A little background: when I was still in college, I had a lovely teacher who, for the purposes of this post, shall go by Professor Smartass because, well, that's exactly what he was. He looked like Sherlock Holmes and dressed like Don Draper, but oh good God the pure gold that came out of that man's mouth...I'm not kidding, we actually had a swear tally for him because he dropped f-bombs like they were going out of style.
So it didn't take me very long to decide to record his finer quotations and squirrel them away in my film theory notes for safekeeping. I don't know if I can use any of this in a movie script later, which is technically the purpose of stolen dialogue (a thing I picked up from another of my teachers, this one in actual film school), but it's still pure gold and that's all that matters. Here are some of Professor Smartass's best moments. (And yes, there is cursing in this post. Not very professional, I know...but neither is saying "f that" in the classroom. You'll see.)
"The quizzes were okay...the lowest grade was a 60, the highest was a 100. There was some decent bullshitting going on!"
"If I was sitting here and the wall started talking I would not think, 'Oh, that's probably a voiceover!'"
"You have a research plan due for a research paper, the prompt for which you have not yet received...that's fucked up!"
(On Easy Rider)
"They can't really do worse than Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra...so why not just give Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper $500,000 and a ton of cocaine and see what happens?"
(On Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
"The film is trying to ease us into this shitshow!"
"Have any of us gone to a store where we could ask them to erase our memories? I don't mean, like, a coffee house in Amsterdam, I mean they put, y'know, that giant metal sieve, or whatever they put on his head in that movie..."
"The Warsaw Pact caused countries to break away from Communism, because who the fuck wants to be a buffer?"
"It will ROCK YOUR DONKEY."
"In the mid-sixties--I almost said the mid-SEXties, in the MID-SEXTIES..."
(on Italian neorealism)
Student: The audience found L'Aventura boring as heck.
Professor: "Boring as heck"...I think that's the nicest way it's ever been put.
(on sexist advertising)
"All these women, scantily clad, are not only holding these giant phallic bananas, but at some point they actually dunk them into a vaginal fruit cup."
"Now, the problem is that most people don't know what the fuck they're talking about."
Professor: The 3rd cinema...third world? What were the other two?
Student: First and second!
Professor: And we have a winner for "Jackass Answer of the Year!"
(on Soviet Montage)
"Is there any other way to interpret that? No! Eisenstein doesn't give a shit! He's kino-fisting you in the face!"
"Life sucks...I dig it!"
(on Citizen Kane)
"They gave Orson Welles a rare offer: make whatever film you want, and we will not fuck with you."
(on a movie mob boss)
"He has all these suits, he steals Michelle Pfeiffer from his boss, he has a pet tiger at one point...so yeah, things are pretty fuckin' good for him, right?"
"She's involved in , you know, drugs, crime, guns, maybe some casual terrorism..."
"It's totally arbitrary, calling this concept 'Objectif'...it could have been named, 'pile of bullshit,' who knows?"
Professor: What are you doing, Kelsey?
Kelsey: Um. I'm playing with play-doh. (holds it up so he can see)
Professor: Oh, that's fine. I thought you were texting. Go ahead.
"Now, Krackauer's not fucking around!"
(on the variety of art today)
"So, we have Mozart, and then we have Paulie D."
"Unfortunately, that did not play out, and so we still have to watch Justin Bieber on television."
(on Hitchcock)
"He has experience with the shit hitting the fan."
"Hitchcock was a genius at this, he forced people to identify with these crazy-ass bastards!"
(On Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo)
"This dude is batshit crazy!"
(on the new wave)
"It was basically a total shitstorm for 20 years--and it was AWESOME."
"You get to walk out of the theater after the movie ends, go back to your job and go, 'whoa, hey, I didn't kill someone today!'"
(on German expressionism)
"So what, are we supposed to think 'Wow, they have really weird windows in Germany?'"
"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari--I don't know if you've seen it, but it's about this sleepwalking crazy dude that kidnaps women."
(on class discussion)
"Shit might get a little dicey."
"To use the technical term, this is a janky-looking website."
"And I didn't know what to do, so I drew a picture of a hippopotamus and a truck."
...and now I'm homesick for college. Excuse me while I go e-mail my teachers and tell them all how much I miss them. :)
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