OH, FUCK OFF, MAN.
Sarsgaard leads them to this quarry in Newark, which is a metaphor for GUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, where they find a bloviating Pilates instructor who lives in an old boat.
Ugh, you live in an old boat in the bottom of a quarry in Newark? How pedestrian. MY junkyard guru lives in an old tampon box in the bottom of a witch’s well in San Antonio.
He gives Sarsgaard a package and then, famously, everyone screams into the abyss to represent the battle against overmedicated twenty-first-century millennial ennui, and it is so fucking stupid that now I AM an abyss. Then ZB sort of tenderly lips NP’s face like a gorilla investigating a pair of bifocals.
Sarsgaard finally gives Braff his secret present, which is his dead mom’s “favorite necklace,” and is like PS, YOU’RE WELCOME, I ROBBED YOUR MOM’S GRAVE FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY. I DUG UP HER COFFIN AND UNBUTTONED HER BLOUSE AND LIFTED HER CORPSIFIED HEAD AND TENDERLY UNDID THE CLASP AND STOLE THIS NECKLACE AND NOW I’M GIVING IT TO YOU. SORRY ABOUT THE SMELL. AND THE CURSE.
And Braff is, like, jazzed about it. Like that was a real solid thing to do.
He and Portman go celebrate by sitting in the dry bathtub where his mom died, and he goes, “When I’m with you, I feel so safe. Like I’m home.”
OH, THANK GOODNESS. BY THE WAY, SHE HAS LITERALLY NOT ONCE SAID HOW SHE FEELS FOR THIS ENTIRE MOVIE.
Then he goes to the airport and then he changes his mind and comes back from the airport because he realizes that without his presence she would simply wink out of existence because she is a fucking shell of a person, a marionette, an agency-free boner-golem.
“You changed my life,” he explains. “You changed my life, and I’ve known you four days. This is the beginning of something really big [MY PENIS].”
And then they penis. The end.
RATING: 2/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Footnotes
1 Note for the writers of 2026’s Garden State reboot: Missed opportunity to have him work at a MALAISE-ian restaurant, IMO! Be the change.
2 I get that this is part of the joke/satire, but I still hate it!
Auf Wiedersehen, Kinderbjorn!
Look, sorry to knock your socks off with this brave confession, but I, an iconoclast, never saw any of the Terminator movies before watching Terminator 2 for this book. It wasn’t on purpose, although it IS true that I am too sophisticated for popular things. I just accidentally never sought out Terminator stuff or watched it or asked anyone what it was about or thought about it. I do not know why. I knew that there was a Sarah Connor and a John Connor and that a possibly good or possibly not good robot was going to “be bock,” but that’s it.
And that’s really all you need to know to believably fake Terminator discourse for your entire life! I was able to bank those two hours and thirty-six minutes like an efficiency queen, and you all have been two hours and thirty-six minutes behind me this whole time. Until now.
It’s Los Angeles, 2029 AD (LOL @ the idea we’ll make it to 2029!). Seems like a normal day. The sun is shining, people are sitting in traffic, kids are swinging on swings (safety tip: never let your kid swing on swings at the beginning of a movie!). Uh-oh! A white-hot blast, three billion human lives lost, the swing set has been nuclearly broken to shit. As it happens, humans are on the losing end of a war against an army of machines ruled by an intangible collective robot brain named Skynet, and they just got Judgment Day’d.
Skynet! Huh! Skynet’s a Terminator thing! Heard people talk about Skynet my whole life, never knew what it was. Sometimes internet trolls would say things like, “Lindy West is what happens when PIE-net becomes self-aware!!!!!” and I was impervious to the burn because it meant nothing to me. Watching Terminator 2 has now weakened me in that way. Hmm.
The machines are really hard to fight because some of them are planes, some of them are bombs, and some of them are like if a skeleton were a tank. They are so good at fighting! We should not have made them like that! “We should not have made them like that” is, I think, what this entire franchise is about (?), so let’s see how things unfold.
Man, remember when FLAMES on METAL were really cool? No offense because this is actually a compliment, but the opening credits of Terminator 2 look like the opening credits of Guy’s Grocery Games. A metal skull emerges from the flames. Oh no! It’s the mayor of Flavortown! And he’s come to TERMINATE CHEESE. Hasta la vista, gravy! <—I am not sorry!
Cut to a parking lot at night. A portal through time opens up and look who plops through it! It’s Arnold, squatting in a custom time-traveling Glassybaby. He’s bock, and, schwing, the time travel has terminated his pants! Arnold clomps to a nearby country biker bar with his bockwurst hanging right out there, and the horny cougars of the bar love it. Hey, though! Why would they give the Terminator a dick!? What’s he supposed to use it for? Also, why is he Austrian? Call me old-fashioned, but I think it’s weird not to explain why your robot is Austrian and has a dick.1
Arnold approaches a tough biker and tells him, “I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle.” The biker, reasonably, refuses, so Arnold griddles his face on the flat top, then impales his friend on the pool table, then steals all their stuff. (Terminator! You are the asshole here!) The bar owner follows
