linguistic movie moments

[Laura Miller]

For linguistic moments from popular media, like everyone else I  use clips from SNL, In Living Color, Mad, etc. There's also great material in any of the films of Japanese director Itami Juzo. Most of them have been subtitled into English and are available in US video stores. In the film Tampopo, you find a "noodle master" using high-register tea-ceremony-like language and gestures to instruct a truck driver in the art of eating ramen, in The Funeral, a couple views a video on "How to Have a Funeral" to learn the proper  things to say,  and Taxing Woman has samples of "Yakuza speech" as well as a woman using so-called "masculine" speech.