Shaft Movie Quotes

You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves. After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm. That’s what I believe. The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens. These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.

Then I’d throw my automatic down the elevator shaft-after I’d wiped off all the fingerprints and all. Then I’d crawl back up to my room and call up Jane and have her come over and bandage up my guts. I pictured her holding a cigarette for me to smoke while I was bleeding and all. The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I’m not kidding.

The postmodernist belief in the relativism of truth, coupled with the clicker culture of mass media, in which attention spans are measured in New York minutes, leaves us with a bewildering array of truth claims packaged in infotainment units. It must be true—I saw it on television, the movies, the Internet. The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, That’s Incredible!, The Sixth Sense, Poltergeist, Loose Change, Zeitgeist: The Movie. Mysteries, magic, myths, and monsters. The occult and the supernatural. Conspiracies and cabals. The face on Mars and aliens on Earth. Bigfoot and Loch Ness. ESP and psi. UFOs and ETIs. OBEs and NDEs. JFK, RFK, and MLK Jr.—alphabet conspiracies. Altered states and hypnotic regression. Remote viewing and astroprojection. Ouija boards and tarot cards. Astrology and palm reading. Acupuncture and chiropractic. Repressed memories and false memories. Talking to the dead and listening to your inner child. It’s all an obfuscating amalgam of theory and conjecture, reality and fantasy, nonfiction and science fiction. Cue dramatic music. Darken the backdrop. Cast a shaft of light across the host’s face. Trust no one. The truth is out there. I want to believe.

Okay, now things got tough. In the movies, heroes always get into seemingly impenetrable buildings through a heating duct or ventilation shaft or service entrance. In real life, if someone goes through all the hassle of creating an elaborate security system, they don’t have a 3 ✕ 3 ventilation shaft secured only by a metal grate and four screws. Unless they’re really, really stupid.

She swung her legs around his waist and crossed her ankles behind his back. “I like the way your mind works,” she panted before losing herself in the sensation of his hardness rubbing against her core. Lief took the few steps across the room to the bed in record time and flung her down on the covers. He leaned back to tear his clothes off. “My mind hardly works at all when you are near.” She chuckled leaning back on her elbows, enjoying the view of naked flesh being revealed. She rose up on her knees and traced the ridges on his chest and abdomen. As her fingers trailed down toward his proud shaft, he captured her wrists. “Be careful.” He smiled down at her. “I’m loaded and might go off any minute.” She laughed. “You’ve been watching too many old Western movies with Harold.

We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves. After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm. That’s what I believe. The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.

The movies were just kind of figuring out how to use computers in 2003, and nobody was just kind of figuring out how to use computers harder than Michael Bay. It’s tempting to say that every frame of Bad Boys II looks like a TV commercial, but truly every frame looks like a print advertisement, like those Candies ads where Jenny McCarthy’s taking a shit, shallow and glossy and tinged acid green. There are four car chases, one of which is at least fifteen minutes long. Even the most passing transitions are giddily tasteless: the camera EXPLODES out of the speedboat’s tailpipe and ZOOMS across Biscayne Bay and WHAMS down the ventilation shaft in the backward sunglasses factory and SHOOMPS into the buttcrack of a raver’s low-rise jeans and SPROINGS across her transverse colon and SQUEAKS through her appendix and AIRHORNS out her belly button and PLOPS into the Cuban drug lord’s mojito as he shoots his favorite nephew in the head while saying, “Adios, kemosabe,” or something fucking cool like that. When faced with a choice, Bay picks “all of the above” every time. He’s like a dog in one of those obedience trials who’s like, “Obedience? I don’t know her,” and just goes buck wild on the sausages. Except instead of “obedience” it’s “having a coherent plot that holds the audience’s attention” and instead of “sausages” it’s “explosions, Ferrari chases, and how many different cool kinds of box could a gun come in.

Jim: We got the idea of subtitling the Black dudes after we saw the 1975 Blaxploitation movie Shaft, starring Richard Roundtree. When we left the theater we thought it was pretty good, but we couldn’t understand a lot of the jive dialogue. The cast was 95 percent Black. So we thought wouldn’t it be fun to put a couple of those characters in Airplane! and subtitle them with idiotic white guy translations?

The woman at the other end of the room stood unmoving, her posture a slender question mark, silhouetted against the light from the window. She had large dark eyes surrounded by thick lashes that appeared damp from crying. Her sable-brown hair was looped into a careless braid down her back, and she wore a gauzy skirt and blouse, an apron, a pair of oven mitts and espadrilles tied at the ankles. The two of them stared at one another. The stranger shifted, stepping into a shaft of light through the open window. She had the face of an old Hollywood movie star, with an aquiline nose and full lips. She wore little or no makeup; her olive-toned skin gave her an air of unstudied elegance, needing no embellishment.