Maybe! I certainly don't know that movie nearly as well, by MMMV.
Is there any movie that has been more thoroughly absorbed into American culture?
Round up the usual suspects.
Airplane! is the most American movie of all.
The Birth of a Nation?
Never heard of it!
Round up the usual suspects.
I love that movie about the grumpy commenter who sucks the wind out of the sails of a brand new thread.
7: heebie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful thread.
I haven't seen it since childhood, but played it once. For old time's sake.
Google 4, heebie.
Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon, and for the rest of your life.
If you really think Bogart and Bergman being all noble and good looking represents America more than poorly run airlines and Barbara Billingsley, I wouldn't presume to intrude upon your delusion.
Well we could make this a thread of movies people reference as cultural touchstones that you haven't seen (or have only seen small clips of the key phrases). For example, 4. Or any of the godfathers.
We all know perfectly well what this is about. You want me to have an abortion.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Looks like I picked the wrong day to quit quoting movies.
I'm shocked, shocked that rolling is going on in here.
It was really when they got to the "Pay no mind to the man behind the curtain" line that I thought how every single last detail of the movie has become a tagline.
"Rick, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."
Now I'm picturing Peter Lorre saying "If I only had a braaiiiin."
Lorre was more the type to dabble in hands.
There is no more inspiring scene in American film than the moment when the Lollipop Guild starts singing La Marseillaise.
Are you sure it wasn't the Oompa Loompas?
26: Or more scary than when the Luftwaffe spells out "Surrender Victor" in the sky.
Dear Mr. Kramer, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole airplane in for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us - in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a doctor...
...and a stewardess
...and a washed-up fighter pilot
...and a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
The movie I most remember watching while growing up is The Princess Bride. My parents are suckers for Billy Crystal ("Have fun storming the castle!"), plus Columbo.
29 -- or when Emilio Estevez confesses to Molly Ringwald that he taped Bert Lahr's buns together, but only to help get him on a flight to Lisbon.
I was really shocked by how terrible The Breakfast Club was. Except for the dancing scene which was great.
How about the sequel, where the Tin Man is transported to Kansas and tells Dorothy: "Come with me if you want to live"? Iconic.
I don't think I have ever felt older.
To be fair, you've never been older than you are right now.
I never knew until I was an adult that The Wizard of Oz had been a huge Harry Potter-esque phenomenon for almost a generation by the time the movie (the famous one, apparently there was a least one before that) was made. I like the movie well enough, but I wonder what the huge appeal was?
They got a lucky break. Yesterday, they were just two Kansas farm hands. Today, they're the Honored Dead.
Of all the comment threads on all the eclectic web magazines in the world...
Since my Dad had them, I read and liked all if the Oz books as a kid (well, not all of them, since they are almost infinite in number, but all of the Frank Baum ones and most of the Ruth Plumly Thompson ones, by the time we got to Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz you knew that shit was getting real. I feel like I'd read the books before seeing the movie for the first time, but that could be wrong; in any case it was near-simultaneous. AWB here once said that they were terrible, soulless books for only for right-wing consumerist technology fetishists, and her taste usually trumps, but what can I say, I still liked them and have read them to my own kid.
If you read the books, you'd learn that the Gales moved to Kansas for the waters. They were misinformed.
I mean if you haven't even put in the time to read, say, Kabumpo in Oz should you really be commenting on the Oz books in a public forum? I say no.
To humorlessly answer the original question, I think Star Wars has had a bigger effect.
I do hear all sorts of really shitty dialog in real life. That's probably because of Star Wars.
I refute you thus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDNkjZBPgzw
31: That was on TV yesterday. Fred Savage looked so young!
I read a lot of the Oz books, especially those featuring Ozma and Jack the pumkinhead.
I haven't read a single Oz book.
After you've seen The Wizard of Oz, you should watch the sequel, Zardoz.
You know jar jar didn't give nothin to anikin that he didn't, didn't already have.
Or is it better as 'Rick didn't give nothin to the Lazlows that they didn't, didn't already have'?
26 would be such a great mash up.
well, not all of them, since they are almost infinite in number, but all of the Frank Baum ones and most of the Ruth Plumly Thompson ones, by the time we got to Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz you knew that shit was getting real.
Wow, that's a real thing. I was sure you misspelled "Ozsplaining".
I read all the Baum ones over and over, but didn't know there were any by some other person.
Sir Paul's voice is not good today.
4 makes me so happy.
28: If they filmed Back to the Future today, Marty McFly would be going back to 1985.
31: The movie I most remember watching while growing up is The Princess Bride. My parents are suckers for Billy Crystal.
You should read (and get your parents) As You Wish, Cary Elwes' book on the making of the movie.
"The Princess Bride" is easily the most-quoted around our office, but that might reflect nerd culture more than the broader society. (Inconceivable!)
The Big Lebowski deserves a shout-out. "Hey, careful man, there's a beverage here!"
I feel like I've got some deficiency where I just don't see the appeal of The Big Lebowski.
I feel like I might have appreciated The Princess Bride more if it weren't for the people I heard enthusiastically quoting bits of it over and over and over again before I ever got around to seeing it. Actually, a lot of the "nerd culture' things like that, to use Dave W's phrase, tended to turn me off.
62: Some of the people I know who loved it were anti-nerds, like the tough high-school crew coach with the even tougher wife who made their own furniture.
About 75% of the running time of It's a Wonderful Life is boring crap nobody remembers.
Once, after watching the Big Lebowski, I ordered a white Russian. It was awful.
There are some Capra movies I really like, but I'm pretty much lukewarm on It's a Wonderful Life.
I once dropped a hitchhiker off at the annual Oz festival. I was not attending myself.
I've heard the wizard of oz is about bimetallism.
TBL is a "bromance," as my son says. Reactions to it are not entirely gendered, there are exceptions either way, but predominantly for sure.
Whole swaths of my students can recite the entire Monty Python canon by heart. I mean, line by line, entire movies.
Now, that's not every student, mind you. It's a certain category of student. But within that category, those movies and shows are pretty deeply influential.
I love It's a Wonderful Life, because it's so dark. Cheer up, Jimmy Stewart! Even though you're a failure and your brother got the exciting life you hoped to have, you can comfort yourself with the fact that you... are a good person. American Dream, baby!
I was in a focus group audience for the Princess Bride before it came out. Loved it at the time and since. Andre the Giant proved that all it took to be the greatest human being was to be the greatest human being.*
I mean, friend of Samuel Beckett (and, I guess, Wallace Shawn). All around nice guy. Greatest pro wrestler and the greatest drinker in the history of time. What else do you want?
"I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no nations!"
when my sister was a toddler she was obsessed with the wizard of oz and so I watched it twice a day for many, many, many days. I as a child loved (and still read to my kids) the books, the true bizarreness of which is under appreciated. ripper, remember when the king of the flatheads steals everyone's brains because they keep them in tin cans, and thus they are unprepared for war against queen koo-ee-oh who has the ability to sink her crystal domed city beneath the lake and render it thus impregnable? and she's turned the only good fairies that could have helped into fishes of gold and silver and bronze? like ten equally weird things happen in that book. glinda of oz. what about when ozma is a boy for the first 3/4 of the book, which he spends adventuring with the wooden sawhorse, and begs piteously not to be turned into a girl? yep. normal oz shit.
Relevant conversation this morning: someone made a Deliverance reference ("squeal like a pig") and I pointed out that that is literally the only bit of the film anyone remembers. I will give $10 right now to anyone who can tell me what happens in the end to the four main characters, I said, and no one could.
re: 75
I also remember the guitar/banjo duet, and Burt Reynolds shooting someone with a bow.
Looking at the plot on wiki, I do also remember the leg-thing. But not most of the rest, yeah.
I remember that someone made a funny light-up-your-nose video with the banjo song.
We went to see a ballet school performance that a friend was in last spring, they did an adaptation of the Wizard of Oz. The school is in a small-ish town in the less well known winey county to the north of here. My kid had never seen the movie or read the books. For about the first 1/3 of the show I was able to whisper plot tips/summaries to the kid so that he could roughly follow what the hell was going on, but then the unhinged bizarreries of the adaptation combined with the underlying ur strangeness of the story took over completely and I gave up. If you mention the Wizard of Oz to him now you get this really satisfying, profoundly puzzled reaction. So there's that!
Our friend danced very well, but the complete nutsiness of the school's director was limpidly apparent, so we understood why she was chucking in her pointe shoes after that show. It's a shame as she loves dance and has done very well at the summer program in PA, but there she is without a decent regional train system, unable to access any non-insane dance instruction.
White russian's are not something to order at a bar.
72 is 86 bazillion kinds of awesome.
Since like half of this thread is about Airplane!, I will add that a) I recently went looking for a quote from it, got sucked into watching the whole and specifically thought of Moby Hick, and b) I once helped Robert Hays select a French phrasebook when I worked at Powell's. Had I been more on my game, I would have come up with some clever twist on qu'est-ce que c'est?, but, well, l'esprit de l'escalier.
Since Portland is basically the same as Seattle, I'm going to ask you. Is it hard to take the light rail from Seattle's airport to downtown? I may have to take a trip there. Probably not, but maybe.
86 -- I've done that several times, it's easy as you could want it to be.
(When I have a choice, I try to have Seattle as my connecting city rather than Denver or Mpls, because of the lower risk of weather delay, and of a cascading system failure messing with my flight home. Anyway, if the layover is 2.75 hours or more, and it's a weekday before 4, I go downtown to get a fish at the fish market. AIHMHB.)
The light rail is a huge improvement over the buses that used to be the only public transit option.
Thanks. I haven't been there since 1980 something.
Mobes! CharleyCarp! Seattle meetup! And the light rail is easy peasy. I don't think it runs 24/7 yet, though.
I don't know if I'm going yet, but I will bring it up again if I am.
|| You can cry if you want to, but NMM. |>
|| You can cry if you want to, but NMM. |>
Worst encyclical ever.
About 75% of the running time of It's a Wonderful Life is boring crap nobody remembers.
But they should; it's pretty much all golden. Capra (and writers) really did an amazing job of weaving together a lot of threads, many of them not important to the big story, but enjoyable and real* (e.g., Mary's mother being disappointed that she chooses George - it's a nice bit of humor in the telephone scene where they start kissing, then followed up with Mrs. Hatch weeping - in sorrow, not joy - at the wedding).
I must have seen that movie 40 times by now. And that's just in its entirety; I've of course seen snippets many more times.
*or movie-real, at any rate; not walking punchlines, but quirky and human, if a bit broad