I speak jive

There's an interesting piece by Virginia Heffernan in today's Times magazine. The news peg is the 25th anniversary of Tootsie's release, but the argument she makes in the lede, that before the home video era one was more likely to memorize entire swaths of movie dialogue and styles of delivery, is what caught my eye.

“Tootsie” came out in 1982, when most Americans assumed that if you didn’t catch a movie while it was playing in theaters, you might never see it. Moviegoers were largely ignoring the climactic developments in home-entertainment technology — including the so-called format war between Betamax and VHS — that would, in the coming decades, transform not just movie watching but also home design and romantic relationships. The best format for audiovisual data storage was still considered to be the human memory.

Er, yes and no. No mostly because I'd argue this is an ongoing phenomenon--aided by home video, sure--rather than a historical moment. Nature, not nurture. Granted, the cinetrix sometimes speaks to immediately family and close friends solely in a patois drawn from The Simpsons, Lebowski, Better Off Dead, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and the Brothers--Blues, Marx, and Warner (cartoons). But she never got the hang of speaking pages of dialogue the way her video store, grad school, and film blog confreres [and they do skew freres-ward] are prone to do.

Why is that? Got me. But I'm interested in hearing which bits from which movies you're most likely to break out to indicate, bandanna in back pocket stizz, that you're a member of the secret society of film geeks--and why.