Longing for the Lines That Had Us at Hello
Did you see this article in the NY Times yesterday:
LOS ANGELES — Have we heard the last (truly memorable) word from Hollywood?
Probably not, but it’s been a while since the movies had everybody parroting a great line.
Like, say, “Go ahead, make my day.” That was from “Sudden Impact,” written by Joseph Stinson and others, more than 27 years ago.
Sticky movie lines were everywhere as recently as the 1990s. But they appear to be evaporating from a film world in which the memorable one-liner — a brilliant epigram, a quirky mantra, a moment in a bottle — is in danger of becoming a lost art.
Life was like a box of chocolates, per “Forrest Gump,” released in 1994 and written by Eric Roth, based on the novel by Winston Groom. “Show me the money!” howled mimics of “Jerry Maguire,” written by Cameron Crowe in 1996. Two years later, after watching “The Big Lebowski,” written by Ethan and Joel Coen, we told one another that “the Dude abides.”
But lately, “not so much” — to steal a few words from “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” Released in 2006, that film was written by Sacha Baron Cohen and others and is one of a very few in the last five years to have left some lines behind.
Pretty laughable premise it seems to me. Like screenwriters have consciously decided not to write memorable lines? We’re in a sort of post-modern age where pseudo-dialogue rules?
It may be that a Web-driven culture of irony latches onto the movie lines for something other than brilliance, or is downright allergic to the kind of polish that was once applied to the best bits of dialogue. Thus one of the most frequently repeated lines of the last year came from “Clash of the Titans,” which scored an unimpressive 28 percent positive rating among critics on the Rottentomatoes.com Web site after it was released by Warner Brothers in April.
“Release the Kraken!” thundered Liam Neeson as Zeus — spawning good-natured mockery on obscene T-shirts and in Kraken-captioned photos of angry kitty cats.
In truth, a good deal of thought went into the line. “When we came on, one of our conditions was that the line had to be in the movie,” said Matt Manfredi, who, with his writing partner, Phil Hay, joined in revising a script by Travis Beacham.
Bad dialogue has always been memorable ala ‘’Love means never having to say you’re sorry” (Love Story) or “You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!” (Plan 9 from Outer Space). But that’s not the article’s point. The author wants to know where the memorable good lines have gone.
Meanwhile, a call to Eric Roth, the veteran screenwriter behind movies like “Munich” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” found him scratching to find an unstoppable one-liner in “The Social Network.”
That film was written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, and in a bit of dialogue that inspired Web parodies galore, it has the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg “talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online.”
Mr. Roth said that he deeply admired “The Social Network,” and that he thought that it could secure its place in history with a simple bon mot.
But “is there a great line” in it? he pondered. Its best lines, Mr. Roth said, were not as “sophomoric” as his own much-quoted speeches from “Forrest Gump.” Who could forget “Stupid is as stupid does”?
For me this is the height of ludicrousness. If nothing else, even critics of the film — the few that there are — would have to admit that The Social Network is filled with great dialogue, one scene after another of vivid, compelling sides and lines from Aaron Sorkin. To judge it because the movie doesn’t have a memorable “bon mot” is silly. Besides what about these candidates as a possible “unstoppable one-liner”:
“I’m six-foot-five, 220 pounds, and there are two of me.”
“If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.”
“Did I adequately answer your condescending question?”
“Sorry, my Prada is at the cleaners, along with my hoodie and my ‘fuck you’ flip-flops, you pretentious douche bag!”
“As if every thought that tumbles through your head was so clever it would be a crime for it not to be shared.”
“You know what’s cooler than a million dollars? A billion dollars.”
“Dating you is like dating a Stairmaster.”
“You’re not an asshole Mark, you’re just trying too hard to be one.”
What do you think? Have Hollywood writers suddenly been sucked into a creative sinkhole when it comes to penning notable one-liners?
H/T to James Tichenor for sending me the link.
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