Worst Movie Dialogue?
Posted on October 7th, 2008 at 9:30 am by Scott Stein
Entertainment Weekly has posted “15 Nominees for Worst Movie Dialogue Ever.” I know our readers and contributors have seen a couple of movies. Maybe even several. Which of the nominees don’t belong? Why? What terrible movie dialogue did they leave out? Discuss.
Print This Post
About Scott Stein
Abusive comments may be deleted and abusive commenters may be banned. See comment policies.
I didn’t think some of the examples in the article were that bad. In any event, rather than come up with specific examples of my own, I would like to indict an entire genre: The period piece, particularly the one based on a literary novel. Let’s take movies based on Edith Wharton novels, for example. There is never (and I mean never) any attempt to render her dialogue more naturalistically. It just wasn’t a convention of the time to write realistic dialogue; in older novels, the dialogue is literary, not literal. But the movies are a different art form than the novel, and literary dialogue that works beautifully on the page can sound stiff and stilted onscreen. I know it’s difficult or impossible to know exactly what people in different social classes talked like in the days before recording devices, but I’d be willing to bet that they weren’t as effortlessly eloquent and witty as the movies would have us believe. I’d like to see a film maker at least try to imagine the way real people talked (as I think “Deadwood” tried to do, though that wasn’t based on a novel as far as I know), rather than to slavishly replicate what’s on the page.
I can’t say I’m impressed with their list, though it’s a great premise for a list. A few of the entries were worthy, but some of them were actually good lines. “I carried a watermelon”? The point of that line is that it was an awkward thing to say… it made no attempt to be suave. It’s as though they missed the point of that line entirely… while missing the famously worst line of Dirty Dancing, “Nobody puts Baby in the corner”.
Now *that’s* worthy of making the list.
Agreed - great premise, shoddy implementation.
My own nomination:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
I mean, make up your mind, dude.
Ok, so it’s not a movie quote. Maybe they made a movie of it, I’m not sure.
Hey, you know what? Dickens can bite me.
Good point, Michael. Yes, Jason, it seems as if they didn’t even consider context for some of their selections, and they missed the obvious choice from that movie. Turnstyle the II 1/2 (if that’s your real name), yes, shoddy implementation. Maybe our readers can do better. (By the way, your example isn’t dialogue.)
I think they are short a few movie geeks at that site. I have some friends that could come up with better examples, I’m sure. I do agree on the Love Story quote though. I am a child of the 70’s & therefore have a mother that was nuts about that film. That line has bugged me since I was maybe 8 or 9. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” WTF? Love means saying you are sorry all the time. You say it when you wish you didn’t have to say it, when you wish you could just forget everything that happened and never speak of it again, and you say it when you don’t mean it at all just because you want the fight to be over. You say it when you have no idea why you are saying it. And you expect it to be said back to you way more often then it actually is said.
Love means way more crap than that.