The actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman The character: Lancaster Dodd The film: The Master The quote: “Close your eyes. From now on you are not to blink. If you blink we go back to the start.” There are three categories of great lines from The Master. The first is a small category. It’s lines from skeptics… Read More Top 100 American Movie Quotes of the 21st Century: #86
The actor: James Franco The character: Cowboy The film: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs The quote: “First time?” I have The Ballad of Buster Scruggs as a top-10 Coen Brothers film, which is to say that it’s in the top half. As far as I can tell, this is not a terribly popular opinion. I… Read More Top 100 American Movie Quotes of the 21st Century: #87
The actor: Samuel L. Jackson The character: Lucius Best / Frozone The film: The Incredibles The quote: “Where’s my super suit?” The first animated movie on this list and, hold onto your butts, the only animated movie on this list. No Shrek, no Frozen, no Finding Nemo. All of them made the shortlist but none… Read More Top 100 American Movie Quotes of the 21st Century: #88
The actor: Johnny Depp The character: Captain Jack Sparrow The film: Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl The quote: “But why is the rum gone?” There are multiple movies on this list which have two entries, like I’ve hinted elsewhere. However, there are no characters with more than one line represented. This… Read More Top 100 American Movie Quotes of the 21st Century: #89
The actor: Chadwick Boseman The character: T’Challa The film: Black Panther The quote: “Wakanda forever!” Wonderland, Narnia, Shangri-La, Oz, Brigadoon, the Wizarding World, Atlantis. One accesses these fantasy places from a place in the real world, as we know it. A rabbit hole or a wardrobe, a plane crash or a tornado, a train platform… Read More Top 100 American Movie Quotes of the 21st Century: #90
The actor: Sacha Baron Cohen The character: Borat Sagdiyev The film: Borat The quote: “Very nice, how much?” At the moment, I didn’t expect this to become a formative memory. Looking back across half of my life, this is absolutely a formative memory. I saw the teaser trailer for Borat on MySpace. Most of it… Read More Top 100 American Movie Quotes of the 21st Century: #91
The actor: Leonardo DiCaprio The character: Jordan Belfort The film: The Wolf of Wall Street The quote: “I’m not leaving. I’m not fucking leaving!” In 2013, Martin Scorsese had yet to make two of his best movies period in Silence and The Irishman, which both turn on extended moments of indecision from their protagonists. Rodrigues,… Read More Top 100 American Movie Quotes of the 21st Century: #92
The actor: Greta Gerwig The character: Frances Halladay The film: Frances Ha The quote: “I’m so embarrassed. I’m not a real person yet.” Remember when Greta Gerwig didn’t get an Best Director nomination for Little Women and everyone, especially me, freaked out? In retrospect, more of us should have been freaking out about Greta Gerwig… Read More Top 100 American Movie Quotes of the 21st Century: #93
The actor: Ralph Fiennes The character: Laurence Laurentz The film: Hail, Caesar! The quote: “Would that it were so simple.” I tried to look up Ralph Fiennes’s ancestry, but after about two minutes my eyes started crossing and I gave up. Basically, the dude is descended from nobility going back several hundred years, and his… Read More Top 100 American Movie Quotes of the 21st Century: #94
The actor: Tom Hanks The character: Chesley Sullenberger The film: Sully The quote: “Birds.” In The Graduate, Walter Brooke goes up to Dustin Hoffman at a party and gives him a little advice about what field to get into. “Plastics,” he says. It’s ranked forty-second on AFI’s list, one spot above “We’ll always have Paris.”… Read More Top 100 American Movie Quotes of the 21st Century: #95
Seeing Things Secondhand 