Despite the recent sale of Tom Ford’s A Single Man, no film has taken the Toronto Film Festival by storm this year. But we’ve witnessed some terrific moments and heard some brilliant one-liners. Like “This is not about whoopsie-doopsie,” a cheating wife’s unconvincing defense in the Coens’ A Serious Man. Our favorite screenplays so far? The hilarious Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe’s spastic gangster script for Perrier’s Bounty and William M. Finkelstein’s stratospherically over-the-top script for Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Cage: “Everything I take’s prescription — except for the heroin”). Yes, both are relentlessly dirty — maybe because there’s just something so right about watching extreme, profane cinema in one of the nicest, most polite places on Earth. After the jump, the best least-polite lines.
“I am the woman you don’t have to worry about. Yourself, only with a vagina.” —One commuter (Vera Farmiga) to another (George Clooney) in Up in the Air; screenplay by Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking).
“Certain things I like to keep obscure and enigmatic. Because that’s me way, man” —The streetwise Spectre of Death in Perrier’s Bounty; screenplay by the terrific Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe (Intermission, Boy A)
“Why is there a fucking iguana on my coffee table?” —Nicolas Cage, freaking out in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans; screenplay by William M. Finkelstein (NYPD Blue, L.A. Law, Murder One, and, yes, Cop Rock)
“Even though you can’t figure anything out, you will be responsible for it on the midterm.” —Michael Stuhlbarg, teaching math (and the meaning of life) in A Serious Man; screenplay by Joel and Ethan Coen
“Bastards. They eat their own god … We have many gods. They’ve only got the one.” —A Viking, describing the invading Christians in Nicolas Winding Refn’s unrelentingly bleak Valhalla Rising; screenplay by Refn and Roy Jacobsen
“You demonic concubine.” —The teenage reincarnation of Trotsky (Jay Baruchel), addressing the head of the school board in The Trotsky; screenplay by writer-director Jacob Tierney
“I was up in Chicago with the wind blowing snow so far up my ass I was farting snowflakes in July.” —Robert Duvall as an old codger in Get Low; screenplay by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell
“Holy shit.” —Michael Moore, summing up his 2008 election-night reaction in Capitalism: A Love Story
