What's My Line

It's hard to complain about the top 100 movie lines, according to the American Film Institute. Most are famous and deserve to be on the list. Nevertheless, I'll give it a shot.

Their first mistake was allowing more than one quote per film. A film like Casablanca is a compendium of great lines--you could create the entire list from it. The AFI list has six. Better to have just one line represent any given film.

About ten lines or so seem too trivial to me to make the list, but that's not bad.

Then there's the trouble of comedians--funny lines aren't necessarily classic lines. They had to include something from Groucho, so they used the fairly famous elephant-in-the-pajamas bit from Animal Crackers. Fair enough, but it's not as if this is his best single line or moment. (How about "We're fighting for the woman's honor--which is more than she ever did.")

Then there are lines which became famous at least partly from promotion, such as "They're here" or "No wire hangers, ever!" or "Houston, we have a problem." Are these famous movie lines, or famous lines from ad campaigns?

A few shouldn't be on the list because they're famous from other source. For instance, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers" was well known from the play A Streetcar Named Desire before the movie.

The only line I feel they severely underrated is "Well, nobody's perfect" from Some Like It Hot. I was sure it'd be top ten, but it's only #48.

P.S. One more complaint. I think they could have found room for at least one line from the best dialogue writer around today, Quentin Tarantino. A few of his lines appear in the ballot of the top 400 choices, but they're still missing what I'd choose: "I'm going to get medieval on your ass."