Watching Clerks, it reminds me of other movies that have this type of dialoge, movies like Dogma, Mallrats, Jay and Silent Bob Strike (I haven’t seen it, but I’m sure Chasing Amy) and even Clueless.
I don’t have to explain it, you know what I’m talking about. They use more adjectives then neccesary and they roll out of the actors mouth so fast and naturally you’d never guess that it must have taken the writes several minuets to write each sentence. The work rhetoric comes to mine, but is there a specific term for this style?
You mean like how in Gilmore Girls, every stray conversation is set up like a verbal ping-pong match with cutesy, perfectly-timed back-and-forth chatter?
Mannered and stylized are the two words I’ve heard. David Mamet is probably the greatest at this or the worst offender depending on how you feel about people who don’t talk like real people.
**David Mamet **helped popularize not only witty dialog, but *overlapping *dialog. It was pretty mind-blowing once upon a time to have more then one actor speaking at a time. Interruptions were carefully timed so as not to “walk on someone’s lines” before Mamet and his ilk (Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett and Caryl Churchill also come to mind) changed playwriting with their postmodern dialog.
**Kevin Smith **does the “impossibly witty” that seemingly inspired **Kevin Williamson **(Dawson’s Creek, Scream, lots of other '90s teen scream flicks) and Rob Thomas (Dawson’s Creek, Veronica Mars) - except that Kevin Smith uses a LOT more profanity at the same time.
Joss Whedon took “impossibly witty” and then got all funky with the sentence structure itself. He is the master of the gerund, and he created adjectives out of nouns and held not a few participles for ransom. His writing has an unmistakable pattern of rhythm and meter to it. Of course it was mimicked, and very well, by the very skilled writers working with him - but it was, according to the DVD commentaries, a Joss led and taught skill. Many articles have been written about Buffyspeak and the words, phrases and conventions that *Buffy *added to our working lexicon, but I think his more amazing linguistic and literary work came later. His patois in *Firefly *especially is a terribly interesting, grammatically headache inducing language that sounds Old West, but isn’t, sounds Neofuturist, but isn’t, sounds classically Oriental, but isn’t, and at moments sounds Shakespearean, but isn’t. And yet in the right actor’s mouth, it’s completely comprehensible, even with smatterings of mangled Mandarin thrown in for good measure.
Overused it can be maddening, but I don’t agree that in-and-of-itself it is a bad thing to have in a film.
It seems to me many viewers cannot look past the “reality” of a film, where everything has to be explained and justified as real within terms laid down by the film premise (I’d lump SciFi into this category; even though it shows us patently unreal things, they’re always presented as adhering to some “rules” valid within the film’s universe). I think such an attitude toward film severely limits one’s ability to appreciate it (e.g. most of these folks in my experience will say they don’t like musicals–an extreme example of stylization–because “I just can’t believe people just burst into song like that”).
Stylized reparte–such as the discussion on “Star Wars” in the Clerks film–can be very funny; I just don’t see how that can be a failing.
If I can enjoy a film where the protagonist has superhuman strength or wall-climbing powers, suspending disbelief enough to accept superhuman wittiness hardly seems like much of a challenge. Anyway, even in movies where characters speak at a normal rate and aren’t able to rattle off dozens of pop culture references, they still have an exaggerated tendency to come up with the perfect dramatic line at just the right moment – not five minutes later as so often happens in real life. So I guess it’s just a question of “How much is too much?”
As for what to call it, I think I would have just gone with “banter” or perhaps “exaggerated banter”, but the other answers given above seem at least as good.
The psychiatrist or whatever they brought in to work on Audrey on this past season of 24 talked so fast, I turned to Mrs. ToKnow and asked, “Did he think he was guesting on Gilmore Girls?”
I don’t know why so many of you are saying this is some sort of failing on Kevin Smith’s part. Don’t you know every single one of us Jerseyites speaks in exactly the manner he portrays on film?
I just think of Smith’s dialogue as geeky and stylized. He may be the best modern screenwriter of that style, but there’s some fantastic stuff in His Girl Friday, which isn’t exactly new. That could be considered a forerunner of the Smith/Whedon/Tarantino style, although it lacks the pop culture references - and in fact, Wikipedia says Quentin Tarantino is a big fan of that movie.
They talk super fast in that movie, but that’s it. It’s not like the movies I’m referring to, these movies don’t necessarily talk fast, but the use an overabundance of adjectives and other un-needed words. The easiest example I can give of this is the movie Clueless.
I can handle stylized dialogue but when they have every character speak that same way, it bugs me. Yes, friends pick up each other’s style but there needs to be some differentiation between unique characters.
That could be considered a forerunner of the Smith/Whedon/Tarantino style, although it lacks the pop culture references - and in fact, Wikipedia says Quentin Tarantino is a big fan of that movie.