Epic lines from lame movies

Last night I was at Cinema Nova watching Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor (review here), and I saw a trailer for the re-release of the god-awful Godfather Part III.

Why anyone needs to reconsider/reevaluate this movie, just because it happens to be turning 30 years old, is beyond me. I'm sure it's some lame attempt to elevate the film's reputation through putting lipstick on a pig, as the unfortunate saying goes. A new cut of the film? Changing the title to Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone? None of it will change the essentially rancid flavor emitted from that film.

But I'm not writing about it today to complain about the decision to re-release it. Re-release whatever you want, I really don't care.

It's that it made me realize that possibly the most famous line of dialogue from the entire Godfather series actually comes from this movie.

You could choose a couple other lines from the series that have a lot of pop culture prominence, like "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse," or "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes," or "I know it was you, Fredo."

But the first line I ever knew from a Godfather movie was  "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

I believe it was my college roommate, Al, who first used it in my presence. I can see him doing the Michael Corleone impression, with the clawed hands gesture imitating a person being pulled back in. And this was years before I had seen any Godfather movie. This would have been about 1994, and I didn't see the original Godfather until the early 2000s. 

However, Al was just the first. This was a meme before memes existed, a quotation people liked to apply to any situaton where they had hoped to extract themselves, only to find themselves still mired in whatever quagmire it was they wanted to get out of. In fact, a friend of mine used it just last week in my presence. (Over Zoom, but still, "in my presence.")

Knowing that this was Michael Corleone, I assumed the line came from either The Godfather or The Godfather Part II -- you know, the only two Godfather movies anyone actually likes. In fact, I think I went so far as to look for them when I first watched those movies. I didn't have to wait long to find the line after not seeing it in The Godfather Part II, as we watched The Godfather Part III the next night as the end to a three-night Godfather weekend.

I must have acknowledged that the line came from the third movie at the time, but that was almost 15 years ago, so I've blocked out a lot of that movie. Who knows, maybe it's not even as bad as I remember it.

In a way it makes sense. I mean, Michael is not actually trying to "get out" in the first two movies. It's only in the third movie that he tries to go legit. So that line wouldn't have made any sense before 1990.

But I guess the timing of it is funny. Some lines of dialogue feel like they have been around for years, when they are actually comparatively new. That would have been the case with this one. When Al quoted that line to me -- if it was, indeed, the first time -- it would have been only four years after the movie originally came out. Yet it was referenced in the way you'd reference one of the classic lines of cinema, that had been around for decades.

I'd accuse Al of bad movie taste, but not by a long shot is he the only one who has tried to get out and been pulled back in over the years. Others have repeatedly endorsed this line and elevated to, I don't know, maybe even one of the hundred most recognizable cinematic quotations of all time? Is it possible it is that well known?

Because this whole phenomenon felt somewhat familiar from my own writings, I researched it the best I could (using my tag "quotations") and found that I wrote about a similar phenomenon back in 2015. That was about a line in Poltergeist II ("They're baaaAAAAaaack") that had inexplicably found greater pop culture endurance than the line it was playing off from the original ("They're heeeEEEEeere"). 

Maybe we should just follow the logic of my former co-worker Jason, who waved off the Back to the Future movies as "all the same," as though the first were not orders of magnitude better than the second and third. Although that was a ridiculous viewpoint, maybe there was a hidden logic to it. Maybe when we make references like Al Pacino's "pull me back in" line, we are really referencing a whole franchise, and the beloved characters in it, rather than re-litigating the strengths and weaknesses of any one film. 

Hey, I'm sure Pacino didn't want to be in a sub-par third Godfather movie. If he managed to wring from the experience an epic line of dialogue, more power to him. 

The most quotable line from Poltergeist ... II

One movie reference that has persisted for years in our culture is the notion that something is "baaAAAaack."

That's how I write it whenever I use it, anyway. I've seen it written as either "ba-ack" or just "baaaaack," the latter hoping, I guess, that you will imagine the vowel sound going up in that sing-songy fashion without any visual cues to indicate it.

This is, of course, the ominous pronouncement of one Carol Anne Freeling upon realizing that the Poltergeist ghosts have returned to her television. She announced their original arrival with "They're heeEEEeere."

But the meme that has persisted in our culture is not "They're heeEEEeere." It's "They're baaAAAaack." It is most often used to describe the return of someone or something that we'd thought was, practically speaking, dead. I used it most recently to describe Boston Red Sox hitter Shane Victorino, a former star who has suffered through a panoply of injuries and ineffective play over the past two seasons, who hit a home run and led his team to victory on Thursday. (A friend of mine is obsessed with Victorino.) That was a decent usage, but it's better for (staying in the world of baseball) someone like Alex Rodriguez, who missed all of last season after an infamous steroid suspension but has been playing like gangbusters early on in 2015. It should really be for someone you hoped was gone, but now is back -- like those Poltergeist ghosts.

Of course, it's not actually from Poltergeist. It's from Poltergeist II.

When you think about it, it makes sense. It was the perfect marketing hook for a Poltergeist sequel, playing off the most famous quote from the original movie. What's odd is that it has risen up above the original quote in prominence and frequency of usage, even as the second Poltergeist movie on the whole is justifiably forgotten and dismissed.

For example, did you even remember, without seeing that poster, that Poltergeist II was subtitled The Other Side?

Alright, that one was too easy. Yeah, you remembered.

But it's funny that when we think we're doing "the Poltergeist quote," we're actually doing "the Poltergeist II quote." It's kind of the same as that time I discovered that most of my friends and my favorite quotes from Airplane! were actually from Airplane II -- although not really the same, because Airplane II is also really funny. Whereas Poltergeist II ... well, that old guy at the beginning really scared me, anyway.

I haven't seen any advertising for this summer's Poltergeist reboot, but I imagine that, also, would be a good opportunity for "They're baaAAAaack." Of course, "they" can never really be back in a soulless reboot that is as likely to scare me as it's likely to do my taxes.