Saturday, May 22, 2004
Stupid Movie Lines
With an eye out for the onset of the summer blockbuster season, and taking a cue from Roger Ebert's Little Movie Glossary, I've begun trying to catalog the various stupid movie (especially action movie) lines and phrases that pop up repeatedly in the periodic celuoid morons with which our warmer months are cursed.
Ebert's book finds names for common movie cliches (of which there are hundreds). My aim is more subdued: I seek only specific phrases, or near-matches of those phrases, that crop up time and again in many movies.
Here are the first two:
"It's more (X) than you can possibly imagine."
Recently guilty: Hidalgo
Sakes alive, how many things are there in this world that we can't possibly imagine? I suspect more than any of us realize, but I doubt a typical lobotomy-patient action film is an appropriate guru to seek out for such enlightenment. This one is so overused that it's quickly shooting up to "In a world where..." status, in other words, infallibly indicative of movie lameness.
This one crops up both in movies and in trailers. No one expects great writing from trailers, but the movie itself should know better.
To "call" this phrase, in case you're engaged in some sort of drinking game, it must at least contain the word imagine or a derivative of it, and the implication that the movie, or something within it, defeats imagining. So for example, also fitting this structure is anything that is "beyond imagination."
"You can't kill me... I'm already dead!"
Recently guilty: Van Helsing
The undead are constantly gloating about their status to mortals. Well, I guess I'd have reason to gloat too, if I found a way to send the laws of thermodynamics packing and had applied it to the workings of my internal organs.
This also comes in the form of a question, like "How do you kill what's already dead?" The answer, obviously, is: "You don't have to. Go have a cookie." If you're dead and still walking around, then the authority that's doing the dead-declaring in your area is incompetent, and you should be directing your complaints to the local morgue.
With an eye out for the onset of the summer blockbuster season, and taking a cue from Roger Ebert's Little Movie Glossary, I've begun trying to catalog the various stupid movie (especially action movie) lines and phrases that pop up repeatedly in the periodic celuoid morons with which our warmer months are cursed.
Ebert's book finds names for common movie cliches (of which there are hundreds). My aim is more subdued: I seek only specific phrases, or near-matches of those phrases, that crop up time and again in many movies.
Here are the first two:
"It's more (X) than you can possibly imagine."
Recently guilty: Hidalgo
Sakes alive, how many things are there in this world that we can't possibly imagine? I suspect more than any of us realize, but I doubt a typical lobotomy-patient action film is an appropriate guru to seek out for such enlightenment. This one is so overused that it's quickly shooting up to "In a world where..." status, in other words, infallibly indicative of movie lameness.
This one crops up both in movies and in trailers. No one expects great writing from trailers, but the movie itself should know better.
To "call" this phrase, in case you're engaged in some sort of drinking game, it must at least contain the word imagine or a derivative of it, and the implication that the movie, or something within it, defeats imagining. So for example, also fitting this structure is anything that is "beyond imagination."
"You can't kill me... I'm already dead!"
Recently guilty: Van Helsing
The undead are constantly gloating about their status to mortals. Well, I guess I'd have reason to gloat too, if I found a way to send the laws of thermodynamics packing and had applied it to the workings of my internal organs.
This also comes in the form of a question, like "How do you kill what's already dead?" The answer, obviously, is: "You don't have to. Go have a cookie." If you're dead and still walking around, then the authority that's doing the dead-declaring in your area is incompetent, and you should be directing your complaints to the local morgue.
