Troy: Yeah, this girl is kookoo for Cocoa Puffs.
YOU’RE JUST FUCKING WITH ME NOW, RIGHT?
FROZEN EMBRYOS > HEY, THAT’S MY BIKE.
19. Lelaina: I win the big commitment cook-off and you just run away!!!?!
You see, what’s going on in this scene is that Lainey won the big commitment cook-off, and in response Troy has run away.
20. Troy: I’m sorry, Lelaina, but you can’t navigate me. I might do mean things, and I might hurt you, and I might run away without your permission, and you might hate me forever. And I know that that scares the shit out of you, because I’m the only real thing that you have.
Lelaina: Yeah? Well, that ain’t real much.
At this point in the rewatch, you realize that you are nearly a decade older than these characters, and what you’re watching is a movie about children yelling nonsense at each other.
21. Troy: What happened was that I kind of got this arcane glimpse of the universe, and the best thing I can say about that is…I don’t know. I have this planet of regret sitting on my shoulders, and you have no idea how much I wish that I could go back to that morning after we made love and do everything different. But I know I can’t do that, so I thought that I would come here and tell you something. And what I wanted to tell you was that I love you. And, uh, I just wanted to make sure that was clear so that there wasn’t any confusion.
If these weren’t attractive white people, they’d definitely have to explain how a couple of jerks who hate jobs got a free house at the end.
I absolutely love this movie.
RATING: 7/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Footnotes
1 My horrible secret: I AM AND I CAN’T ESCAPE IT.
Never Boring,
Always Horny
One thing you can say about Twilight is that it is not boring. There are a billion characters, they’re always saying some crazy shit, and they’re SO HORNY! Twilight feels like it was written by an AI that almost gets it. Something is just 2 percent off about every line and every interaction, which, taken cumulatively, is like a window into one of those dimensions where everything is identical to ours except cats and turtles are switched and Prince never died. Twilight took me out of my body in a way that did not give me pleasure but did give me fascination, and when it was over, I couldn’t believe it, but I felt compelled to watch the next one just to continue the satisfying, itchy glitch of it all. Twilight kept me awake, which honestly is more than I can say for Top Gun, peace be upon Tony Scott (I stan Déjà Vu).
For instance, this is the opening line of the movie, delivered in sullen voice-over by Bella (Kristen Stewart): “I’ve never given much thought to how I would die, but dying in the place of someone I love seems like a good way to go.”
WHAT????????????????????????????????????????????
How is that a “good way to go”!? There are zero versions of that “way to go” that don’t involve some sort of violent hostage situation and/or dystopian fascist cull. How about a “good way to go” is dying of old age gently and simultaneously with everyone you love while lying on a quilt and holding hands in a big circle and reminiscing about the time you reversed climate catastrophe and squashed the global Far Right together? If you’re picking a hypothetical “way to go,” pick something that doesn’t include your life and the life of a dear one being leveraged against each other in some zero-sum villainous endgame! What!?!? You weirdo!
The thing about that line is that it is both semantically ambiguous in a way that obscures its meaning, AND it turns out to be borderline cyborg argle-bargle anyway!!! That’s Twilight.
When we meet Bella she has just moved from Phoenix, Arizona, where she lives with her mother, to Forks, Washington, where her father is the chief of police, because her mom wants to “go on the road.” You can tell this is Bella’s childhood room because it’s still decorated with her old childhood construction paper hand turkeys, you know, like kids love to make for themselves and show off to other kids on their walls year-round (SEE? ALIENS).
Her dad gives her an old truck that he bought from their neighbors, and the neighbor kid is like, “Hi, I’m Jacob. We used to make mud pies when we were little.” Bold intro, also, “mud pies” is one of those phrases people casually throw around that I feel like is not tethered to any foundational meaning. I’m not talking about “mud pie” as a euphemism for a dank dump; I’m talking about when people use it not to mean that, which they absolutely do! It’s, like, a pervasive child stereotype! Why do I know the phrase mud pie but don’t know what it is? Is it just a…pile of mud? What do you do with it? Eat it? Am I the only one who didn’t grow up slapping mud into a patty and going hog wild on it? Anyway I think Jacob meant the dump kind.
Bella goes to her first day of school, and all the kids glare at her like, “Who’s the dweeb with the truck?” because if there’s one thing teenagers hate it’s an extremely gorgeous new girl. Now, most movies would be content with giving Bella two to three friends at school, especially since they are shooting on location in FORKS, WASHINGTON, but Twilight gives Bella seventy-five distinct friends who all have names and personalities and LINES (which = MONEY), and they’re all flirting and doing slapstick comedy and kissing one another on the face and falling down and taking pictures of Bella for the school paper (“It’s like first grade all over again, you’re the shiny new toy” <—WHAT) within the first ten minutes of the film and it is truly, truly bonkers.
Then the Cullens arrive, and
