That's the problem a new site called Movieclips.com is designed to tackle. Movieclips.com is a free site that already offers users access to more than 12,000 movie clips. It's kind of like Hulu, but dedicated strictly to movie clips. Even better, Movieclips.com has entered partnerships with six major Hollywood studios -- 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros. It's an awesome free service currently available to users in the U.S. and Canada (although the Movieclips team plans to roll out the service to the UK, Australia and New Zealand soon).
How it Works
The Movieclips team put together this video to explain the service:
Finding Movieclips
Although the service has just launched, the site already has a pretty substantial clip library. New and catalog titles are represented, although it looks like Paramount and Universal are currently the most represented studios. You can search for a clip by title, actor, character name, theme and more. You can also search by dialogue if you have a clip or quote rattling around in your brain that you can't connect to an exact movie.
As a big movie fan, I was impressed with the quality of the clips that have been chosen. I did a number of searches for different films in a vairety of genres and found that the clips available, across the board, were some the most memorable and quotable from the silver screen canon.
I even managed to find this clip from Steven Soderbergh's 1998 film Out of Sight, which is one of my favorite scenes in all of moviedom.