Edit: The answers, in their entirety, are up! Thanks to everyone for playing.
Because a little levity and frivolity and game-playing are in order; because I punked out on the Oscars this year; and because it has been so much fun to watch this game being played over at bunni's, I have decided to play the Movie Meme. The rules, as our Miss Lapin says, are simple: Below are quotes from 12 movies. Please feel free to guess as many guesses as you have to guess. As the correct answers arrive, I will post them, along with a little annotation explaining why I picked that particular movie, as well as any useless trivia I can seize at that moment. With any luck, we'll have something fun to read here; you might find some movies you want to add to your Netflix queue; and you'll get a little window into my soul. (I can hear all y'all now: "So *that's* where that vast empty vacuumy sound is coming from...honey, do we have any weather-stripping left?"![]()
An advisory: The lines that follow include some f-bombs and adult situations. I know that not everyone is a fan of the f-bomb; if you are not a fan, you may want to sit this meme out.
1. "Do I laugh now, or wait till it gets funny?"
From the same film:
"I picked you for the job, not because I think you're so damn smart, but because I thought you were a shade less dumb than the rest of the outfit. Guess I was wrong. You're not smarter, Walter. You're just a little taller."
Michele has guessed correctly! Both of these quotes are from Double Indemnity, my very favorite Billy Wilder film. The dialogue in this movie is so good that it makes me wriggle with pleasure. Fred MacMurray plays an insurance salesman who falls in love with a client's wife and hatches a plan with her to kill her husband and collect the insurance money. Barbara Stanwyck is the wife, and she smokes; Edward G. Robinson is MacMurray's boss, and he is funny and intense; but the real revelation here is MacMurray. If you are only familiar with him as the father on My Three Sons, you will be stunned at how dark and amoral and fascinating he is here.
2. "Waiter, will you serve the nuts? I mean, will you serve the guests the nuts?"
Per the lovely Snowball, this line comes from The Thin Man, another corker of a movie for snappy dialogue. This movie is actually a tricky one to quote, as much of the brilliance shows in the dialogue, i.e. "It says you were shot five times in the tabloids." "That's not true. They never got near my tabloids," or in the lines that are set up as punchlines for visual jokes, such as when William Powell starts to drink a scotch as a detective goes through his wife's armoire, looking for evidence in a shooting, and his wife (the goddess that is Myrna Loy) wakes up and cries, "Nicky, what's that man doing in my drawers?" and Powell does a spit take. I could watch Powell and Loy for weeks, with only occasional breaks to brush my teeth and take in some fluids.
3. "Hey, Ted, where's that corkscrew? You know, that fancy corkscrew for the wine bottle? Ted. Ted? Ted! Hey, Ted, where the hell is that corkscrew?"
No, it's not from Bill and Ted. No, it's not from some screwball comedy -- or at least not an intentional screwball comedy. It's from Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, also known as Ft13 Part IV. Normally I don't have much truck with the hamhanded killdozer tactics of Jason Voorhees, but this one is special to me. Long before he elevated his own brand of sheer weirdness to an art form, Crispin Glover was a fresh-faced, nice young man/struggling actor, and it is he who delivers this line. Considering the way of the Ft13 movie, and considering that Crispin's character has just finished having sex with his new girlfriend, do you really need me to tell you where the corkscrew is?
4. "Not so fast. We're going to play a little game. It's called: Guess who just called the cops and reported your sorry motherfucking ass!"
My fellow Matthew Lillard fan kas called this one. This is the way that Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) turns the tables on the spree-killers of Scream. You can tell that everyone involved with this film -- Campbell, Lillard, Skeet Ulrich, Rose McGowan, Jamie Kennedy, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Wes Craven, Kevin Williamson, even Drew Barrymore and Henry Winkler, had fun making this movie.
5. "Baby's fat...you're fat...fat and juicy!"
Another Wes Craven golden gasser, this one from The Hills Have Eyes. I will repeat here the advisory I once read in a Time Out New York article about Uncle Wes, advice I found, and still find, useful: If your exposure to Wes Craven has come primarily from the Scream movies, or even the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, and you think to yourself, "I like those funny Wes Craven movies! I think I'll rent Last House on the Left or The Hills Have Eyes! It'll be a riot!"...no, it won't. These movies are very, very, very, very disturbing. Did I mention very? Very.
6. "If you are sad and like beer, I'm your lady."
Guy Maddin is a filmmaker and lunatic from Winnipeg. His movies definitely are love-'em-or-hate-'em enterprises. I have loved them ever since my dear friends Sharon and Todd introduced me to Maddin via Tales from Gimli Hospital. This particular line comes from The Saddest Music in the World, delivered by the luminous Isabella Rossellini, as the wealthy owner of a Winnipeg brewery during the Great Depression. Other reasons to love this movie (or for me to love it, anyway) include my boyfriend Mark McKinney in the lead, gorgeous cinematography, terrific music and the most demented play-by-play commentary (accompanying the titular contest) in existence.
7. "Aunt Barbara, I love you, but you're gonna get it."
Continuing the Isabella Rossellini tribute (although Ms. R. did not actually deliver this line), this comes from Blue Velvet, delivered by sweet little Kyle McLachlan. It's not the most famous line from Blue Velvet, but really, do you need to hear "Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!" one more time?
8. "Well, that's the war for you. It's always hard on women. Either they take your men away and never send them back at all, or they send them back unexpectedly just to embarrass you. No consideration at all."
This comes from the sublime 1944 Preston Sturges comedy Hail the Conquering Hero, starring Astoria, Queens's own Eddie Bracken as Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith. The son of a deceased war hero, Woodrow rushes to enlist, only to be designated 4F by chronic hay fever. Loath to return home and admit he can't be a hero just like his old man, Woodrow meets a group of furloughed soldiers in a bar, who decide to boost his spirits by creating an alternate tale for him to bring home to his family, a tale of receiving an honorable discharge after being wounded in combat. Complications, of course, ensue. I love this movie so; I want to recommend it to as many people as is humanly possible, particularly in light of current events and the question of media manipulation of war news coverage.
9. "Your Honor, the charge is homicide. Never having done it before is not a defense."
We can dig it. This comes from Shaft, not the original ("Richard Roundtree IS Shaft!"
, but from the 2000 update ("Richard Roundtree IS the uncle of Shaft!"
. I didn't really have a lot of expectations for this movie -- except, of course, for the always-enjoyable spectacle of Samuel L. Jackson opening cans of richly-deserved whoopass -- so I was pleasantly surprised by the droll line above, which is delivered by the district attorney after the counsel for the defense, at Christian Bale's bail hearing, points out that the defendant is from a socially prominent family and has no criminal record.
10. "Well, Brian, congratulations! You've succeeded in convincing me that you do have the most tedious fucking job in England."
From the same film:
"You think you can recapture your youth by fucking it? You don't want to fuck me. You'll catch something cruel."
The famous and not-at-all-evil Walt brings a smile to my face once again, this time for his correct identification of the two lines from Naked, as well as his anecdote about improvised dialogue. If you are not familiar with the director Mike Leigh, he does indeed create scripts based on improv from his actors. Naked is not my favorite Leigh movie -- that would be Life is Sweet -- but it is the one that takes my breath away every time I see it; it is brilliant, visceral, horrifying, sad, funny and it never, ever flinches. David Thewlis plays the protagonist, Johnny, as a whipsmart, doomed monster, turning from sexy to repellent on a dime. (I first saw Thewlis in Life is Sweet, in a small but memorable role as Jane Horrocks' lover, who at first glance appears thuggish and brutish, but ultimately proves himself to be curious, intelligent, and oddly tender, trying in vain to engage Horrocks' Nicola in a Socratic dialogue about the feminist texts on her bookshelf.) Although the two lines I quoted are the ones I associate most with this movie, probably my favorite moment is when Johnny is reading the Bible and wonders, aloud, "Fucking hell, why hast thou forsaken me? Bastard."
11. "Now this next part, I think you're not gonna like."
From the same film:
"When I invite a woman to dinner, I expect her to look at my face. That's the price she has to pay."
Called once again by Snowball. These two lines are from A Night at the Opera, the fastest and funniest of the Marx Brothers movies. My mom has frequently told the story of sitting in my grandmother's kitchen, drinking coffee, and suddenly hearing deep belly laughs from the living room, coming from my two-year-old self. She went into the living room to see what could make me laugh that hard for that long. It was Monkey Business, specifically the scene where Harpo chases girls around campus on a bicycle. You can't go wrong with any Marx Bros. movie, but I like Night at the Opera best because it has everything in it: the Marxes, Margaret Dumont, Allan Jones and Kitty Carlisle as the winsome and not-at-all-saccharine lovers, the famous crowded stateroom scene, the famous switching-the-furniture-between-rooms scene, decent musical numbers, and more perfect one-liners than can be counted in one lifetime. ("I can see you now, bending over a hot stove. Only I can't see the stove."![]()
12. "Shut up, Linda!"
We close with a quote from Evil Dead, starring my boyfriend Bruce Campbell as Ash. This particular line is delivered as the aforementioned evil dead are occupying the body of Ash's girlfriend Linda. They dig her fingers into his flesh, they draw blood, they try to kill him, they spew viscous body fluids all over him -- and then the taunting starts. It is one thing to be nearly devoured by your dead girlfriend, but being taunted by her, well, this cannot stand. This is my second favorite line from the Evil Dead trilogy, running just ahead of "Shop smart. Shop S-Mart," but just behind "All right, you primitive screwheads, listen up!"


Oh, a game, I like games. My guess for number one: Double Indemnity.
Yes, I will be back to guess more after other people have guessed.