My Favorite Line Readings

Where writing meets performance

As a writer, I love a good movie quotable. Be it the AFI’s greatest from their 100 Years series (“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” from Gone with the Wind) or a more recent example that enters the cultural lexicon (“My job … it’s just, beach” from Barbie), a well-crafted one-liner always helps make a movie sing.

But I’m also aware that something that reads well on the page is only part of what makes cinematic dialogue work. The beauty of a movie line is that what starts with the writer only comes to life when spoken into existence by an actor. And while it helps if they’re working with something prosaic, a great performer can make even a throwaway line memorable.

Greta Gerwig and Ryan Gosling on the set of Barbie, 2023. © Jaap Buitendijk

And those moments are exactly what make for my favorite line readings. They’re a celebration of the interplay between an intellect and an embodiment. These moments are both borne from language and creating a new one altogether.

A great actor can elevate the banal into something unforgettable, ensuring that when you hear a certain word, you immediately repeat it in their voice. If you see the moment without audio, you can probably mimic the exact cadence, volume, and delivery with a precision that will scare the living daylights out of people who don’t know the joy of the line you love.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my list of favorite line readings has a heavy overlap with the movies I’ve lost track of how much I’ve watched. Several of these are so deeply embedded in the Shaffer family lexicon that if you said any of these in our presence, we’d probably launch into an impression of the line without ever stopping to think if you know the origin. But there are also some newer additions as well that have been rattling around my head in the social media era. I hope if you were to make a list of your own, the picks would be similarly eclectic and tied to deep, meaningful movie memories!

HONORABLE MENTION: Rachel McAdams, Mean Girls, all

I’m sorry, but I don’t think I could pick a single Regina George line delivery to elevate as superior to all others. Every time I watch the movie (or a YouTube clip), something else catches my ear and highlights just how uniquely she enters the mindset of the queen bee high school meanie. There’s not a single line of Tina Fey’s script that she doesn’t volley off without putting some massive spin on the ball.

Mean Girls is available on Hulu and Paramount+.

#10: Rachel McAdams, Game Night, “Oh no, he died!”

Fine, I’ll pick one superior Rachel McAdams line delivery. I’m not as sold on Game Night as the last great studio comedy as some online, though I came around on it a little upon a rewatch. But even on first watch, I recognized how brilliantly she delivers the line “Oh no, he died!” It’s the perfect distillation of the entire movie’s tone as a jokey casual game night quickly devolves into an actual night of mischief and mayhem. Watching her moment of jubilation upon vanquishing a foe who threatens her quickly dissipate into a realization of the real stakes is like hearing the air go out of a balloon as expressed through the English language.

Game Night is available to rent from various digital providers.

#9: Sally Field, Mrs. Doubtfire, “The whole time? The whole time! THE WHOLE TIME.”

Frankly, nothing in Sally Field’s two Oscar-winning performances holds a candle to her stream-of-consciousness reaction to realizing her family’s beloved housekeeper was actually her ex-husband in drag. It’s the perfect capper on the extended climax of Mrs. Doubtfire as Field works through a storm of conflicting and intense feelings in real-time. She wears it on her face, too, but there’s nothing more indelible than her ability to repeat the same line three times in rapid succession with an entirely different and valid reading with each variation.

Mrs. Doubtfire is available on Hulu.

#8: Tom Hanks, Elvis, “He’s white?”

I’m on the record as being a massive Elvis hater – it’s Bazmataz gone spectacularly wrong, in large part because it focuses far too much attention on a character, Tom Hanks’ Col. Tom Parker, that offers limited perspective on a defining figure of the American century. (Apologies to my friend Ethan Warren who has written beautifully about his love of the movie upon multiple rewatches – I just can’t get there, bud.) But I have to give credit where it’s due. Hanks takes one of the absolutely wildest lines of dialogue that I’m sure he’s ever been presented with in a script and hams the absolute hell out of it. “He’s whAAAiiiIIIIte” will forever rattle around in my brain. I will just be minding my business and enjoying my day, when out of nowhere, there it is. There’s that sound. “He’s whAAAiiiIIIIte.” Curse you, but also … maybe thank you, Tom Hanks?

Elvis is available to rent from various digital platforms … but why would you want to do that?

#7: Mel Brooks, The Little Rascals, “Seven? SEVEN?!”

The joy of Penelope Spheeris’ take on The Little Rascals – sanitized as it may be from its Great Depression-era economic roots – is watching the youthful imagination of kids creating their own imaginary world they rule collide with the realities of one actually controlled by adults. Nowhere does that outsized sense of self-importance come to a more hilariously screeching halt than when the leaders of the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club attempt to get a bank loan to rebuild their burnt-down clubhouse. Mel Brooks’ unnamed bank manager, too busy looking at his paperwork to notice that he’s chatting with two children stacked on top of their friends, asks for their account number only to receive their flustered reply of … seven. Listening to him repeat their laughably incorrect response back at them (twice!) with increasing exasperation is absolute comic gold. In my mind, no one has ever taken longer to say this number than Mel Brooks does here.

The Little Rascals is available on Netflix and Peacock through 9/30.

#6: Thomas Haden Church, Easy A, “Don’t forget tomorrow’s Earth Day”

I’ve been trying to make the day before Earth Day an unofficial celebration of my beloved Easy A, although I’m not helping my case having forgotten in the past two years. Any movie that references a day (cough, October 3) can easily become a meme, but the Thomas Haden Church deadpan here is worth acknowledging in its own right. In a film full of cliché-busting by Emma Stone’s incisive protagonist Olive, his Mr. Griffith is one of the few other similarly self-aware characters. At the end of the first montage where Olive struts her newfound defiant sex appeal, her projection of promiscuity runs headfirst into the reality of her beloved English teacher. He seems set to deliver the kind of inspiring speech that we’d come to expect from the Dead Poets Society-pilled teen movies of the last several decades … only to stare blankly at her and issue his out-of-the-blue reminder. Stay golden, Mr. Griffith.

Easy A is available on Netflix.

#5 (tie): Beanie Feldstein, Lady Bird, “It is the TITULAR role,” Saoirse Ronan, Little Women, “Women—," and Issa Rae, Barbie, “Are you guys watching The GodFAther?”

Is Greta Gerwig becoming our greatest contemporary director of unexpected line readings? It’s a marvel how each of her movies has at least one wild delivery that emphasizes a word or syllable that just sounds a little wrong … but oh so right. The gusto with which Beanie Feldstein utters “TITULAR role” in Lady Bird feels almost like a take that Gerwig should have thrown out, but thank goodness it stayed.

Lady Bird is available on Max.

Ditto Saoirse Ronan’s breathy intonation of “women” ahead of a big attic monologue in Little Women; it’s so unvarnished and lacking actorly affectation that it perfectly sets the stakes for Jo March bearing her soul so vulnerable.

Little Women is available on Hulu.

And while “iconic” gets bandied around quite loosely these days, Issa Rae’s subversive upspeak when name-dropping The Godfather within the Barbie deprogramming sequence actually deserves it. Everybody say thank you Greta Gerwig for injecting some vitality into her line readings.

Barbie is available on Max.

#4: Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada, “Why is no one re-ady?”

No one told me that once you got into a management role at work, you’d start to see The Devil Wears Prada from the perspective that Miranda had a point. (Several, actually!) Everyone remembers the brilliant “cerulean” monologue that follows, but the most indelible bit of Streep acting in the scene comes from her hanging of the last word of her interrogation of staffers: “Why is no one re-ady?” She’s not wrong to expect good work from employees, and she makes that disappointment register with a dagger of a line delivery far more cutting than if she’d simply raised her voice and screamed them out.

The Devil Wears Prada is available on Max.

#3: Sandra Oh, The Princess Diaries, “The Queen is coming. To Grove High School.”

I would like to make one thing clear: I knew this was an all-time line reading before Sandra Oh became famous through television shows like Grey’s Anatomy. When people say “there are no small parts, only small actors,” there should be an illustration of Sandra Oh’s Vice Principal Gupta in The Princess Diaries. She can turn a morsel into a gourmet meal by thinking through how a supporting character would think herself the main character of any scene. The grandiosity of her taking a phone call and taking a deep breath before relaying the findings to the people sitting in her office – “The Queen is coming. To Grove High School.” – speaks to her prodigious talents at any scale.

The Princess Diaries is available on Disney+ and Hulu.

#2: Lee Arenberg, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, “’Ello poppet”

Did I have to look up the name of this actor and character from Pirates of the Caribbean? You betcha! But with our closest family friends, this indelible line delivery – meant to be terrifying but rendered slightly hilarious by the thick English accent – has become an everyday epithet. I feel like we’ve long since forgotten the name's root because it’s just taken on such a life of its own.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is available on Disney+.

#1: Meg Ryan, You’ve Got Mail, “That caviar is a GARNISH!”

If you don’t know by now this is a Nora Ephron stan account, I cannot help you. The beauty of the late great humorist’s work is that she couldn’t write a throwaway line if she tried. Every single utterance comes packed with her insights into the way we use language as an expression (or, by contrast, a mask) of our truest selves. There’s nothing like an Ephron line that’s dripping with polite disdain for a faux pas, such as when Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly catches Tom Hanks’ Joe Fox scooping a caviar garnish off a nice dinner party dish.

It’s these little things that reveal so much about people, and Ephron writes characters perceptive enough to realize how micro-moments reveal true character. When she expresses her consternation – “You’re taking all that caviar? That caviar is a GARNISH!” – it reverberates because we know she’s talking about his rapaciousness at large. As a bookseller, it only makes perfect sense that Kathleen understands the power simple words have to speak directly into the soul. Without forcing anything, Ephron gives us all we need to know about these characters – and me an excuse to quote her anytime I hear the word “caviar” or “garnish.”

You’ve Got Mail is available to rent from various digital platforms.

These are mine — what are your favorites?

Happy New York Film Festival to those who celebrate! I wrote the curtain-raiser intro for Slant Magazine and also contributed two new reviews to the blurbs — the much-hyped The Brutalist and quiet festival smash Happyend.

I also had a great time interviewing Gregg Araki on the occasion of his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy hitting the Criterion Collection this week. (If you think Euphoria and Gen Z invented doomerist teen angst, think again.) He’ll be at it again soon with I Want Your Sex, the soon-to-be nuclear bomb into online movie discourse as it features an age gap relationship between Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman. And it also features Charli XCX, which may be notable to some of you.

You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.

You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.

The Substance is getting a lot of buzz from its opening weekend — I’ll be honest, it did not really work for me. I found Coralie Fargeat’s body horror take on women’s aging in Hollywood to be quite monotonous as it relentlessly pummels us over the head with one idea for nearly two-and-a-half hours. Like some “elevated” genre filmmaking today, maybe it’d be better as a film studies' thesis paper. If you’d rather just hear the ideas discussed, star Demi Moore has done a great job speaking about the parallels to her own career on the press tour.

If you need a little more context on Demi Moore’s career, this essay for Metrograph by Jourdain Searles contextualizes her within the rise of a new professional woman in the 1980s.

A little something fun is coming for subscribers this weekend — it’s a bit of shop talk around how I approach writing reviews.

Ratatouille, 2007. © Disney

Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall