MISS BRODIE'S FAVORITE ANSWERS PART ONE: NOIR TALK, FUNNY TALK, DISSING THE CLASSICS AND OTHER INDULGENCES

     UPDATED 3/21/13  4:06 p.m. 

   And now, lifted straight from the Blue Books of the schoolmistress herself, some of Miss Jean Brodie's favorite answers submitted for her approval to the latest SLIFR Movie Quiz:

     1) The classic movie moment everyone loves except me is:

The fake orgasm in When Harry Met Sally. I never bought the character Sally doing this in a public setting - Holly Golightly would before Sally would. And am I the only one who saw the "I'll have what she's having" line coming from a mile away? (And I'm speaking as a guy who saw this in the theater on its opening weekend.) (Patrick)

Probably “Nobody’s perfect” – just never found it all that amusing. (Weigard)

The restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally. Much funnier in 'Round Midnight. (Mike Schlesinger)

Tom Joad launching into his “…any time there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there…” monologue in The Grapes of Wrath. (Jeff Gee)

Thelma and Louise. Never liked the joint suicide pact at the film’s end. Gravity always wins. (Jack Deth)

Since I can’t pick all of The Big Lebowski, I’ll go with MacMurray laying eyes on Stanwyck for the first time in Double Indemnity—yet another of Wilder’s self-consciously classic moments. The deep, deep appeal of that scene, like most of the rest of that movie, is a mystery to me. (Tom Block)

I’m a big George Cukor fan, but almost everything in My Fair Lady leaves me cold. (Josh K.)

I really like My Best Friend’s Wedding, a sweet-and-sour romantic comedy that uses Julia Roberts' blend of charm and entitlement to excellent effect (even if it has absolutely no sense of Chicago geography). But I cringed and slipped down into the bottom of my theater seat when Rupert Everett started leading the wedding party in a campy rendition of "I Say A Little Prayer," the Bacharach/David classic that no one but Dionne Warwick should try to sing. It's less the besmirching of a favorite song that bothers me, than the forced "fun" I knew was about to descend upon the theater (as noted cultural critic Cordelia Chase might say, "Please note my air quotes around the word 'fun'"). I really hate the notion that we're all supposed to sing, or clap, or wave our hands in the air ('cause I just don't care), simply because a movie (or play, or any cultural object) tells us to; it's a fake obligation reinforced by the implied bullying of everyone around me, wondering why I don't want to join in the hijinks. You know why? Because I'm paying to watch other people do that, thank you, and they're up there on the screen or stage.

Also, singing along like you're at Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Sound of Music Sing-a-long really does seem to miss the point of the scene, doesn't it? Everett is having a laugh on Julia Roberts, deliberating making her feel uncomfortable by putting her on the spot (and by extension, having a laugh on the rubes at the table who sing along with his clearly satiric rendering-- and maybe having a laugh at the folks singing and dancing in the movie theater, too).   (Brian Doan)

     Tons, but let's say James Dean screaming "You're tearin' me apaaaaaht!" This relates to my assertion that Nicholas Ray is generally--not always, but largely--full of shit. (Matthew David Wilder)

     “As God is my witness, as God is my witness they’re not going to lick me. I’m going to live through this and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” Spare me.  (Michael Allatore)

When John Cusack holds the ghetto blaster up to Ione Skye’s window in “Say Anything…” (Dave Stewart)

The entire movie Dr. Strangelove…, but the most gratuitous, unfunny moment that everyone loves and I despise is Slim Pickens riding the bomb like a bronco. Such sublime subtlety, there.   (xterminal)

Garbo on the prow of the ship in Queen Christina. Never understood what was so great about that shot. She's a lot more alluring in so many other movie moments. (Larry Aydlette)

"Show me the money" from Jerry Maguire, a movie that always seemed to be trying too hard. (Anne Thompson)

DeNiro talking to himself in the mirror in Taxi Driver. I’m sure this is because I saw SCTV’s parodies of it before I saw the original. As a result, in my mind’s eye it will always be Gregory Peck via Joe Flaherty who delivers this monologue, rather than Travis Bickle. (wwolfe)

All of Casablanca. (Thom McGregor)

The last shot of The Third Man. Yes, it’s a visually clever and, on first viewing, darkly funny defiling of cliché happy endings. But under the superficial punch is a facile quality that leaves a bad taste in my mouth now. Greene’s attempt to transplant a passion play onto a selfish and sleazy profiteer feels dishonest to me, and the film’s moral complexity is reduced to a cheap and cynical laugh line. Runner-up: the finale of On The Waterfront. (Roderick Heath)

  

“Get away from her, you bitch!” I saw Aliens at a sneak preview in Los Angeles a few weeks before it opened in 1986, and even then, that line—as it made everyone else in the theater stand up and cheer—made me groan. Still today, I consider it an obvious and heavy-handed play for the cheap seats. It just seemed so simpleminded and obvious, that for me it was like finding a bug in my soup. (Ivan)

Steve McQueen's fence jump at the end of The Great Escape. Almost every other character's escape attempt is un-done by cruel fate and misfortune, but Virgil Hilts' ridiculous showboating gets him gently escorted back to jail. He doesn't even nosedive into the barbed wire, but delicately drapes himself on a few carefully arranged strands that miraculously fail to rip the smug, pussy-chomping grin off his face. When he wimps out and flashes his stripes at the Nazis they don't even have the decency to machine-gun him for being such a tosser. (Jamie Lewis)

"Plastics."The Graduate. (Steven Hart)

       

       2)     Favorite line of dialogue from a film noir

"I don't mind if you don't like my manners. I don't like them myself. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings." (Self-Styled Siren)

“My, my, my! Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains! You know, you're the second guy I've met today that seems to think a gat in the hand means the world by the tail.” - Philip Marlowe, The Big Sleep (Scott Nye)

 

“I wouldn't give you the skin off a grape.” – Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (rudyfan1926)

"I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me." In a Lonely Place  (Simon Abrams, Tony Dayoub)

'She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.' The Big Sleep (estienne64)

That’s what noir is all about, the incredibly quotable lines. Well, I’ll pick one I like: “Match me, Sidney.” (Sweet Smell of Success) (Marilyn Ferdinand)

"Next time you wake up, Bart, look over at me lying there beside you. I'm yours and I'm real."  "Yes, but you're the only thing that is, Laurie. The rest is a nightmare." (Sean Axmaker)

[In response to the line "I don't want to die"] "Neither do I, baby, but if I do, I want to die last." Out of the Past (Robert Fiore, leo86)

 “He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?” (Roderick Heath)

Today's favorite? Sam Spade: "The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter, eh?" (Larry Aydlette)

Sam Fuller in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou: "Film is like a battleground: it's love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion." (Anne Thompson)

From Narrow Margin: "You make me sick to my stomach." "Well, use your own sink." (Patrick)

"He was fulla laughs." "Now he's fulla lead."—Tension (Mike Schlesinger)

There are lots of famous lines - though the one that seems to me to get the essence of noir is the last line in The Killing – “What’s the difference?” Hayden's delivery is required, of course. (weepingsam)

Elisha Cook Jr.: “Keep on riding me and they're gonna be picking iron out of your liver.” (Jeff Gee)

 Body and Soul: “What are you gonna do, kill me? Everybody dies.” (Tom Block)

"I should be very sorry to see my neighbor's children devoured by wolves." –Laura (Happy Miser)

The Last Seduction. “Anyone check you for a heartbeat recently?” (Jack Deth)

"Don't say that word: catgut! That's a HORRIBLE word!" Laird Cregar in This Gun for Hire. (David Cairns)

Terry Lennox: “Well, that's you, Marlowe. You'll never learn, you're a born loser.” Philip Marlowe: “Yeah, I even lost my cat.” The Long Goodbye (Robert T. Daniel)

"Such a lovely body. It's revolting." Actually, the whole scene in Frank Tuttle's This Gun for Hire (1942) between bad guy Gates (Laird Cregar) and his hired muscle (Marc Lawrence) on the disposal of Ellen Grahame (Veronica Lake), who knows too much to live, is just fantastic -- from prissy Cregar being both morbidly fascinated and repulsed by all the gory details about cat-gut tethers and staged suicides to the subtle, censor-slipping insinuation that Grahame will be stripped naked before she's deep-sixed (-- a "secret" that will be just between the dastardly chauffeur and the lake.) (W.B. Kelso)

       3) Second favorite Hal Ashby film 

 

The Last Detail. Shampoo has a very slight edge because of Julie Christie’s hair. (Marilyn Ferdinand)

The Last Detail (1973). The best Hal Ashby movies are really Robert Towne movies. (Brian Doan)

Bound for Glory (leo86)

I missed a bunch. I liked The Last Detail best and the other ones I saw have good things in them but there’s no obvious number two. (Jeff Gee)

The Landlord (Josh K., David Cairns)

Shampoo (Harold and Maude is number 1) (weepingsam)

A tie between Coming Home and The Last Detail. (Larry Aydlette)

Being There. Shampoo is number one. Harold and Maude is a very close third. (Mr. Peel)

It's been a while since I've seen any Ashby film, but I was very fond of 8 Million Ways to Die, strangely enough. (Tony Dayoub)

The Slugger’s Wife. (W.B. Kelso)

4)  Describe the moment when you first realized movies were directed as opposed to simply pieced together anonymously.

Kind of a two-part process, but it definitely escalated from Network-- particularly the four-TV-sets-talking-at-once opening and the gundown of Howard Beale, followed by the TV camera push-in and the canned applause, followed by the babbling TV's over the credits at the end...that was a shocker of real DIRECTED-NESS. Then, the next year, seeing Peckinpah's Cross of Iron. Very strange, beautiful film. Saw it with my dad who was, for some reason, a Peckinpah fan. I guess trying to like what my dad liked or see what he saw made me look into the Peckinpah-ness of the movie, and I found it terrifying and wonderful, the inside of this guy's mind. The body squashed like a pie plate by passing jeeps, just left there to stay squashed...things like this blew my mind. (Matthew David Wilder)

 I’m not sure I ever thought the latter. The first time I actually noticed a directorial style and started hunting down movies by “this one guy” because I thought he was awesome was upon seeing Arthur Penn’s Four Friends (a movie only I, out of my circle of friends, could abide). (xterminal)

I can’t recover the exact moment, but I know it came from reading Famous Monsters of Filmland when I was a Monster Kid. (Dave Stewart)

There might be two answers here. One might not be what you are asking - I because an auteurist because of Howard Hawks. I noticed that he had directed a number of completely different films I loved - Bringing up Baby, Scarface, The Big Sleep, Red River - and thought - you know, these films have nothing obvious in common, but they all play alike - how does that work?.... The other is a bit strange: I believe it is true that I made a film before I had ever actually seen one. It’s not quite literally true, even in the narrow sense of seeing a film as film, projected - I saw home movies and 8 and 16 mm films in school and church and what not. But commercially, I did not go to the movies - but I made one, in early high school, along with my Sunday school class - a Christmas film. I played Joseph. 8 mm with post synch sound (which didn’t work too well because the tape player had a dying battery.) So - my point being - I knew more about how films were made (at a pretty basic, crude level) before I had seen enough films to have any other ideas about them. (weepingsam)

I really cannot recall the a-ha moment. I must have snuck up on me somewhere between a late-night TV showing of Bride of Frankenstein and seeing Excalibur in the theater. (Sean Axmaker)

Watching Kong's entrance in King Kong (1933) on TV and noticing the difference in the way Kong looked in long shot (animated) and up close (giant face model) (leo86)

I was an eight year-old who insisted on staying through the end credits so maybe I always knew. (Mr. Peel)

  

Bonnie and Clyde. I was 13 the first time I saw it and sat through it twice, completely enthralled. I noticed everything that day: the association between the music cues and automobiles, the strangeness of Estelle Parsons’ jodhpurs, the time-lapse shot just before the shootout at the fairgrounds. I’ve never been so ready to learn from a particular movie as I was that day. (Tom Block)

          I was eleven years old, and my father had just taken my Webelos troop to see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark countless times in the theater and on videotape, and have been looking forward to this trip for months, and so it's with a heavy heart that I sit on our back porch after the film, and try to ascertain why I feel a curious disappointment in what I've just seen. "Indiana Jones needs a stronger villain," I tentatively explain to my father. "Belloq is like...he's like his opposite, so it...it means more than the guy pulling hearts out of the chest." Even then, I know my discomfort has as much to do with telling my father-- my hero, who had organized this outing--that I didn't like the film, something that it's very hard for me to do at a young age, as I'm afraid he will take it personally (which he does not). Being able to articulate that disappointment is an important moment. But it's also the moment when, in sensing and trying to work out a movie's failures, that I begin to understand that they are the result of choices, good or bad, that can affect the whole. I will later shift my opinion on Temple of Doom-- it's deeply flawed, but I love its go-for-broke spirit-- but this backyard discussion heralds the next step in my transformation: from film fan and trivia geek to budding critic. (Brian Doan)

In The Graduate, when Elaine realizes that Ben slept with her mother as the camera slowly brings her into focus. I understood how this was a specific decision the director made to help tell the story, and that he didn't just point the camera and say "action" and "cut." (Patrick)

There’s a WW II movie called No Man Is an Island (1962). I was 11 or 12, watching it on TV with my dad. Jeffrey Hunter & his guys are escaping Japanese soldiers by climbing up a cliff side, and there’s a zoom in on them (maybe even an iris), which puzzled me. “Does that mean the Japanese guys are looking at them with binoculars?” I asked. My father guessed it did. Turned out it didn’t. I remember thinking, ‘Well, somebody screwed up there.’ Which got me to wondering: who? (Jeff Gee)

The scene where Cary Grant carries the glass of milk upstairs in Suspicion, seen by me on Channel 61 out of Cleveland (hurray, UHF!) when I was eight or nine. I distinctly remember thinking, “Someone made this – it didn’t just happen.” (wwolfe)

The first director I was consciously aware of was Chuck Jones. Couldn't say when, but it must have been before I was 10. I always knew that Bugs Bunny cartoons were better than anything, and I knew the best Bugs Bunny cartoons were the ones that said Chuck Jones up front. (Robert Fiore)

I don't have a clear fix on it. But I knew SOMEBODY was rewriting paleontology in King Kong.(David Cairns)

I think it was seeing The World's Greatest Athlete starring Jan-Michael Vincent. (Thom McGregor)

      5)   Favorite film book

 Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees by Christian Keathley (Scott Nye)

At the moment, Richard Brody's Everything is Cinema. (Simon Abrams)

Geoff Dyer’s Zona: A Book About a Movie About a Journey to a Room, which topped my Best Reads of 2012 list. (xterminal)

Hitchcock/Truffaut: The Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock by François Truffaut (Dave Stewart)

Ephraim Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia. (Katherine Wilson)

The Movies by Richard Griffith & Arthur Mayer, and The Bad Guys by William K. Everson were the first two film books I owned (the former actually a communal family / bathroom possession) and although I think the Griffith & Meyer book is wrong-headed about almost everything and wrong-hearted more often than I’m comfortable with, I was gaping in wonder at the two page spread of the Thousand Faces of Lon Chaney (actually fourteen) before I could read the captions. I can’t even begin to articulate my debt to this book. (The Bad Guys has lots of monster pictures in it). (Jeff Gee)

Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape is still a relevant must-read. (Anne Thompson)

Cult Movies by Danny Peary. It took forever, but last year I finally tracked down copies of volumes 2 and 3. Whoo-hoo!  (Patrick)

For Keeps by Pauline Kael. (Edward Copeland)

The Immediate Experience by Robert Warshow. (Josh K.)

Guide for the Film Fanatic by Danny Peary is far more than your average video guide, offering insight into a whole variety of films even before they were ever available on VHS. It's still a treasured reference source for me. (Tony Dayoub)

Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion. (Larry Aydlette)

      I have a sentimental attachment to Pauline Kael's When the Lights Go Down. It was an Easter gift to me as a kid with a bunch of chocolate rabbits. I swirl the feel of biting into a hollow chocolate rabbit with reading that book (wags, mock all you will). Manny Farber's Negative Space is obviously a big deal, and for a more adult user. (Matthew David Wilder)

I’m not saying it’s definitely my favorite but I’ve been going through a period where I’m reading Zeroville over and over and over. I believe it’s a very good book. (Mr. Peel)

The American Cinema, by Andrew Sarris. (wwolfe)

Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns. (Robert Fiore)

  

Zeroville by Steve Erickson: through “cineautistic” Vikar Jerome’s adventures in late-1960s/early-1970s Hollywood, we learn of the supernatural quality of film and how it infuses our collective unconsciousness—with the potential of bringing us closer to God (who may not be a very nice person). Meanwhile the cast of characters includes all the “Movie Brats” who took apart Old Hollywood—and made the movie business ripe for attack by the bean-counters and greedheads. Hollywood outsider/insider John Milius appears as the shamanistic Viking Man, and there are a gazillion movie references for fans and trivia experts to mull over. (Ivan)

The Parade's Gone By, Kevin Brownlow. I was going to go with The Phantom Empire by Geoffrey O'Brien (which I've handed out as a present many times), but Brownlow's book had a bigger effect on my than any film book before or since, and I still return to it for its information, its passion for its subject, and way all those voices combine to offer an evocation of an era. (Sean Axmaker)

The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco- by Julie Salamon. I still wince every time I see or hear Morgan Freeman. (Jamie Lewis)

The Psychotonic Encyclopedia. Superb reference text for many or any genre of film. (Jack Deth)

At the moment, Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Patricia Erens. (Marilyn Ferdinand)

      Oh, man-- so, so many to choose from (budding critic indeed!) Andre Bazin's What Is Cinema, vols. 1& 2 were an immense discovery for me in college; I've talked so much about Pauline Kael's work on this blog that I almost feel like she should be its avatar; I adore David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film, even if its author has abandoned his movie love for a weird love/hate cinephobia (although I think that stance also gets exaggerated by Internet movie mandarins with opposing agendas); while not strictly a "film book," Raymond Benson's James Bond Bedside Companion (which combines analyses of the books and movies) was my first encounter with "serious" (i.e., not newspaper) film criticism at the tender age of 13, and so it holds an important place in my heart; the 1950s and 60s collections of Cahiers du Cinema (and Francois Truffaut's The Movies of My Life, and Tom Milne's edited collection Godard on Godard) remain benchmarks of movie crit cool; everything written by James Naremore is essential; and a world without Andrew Sarris' The American Cinema is simply unthinkable.

But if I'm honest, it's probably The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (1995), Robert Ray's wittily titled academic study of the Mickey Rooney series. 
 
Describing it that way is like saying Citizen Kane is simply about a man with a sled fixation, and I don't make that comparison flippantly-- for me, reading it over the course of a Chicago winter was as life-transforming as watching Orson Welles' masterpiece was for those young cinephiles in post-war Paris. "To make Citizen Kane at 25, is that not the dream of every young cinephile?," Truffaut wrote, and for me, on the cusp of 24, Ray's formally audacious book blew open my notions of what film writing--especially academic film writing-- could be. Starting from the (sadly still-true) proposition that academic film studies has, through institutional inertia and ideological convenience, found itself recycling the same theoretical tropes again and again (ironically, much as the Hollywood apparatus it so often critiques recycles genres and stars), Ray proposes two seemingly opposed solutions: moving from "major" films to overlooked B-films like the Andy Hardy series, and applying Surrealist and post-structuralist strategies for examining them. But not just the ideas of those movements (which are well-integrated into academic study), but their formal methodologies: games, fragments, experiments, an Exquisite Corpse of film study. From Irrational Enlargement to Barthesian ABCs to Ulmerian mystories, The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy casts a wide, deep, and thoroughly engaging net. And it reads like a dream.  

      Simple plot summary doesn't do it justice, anymore than a capsule can capture a film-- you just have to read the damn thing to get its real effect (which is, after all, Ray's larger point about needing to make academic study as accessible and addictive as the movies it studies).  Ray's work had hit me at several moments in my life: the fall evening in 1992 when I read his essay on It's A Wonderful Life in my dorm room and had a "eureka!" moment, pushing and pushing and finally understanding his use of structuralism; reading A Certain Tendency of The American Cinema, his first book, in the fall of 1996 in a drafty Rogers Park apartment, thinking about graduate school, enthralled by his readings of The Maltese Falcon and The Godfather; being so excited about that book that I immediately dove into the next, read the first few pages of The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, and threw it across the room in seething disgust, actually spatting a "NO!" out as I did so; picking it up a while later, and really starting to read it, and pushing through its dense ideas (only some of which I was then familiar with), over the next couple of months. I was in the process of applying to graduate schools, and Florida, Ray's homebase, was one of the places I was looking. I got in, wasn't sure where to go, and finished the book on a bus back from a trip to Bloomington, Indiana. I think it was the ABCs chapter that was my eureka moment that time--it was enthralling, and I thought, "I could do this. I could go there, and do this kind of work." 

And that's what I did.  That fall I moved to Gainesville, met Ray, took his class the following spring, and it was, as Rick says to Louis at the end of Casablanca, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. My M.A. thesis would be built around the ABC method described in the book, looking at Since You Went Away; my dissertation-- an anecdotal history of Hollywood-- would be a new extension of the experimental strategies Ray outlined in 1995. I've taught The Avant-Garde several times, had students write experimental papers based on its strategies, asked them to dream up new ones following its inspiration. Ray lit a fuse in me with that book, a desire for a writerly academic cinephilia, that burns to this day (hell, it's why I blog). He would be a director, mentor and friend for the next fifteen years, as he remains today. The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy is the most readable academic film book I've ever encountered, and even if one cares not one whit for Andy Hardy, it can transform your life. After all, it transformed mine. (Brian Doan)

 

6) Diana Sands or Vonetta McGee

 Vonette, for Repo Man. I jumped on that action from day one. (Patrick)

Diana Sands. (Edward Copeland)

Vonetta. Like everyone in Repo Man, she has a lifetime pass from me. Plus she was just great. (Roderick Heath)

Sands, for The Landlord alone. (Tom Block)

Vonetta McGee gets the slight edge. Love both of them. (Josh K.) 

I’m not sure that either one is necessarily a favorite, but since Diana Sands was in Ashby’s The Landlord that puts her up to the front of the line. (Mr. Peel)

Vonetta McGee, who was so gorgeous in Shaft in Africa (1973). (Tony Dayoub)

I'm not familiar with either actress enough to make a choice. Actually never heard of Diana Sands until this year. (Thom McGregor)

Vonetta McGee. She has an unforgettable face. (Marilyn Ferdinand)

7) Most egregious gap in your viewing of films made in the past 10 years

I have yet to see a film by indie it-boy Shane Carruth. (Anne Thompson)

4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days (Scott Nye)

 I haven’t seen a single film by James Gray or Pedro Costa, but reading about both makes me think I’m missing out on some great stuff. (Josh K.)

I haven't seen any Steven Spielberg movies since Catch Me If You Can. I also haven't seen any Sasha Baron Cohen movies. History will vindicate me. (Patrick)

Too many to name. I guess I could have seen more Asian Cinema. What I’ve seen of mumblecore doesn’t make me want to seek out others. Plus I missed all the Twilights, but I don’t feel so bad about that. (Mr. Peel)

I've only seen one Steven Soderbergh film since 2001's Ocean's Eleven remake (which was Che). (Sean Gilman)

Lots of Tarkovsky and Antonioni. (David Cairns)

 

Fantasy: couldn’t finish the Hobbit trilogy, and I missed both Narnias, the last three Star Wars movies, and all of the Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean movies. I’m now in the process of missing The Hunger Games and the SECOND Hobbit trilogy. None of these gaps feel “egregious”, though. If I hadn’t seen all the things I’ve been watching in lieu of all that stuff, THAT I’d consider to be egregious. (Tom Block)

       

        I've avoided Harmony Korine like the plague so far, but Spring Breakers may finally change that. (Craig)

Given my loyalty to Hong Kong films in the 90s, I find it very troubling that I have seen so few in the 00s and 10s. 2-3 Johnny To films is about it - which itself is very disappointing to me. (weepingsam)

The Master. (Larry Aydlette)

Gaps in viewing films made in the last ten years are hardly ever egregious. Biggest recent film phenomenon I've skipped is, I've yet to see a Harry Potter movie. If we broaden the question to 20 years I suppose the most acclaimed thing I haven't gotten around to seeing is the Three Colors trilogy. (Robert Fiore)

Apichatpong Weerasethakul remains a mystery. (estienne64)

Sadly, more gaps than I care to remember. The most glaring I guess is Bela Tarr: I've seen only two of his films, and only one from the last decade. And both of them, mind you, were amazing. (Sean Axmaker)

      

     8) Favorite line of dialogue from a comedy

 

 

W.C. Fields, The Bank Dick: "Don't be a luddy ruddy, don't be a jabbernowl, don't be a mooncalf. You're none of those, are you?" (leo86)

 

“Well, a scavenger hunt is exactly like a treasure hunt, except in a treasure hunt you try to find something you want, and in a scavenger hunt you try to find something that nobody wants.”  (Brian Doan)

"I don't think you're gonna hit 'em, Ward." (W.B. Kelso)

When William Forsythe's Evelle stops at a convenience store to get something to pacify a baby he's kidnapped, he asks the clerk if a selection of balloons he buys "...blow up into funny shapes..." The clerk responds, "Well no... unless round is funny." (Tony Dayoub)

“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.” - Lady Bracknell, The Importance of Being Earnest. (Scott Nye)

 “You see, man, there’s this… lattice of coincidence…” (Repo Man) (xterminal)

 “I wouldn't suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls! “ from John Waters’ Female Trouble. (Dave Stewart)

“Listen the last man that said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut his throat.” ~ Cary Grant as Walter Burns in His Girl Friday. Best in-joke, ever. (Michael Allatore)

"Why do you have to paint everything so black? Suppose you got hit by a truck. Suppose the stock market crashes. Suppose Mary Pickford divorces Douglas Fairbanks. Suppose the Dodgers leave Brooklyn!" – Some Like it Hot (rudyfan1926)

From Way Out West-- Stan: 'Well shut my mouth! I'm from the south too.' Olly: 'South of what, sir?' Stan: 'South of London.' (estienne64)

“Well, that covers a lot of ground. Say, you cover a lot of ground yourself. You better beat it; I hear they're going to tear you down and put up an office building where you're standing. You can leave in a taxi; if you can't find a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff. You know, you haven't stopped talking since I came in here? You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.” (Patrick)

"Repeat after me--I..." "I..." "Your name..." "Your name..." – Blazing Saddles (Mike Schlesinger)

“Don’t call me Shirley” is almost too obvious but it rarely gets better than that. (Mr. Peel)

Frank McHugh: What’s that on your head?

William Powell: Scrambled eggs. What did you think it was?

 Frank McHugh: I didn’t know. (Jeff Gee)

 

 A tie, both from The Palm Beach Story:  “I'm the Wienie King! Invented the Texas Wienie! Lay off 'em, you'll live longer.” and “That's one of the tragedies of this life - that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous.” (Josh K.)

This is a very tough one, but I might as well go to the top: “Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don't let that fool you: he really is an idiot.” (weepingsam)

“The mayor of Canada possibly?” (Ruggles of Red Gap). (Marilyn Ferdinand)

 Today’s favorite.

Tom: I mean, sex didn't even enter into it.

Gerry: Oh, but of course it did, darling. I don't think he'd have given it to me if I had hair like excelsior and little short legs like an alligator. Sex always has something to do with it, dear.

Tom: I see.

Gerry: From the time you're about so big and wondering why your girlfriends' fathers are getting so arch all of a sudden. Nothing wrong - just an overture to the opera that's coming. (Larry Aydlette)

      "Did anybody evah tell you....you're a MOE-RON?" -- Jerry Langford from The King of Comedy (which, yeah, I guess, isn't "a comedy") (Matthew David Wilder)

"Puht-in onna Ri-i-i-i-i-itz!" (It's all in the delivery) (Sean Axmaker)

"I always keep a pair of mules under my bed."  "And don't the board of health say nutin? Joan Davis/Lou Costello: Hold That Ghost. (Happy Miser)

Up next, Part Two : BACON, HAM, REFUSALS, TEAMWORK, MONSTER TALK AND OTHER INDULGENCES

*********************************************