This is the final blog/journal for the first marking period. You do NOT need to post your response, but you do need to print your response to hand in with your other four journals on Wednesday, October 24. Staple all five journals together in the order in which they were assigned: #1 personal essay warmup, #2 old fashioned stories, #3 Vermeer or Degas?, #4 John Updike interview, and #5 cheesy movie dialogue. Each response should be a minimum of 200 words and is worth ten points.
Here goes:
I'll
proudly pronounce that no melted real cheese tastes better than Velveeta, the
processed food substitute that to me, out cheeses the real thing. You
could slop on that velvety yellow goo on anything, even broccoli, and
you'll get my taste buds standing at attention. Put it on a Geno's
cheese steak in South Philly, and well, my buds are marching while my
jaws are munching.
My plebeian, if not bad, taste, does not begin
and end with food. Quote Shakespeare if you want to impress the OTHER
English teachers 'round here; I'm a sucker for a cheesy movie line. The
cheesy movie line, like its Velveeta counterpart, isn't
REAL, but boy is it GOOOOOOD.
Come on. Admit it. When you're
watching a movie for the umpteeth time, you patiently wait for your
favorite cheesy bits of dialogue as you smile, or roll on the
floor in hysterics, or maybe even grow sad for a moment, or pump your fist with emotion. It doesn't matter that the lines seem so unrealistic, so
contrived, so cheesy. They're infinitely satisfying.
So you say you need some examples? Well, from my era, I've got ...
"No one puts Baby in the corner!" (Patrick Swayze says this to Baby's dad in
Dirty Dancing)
Swayze continues to heap on the sauce: "I do the last dance every year,
and I'm going to do it again this year. Except I'm going to do it my
way."
In my younger years, I've used these words as a (not-so-cool) "line" whenever I saw a pretty girl sitting in the corner at a wedding.
"I'm the King of the World." (Leonardo DiCaprio in
The Titanic) Dream on, Leo. Tomorrow morning you'll still be down below with the rest of the hired help.
Cheesy, yes, but my Leo imitation at the top of the library steps cracks up everyone but Mrs. Hadjipanayis.
Even so-called "real" mobster movies aren't exempt. In
The Godfather, for example, a chubby hit man by the name of Clemenza blows out someone's brains and then instructs his gang,
"Leave the gun, take the cannolis" (an Italian dessert pictured above).
If you're lucky enough to get your hands on these Italian treats, you must work in this movie line into the conversation.
Dialogue
in movies, drama, and prose, for that matter, isn't always very
realistic. That's the great illusion. No one WE know would ever talk
as they do in the movies, or even as they do in novels, but given the boring alternative, we also know that we want our characters to talk EXACTLY
as they do.
Good dialogue may sometimes get a little cheesy, but at least it is NOT ordinary. To me, the trick is to write
extraordinary,
fascinating, or at least, interesting dialogue, and make it SEEM
entirely natural for the situation. The pros, in any profession, make
the difficult look easy: Albert Pujols hits a home run as Luciano
Pavorotti used to hit the high notes--with ease.
So when you read,
watch drama, film, or TV, listen carefully to the dialogue and then
think about its purpose within its scene. It creates character,
conflict, dramatic tension, moves the plot along, or makes us laugh,
cry, and get angry. It sounds real although we know it's completed
fabricated. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that all fiction is about
character, but to me, it's dialogue that makes or breaks a good story.
Assignment:
Write about your favorite movie lines, their cinematic origins, their
speakers, and why you love them so much in 200 words or
more. Your writing can be heavy on the cheesy lines and light on the
explanation or vice-versa, but I don't want you to give me mere lists. If you're not into movies, choose bits of dialogue from your favorite books or stories.
