Let's help 'Entertainment Weekly' out a little more, shall we?

Some commenters on a prior post, in which this blog cited EW.com's nominees for something like the worst 15 lines of movie dialogue or somesuch, brought up badly-aging lines from Cameron Crowe movies and the like, implying that the EW.com list I was deploring had somehow been conceived in good faith, or some such. It was not. You can take ANY movie dialogue from ANY movie and subject it to the same patented EW snark treatment, was my point. For instance, let's look at the print version of EW's Valentine this week, Juno, putatively "The Little Movie That Did."
Let's not even think about how that cover line is making my confrere Karina Longworth projectile-vomit blood for the time being. Yep, I know she called it—that the Fox Searchlight marketing machine was going to make this its operative narrative, and get away with it. I didn't get overly agitated about it because, hell, I knew it all along, and dang, they took enough of a hit with Bee Season that I can't begrudge them this.

But again, never mind. What I'm predicting is that, in nine years or less, presuming that Entertainment Weekly has another 15 nominees for Worst Movie Lines or some such, their Number One pick is gonna be:

THE MOVIE: Juno (2006)
THE SCENE: Juno (Ellen Page) calls improbable best friend, cheerleader Leah (Olivia Thirlby) to confide about her pregnancy.
THE LINE: "Honest to blog?"

and that the accompanying condemnation will run kinda like this:

"Wow, do you believe credulous hipsters let this doofy non-sequitor pass even as it was infecting the brains of the mass movie-going public as this fraudulent indie made it to the $100-million box-office mark, and beyond? Never mind its multiple Oscar nominations/wins. What was anybody thinking? Except EW, of course, we knew it was a crock all along."

As I said, some of the commenters at my "Pop Journalism Will Eat Itself" post have been bringing up movie dialogue which they believe hasn't aged well. This is all well and good but misses my point. Allow me to reiterate: via the EW method/weltanschaung, ALL and ANY movie dialogue can be deemed as not aging/wearing well. I shall demonstrate via this, ahem, parody.

THE MOVIE: Last Tango In Paris (1972)
THE SCENE: That same damn Paris apartment, with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider.
THE LINE: "Get the butter":
We polled all of the heterosexual women and all of the homosexual men on the EW staff, and in an overhwelming consensus, it was concluded that Butter+Anus=A Great Big Turnoff!!!! Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci, what were you thinking? No wonder Maria Schneider was so freaked out she couldn't have much of a movie career after this!

THE MOVIE: Casablanca (1942)
THE SCENE: More than a few. It's a pretty nauseating refrain, in fact.
THE LINE: "Here's looking at you, kid."
Whoa. Where do you want us to start? It's patriarchal, condescending, and frankly, kind of gross: leading man Humphrey Bogart was a full sixteen years older than leading lady Ingrid Bergman when the film was shot, and he said that stupid toast over and over. Ugh.

THE MOVIE: Citizen Kane (1941)
THE SCENE: Some fucking scene. Christ, do we have to look up every fucking thing? Shut the fuck up, old person!
THE LINE: "I think it would be fun to run a newspaper"
WE GET IT!!!: This is a stupid movie about a stupid guy who's gonna be fat who has a diamond mine and wastes all the money he makes on it to run a newspaper, okay. If this movie were being made today it would be about a Nick Denton type, who ran a hedge fund and then created a bunch of websites and terrorized his employees and still stayed rich. And it would still completely be lame and SUCK.

THE MOVIE: Gone With The Wind (1939)
THE SCENE: Right before the part where you have to put in the second DVD.
THE LINE: "As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again!"
Okay, my grandparents who keep telling me that it was really them and not my divorced mom and dad who paid my tuition to Duke are insisting that I've gotta be kinda respectful of this movie but the other editors are showing me books by Richard Dawson and Kristofer Hitchens and Sam Harris (who my mom thinks was on "Star Search") and telling me that these guys are saying God is totally OUT and that therefore Scarlet O'Diva has to get taken down a peg by the authorities here at EW but I gotta tell you right now it's kind of late and I'm here at the office all by myself and I'm really dying for one of those infused halapinio vodka shots down the street and now I'm SO outta here...

Comments

[Aaron Aradillas]

Someone's a little cranky...

I really don't see the harm in the EW.com column. I don't feel a critic should be trying to stay hip and embrace those movies that will age gracefully. Ms. Scwarzbaum's rave for Notting Hill stands apart from the possibility of its dialogue not aging well.

Mr. Gleiberman gave an A grade to Ghost back in 1990. I'm sure some people would nominate the imortal line "Ditto" as a Bad Movie Line.

The poeple behind the Worst Movie Lines list are operating in a different mode than movie critics.

Mr. Kenny's statement that any line of dialogue can be made to sound bad if taken out of context is absolutely correct. What should be noted is that lines chosen in the column weren't taken out of context. The Julia Roberts line from Notting Hill clanked within the scene it appeared. That's why it made the list.

Also, there's a diference between a line of dialogue and a catchphrase. Juno"s "Honest to blog" is a catchphrase. The same with "You're money" from Swingers.

"I drink your milkshake" is dialogue.

[Steve]

Right, but.... "Honest to blog" sucks terribly, both in and out of its proper context.

[tuck]

Does anyone take EW seriously anyway? Aren't they just the movie version of People magazine?

[bemo]

Five words come to mind:

"Comet career", "at" and " Entertainment Weekly".

Couldn't you, like, subvert that magazine from within, GK?

[demimonde]

"Right, but.... 'Honest to blog' sucks terribly, both in and out of its proper context."

It...has no context, yeah? It's a meaningless pun (and what British critics meanly call a "French rhyme," to boot) meant to signal that young people know about the Interwebs and HEY, listen to this Shins album for 40 minutes. Gawd, I hate "quirky."

One can be lulled by the relative maturity of the Schwarzbaums and Tuckers over there, but Glenn's not far from the mark. I'll never forget the time an EW copy editor told me to take out a reference to "Bewitched" (it was a hilarious analogy referring to the amount of alcohol consumed by the characters; hilarious, I tell you!) because, "If I've never heard of it, no one else will have, either."

[Glenn Kenny]

A couple things: Just in case anybody got the wrong idea, I wasn't attempting any kind of left-handed defense of "Honest to blog." It IS awful, worst line in the movie, and one that betrays the particular brand of straining that made a handful of discerning critics distrust (not to say loathe) the picture. (I wasn't one of them, but I understand where they're coming from.) Bemo, once upon a time I DID write for Entertainment Weekly...and at that time it was a rather different magazine. (It allowed Ty Burr to proclaim, at length, his esteem for "Celine and Julie Go Boating," whatever year it was that New Yorker Video put it out on VHS.) Unlike Demi's, my experiences there were only ever positive, and I still believe there's stuff of value to be found in its pages. The tendency I'm deploring is all over the place; indeed, I could well be pointing out a mote in someone else's eye while ignoring the beam in my own. Still, one does enjoy a vent every now and again.

[Peter Debruge]

On the knee-jerk reactions to Juno's hipster quotient, I'd argue that a movie doesn't have to be "above" its subject to serve as an effective commentary on it.

This is where Glenn and I diverge on Roger Avary's Rules of Attraction, which he panned in print and permitted me to extol on DVD. I won't reopen that debate here, except to say that the spirit of being open to multiple opinions is exactly what made Premiere's level of discussion superior to its snarky competitor: the magazine didn't force one "right" answer down its readers' throats, but fostered the conversation.

Back to the topic at hand... I love that Juno (and Diablo Cody by extension) are nutty quipsters, and I'm willing to permit a groaner now and then. Hell, I'm willing for all the lines to make my eyes roll, as long as the characterizations are sincere, and I think Ellen Page and her co-stars sell it (with the exception of sour-note Rainn Wilson -- if there was one line I'd like to see "undid," it would be his "homeskillet" bit).

We may not be dealing with Jacques Rivette here (I assure you, I imply no contempt in the reference), but within the boundaries of studio storytelling, Page's terrific performance makes clear that for all Juno's smug cleverness, the character spends the movie "dealing with things way beyond (her) maturity level."

Juno uses her wit and too-cool-for-school indifference as a defense against the world. Did Diablo Cody intend for her one-liners to be interpreted this way? Doesn't matter. I love that all Juno's posturing serves to illuminate her insecurities, and I can forgive her the occasional misfire -- in my book, that's what makes the character human.

[cadavra]

Anyone remember, oh, musta been way back around 2003, when people were blowing their brains out over THIRTEEN and its teenage writer, Nikki Reed, who was the hot new "it" girl?

Anyone wanna bet that four years from now, she and Diablo Cody will be carpooling to their jobs at Arby's?

[Joe]

Good call! I liked Juno on the whole and thought it had a good script, and that a lot of the dialog was really witty and funny but I HATED that SPECIFIC line.

"Honest to blog" I did!

[bradfordla]

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[Government jobs Hyderabad]

I watched Casablanca recently and it was a nice movie.