Sweet and Low: Oliver Schmitz

The Director of 'Hijack Stories', chooses his best and worst scenes of all time

Best Scene: Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000)

It's a very simple scene at the beginning that plays on a wonderful irony about racism and identity, turning these issues on their head. A black TV executive, Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) is in a meeting with his white boss, who claims to be more in tune with black attitudes. He brags about knowing what's happening in the projects, and taunts Pierre about his lack of connectivity to the black community. Pierre comes across as very limp and middle class, and there's a cut to his fantasy of pummelling his boss. It's Lee developing the comic characters that deal with black and white issues in American movies. At the same time it pays tribute by taking characters out of comedies like Beverly Hills Cop and turning them on their head. I think the layers of irony are a re-examination of different layers of identity. Spike is asking: in what ways can we be free as human beings and individuals?

Worst Scene: Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones (George Lucas, 2002)

The scene is terrible; there's no matching of words and emotions at all. The adult Anakin (Hayden Christensen) is in his childhood workshop with his dead mother in his arms and says something like: "I'm not very good at fixing things." This is trying to encapsulate his feelings of how he's failed to save his mother in one cliché line, and it doesn't show him mourning directly for her. Christensen struggles with his line, which contributes to it being like watching a morality play without any depth.