My 5 Favorite Last Lines of All Time, In No Particular Order

A movie's final line is the filmmaker's last chance to say something to the audience. Sometimes a last line is too pithy to have any meaning. Sometimes a last line is so lofty that it feels forced. Sometimes a last line does a very nice job of wrapping up the plot in a neat-little package, but despite that (or maybe because of it) isn't very memorable otherwise.


But sometimes, a movie's last line is so perfect in what it says about the movie you just saw that it follows you out of the theater and makes sure you never forget that movie. What follows are what I consider to be the best last lines of all time.


FAIR WARNING: Seeing as last lines come at the end of movies, there's no way to write this list without giving away some SPOILERS. So, if you haven't seen any of the movies on this list, I suggest you go see them, and then come back.


The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
Screenplay by Mario Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola, and Robert Towne, based on the novel of the same name by Mario Puzo

The Line:

"Don Corleone"

The Godfather is a tragedy of wants and needs.  Michael Corleone never wanted to be his father's son (keep in mind that his father is a murderer).  But as unforeseen events push Michael towards a life of crime, he comes to realize that he never had it in him to be anything else.  In the final scene of the movie, Michael lies straight-faced to his wife about having made his sister a widow.  And then, hearing this line, he embraces the title once held by his father and closes the door on goodness forever.

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

Screenplay by Quentin Tarantino

The Line:

"You know something, Utovich?  I think this just might be my masterpiece."

Tarantino has always been a master of dialogue, and I love every movie he's done because each one has at least a dozen brilliant moments.  But prior to Basterds, he was only pretty good at stringing together an entire story.  For me, this movie marks his transition from exciting new mind to fully-arrived auteur.  And I think Quentin knows so too.  Make no mistake about it, when Aldo Raine looks right into the camera to say this line, it's because he's talking to the audience on behalf of the director.  This is a great movie moment for the same reason that Babe Ruth's called shot is a great baseball moment: You've gotta respect it for being a ballsy move, but the impressive part is that he was right.

25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)

Screenplay by David Benioff, based on his novel The 25th Hour

The Line:

[It's a like a ten-minute monologue.  Read it here.]

25th Hour ends with a sequence of Monty imagining the possible future his father describes to him, in which he flees his prison sentence, runs away out west, and starts a new life.  On its own, it's one of the most beautiful, wistful fantasy sequences I've ever seen, but what really makes it poignant is when you realize that Monty decides to go to prison after all. It's an amazing expression of the gap between what we sometimes dream of and what we actually do.  Then you put this movie in its historical context.  It's set in New York and came out in 2002; the aftermath of 9/11 is a subtle but pervasive theme. And the impulse to run out west away from one's troubles must have occurred to every New Yorker at some point after 9/11. But, like Monty, most of them decided to stick around and take their lumps, because that's what New Yorkers do.


Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman

The Line:

"...Okay." 

What makes this line is the dialogue that precedes it.  Joel and Clementine have just realized that they were once in a relationship, but it ended so badly that they both paid to have the memory of the other erased from their minds (it's part of the premise, just go with it).  Joel suggests they get back together, but Clementine is reluctant because they both know for a fact that they'll have problems later on.  Eventually though, they decide to go for it anyway.  And then you realize that any time you enter a relationship, you do so knowing there will be problems of some sort eventually.  The whole trick is having the balls to take that risk because of how great the rewards can be.  And thus the somewhat whacky premise of this movie gets turned into something real and universal.  That's why Charlie Kaufman is a great screenwriter.

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

Screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, based on the play Everybody Comes To Rick's by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison

The Line:

"Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

This (frequently misquoted) line shows up on so many lists of great ending lines that it's easy to write it off as a cliche. In fact, I almost forgot about it myself.  Then someone reminded of its historical context.  Today, when America is often accused of trying to police the world, it's easy to forget that we once followed a policy of strict isolationism up until the second World War.  And this last line has been widely interpreted to reflect America's decision to stand with Great Britain against their common enemy.  And there are historians who have written books about how, prior to World War II, isolationism was a defining feature of American culture and identity.  So, if they're right, Casablanca marks a momentous turning point in the history of the United States, and consequently, the world.  

Honorable Mentions

Film that would've made this list if its best line weren't its second to last line: The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)

Dumbest Last Line of All Time: Love Story (Arthur Hiller, 1970)

Films with great last lines that didn't make my top 5:

 -Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002)

 -Airplane! (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, 1980) 
 -Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)

 -Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

 -Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967)

 -The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

 -Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)

 -The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999)

 -Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008)

 -Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

 -Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)

 -Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010)

INCEPTION (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

Wicked-awesomeness: 8/10
Visual and Sound Effects: 8/10
Writing: 7/10
Brain-hurtiness: 8/10
How much you kinda wish Nolan would just make the next Batman already: 6/10

The Bottom Line: If you're in the market for a well-crafted thriller that rewards careful attention, this one is for you.

The tinseltown folklore has it that Christopher Nolan has wanted to make this movie ever since he finished Memento, but thought he needed more experience in a big-budget, large-scale format in order to pull it off.  So he agreed to do Batman Begins and The Dark Knight as "practice."

Overall, I don't find Inception as powerful as The Dark Knight or as innovative as Memento, but that's not to say that that this film isn't powerful or innovative.  It keeps you on the edge of your seat for pretty much the duration of Acts 2 and 3, and it's puzzling enough to keep messing with your head well after you leave the theater.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an "extractor," that is, a very special kind of thief.  He can break into your dreams and extract very private thoughts from your unconscious mind.  The science of this is all a little iffy, of course, but once you buy the initial premise, Nolan is pretty good at sticking to the rules he's made for himself. Cobb has been focusing his efforts as of late on corporate espionage.  These types of jobs can be especially tricky becausein the universe of this movie, dream extraction is apparently common enough that people who know important enough secrets can purchase training to protect themselves against this kind of theft.  This training causes one's unconscious mind to project a personal army into one's dreams that can guard against invaders. Yes, this is suspiciously convenient for the purposes of an action movie, but it makes for badass enough action scenes that I'm not complaining.

What's not so common in this film world is "inception," which is like extraction except it involves putting an idea in someone's head instead of taking one out.  Apparently, there is debate within the universe of this movie whether such a thing is even possible, but a very rich and powerful man who thinks it is has hired Cobb to perform an inception. Add to the mix that Cobb is, of course, dealing with some difficult personal stuff as well, and you've got all the ingredients for a high stakes crime caper combined with a sci-fi mindf***.

A lesser director would have gotten so caught up in exploring the amazing world that s/he created, that s/he'd forget to, you know, make a movie. But Nolan manages to tell his story compellingly in the midst of all the twists and explosions. There are a few moments when Nolan seems to have temporarily lost track of his own rules or when the writing seems a tiny bit forced. Unfortunately, I can't give specific examples without giving away some spoilers, but I can say that they are momentary distractions in an otherwise tightly-knit thriller.

A word to the wise though: like Memento, this movie expects you to pay attention.  But it's worth it if you do.  I thought I paid very good attention, but I wish I had paid even better attention so that I could have more of an opinion on the ending. This is one of those movies that is content to end ambiguously.  I've personally always found that ambiguous endings toe a fine line between a genuine artistic choice by a filmmaker to ask more questions than s/he answers and a last minute cop-out because the filmmaker doesn't know how to end his/her film.  And honestly, I'd have to watch Inception at least once more before I can decide which side of that line its ending falls on for me.

But in any case, the journey to that ending is worth the price of admission.

AVATAR (James Cameron, 2009) - Sample review of 2009 Best Picture Nominee

Visual Achievement: 10/10

Narrative Originality: 1/10

Biological Originality: 3/10

Racism: 8/10

Ratio of hours it was to hours it should have been: 2.75/1.5

The bottom line: Avatar is a marvel of technology, but if you value storytelling the price of your 3D glasses is a ripoff.

Avatar is a sci-fi epic that you'll be hearing about for a long time because it made impossibly large amounts of money and because (let's get this on the table right away) it is a staggering technological achievement that will have a huge impact on the way movies are made in the future. All the poor bastards who had to sit at computers for God-only-knows how many hours to make this movie possible deserve every award that exists for that sort of thing and probably a few that should be invented just for them. For that reason, it's pretty disappointing how mundane the writing is.

Apparently, at some point in the future, a giant Earth corporation travels to Pandora (a moon of a distant gas giant) to mine a very rare and valuable element called, wait for it, 'unobtanium."  The locals, called Na'vi, are about as pleased with their planet being strip-mined as you'd imagine they would be, so security is a serious concern for the giant Earth corporation. Jake Sully is a paraplegic ex-marine who gets recruited for the Avatar program, in which his mind controls a Na'vi body...somehow. This is one of those movies where they just kind of wave their hands and say "science!"

(xkcd written by Randall Munroe)

Whatever.  Plenty of films I like have done that too.  Anyway, the stated purpose of the Avatar program is to nourish positive relations with the Na'vi.  Of course, the big bad evil general who's in charge of security has a sinister secret plan.  That character has a real name, but if James Cameron can't be bothered to write a villain with any depth, then I can't be bothered to visit IMDb to look it up.  I'll just call him 'Bad Guy,' because other than his scars and stupid haircut, 'bad' seems to be his only character trait.

So, Bad Guy wants Jake Sully to infiltrate the Na'vi, so that he'll have a double-agent at his disposal.  Instead, Jake comes to respect the Na'vi for their simple nobility and joins them in their fight against Bad Guy.  This is not particularly surprising if you've seen, Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas, The Last Samurai, Fern Gully, or any of the other movies that have told pretty much the same story.


And honestly, this is 2010.  We need to stop with these "noble savages" stories.  They're offensive.  On the one hand, there's the Na'vi, whose facial features and accents are vaguely African, and whose culture is a caricature of the American Indian.   Because, you know, all the peoples that Europeans have screwed over are basically the same right?  And then on the other hand, you have Bad Guys and his army of mindless goons.  Because that's always where capitalism gets you, right? So basically, we're left with a story where "ethnic" = nature/good and capitalism = greed/bad.  


Now, I'm not saying that there aren't any good movies to be made about colonialism, the environment, etc.  But these are complicated issues.  Turning them into caricatures is insensitive to all involved.  Oversimplifying the crimes of the past is almost as dangerous as trying to revise them away.


At bottom, though, this movie fails because its story fails. And its story fails because its characters lack depth.  At this point I should point out that, if the characters had depth, the above political criticism would be null and void. So, my parting shot to Mr. Cameron is this:  


Three-dimensional images will never make up for one-dimensional characters.  For the record, though, True Lies is one of my all-time favorites.  

THE HURT LOCKER (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) - Sample Review of 2009 Best Picture Winner

Writing: 8/10
Editing: 9/10
Acting: 10/10
Sand: 10/10
Guns you'll recognize if you play Modern Warfare 2: M4A1 ACOG, AK-47, Barrett .50cal

The bottom line: The Hurt Locker is an extremely powerful film and deserved its Best Picture Oscar; an absolute must-see.

"War is a drug," the opening title card of The Hurt Locker tells us, and the exploration of that metaphor gives this screenplay its unique power.  There are lots of war movies with interesting characters and intense drama, but this is the only war movie I've seen that's also an addiction movie.

Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner) steps in as a team leader in the Army's Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit when the team's original leader (Guy Pearce) gets Hitchcocked* out halfway through the first sequence. We are supposed to gather that this takes place early on in the U.S. occupation of Iraq, at which point official protocol for disposing of bombs had not yet been developed. So, the debate over how to best proceed is how the central conflict of this film manifests. James is prone to run headlong into danger and wing it, whereas his teammates (Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) are much more inclined to take things slowly and carefully. 

Of course, the true root of the conflict is James' adrenaline addiction.  And like in any other character study about addiction, we follow him through the highs and the crashes, and see the toll that his addiction takes on the people who depend on him.  I won't tell you whether or not he eventually kicks his habit, because that would ruin the ending.  But I'll say that, for reasons already discussed, this is neither a run-of-the-mill war movie nor a run-of-the-mill drug movie.    

When I started this review by complimenting Mark Boal's screenplay, I didn't even remotely intend to take away from Kathryn Bigelow's execution of the film. She gets painfully real performances from her actors and, together with Director of Photography Barry Ackroyd, made some great visual decisions.  Hurt Locker was shot on beautiful 16mm film.  So beautiful, in fact, that I often have a hard time believing it's actually 16mm. Often,  you can almost feel the desert heat coming off the screen. And the camera work is inspired.  Usually, handheld multi-camera setups in a fiction film result in a faux-documentary feel that can seem forced in the hands of an unskilled cinematographer or editor.  But Hurt Locker doesn't feel like it's trying to be a documentary.  Rather, the camera work is just shaky enough for us to feel as if we're watching a drama that could fly off the tracks at any moment.   

In short, I've always said that truly great movies merit multiple viewings.  But it's very rare that I'll watch a movie, and then pop the DVD right back in an hour later and watch it again.  I did  that with The Hurt Locker.  This is one you need to see tonight.

*For future reference, 'hitchcocking' means to kill off the character played by the most famous actor in a movie relatively early on, a la Alfred Hitchcock killing off the Janet Leigh character at the end of the first act of Psycho.

About What I Do Here

There are two types of film criticism. There's what people who write for newspapers do, which is tell you whether or not you should go see a movie and why. I'll call this 'practical film criticism.' Then there's what people who have Ph.D.s and write books do, which is analyze movies psychologically, politically, historically, etc. I'll call this 'academic film criticism.' What I'll be doing here is mostly practical film criticism.

As a Cornell graduate with a double major in Film Studies and Philosophy, I've done a fair amount of academic film criticism in my day. But if that's what you want to read, I can recommend a whole bunch of books by people much better at it than I am. Chances are, though, if you're looking for movie reviews on the internet, you want to know one thing and one thing only:

Is this movie worth $10 and 2 hours of my life?

No doubt my formal film education will shape my opinions of movies, but my main goal is to answer that question. Every review I write will start with a rating of 5 key aspects of the film, each out of 10. That will be immediately followed by The Bottom Line, which is basically one sentence that answers our key question up there. Then there will be a more in-depth review with maybe some analysis.

Many of my reviews will actually be of movies that are no longer in theaters. I'm going to try to keep up on current releases, but in all honesty, unless I get famous enough that studios comp me tickets, it's pretty expensive to keep up with new releases. But if you're looking for ideas about what's worth renting tonight, this is a good place to go.

From time to time I'll also have posts that aren't reviews of specific movies, but opinions about movies in general.

So that's about it. I guess from this point on I'll let the content speak for itself. Enjoy.