Movies - Quotes posts

Isaac: Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? I read this in the newspaper. We should go down there, get some guys together, y'know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.
Male: There is a devastating satirical piece on that on the Op-Ed page of the Times. It is devastating.
Isaac: Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.
Female: Oh, but really biting satire is always better than physical force.
Isaac: No, physical force is always better with Nazis. It's hard to satirize a guy with shiny boots. 

-- “Manhattan” (1979), written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman

I came across this the other day, remembered it fondly, but man does it speak to me today. I'm with Woody here: bricks and baseball bats is way better than anything in the Times.  I want to live in a world again where Woody Allen is relevant and Nazis are distant things. 

“For example, James Burke, CEO of Johnson & Johnson. When he found out that some lunatic had put poison in Tylenol bottles, he didn't argue with the FDA. He didn't even wait for the FDA to tell him, he just pulled Tylenol off every shelf of every store right across America—instantly. [SNAPS FINGERS] And then he developed the safety cap. Because as a CEO, sure, he's gotta be a great businessman, right? But he's also a man of science. So he's not going to allow his company to put on the shelf a product that might hurt people.”

-- Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) to Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) in Michael Mann's “The Insider”

This is the conversation I kept going back to when data from Facebook was leaked to groups that helped elect Donald Trump in 2016. I thought, “Well, their product has become harmful. So surely they'll pull it from every shelf and develop the social media equivalent of the safety cap.” Guess what? Not even close. Not even a discussion. They don't care. Zuckerberg doesn't care, Bezos doesn't care, Musk really doesn't care. What CEO today does? I'm curious. There must be a few, right? But they all grew up in a world where there wasn't a sense of shared tragedy and trauma (the Great Depression, WWII) and civic responsibility (FDR, Great Society, mandatory military service); they grew up in a world of get-rich-quick and get your own. Reagan, not FDR.

“... That's what sustained me in my time of trouble.”

This isn't one of my most-quoted movie lines but I feel like it should be. It's from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” so it tends to get lost amid the many, many great lines there. The other night, I watched the movie for the first time in decades, and for some reason this line stood out.

It's early in the movie, Butch and Sundance are returning to their hideout at Hole-in-the-Wall pass, only to find that a member of the gang, Harvey (Ted Cassidy, 6'9“, who played Lurch on ”The Addams Family), has usurped Butch's authority. So there's a knifefight. That's one of the famous lines. “Rules? In a knife fight?”

After Butch wins a fight no one thought he could win, one of the gang members, Flat Nose (future “Police Woman” regular Charles Dierkop), goes up to him and says, almost childlike, “I was rooting for ya, Butch.” Which is when Newman says the line.

I suppose you could say it when someone professes support after the battle is over. Which ... yeah, I guess that's why we don't use it. The circumstances are too rare, and most friends aren't so two-faced. But politicians? Taking credit for, say, the results of a law that benefits their constitutents but which they fought and didn't vote for? “Well, thank you, Flat Nose. That's what sustained us in our time of trouble.”

There's something there anyway.

What does it mean to you to direct an actor or an actress?

You cannot generalize that. That is like asking a doctor the same kind of question. “Well, there are some nice patients, there are some terrifying nudniks, there are hypochondriacs and there are some jolly ones who say, 'So I've got a 106-degree fever, I'll be all right, Doc.'” It all depends. Maybe if there is some kind of generalization possible, I would say that fifty-five percent are bores. Yes, expecially when they start digging deep into the character, because then you have to spend a week with them saying, “Yes, blah, blah, my father, my grandfather, blah.” And then I say, “For Chrissakes, learn those goddamned lines and let's get it over with.”

-- George Stevens Jr. interviewing Billy Wilder in Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden Age

More takes on that early 20th-century catchphrase “Free, White and 21,” which I wrote about in 2009 (“Fugitive from a Chain Gang”) and revisited 10 years later (“What Price Hollywood?”). This spin is from George Cukor's “Dinner at Eight:

The character on the left is Hattie Loomis, whose carping husband, Ed, would rather go to the movies than to the titular event. She's played by Louise Closser Hale, who sadly died before the movie premiered. The character on the right is Millicent Jordan, host of the dinner, at which most everything that can go wrong does. Recognize her? Billie Burke. Six years later she played Glynda the Good Witch of the North in ”The Wizard of Oz.“ Her husband in this movie is played by Lionel Barrymore, who played one of the most horrible men in cinema, Mr. Potter from ”It's a Wonderful Life.“ He's about the only good man in ”Dinner at Eight."

For more on the history of the phrase, check out Andrew Heisel's well-researched 2015 Jezebel article.  

The only thing soggy is the paper.

I've got most Marx Brothers movies all but memorized but not The Cocoanuts, which I only saw once or twice in my heyday with the Marx Brotherhood. Just didn't care for it. I put it with Room Service or Love Happy as the disappointments. Yes, it was a big Broadway hit and their first Hollywood movie, but it's so unevenly paced. Paramount put two directors on it and the Brothers didn't think much of either. “One of them didn't understand English,” Groucho said, “and the other one didn't understand comedy.”

Anyway I watched it the other day and it still isn't good but it has its moments. Harpo shines. The auction scene is great. Plus, of course, “Why a duck.” But I missed this great pun right before the “Why a duck?” bit. Groucho is about to auction off lots in the Florida land boom and he wants Chico to bid up the price, and he's explaining to him where the lots are. 

Groucho: This is the riverfront. And all along the river, those are all levees.
Chico: That's the Jewish neighborhood.
Groucho: [Gives him a look] Well, we'll pass over that.

As a kid in Minnesota, I probably didn't know levees or Levys (not to mention Passover), which may be why the joke never stuck. But man did I laugh the other day.

Something else that stuck this viewing: During this scene, Groucho also says to Chico, “Look, Einstein...” This was in 1929. It made me wonder about the first ironic usage of an “Einstein.” Is there an earlier recorded example? And did Einstein's friends ever use it on him when he got something wrong? “Nice going, Einstein.” 

• “You just keep thinkin', Butch, that's what you‘re good at.”
• “Rules? In a knife fight?”
• “Are you crazy? The fall will probably kill ya.” 
• “You think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?”
• “Who are those guys?”
• “Follow the money.”
• “The truth is, these aren’t very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”
• “Now don't tell me you think that all of this was the work of little Don Segretti.”
• “You haven't got it.” 
• “Is it safe?”
• “Nobody knows anything.” 
• “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
• “No more rhymes now—and I mean it!” “Anybody got a peanut?”
• “INCONCEIVABLE!”
• “You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.”
• “This is true love. You think this happens every day?”
• “As you wish.”

OK, so last week I talked about the shitty, closed-caption transcription of the 1933 Cagney flick “The Mayor of Hell.” The characters were saying “Miss,” the transcription updated it to “Ms.” A Jewish kid called someone a “gonif,” the transcriber, gentile no doubt, went with “[INAUDIBLE].”

But this is the worst:

He's saying Fagin. As in the character from “Oliver Twist”—the corrupt man leading a group of Dickensian pickpockets. “Where's the Fagin that runs this joint.”

Look, I know how tough it is to transcribe. In the 1980s, I did it for a Taiwanese record company, which needed accompanying lyric sheets for their English and American records. I remember listening over and over to some songs and never figuring out certain words, and having to go with my best guess. 

But this? This is embarrassing. For Warner Bros. and Filmstruck. 

At the least, we're narrowing down the identity of the transcriber: progressive, gentile, not a big reader.

The shit you come across on Twitter. 

This thing somehow wound up in my feed today. It's a right-wing defense by a right-wing idiot of Donald Trump's severe and idiotic budget cut proposals. 

In Matt 25, when Jesus talks about caring for “the least of these,” he isn’t talking about the poor in general, but fellow Christians.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) March 17, 2017

What do you do with that? Argue? Face palm? Move to Mexico?

On the plus side, it did make me recall one of the greatest lines in movie history—something that is truer today than when it was originally said in 1986:

Point for the arts, currently on the chopping block. 

We get a lot of dumb lines masquerading as wisdom in “The Equalizer,” directed by Antoine Fuqua (“Olympus Has Fallen”) and written by Richard Wenk (“The Expendables 2”), which gives the movie an air of a bloody Bill Cosby action movie, if you can imagine such a beast. “You gotta be who you are in this world, no matter what,” spoken to a child prostitute, is one of those lines.

Here's another. It had me talking back at the screen. In my head, I mean. I don't talk out loud at movies. (Although I might groan occasionally.) 

Robert McCall (Denzel) is a former super-espionage agent trying to live out the rest of his life with a quiet warehouse job. It's a friendly place, and he's friendly there, and he tries to help an overweight Hispanic worker, Ralphie (Johnny Skourtis), become the security guard he always wanted to be. So he keeps him on his diet and trains him on weekends. He has him pull tires at a local park. (This exercise will come in handy later in the movie.) But Ralphie keeps giving up on himself. 

Here's the line and here's what I answered back:

Denzel: Hey, don't doubt yourself. Doubt kills.
Me: So does certainty.

I was thinking specifically of the certainty, the hubris, of the Bush adminstration, and all of the people who died as a result. They were certain it made sense to demote Richard Clarke, terrorism czar, to a deputy position, and 9/11 happened. Then they were certain it made sense to invade Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein. They could nation-build in a matter of months—they were certain of that—and get out cleanly. And their certainy killed. It goes on killing, even after they've long left the scene.

Of course, we go to the movies for the very certainty someone like Denzel projects. That's part of the wish-fulfillment-fantasy bargain. We're fearful and doubtful. He's brave and certain, and in the end he'll save the day. It's great to see up on the screen. If only it stayed there. 

Certainty, about to do some killing. 

“The idea that the [Obama] administration would be in any way 'rattled' by D’Souza’s documentary is highly unlikely. '2016' spins a cockamamie theory that President Obama is using his power to diminish America’s standing in the world in order to fulfill the aspirations of the father he never knew. It’s a derp-fest for the high-brow anti-Obama zealot who believes the president is a “Third World anti-colonial” and also demands slick production values.”

-- Simon Malloy, “The Right's Favorite Criminal: Inside the hopeless obsession with Dinesh D'Souza,” on Salon.com.

I particularly like “derp-fest.” But not as much as I like the schadenfreude of D'Souza's troubles.

What Billy Martin said of both Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner can now be said of just D'Souza: a born liar, now convicted.

“Stefania, mother and woman, you're 53 with a life in tatters like the rest of us. Instead of acting superior and treating us with contempt, you should look at us with affection. We're all on the brink of despair, all we can do is look each other in the face, keep each other company, joke a little...Don't you agree?”

-- Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) in Paolo Sorrentino's “La Grand Bellezza” (“The Greaty Beauty”), which is currently playing at the Varsity Theater in the U District in Seattle.

“I do not think that word 'compromise' means what Mr. Ryan thinks it means.”

-- Paul Krugman in his column, “The Dixiecrat Solution,” about You Know What. The rest of the piece focuses on “How does America become governable again?” Read that part, too.

For more on movie quotes and why Krugman's works, here.

“The film shrewdly touches contemporary nerves. Our society is pervaded by a conviction of powerlessness. ___________ makes it possible for all of us, in the darkness of the movie house, to become powerful. It plays upon our inner fantasies, not only on the criminal inside each of us but on our secret admiration for men who get what they want, whose propositions no one dares turn down.”

-- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

For a while I kept screwing it up; I kept saying “Most definitely.” Then I watched “The Insider” again and realized it was “Most Certainly.” That's how “Play It Again, Sam”s are born, I guess. Particularly in the age before VHS and DVD and Blu-Ray and streaming, and all of the options you and I have. 

The line comes at 2:25. The whole scene is great. That everyone involved, from director Michael Mann on down, could make what is essentially the taping of a “60 Minutes” segment so fascinating, making it into one of the best movies of the 1990s, says a lot about the talent involved.

Extra credit: Jeff Wigand, on Charlie Rose, talking about the exemplary job Russell Crowe did in portraying him. He calls it “surreal” and “eerie.” Most certainly.