Forget awards season, these movies changed the way we speak

3 months ago 18

Opinion

December 5, 2025 — 6.00pm

Alexi Indris-Santana wasn’t really Alexi Indris-Santana. Instead, the Princeton athlete was born James Hogue, not a self-educated orphan from Utah but a wily opportunist from Kansas. A natural runner by either name, the student was the focus of a Chameleon podcast I caught last week. The story revealed how he’d conned the system to create a new identity, stealing bicycles and status wherever he went.

The year was 1988, back when impostors had it easier, spared the pesky evidence of digital footprints. Of course, scammers will scam regardless the era, but this audio yarn teemed with good old-fashioned chutzpah. As host Josh Dean put it, Hogue was his own “talented Mr Ripley”.

Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors. The film’s title has entered our general vocabulary.

The reference caught my ear, as lately I’ve been hunting film nods. You know the kind, where a speaker only needs to utter Groundhog Day, say, to put you in the picture, that endless loop of existence. Just as The Truman Show will summon the covert surveillance we endure without consent or clue, all thanks to the nightmare awakening of Jim Carrey (as Truman Burbank) in 1998.

Only last month, the Macquarie panel seeking Word of the Year assessed two new film allusions, proof the trend is climbing. “Clanker” was the first, a caustic nickname for any chatbot or artificial communicator, stealing the slur from Star Wars.

The second was a darker reference to The Matrix, if that’s possible, adopting that realm’s pill system, where a red pill dispels delusion, allowing you to see things for what they truly are. If all that sounds innocuous, bear in mind that militant incels have commandeered the term to weaponise their war against woke.

Everyone understands the meaning of Groundhog Day, which starred Bill Murray as a man living the same day over and over.

Though my favourite examples in a sprawling collection answer to film titles only. Sure, “bunny boiler” is vibrant shorthand for a spurned psychopath. Quotes and catchphrases are equally rife, from The Castle’s poolroom to the first rule of Fight Club. But if we want to list all those movie titles that have crept into English, then we’ll need a bigger boat.

Screenwriter Justin Zackham may not be a household name, but the genius of his title – The Bucket List – has adorned every travel liftout since 2007. Frank Howitt may have broken the Profumo scandal in 1963 for the Daily Express, but his thespian son Peter has long eclipsed his dad’s fame by introducing Sliding Doors into our vocab: two words evoking the umpteen lives we might have led.

Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, quibbling over the first rule of Fight Club.

To imagine a horse whisperer having a seven-year itch with his Stepford wife is to squash a novel into a grain of sand. Thanks to films, we can conceive of Goodfellas facing a Sophie’s Choice, or a Catfish going The Full Monty to pay it forward. Perhaps a Manchurian Candidate receiving an Indecent Proposal – not to be confused with a close encounter.

Closer to home, Romper Stomper will conjure neo-Nazi skinheads, just as Wolf Creek elicits a couple stranded on an outback highway as “help” looms on the horizon. There lies the semaphore’s power. Wave the right title and the elevator pitch converts into storyboard, a show reel of images and implications embedded in a clutch of familiar syllables.

Maybe that’s the real magic, the trend’s secret fuel. In the groundhog blur of modern life, the Koyaanisqatsi of online brainrot, we want the story and we want it yesterday.

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