Memorable Movie Lines

Despite being over 45 years old, the movie Spartacus seems to have recently added the "I'm Spartacus!" line to our collective subconscious. I suspect it was largely the ad campaign that used the clip a few years ago that kicked it off (was it Pepsi? I don't remember). Or maybe it was always lying just below the surface and I've just started noticing it more, lately. It's certainly out there now, though.

I've mentioned the "I'll have whatever she's having" line from When Harry Met Sally before. It's one of those moments that puts a cherry on top of an already memorable and unique treat (Meg Ryan faking an orgasm in a restaurant, in this case) and makes the whole experience just that little bit more special.

Another line that cracks me up each and every time I see it, comes from one of the Alien movies, Alien: Resurrection. In it, Sigourney Weaver is walking through a room and another character says, "Ripley? I thought you were dead!" and she responds, "Yeah, I get that a lot." What a great metacomment about so many things, all in just a few words: the strength and power of Weaver herself in a genre dominated by males, the survivability of Ripley through four situations that each should've been fatal, the fact that the character was actually killed off in the previous film when Weaver decided she was done with the franchise, and even the fact that a fourth film had come out at all.

I've also been known to use Margot Kidder's famous line from the first Superman movie with Christopher Reeve, when he's caught her after she plummets out of a helicopter and told her, "Don't worry. I've got you." She fires back with, "You've got me? Who's got you?" Pure genius on one of the screenwriters' part!

Apocalypse Now provides more memorable lines than any three or four typical films I can think of. Besides "Charlie don't surf!" and "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" by Robert Duvall, you've got "The horror... the horror", "Horror has a face.. and you must make a friend of horror", and "What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassin?" from Brando, along with Martin Sheen's mood-setting voiceover at the beginning that includes "I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said 'Yes' to a divorce" and "When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle."

Possibly the most famous movie line in history belongs to Orson Welles. All decked out in makeup to appear like a man in his 70s or 80s, there he is dropping the snowglobe while delivering the single word, "Rosebud" before cashing in his chips. Considering Citizen Kane's place in the pantheon of films, and keeping in mind the entire movie is ostensibly about the search for the meaning behind that one utterance, it's hard to imagine anything topping it.

By the same token, it's pure folly to imagine any movie providing more topnotch ear catchers per minute than Casablanca. Off the top of my head (with maybe just a bit of online help to check the wording), I can think of "Here's looking at you, kid", "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship", "We'll always have Paris", "Play it, Sam" (often misquoted as "Play it again, Sam"), "Round up the usual suspects", "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine", "the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world" and "I'm shocked - shocked! - to find that gambling is going on in here!". I spot new ones pretty much every time I watch it, and I'm probably up to my eighth or ninth viewing by now.

Anyone else have movie lines to contribute?