Scenes Made of Awesome - Out of Sight

In honor of this movie's Blu-Ray release today, I thought I'd give a shout-out to one of my favorite love scenes of all time. George Clooney was still best known for being Dr. Ross on E.R. Jennifer Lopez was still an actress, and her "J.Lo" days were a few years away. And director Steven Soderbergh was still an indie guy, a few years away from the critical success of Traffic and the commercial successes of his Ocean's movies.

In the 1998 film Out of Sight, Clooney plays Jack Foley, a bank robber, and Lopez plays Karen Sisco, a U.S. Marshal. They have a connection while sharing the trunk of a car after one of Foley's escape attempts, and Sisco pursues Foley as a U.S. Marshal pursuing a criminal, but she may have other motives as well. Foley tracks her down in a Detroit hotel, and what follows is this scene, where they try and figure out how to explore their attraction to one another.

The editing in this scene is where the magic is, taking the scene in the bar and the scene in the bedroom and weaving them together. I compared it once to the love scene in Don't Look Now, and apparently Soderbergh did style his scene after that one. The sense I get from Foley and Sisco in this scene is that, despite the difficulties their prospective careers pose to any kind of relationship, there's an inevitability about their being together, however briefly. They're sitting there talking, but it's as if they're already in bed together.