Mom shows up and warns them that Marsden is coming, and then drives McAdams over to the quarry and is like, “See that dirty laborer? I used to love him, but I abandoned him because I’m a classist shithead who loved shutters. JUST LIKE YOU. So now I just come here sometimes and stare at him and masturbate in my car. Just kidding, I am repressed.” Then she finally hands over all the letters she intercepted from Gosling, and literally says—as far as I can discern—“I’ve been keeping these inside my ball bag for seven years.”
I’ve been keeping these inside my ball bag for seven years. I’VE BEEN KEEPING THESE INSIDE MY BALL BAG FOR SEVEN YEARS.
I was confused at first, but later I googled it and found out that “ball bag” was 1940s Southern slang for nutsack.
Then Gosling and McAdams get in one last fight because this movie needed to be longer, and he tells her that she’s “a pain in the ass 99 percent of the time.” That means that he loves her approximately three and a half days per year. The rest of the time she makes him feel like a spear or dagger is literally stabbing him in his asshole.
So McAdams is like, “I have to go.” (Whispering: “Number two.”)
Feeling conflicted, she goes to hang out with Marsden, hoping that it’ll help her make up her mind. Marsden tells her, “In spite of everything, I love you,” which is almost as hot a pickup line as “You are a pain in the ass 99 percent of the time.” HOW WILL SHE CHOOSE BETWEEN THESE CASANOVAS? WAS THIS DIALOGUE WRITTEN BY MYSTERY?
Uuuuuuuugh, anyway, she chooses Gosling, OF COURSE, and then they animorph into James Garner and Gena Rowlands, and then James Garner’s magic notebook cures Gena Rowlands’s dementia for five minutes—you know, like medical science—but every time the skeptical doctor comes in, she goes back to being senile again because she’s the Michigan J. Frog of dementia, and then we find out that the title of the notebook is The Story of Our Lives (HEY, WHY NOT JUST CALL IT BOOK), and it turns out the notebook was Tom Riddle’s diary all along, and then Gena Rowlands is like, “Do you think we could just die together real quick?” and he’s like, “Yeah, prolly,” so then they do. Cause of death: felt like it. Cause of death: hospital food, amirite? Cause of death: basilisk.
And that’s how Ryan Gosling got laid one time.
RATING: 3/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Harry Plot Hole
I would call myself a so-so Harry Potter freak. I couldn’t recite the names of everyone on the Slytherin Quidditch team from a random Slytherin vs. Ravenclaw match on page 217 in book three (trust me, SOME KIDS CAN), but I can tell you the wizard who thought the world was ready for a cheese cauldron (Humphrey Belcher), the general gist of Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration (you can’t turn poop into food), and the best kiss Ron ever had (Auntie Muriel). In other words, I could not beat your niece at a Harry Potter trivia pub quiz, but I could maybe beat you. Relative to other Harry Potter people, I’m in it medium.
As it is for, I assume, plenty of other adults with emotional problems, Harry Potter is a reliable security blanket for me—during challenging periods in my life, listening to the (Jim Dale) audiobooks has been the only thing that gets me to sleep. It’s low-stakes and goofy, but also high-stakes and I care about the characters, plus there’s magic. Those are all of my needs. However, the best thing about Harry Potter, the thing that keeps me hooked year after year, is that the internal logic barely hangs together. None of it makes any sense! The best thing about Harry Potter is that I hate it!!!
My best friend and I have a decade-long text thread where we send each other new Harry Potter plot holes we discover (or forget and then remember again) and then become magnificent with rage over each one. And we discover new ones literally every day! If you could run a light bulb on Harry Potter plot holes, we could solve the climate crisis because Harry Potter plot holes are AN INEXHAUSTIBLE RESOURCE.
For starters, because it’s at the start of this movie, can we talk about the Deluminator? Both the book and movie versions of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone open with Dumbledore clicking his “put-outer” and sucking up all the streetlights on Privet Drive so Hagrid can land his flying motorcycle. First of all, how useful is this? How often do you specifically need to put out ten to twelve Muggle streetlights? Often enough that you needed to make a dedicated invention for it? A magic wand isn’t enough? And who fabricated the Deluminator? House elf slave labor? Or was Dumbledore up in his office—right in the middle of Voldemort’s rise to power—hunched over a soldering iron(?) fashioning a tiny hinge for his magic cigarette lighter that sucks up Muggle light-balls? Mightn’t his time have been better spent making, I don’t know, A GUN? Also, if Dumbledore forgets to put the light-balls back in the lamps, how do the Muggles get the lights back on? Does it work to just change the bulbs? Is he stealing the electricity? Or the concept of light itself?
(Then, in book seven, suddenly the Deluminator is also…a radio? That tells you when your friends are talking shit about you and kind of leads you to them anywhere in England? So, it sucks up balls of light and also helps you find your friends’ tent. HOW IS THAT AN INVENTION???? That’s like if I went on Shark Tank with a shoe that was also a dialysis machine, but I didn’t tell Mark Cuban about the dialysis thing until we’d already been in the shoe business for like twenty years. Why????????? People’s kidneys are failing, man!!!!!)
Anyway, Dumbledore walks past
