My three loyal readers have probably noticed that there hasn’t been much action here on Simple Tricks over the past few weeks. Sorry, kids. Real Life dropped by for a visit and hasn’t seemed too interested in going home. I’ve been hamstrung by a million things to do in the offline world, not to mention a deep, all-consuming sense of blog-fatigue brought on by my extensive comments about the recent election season. In other words, after I finished all those rambling political dissertations, I just didn’t feel like writing for awhile.

Now, however, my Christmas shopping is mostly complete, I’m pretty much stuck indoors because the weather is miserably cold and gray, and I figure that any holiday cards I haven’t managed to send out yet probably won’t arrive before the big day anyhow, so there’s little sense in knocking myself out. Which means, since I have nothing else to distract me, that my thoughts are once again turning toward my little soap box here. Have no fear, though — I suspect you folks out there in InternetLand are as sick of reading my political opinions as I am of thinking them, so I’m going to do my best to avoid the subject for a while. For the next few weeks, nothing but pop culture and pointless nostalgia!

For our first subject in that vein, have you heard about the recently released list of the Ten Cheesiest Lines in Movie History?

I myself learned about this list a couple weeks ago, when it made the rounds of all the banter-and-fluff parties that pass for morning news programs. The hosts of those programs must’ve all received the same script, because they all said and did roughly the same things. They chortled themselves silly during film clips, guffawed at the selected dialogue, and generally behaved as if these choices were so self-evident that no one over the age of twelve could possibly enjoy them. These ten lines were presented as if we were all supposed to feel nothing upon hearing them except wincing embarassment for the poor schleps who were forced to recite them.

Except… I didn’t think the lines were all that bad. Seriously, they weren’t. In fact, of the ten, I found seven of them to be perfectly acceptable, and even quite moving when taken in the context of their respective films. They’re not up to par with Shakespeare or even Casablanca, but so little film-writing is these days. The mere fact that these seven lines are memorable at all says something about their serviceability, and for the three that did produce in me a mild cringe, I tend to blame their awfulness on factors other than the line itself.

So what conclusions can we draw from my reactions? Well, either that our culture has become so ironic and “post-everything” that it’s no longer possible to express anything that remotely resembles sentiment in our entertainment… or else proof-positive that I personally have a tin ear for “cheese.”

Before I get to that, though, let me explain what I’m talking about (just in case you haven’t clicked that link up there at the top of the post). This Top Ten list was produced by a British food manufacturer called Warburtons, which conducted a survey of some 2,000 U.K. moviegoers and compiled the list as a promotion for the company’s new cheese-flavored crumpets.

Here’s the list itself, presented in reverse order:

10. In The Postman when a blind woman says to Kevin Costner, “You’re a godsend, a savior,” he replies: “No, I’m a postman.”

9. Renee Zellweger’s big line to Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire: “You had me at hello.”

8. Mel Gibson’s pastiche of the St. Crispin’s Day speech in Braveheart: “They may take our lives, but they will not take our freedom!”

7. Bull Pullman’s effort to rouse the troops in Independence Day: “Today we celebrate our Independence Day!”

6. Julia Roberts in Notting Hill: “I’m just a girl… standing in front of a boy… asking him to love her.”

5. Val Kilmer and Tom Cruise doing that male-bonding-thing in Top Gun: “You can be my wingman anytime.”

4. Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze’s pillow-talk in Ghost: “I love you,” followed by, “Ditto.”

3. Andie McDowell’s apparent ignorance of the weather in Four Weddings And A Funeral: “Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed.”

2. Patrick Swayze’s act of defiance in Dirty Dancing: “Nobody puts Baby in the corner.”

And, according to 2,000 Brits answering cracker-company surveys, the cheesiest line in film history is:

(Drum roll, please)

1. Leonardo DiCaprio’s gleeful shout in Titanic: “I’m the king of the world!”

I’ll give you a moment to stop laughing… assuming that you, like Matt Lauer and Katie Couric, think these lines are laughably bad.

Back with me now? Okay.

I could be a hopeless pedant and point out that a survey sample of only 2,000 people from the same general geographic area is pretty unreliable, or that the list’s claims of representing all of movie history is suspect, considering that nearly all of the choices on the list are from the last ten years and that the oldest film on the list, Top Gun, is a mere twenty years old. Considering that talkies were invented in 1929, there’s a whole lot of potential cheese-fodder out there that was not considered here.

However, considering that filmic “cheese” is largely a subjective thing, I’d probably be wiser to just return to my original point, which is that I don’t think these lines are all that bad, at least not within the context of their source material. Personally, I can’t help but smile at the line in Top Gun (and no, it’s not because I’m reflecting on the homoerotic subtext, it’s because the line actually says something about the arc of these two characters). I always feel like kicking some alien ass after hearing Bull Pullman’s July 4th speech, and Swayze’s white-knight act in Dirty Dancing always makes me want to pump my fist in the air and say, “yeah!” (Yes, I am one of the half-dozen heterosexual men in the entire world who actually like this film.) The Ghost thing is true-to-life — lovers do have their silly personal catch phrases — and if Julia Roberts laid that line on me, my first instinct would be to hug her, not laugh at her.

Finally, I get very impatient with people who criticize Titanic, because I quite like that movie and, as I recall, the criticism only started after every thirteen-year-old girl in America had seen the film for the fourth time. I don’t usually subscribe to backlashes against popular entertainments, and the trendy dislike of Titanic is one I definitely reject. The scene in which Leo’s character utters that supposed stinker of a line has the intended effect on me everytime, which is to say that it makes me feel excited and jubilant. Think about it: he’s playing a penniless boy who lucked his way onto the grandest ship in the world, and he’s going home after a long time adventuring abroad. Standing there on the prow of that mighty ship with the wind in your face, how could you not feel a rising bubble of emotion that demands some kind of over-the-top gesture? I myself felt the same thing on the days I stood atop the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building, and in the shadow of Westminster Abbey and on the tallest turret of the largest ruined castle in the Rhineland. The swelling music, the sweeping aerial view of the ship, and Leo’s underrated performance throughout the film add up to make the line truly effective, in my opinion. I believe the distasteful aura that now surrounds the words, “I’m King of the World,” largely sprang from director Jim Cameron’s swollen head on Oscar night.

Of the remaining items on the list, I will admit that “You had me at hello,” while fine when it was first uttered on-screen, has since grown tiresome due to constant repetition and parody. I’ll also grant that the Four Weddings line about the rain is pretty bad, but I blame that more on Andie McDowell’s vacant delivery. It might’ve been cute in the hands of someone who could actually act. Finally, I haven’t seen The Postman so I’m not going to bash on it; however, I suspect that film was as much a victim of the post-Dances With Wolves anti-Costnerism as any of its own flaws.

But all of this is mere quibbling. As I said, the concept of “cheesy” is pretty subjective, and one man’s cheddar is somebody else’s bread. Still, I do wonder when this disdain for cheese and the concurrent fear of being cheesy infected our culture. I hear the term thrown around a lot these days, usually in relation to something old or unfashionable — for example, it flies pretty freely on the Star Trek message board I occasionally visit, and almost always in reference to the original 1960s TV series, as opposed to any of the spin-offs. But what exactly does it mean to call something “cheesy?” I have to confess that I never have really understood the term.

Does it mean, as I suggested above, that something is old, or that it expresses unfashionable ideas? That certainly seems to be the case for Classic Star Trek, but that can’t be the primary criteria for determining cheesiness, not when the number-one cheesiest line of all time was first delivered only seven years ago.

It seems to me that the term — a close relative of “corny,” which you don’t hear much anymore — relates mainly to sentimentality. Review that list above and note the one thing all those lines have in common: they are all expressions of simple but powerful emotions, mostly of love or affection, but also of courage, humility, or plain old unfiltered, unironic joy. In short, old-fashioned sentiments that most people are not really comfortable expressing publicly these days.

It seems to me that we’re not supposed to be sentimental anymore, not in our art and not in our personal lives either. I could lay a big dissertation on you, outline my theories about why that is so — I blame it all the bane of my college career, post-modernism — but I’ll settle for just saying that I reject this new “common wisdom” that sentimentality in our entertainment is bad. The truth is that I tend to like a lot of films, TV shows, and books that the hipster crowd dismisses as hopelessly trite, and I also tend to dislike a lot of the self-conscious, self-referential, emotionally distant and too-clever-for-its-own-good stuff that those same people find so amusing.

Which isn’t to say that I’m not discriminating or that I can’t identify bad dialogue when I hear it. I mentioned Casablanca earlier as an example of quality writing, and I believe it is, for the most part. But even this pinnacle of classic filmmaking contains a couple of hopelessly clunky lines that make me wince (“Was that cannonfire or is it the beating of my heart?”). Also, as many flaws as I’m willing to forgive in the Star Wars movies, I couldn’t help but squirm when Anakin Skywalker compared his love Padme’s skin to the rough sands of his homeworld in Attack of the Clones. Um, yeah, okay… nice idea, perhaps, but horribly articulated.

However, when it comes to the stuff that people call “cheesy,” as opposed to downright bad, well, I guess I’ll just never get it. So slice me off another hunk of cheddar, please. And then hush up… the movie’s starting…