Senior journal #5--Cheesy Movie Dialogue
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.
posted by JTF @ 10:18 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Oh this is going to be fun, let’s start with the more resent movie quotes first: “It’s curtains for you Dr. Horrible. Lacy, gently wafting curtains.” Then we have this gem which is sung, “But ‘Home is where your heart is,’ so your real home’s in your chest!” Both of these quotes come from Caption Hammer, the hero in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along blog who is, in fact, described as “cheesy” by Dr. Horrible, who is played by Neil Patrick Harris. I absolutely adore that movie, and you can watch it for free! Anyway, the one that really takes the cheese is, “Every time a bell rings, and angel gets his wings!” said at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life by the daughter of the main character. The line gets pretty cheesy when you have watched it as much as my family did. Every Christmas year we used to watch this, so after a while it got old. In fact, it’s my parents’ favorite line as well.
One of my favorite movies is The Notebook. There is just one line in the movie that I think is really cheesy. Noah and Allie, the main characters in the movie, are at the beach and Allie jumps into Noah's arms and she asks him to call her a bird. He says in reply, "if you're a bird, I'm a bird". I think this is kind of cheesy because I can't see anyone actually saying this in realtiy. However, I actually like the quote because I think it's very sweet. I think the quote relates to their relationship in way because Noah just wants to be with Allie and loves her so much despite their differences. Allie is really rich and Noah is very poor so Allie's parents don't want them being together. Despite all odds though, they end up together in the end. The quote, to me, represents that no matter what or where they are, they want to be together because their love for each other is so strong. This quote might be super cheesy, and no one would actually, most likely, say this in real life , but I think it is really cute and in the movie you could tell he really meant it.
My favorite movie quote is "Glenn Coco? Four for you, Glenn Coco! You go, Glenn Coco." from the movie Mean Girls. The character Damian in the movie is the person who says this line. Damian plays the “flamboyant” friend of Cady, the main character, and Janis, the gothic, mysterious friend. The line became so famous because of the humor behind it. Damian is dressed up as Santa Claus and delivering candy grams for the Christmas season. Cady who is pretending to be friends with the “plastics”, Regina, Gretchen, and Karen, is secretly plotting against them to make them see how stuck-up and snobby they are. Damian and Cady decide to give candy grams to all of Regina’s friends and several random, “weird” people to upset Gretchen. The humor is not only what Damian says, but how he says it and acts it out. This is one of my many favorite lines from this movie because it makes me laugh everytime I see it. Also, what makes this quote so funny is the purpose behind it which is to destroy the “plastics” friendship by doing some of the dumbest and most pointless things that teenage girls really do. This movie is my favorite because it in many ways relates to teenage girls’ life and the problems they face even though it is highly exaggerated in the movie, which adds more of a sense of humor to the plot.
My favorite line isn’t from a movie; it is from the TV show How I Met Your Mother. It is Barney Stinson’s catch phrase “Suit Up!” Barney Stinson is an extremely complex character. He only cares about himself most of the time, and he has way to many schemes to pickup woman. One of his most important beliefs is that ladies love a man in a suit. This is why in every scene he is wearing a suit, and is where the phrase “Suit Up!” is from. He says it instead of sayings like “Lets Go!” or any other type of moral boosting statement. “Suit Up” obviously means to go put on a suit. Barney says it so much that it’s now a joke. For example, there was an episode where the gang was going to go scuba diving and Barney said, “Scuba suit up!” The repetition of “Suit Up” is used as a joke, but also to emphasize Barney’s one-track mind. He is sort of a mental case in that he is always with different woman, and he is always partying to hard. He says “Suit Up!” mostly right before he is about to leave a scene or right before the scene ends. Barney has other catch phrases too, such as the over usage of “Legendary,” and his signature “Legen-wait for it-dary.” These are overused so much that it is always funny.
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