Fellowship of the Ring, Elrond is whining to Gandalf about current events: “Our list of allies grows thin.”
No, your list grows short. Lists don’t get thin, unless you write each name on a piece of paper and then stack them. But then that’s not a list.
The line just clangs off my ear every time.
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm:
Andrea Beaumont: Look what they did to us! Look what we could have had! They had to pay!
Batman: But, Andi, what will vengeance solve?
Ugh. Everything about Batman’s line bothers me. It’s a terrible line reading from the great Kevin Conroy, very earnest and bubbly. It’s way too on-the-nose. It’s not something Batman would ever say. Ugh. I love the movie, but that one line nearly spoils the climax for me, every time.
“The ‘Hi, Opal!’ approacheth!”
I always took that as a football analogy: “Our bench of replacements for current players grows thin.”
That was the only way I could make “thin” work in my head.
Roddy
And since the way to describe the quality of your bench is “depth”, then a bench can definitely be thin. But since lists are linear, they just have length.
Not to mention (and I just noticed this) “grows thin” is kind of an oxymoron. You don’t **grow **thin. You may grow fat, but, you get thinner.
Being a middle aged male, of course I love** The Godfather **and The Godfather, Part II. And I also adore Diane Keaton and will always see her as Annie Hall. But I couldn’t stand her or her character in the Godfather movies. Keaton plays a dumb, blind bunny, and given a dumb part with dumb lines that she delivers in a dumb fashion.
In Godfather, Part II, Kay(her character) FINALLY gets that her husband is an evil man (gee, it only took her 10 years to figure that one out),and expresses it to Pacino in her biggest scene in either of the first two movies.
“Oh, oh, Michael; Michael, you are blind. It wasn’t a miscarriage, it was an abortion. An abortion, Michael. Just like our marriage is an abortion – something that’s unholy and evil. I didn’t want your son, Michael. I wouldn’t bring another one of your sons in this world. It was an abortion, Michael. It was a son; a son, and I had it killed cuz this must all end. I know now that it’s over; I knew it then. There would be no way, Michael. No way you could forgive me. Not with this Sicilian thing that’s been going on for 2000 years.”
If I were Michael Corleone, I would have sent her to the bottom of Lake Tahoe to be with her brother-in-law Fredo.
Well, yeah, but it’s a commonplace one. “Our time grows short.” Technically, it can’t “grow” short; it’s diminishing, not growing. But it’s a figure of speech; you could say it’s poetic irony, rather than a formal oxymoron.
(Much like saying “Not to mention” and then mentioning it!) 
I know and love “Shawshank Redemption” but I don’t remember the line (or why it would be considered stupid). Please remind me when it is spoken. Thanks.
Yes…I never tire of condemning this stupid scene (the apex of stupid in a stupid movie! I hate, hate, hate GF2). Uh…let me see, Kay…you murder a baby to bring a halt to the Mafia??? Kill a Mafia Don’s son, and then yell at him about it, as if it were his fault???
It was after finding out the the new guy beaten by Hadley died in the infirmary.
One of my favourite movies is the fairy-tale Ever After, starring Drew Barrymore and Dougray Scott. It’s utterly delightful, and I adore it. But the last lines they say to each other are:
Danielle: You, sir, are supposed to be charming.
Henry: And we, princess, are supposed to live happily ever after.
Danielle: Says who?
Henry: You know, I don’t know.
Which sound like something made up in the first draft of the script as filler that they had always meant to change, but they just never got around to it. So disappointing.
What was it exactly about that line that everyone except me hates? Is it the delivery?
in Star Trek Into Darkness, I think the worst bit was:
“I’m scared, Spock… help me not to be… how do you choose not to feel?”
“I do not know. Right now, I am failing.”
Probably because the first time I saw the movie, I misheard Spock’s line as “Right now, I am feeling.” Which my brain immediately re-parsed as “Right now, I has feels!”
It’s the answer. Which was “The same thing that happens to everything else.”
It should’ve been “It croaks.”
From the movie Twins: “If you’re lying to me, I’ll be back.”
You can almost see Arnold Schwarzenegger cringe as he works in his signature phrase in such a horrible, clumsy manner.
At the risk of being whooshed…
No, the line was supposed to be funny because people would expect the trite “it croaks” joke, but instead they got a straight line. It was the counter-expectations humor often used in the Simpsons and Joss Whedon shows. The problem was that Berry did not understand that, and gave a very stilted, and all too serious delivery of the straight line, which made it very awkward because it did not match the set-up. It should have been very much tongue-in-cheek.
City Slickers, which I loved.
The 3 men have a conversation out on the trail about their best and worst days, which was a really good scene.
But later, when they get back to the city, Billy Crystal tells the wife ‘It’s my best day’. Let alone that the line is delivered very badly, it calls back to a conversation she wasn’t a part of or knew about. Her response was a sweet smile. It should have been ‘What?’
From “Cool Hand Luke”: …“what we have here is a failure to communicate”?
Really? how stupid is this?
What’s stupid about that one?
This is another of those commonly misquoted lines. The real quote is “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate”, the most notable difference being the lack of the “a”, at least the first time the line is used
Saving Private Ryan: Tell me I’m a good man.