “acquiring” one. If I didn’t have one before and I do now, I acquired a gun, whether I paid for it or stole it. “Gun shopping” maybe would suit your target?
I thought I was pretty clear both when I set up the topic and before we read the picks, but maybe not. I don’t remember trying to distinguish between getting and acquiring, but that sounds like a losing proposition! Yikes. As for “gun shopping”, hmm. Seems kind of…glib? And again, it doesn’t really work for my favorite pick, which was largely what inspired the topic. The Blue Ruin scene is very clearly a variation on the Taxi Driver scene. Taxi Driver has a fetishistic fascination that feels a bit glib to describe as shopping. But Blue Ruin is much more along the lines of “well, I guess I need a gun, so…uh, now what?” That’s not really shopping either. What I was looking for is how movies get firearms into the hands of people who don’t just have a gun locker, or a shotgun on the wall, or a handy arsenal, or whatever (i.e. the 70% of Americans I talked about in the set-up).
But, yeah, some of the topics lend themselves to snappier titles more than others. Not every discussion fits neatly under a headline. :)
While the classic “take my hand” line is delivered per the formula, the setup for what you know is gonna happen is telegraphed hilariously by David Krumholtz with the whole “You can hold my full weight?” scene in This Is the End:
It doesn’t have the line, but I’ve always liked the unexpected helping hand that Deckard gets from Roy at the end of Blade Runner at about the 1:00 mark below:
Do you guys ever get a scene in your head for one of these 3x3 and then you just can’t place the movie? That’s where I am at with “Take my hand.” It’s so agonizing. No amount of Googling is helping me to narrow it down.
I remember a young man and his mother. I think mother is a hard ass, tough disciplinarian. (I may be adding to these characters, but I hope I’m not. My memory is just bad). Anyhow, the son is in a precarious situation in a second-story building and mom rescues him by giving her his hand from a nearby window and promising she won’t let go if he jumps. He jumps and… mom holds him (pretty much the opposite of Barry’s scene), but she dislocates her shoulder.* I think the scene is stuck in my mind because in the context of the movie it works to offer some redemption for mom, who I am pretty sure was an unlikable character up to that point. Also because: dislocated shoulder. Ungh.
*dislocated shoulders might be a great 3x3 if it hasn’t been done already. It’s a movie injury that always makes me wince, even more than head shots or even the dreaded kick to the groin. Why is that?
