15 Most Paused Movie Moments Of 2016
The moments that wore out your pause buttons this year...
No matter how much you pride yourself on noticing things in movies and drinking in the moments that matter, sometimes it isn't possible to fully appreciate a movie moment with your eyes alone. It's becoming an increasing currency in film-making for directors to hide secret details that are designed to reward the viewer who endlessly pours over films frame by frame. Easter Eggs have never been bigger business after all.
That's where the pause button comes in - and mercifully, in combination with the HD experience of blu-rays, you won't struggle with jumping lines of interference as you try to find the last remaining secrets hidden in Marvel's latest offerings.
But there's also something timeless about pause moments: in the past the sexiest, most disgusting and most unbelievable moments in film have had viewers reaching to freeze them to enjoy them for longer. And 2016 has been full of those moments from day one.
Here are the moments that wore out your pause button in 2016...
Honourable Mention
Doctor Strange Dies... A LOT
At the culmination of the excellent Doctor Strange debut, Benedict Cumberbatch tricks Dormammu into a pact to leave Earth alone by trapping him in an eternal time-loop. Even if Dormammu himself is not a great character, the sequence is brilliant - particularly when the demon acts out and murders Strange several times to test the time-loop. It's like the Groundhog Day suicides all over again!
There was no way to actually pause it, unless you're a despicable pirate (shame on you, devil), but that montage of deaths is so brilliant and so strange that it deserves appraisal in slow motion.
15. The Giant Bush - Mike And Dave Need Wedding Dates
It's incredible how much effect can be achieved using the simple application of a giant merkin (a pubic wig, in case you've not encountered the word), some glue and an attractive young actress.
Mike And Dave Need Wedding Dates really ought to be applauded for the way it presented nudity: instead of being fascinated with a voyeuristic gaze singling out only the female body, it flipped expectations, using female nudity as a gross-out device. It was a statement of reclamation that few other films have ever done.
And part of that saw former Canadian kids TV star Sugar Lyn Beard strip off to reveal what is an absolutely enormous bush - grotesquely enlarged for maximum effect, and it's completely hilarious. So much so that freeze-framing for added enjoyment is a must.