Death Proof was his boringest one. Too much girls talking and not enough Kurt Russell
This is a good distinction; it’s roughly akin to the difference between poetry and prose.
The dialogue in, say, a Tarantino film is the poetry of language: Beautiful, witty, and expressive, but not necessarily realistic. IMO it is expressive in a way where it could be read as a standalone excerpt and still recognized as brilliant.
“Believable” dialogue IMO is specific to a character or situation; it doesn’t seem like much when taken out of context, but it’s perfectly suited to a situation or character in a “you had to have been there” kind of way. That makes it a bit of a thankless task–like a good referee, this sort of dialogue is only “good” if it isn’t really noticed. I also think actors get a lot of the credit for believable dialogue–probably deserving since they do so much to define their characters.
A few:
Hoosiers
Philadelphia
Silkwood
The Full Monty
Stand and Deliver
Spaceballs
44 replies and nobody’s mentioned The Princess Bride? Inconceivable!
Good dialoque is generally necessary for me to categorize a movie as good. Silents get a pass on this, but I don’t care how much action or CGI there is if people aren’t communicating directly.
There’s a lot of range for that. Robert Altman movies had good dialogue with his ‘eavesdropping’ approach to film making, but I didn’t like the technique that much. *My Dinner with Andre *is a classic all dialogue film that many people like. I think *Miller’s Crossing *is an excellent film for many reasons, dialogue being just one of them. *Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf *is another classic dialogue movie. Mentioned above was the Marx Brothers movies, another source of great dialogue though often unusual in nature. There are a lot of movies that would qualify here.
At the opposite end from snappy, contrived dialog, there’s Christopher Guest’s work where actors improvise. People talk over each other, misspeak, and trail off just like in real life. Just watched Best In Show again, and love those moments, like when Gerry tries to make a rhetorical point by saying, “What if I told your wife she has luscious melon breasts?” and as everyone erupts in conversation, said wife clasps her bosom and says (barely audibly) “Thank you Gerry! Thank you.”
That’s the genius of his dialog - real conversations do have the same loopy tangents and asides and goofy opinions, and he manages to make those interesting. The great thing about the “What? What’s not an answer!” exchange is everyone’s said it themselves. Everyone’s had that one annoying friend/acquaintance that “doesn’t believe in tipping” or dealt with a coffee snob or had their SO forget to pack the one god-damned thing you absolutely needed packed for the move, and it’s hilarious to see criminals in life and death situations dealing with the same crap.
His dialog highlights that no matter who you are, you’re still stuck dealing with humanity. Jennifer Aniston gets cut off in traffic, Anthony Hopkins get’s the wrong toppings on his pizza order, Prince’s royalty checks get stuck in someone else’s mailbox.
About Last Night (based on the play Sexual Perversity in Chicago) had pretty snappy dialogue, as I recall.
The original version of We’re No Angels had some gems: “I’ve seen ledgers that were so crooked they looked straight. These books are so straight, they look crooked.”
Mae West, as a playwright and screenwriter, is criminally underrated.
12 Angry Men hinges pretty much entirely on good dialogue.
Just about anything written by David Mamet or the Coen Brothers, examples of both already given in this thread.
Howard Hawks is generally a winner…including The Thing from Another World, which had considerable input from Hawks.
This is going to be a threadshit so I’ll put it in spoiler tags.
[spoiler]I saw this for the first time a couple of weeks ago, on the big screen. It was a double-feature with a documentary about Andre Gregory. I had always heard how brilliant the dialogue was but I was appalled through much of it. First because Gregory’s dialogue was full of eye-rolling woo that made little to no sense to me but it seemed like we were supposed to take it seriously. Maybe not, because Wallace Shawn looked pretty flummoxed through most of the woo too, and second because seemingly Every. Fifth*. Fucking. Phrase. is either “You know” or “I mean” and by the middle of the movie I was ready to tear my hair out because that got to be all I was hearing.
I mean I mean I mean woo you know I mean you know you know I mean I mean woo I mean I mean I mean woo you know I mean I mean I mean you know? And woo, too. Also.
Did nobody have the balls to tell them that they were saying “I mean” over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again? And again, and again, and again and again and again and again? Good lord! And these guys are famous playwrights?
I mean, jesus! I mean, if I had, you know, no life I would, I mean, learn how to do YouTube montages, you know, and I mean, edit together, you know, all the I means, you know, and I mean, you knows in the film. You know?
- Hyperbole alert[/spoiler]
Not sure what the Dopeosphere thinks about this, but liked the dialog in When Harry met Sally
It’s obviously a stylistic decision, but generally speaking great dialogue is hyper-real, is essential to the script somehow, reveals the characteristics of the characters (the absolute masters make every character “sound” different – they have their own mannerisms, quirks, etc), seems to be what the character says in the moment and not what the writer needs them to say for the plot, and never indicates (isn’t “on the nose” )
If you have some time, read over the screenplay for Eternal Sunshine. What you quickly realize is that the great performances had a TON to do with the dialogue. Like when the characters “first” meet…
CLEMENTINE
(calling over the rumble)
Hi!
Joel looks over.
JOEL
I’m sorry?
CLEMENTINE
What? I couldn’t hear you.
JOEL
I said, I’m sorry.
CLEMENTINE
Why are you sorry? I just said hi.
JOEL
No, I didn’t know if you were talking to me, so...
She looks around the empty car.
CLEMENTINE
Really?
JOEL
(embarrassed)
Well, I didn’t want to assume.
CLEMENTINE
Aw, c’mon, live dangerously. Take the
leap and assume someone is talking to you
in an otherwise empty car.
JOEL
Anyway. Sorry. Hi. Hello. Hi.
From that little snippet, you can tell Joel is introverted, has no confidence, shy, etc. But Clementine is very outgoing, extroverted, spontaneous, etc. But it seems so banal and common place on the surface – “Really?” or “I said, I’m sorry” – but it paints a larger picture taken in total.
The Man From Earth - a man converses with some friends and tells them a fantastic tale.
The Thomas Crown Affair (remake) - Brosnan and Russo have great chemistry and lots of verbal sparring.
Get Shorty - Travolta is in fine form, along with Hackman, Farina (RIP), DeVito, and others (Russo again)
For fast, comedic banter, Danny Kaye is great in movies like The Inspector General and The Court Jester.
The film noir genre includes a lot of movies with great dialogue.
The Quiet Man. Not John Wayne’s lines, but most of the rest of the cast.
Sleuth (1972) is full of ‘intelligent dialogue’.
And, here’s one you’ve probably never heard of: Reuben, Reuben.
Lots of great mentions, but I must recommend both Double Indemnity and The Apartment.
My favorite movie for dialogue is A Man For All Seasons. The scene in which More defends the use of laws as a protection for people is a classic.
