
Dropping a Life Of Brian or Big Lebowski reference in the right situation, surrounded by the right people, extends the communal quality of moviegoing outside the confines of a theater. But at the same time, for a large number of people, much of the fun of being a movie-lover is swapping quotes with like-minded fans.
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It’s not unusual for hardcore cinephiles to distrust films that sound too “written,” or to bristle at lists of “The 100 Best Movie Lines,” which reduce complex works of art to a single catchphrase. Quotability is an underrated element of movies, perhaps because critics often have a love/hate relationship with dialogue itself. Please enable Javascript to watch this video (That was pretty much the default mode back then.) But it’s the only one that seems to have been pasted together from college philosophy textbooks and Silver Age Action Comics, and the only one that crams more quotable lines into every scene than even most outright comedies ever do. In surgery, Buckaroo casually warns, “Don’t tug on that you never know what it might be attached to.” At a tense moment, the United States Secretary Of Defense (Matt Clark) admits, “I’m barely holding my fudge right now.” A malevolent alien named John Bigbooté (Christopher Lloyd) scoffs at concerns over the fate of the Earth, saying, “It’s not my goddamn planet, understand, monkey-boy?” Buckaroo Banzai isn’t the only 1980s adventure film to shrug off seriousness. Throughout the movie, people say odd, funny things in deadpan tones.

Buckaroo Banzai is like a Doc Savage paperback that’s passed through another dimension and has come back… changed. By the end of its first 20 minutes, Buckaroo Banzai has ceased being another retro barn-burner inspired by old Doc Savage paperbacks.

Yet even all that isn’t as strange as what happens next, when Buckaroo, this doctor/rocker/genius/champion, stops his concert to comfort a crying woman with a little zen philosophy. After Buckaroo arrives, he drives the car so fast, it phases directly through a mountain, and then he and his sidekicks race off to their other other job, as rock stars. Then the audience learns that the test-driver, Buckaroo Banzai (played by Peter Weller), has been delayed by his other job as a brain surgeon. The opening sequence of Buckaroo Banzai sees a cluster of muttering technicians-a staple of any 1970s and 1980s science-fiction film aiming for NASA-like verisimilitude-and a souped-up car being readied for a dangerous mission.

It’s a slow-dawning out-of-whack-ness, though. Richter and as soon as its characters opened their mouths, it was clear that something was out of whack.

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Then along came Buckaroo, written by Hollywood weirdo Earl Mac Rauch and directed by his weirdo mentor, W.D. When Buckaroo Banzai was released in August 1984, it arrived toward the end of a cycle of post- Raiders Of The Lost Ark adventure movies that were overt and even tongue-in-cheek about their debt to old movie serials, pulp magazines, comic books, and Poverty Row B-pictures. It’s almost impossible to talk about The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension without quoting it, because the film’s language makes the film. Because, remember, no matter where you go… there you are.”
