This is always one of the more interesting categories, and one that's a bit controversial among voters. Some people seem to love it, while others proclaim that it's kind of a chore to keep track of their favorite scenes from the past year and invariably end up forgetting something awesome. As for me, I love it, although I have such a hard time ranking them that I stopped trying years ago.
Third place:
Hail, Caesar! - "Would that it were so simple." [113 points / 10 votes]
Second place:
Toni Erdmann - the team building party (warning: highly NSFW) [123 points / 10 votes]
And the Muriel goes to...
Toni Erdmann - "The Greatest Love of All" [138.5 points / 14 votes]
"Whitney Houston is an icon of pop music that established her with moving ballads about past and present love, mixing it up with dance anthems that moved generations. Her proficiency in terms of jumping and at the same time avoiding trends, establishing her own style, and is, not without reason, one of the most awarded and successful female performers of all time. Now, what does that particular amount of trivia that you can find on Wikipedia has to do with Toni Erdmann and this particular scene? Actually, a lot. Sandra Hüller, who plays the protagonist of the film, has a hard time in this film trying to see herself, her career and all her accomplishments as important in the male-centered world in which she’s moving, much like Whitney Houston had to fight a sexist and racist music industry, specially to do what she did in a landscape that was dominated by either male performers or white women, who apparently where the only ones who could do the pop sound she wanted to be.
"In a way Houston’s single ‘Greatest Love of All’, which remained at the top of the charts for three weeks and was part of her first album released in 1985, is a statement of intent, which is curious considering that it’s actually a cover of George Benson’s 1977 song ‘The Greatest Love of All’. The song starts with a statement about children, which seems to belong more in a song that’s raising money for a UNICEF charity, but then it quickly changes in its second verse, where it starts to talk about what really we should be talking about: what is actually the greatest love of all? Is it the love that you find in someone else? Is it the love that you find in those that supposedly have the obligation to do so? No, the climax of the song tells us that the greatest love of all is to love yourself. How beautiful is that? How simple is that? How hard can that be of a lesson?
"In a way Hüller’s character in this scene is being forced into that lesson by his overbearing father under the guise of a German ambassador in a house where there’s a semi-public event. She is forced to sing by her father, masking it as part of a big joke that she’s being played with. The scene starts uncomfortable, when Peter Simonischek mumbles in English that they’ll leave a gift for the hospitality of these people and that they’ll sing, and it’s all in the eyes of Hüller, how she reacts, even though she’s not supposed to do so, how she masks her surprise and annoyance. But the scene evolves from that sentiment of awkwardness, which permeates the whole film. Simonischek then introduces her daughter as her secretary and later as 'Whitney Schnuck' as he starts playing the first notes of ‘Greatest Love of All’, and he makes it immediately funny when he makes eye contact with her and doesn’t change his expression while looping the last notes before Whitney’s voice should kick in.
"But when Hüller starts singing, the scene becomes something else. It illuminates. It truly brings forward as to why she is one of the most moving and important performances of the year, especially in one that is so filled with great actresses turning great roles into defining moments of their careers. The way that she starts shyly to sing about the children and the future, and then in the second verse she starts to find confidence, and it is through those words and her singing that she finds enough confidence to turn into an improvised show-woman, that might not be perfect in terms of pronunciation, tone or pitch… but it manages to make you feel every word, how she apparently through the forced performance has found some love in her heart. It also makes you wonder how she knows this song, how her father knows how to play it, and if there’s a code behind everything, there’s a hidden memory between them, something that activates her life. We know what she’s been through, and we might get to know what’s actually the result of this performance. It’s the turning point of the film, and the best scene of 2016, at least for me." ~ Jaime Grijalba
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