Great movie quotes shake-up
Yesterday I received a Brigham’s chocolate milkshake (or “frappe,”
as they are properly called in these parts) as a promotional item from the
“There Will Be Blood” people. Coincidentally, as I sipped it I was looking
over the
“50 Greatest Movie Quotes” as determined by the market research
company “onepoll.com.” So I asked myself, does “I drink
your milkshake (or frappe)" deserve inclusion on such a list?
It can’t be any worse than a lot of the winners this
bunch came up with. I mean, number 3 is
"I like you just the way you are," that deathless phrase uttered by Colin Firth
in “Bridget Jones's Diary” (2001). And three quotes from “Forrest Gump” (1994)? Are
they kidding? To quote a great movie line
not included on the list, “what we have here is a failure to communicate.”
I think the key to this list, which “onepoll.com” claims to have
compiled after interviewing “10,000 movie buffs,” 
is that 20 of the 50 are
from films released after 1990. True, there are some classics cited like “Frankly, my
dear, I don’t give a damn” (Number 1, as it was in the AFI poll in 2005) but
that and the other oldtimers are chestnuts that have entered the public domain
and would be familiar to “film buffs” who didn’t even see “Gone With the Wind" (1939) or any other movie made before "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" (1991). And the rest of the quotes pretty much consist of lines from “Star Wars”
episodes or various Steven Spielberg movies.
This serves as a rebuff, perhaps, to the pointy-headed
intellectuals of the AFI survey of “1,500 film artists, critics and historians”
(they sent me a ballot but I lost it) who only cited one Gumpism (“Life is like
a box of chocolates..” ad nauseam) and only chose 11 post-1990 quotes among the
100 listed. It's also a depressing cross-section of mainstream film
illiteracy, ignorance and vulgarity. And you can quote me on that.
