LA story... Romeo + Juliet.
Welcome to the Clip joint, our weekly roundup of top cinema clips on the internet. Keep the suggestions rolling in - even better, with links supplied.
Forget friendship, love, the passing of time, trying to lose your virginity, robots that have feelings, huge squids and other such trivial nonsense - if you listen to the gurus of screenwriting, they'll tell you the true stuff of drama boils down to conflict. So you can chalk up easy drama points if the protagonists in a film are locked in a feud. That's not just a quick shouting match, or even the kind of healthy apocalyptic world war civilisation periodically needs to get the aggro out of the system, but a smouldering, intractable vendetta fuelled by generations of mindless prejudice and petty reprisals. Ah, beautiful!
1) The Montagues and the Capulets is one of the oldest literary grudge matches going. Baz Luhrmann renders 16th-century argy-bargy fresh, raucous and effective, transposing Shakespeare to gangland in Romeo + Juliet.
2) Another youth culture dustdown in Quadrophenia, between the mods and the rockers. Why aren't nu ravers and emo kids up for this kind of dust-up?
3) Feuds feature frequently in Wes Anderson films, but they're always pretty tame and set to a choice jukebox of tastemaking songs. Here, Gene Hackman's Royal Tenenbaum begins his campaign to break the ice with his estranged family.
4) Now Michael Corleone knows how to conduct a feud - so ruthlessly that the other party doesn't even know there's a feud on, even though he's your own brother.
5) Any feud worth its salt has gone on for so long that no one can really remember why it began. The final duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader in Episode IV was full of tense hints at the history between the pair; George Lucas finally got round to explaining what happened, a touch heavy-handedly, 28 years later.
Not many takers (one!) for last week's menagerie of animal clips:
1) "What's that, Skip? There's someone down the old mine shaft?" At least someone remembered that if dolphins/kangaroos/glossy-haired collies were man's best friend on screen, that extended to painful exposition duties, too.
