To those of you who remain unconvinced, here’s what I perceive to be the best line in the movie Juno:
Oh, and she inexplicably mails me a cactus every Valentine’s Day. And I’m like, “Thanks a heap, Coyote Ugly. This cactus-gram stinks even worse than your abandonment”.
Classic.
It’s climbing my personal chart of “Greatest Comebacks Written for Film”, sitting pretty on top along with this bit from the animated film Robots:
Fender: I told you not to talk to strange men.
Piper: I talk to you. What can be stranger than that?
Honorable mention is this scene from When Harry Met Sally:
Sally: The story of my life isn’t even going to get us out of Chicago. I mean nothing’s happened to me yet. That’s why I’m going to New York.
Harry: So something can happen to you.
Sally: Yes.
Harry: Like what?
Sally: Like I’m going to journalism school and become a reporter.
Harry: So you can write about things that happen to other people.
Sally: That’s one way to look at it.
Harry: (all in one breath while chewing a mouthful of grapes). Suppose nothing happens to you. Suppose you live there your entire life and nothing happens and you never meet anyone and you never become anything and you die one of those New York deaths where nobody even notices for two weeks until the smell drifts out into the hallway. (He then spits grape seeds out the window.)
Scriptwriting. An art that has not even so much as breathed in the direction of many local mainstream moviemakers. They’ve only managed to recycle lines that we’ve had to listen to for the past five decades. I guess it’s not that essential since one can still satisfy audiences with antedeluvian circa “The Three Stooges” slapstick comedy.
