better with each passing day

[Dan Goncharoff]

In general, you have a point. For example, the three movies with the
greatest number of quotes in the 100 Greatest Movie Quotes are
Casablanca (1942), The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind (1939).

There have been more recent periods when movies have infected the
culture. There were the comedies of 1980: Airplane, Blues Brothers and
Caddyshack. There was another period from 1986 to 1989 which was
filled with quotable movies, from Ferris Bueller's Day Off to Wall
Street to When Harry Met Sally.

There are also characters, like James Bond and Harry Callahan, that
worked their magic over multiple movies.

DanG


On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 7:44 AM, Paul Frank <paulfrank at post.harvard.edu> wrote:
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> Poster:       Paul Frank <paulfrank at POST.HARVARD.EDU>
> Subject:      better with each passing day
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>
> There's a popular Latin American saying about Carlos Gardel, who died
> in 1935: "Cada dia canta mejor." It means, as this
> <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129783483> NPR
> piece reminds us, that Gardel sings better with each passing day, that
> his music ages like a fine wine. As a native speaker of Spanish, I can
> only agree.
>
> I saw Casablanca the other day, for the first time in years. And I was
> blown away, again, and for the umpteenth time. Every line gets better
> every time I hear it. Even the lines that aren't in the movie, like
> "play it again, Sam." Has any movie shaped the language more than
> Casablanca? When was the last time that a classic movie, the locus
> classicus of dozens of phrases and idioms, was made? Is it because
> movies have been superseded by TV series in the American cultural
> repertoire , as A.O. Scott suggested in the Times the other day:
>
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/movies/12scott.html?pagewanted=1&ref=arts&src=me>
>
> Or because adult movies (no, not that kind) are a thing of the past
> (or almost), as Matt Zoller Zeits argues in Salon,
>
> http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/09/07/the_romantics_the_american_grownup_movies/index.html
>
> Ducking,
> off-topically,
>
> Paul
>
> Paul Frank
> Translator
> German, French, Italian > English
> paulfrank at post.harvard.edu
> paul.frank at bfs.admin.ch
>
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