Greatest movie scenes ever # 40

In 2021 it's vaguely possible some young upstart will appear in an issue of Cahiers du Cinéma with the hypothesis that Paul W.S. Anderson & Milla Jovovich's Resident Evil franchise was the noughties equivalent of Jerry Lewis' fifties oeuvre which CdC championed back in the sixties, (though, from here on in the series should be referred to as a trilogy since Resident Evil : Apocalypse is just so awful that the only sensible option is to just pretend it doesn't exist.)

But why wait another decade to kickstart your admiration at the behest of a Frenchman when you can cosy up to the franchise which gave us Milla moving with the grace of Ginger Rogers as she kicks zombie ass yet still exhibiting a brooding existential presence similar to Alain Delon in Le Samourai, and the unforgettable sight of Ashanti getting pecked to death by mutant crows who'd been gauging themselves on infected flesh inside a bus right here, right now? It was that noted cinematic expert Chino XL who first brought the narrative arc of black ppl in horror movies to our attention back in 1996, but the grissly death woven around Ashanti's Nurse Betty character in Resident Evil 3 : Extinction was the sort of career move nobody foresaw when she was breaking records in 2002 & 2003 as the first artist since The Beatles to have three songs in the Billboard Hot 100 in the same week with her throwback Uptown-era Mary J. r&b jams, and movies should always be about surprises, right?


Our fictitious Cahiers du Cinéma scribe of the future might point out that this set-piece was such a blatantly obvious homage to The Birds that you'd think it was directed by Hitchcock's most famous imitator Brian De Palma rather than Milla J's husband and Highlander 2 : The Quickening's director - and we use that term loosely here given that it's still one of the most incoherent movies we've ever seen - Russell Mulcahy, but it's a jawdroppingly brilliant mise-en-scène that's executed to perfection. Still, since this is a blog which is primarily concerned with rap related minutiae the question that's begging an answer is this : Where the hell were Cadillac Tah and Black Child when Ashanti really needed them?

BONUS BEATS :

Ashanti ft. Ghostface - Rain On Me remix (2003)


If one of rap's purposes is to make you feel like you're standing under a waterfall in a linen suit getting blown by a mermaid (and even it's rowdiest practitioners like Mystikal and M.O.P have joints which serve this purpose), then the modus operandi of rap & bullshit jams like the Rain On Me remix with Ghostface is to convince the listener that they're standing under that very same waterfall but wearing a pair of XXXL dungarees with one strap hanging off screaming "ALL WE NEED IS A STAGE, GOD!!!" up at the Heavens. This was far preferable to that official remix with Charli Baltimore, Ja and him from The Outlawz with the missing teeth.