by Lindy West
Yeah, there are technically Black characters in Harry Potter, but tell me one thing about Dean Thomas.
The kids visit Hagrid and trick him into telling them the deal with Fluffy. “Bought him off an Irish fellow down the pub.” Wait, you believe in Ireland? Why would wizards care about Muggle borders? Hagrid, bumbling, says that Fluffy is there to guard something “between Dumbledore and Nicolas Flamel.” This is great news for Harry, Ron, and Hermione, who are always looking for some fucking beeswax that’s none of theirs!
Now it’s Christmas at Hogwarts! What the fuck is Christmas! If you’re a wizard! Wizards! Are! Christian! I! Guess!
Harry gets presents for the first time in his life, and now I want presents.
An anonymous gifter sends Harry his dad’s old invisibility cloak, which the kids quickly realize they can use to sneak into the restricted section of the library under cover of night to research Nicolas Flamel. OR, you could…ask Madam Pince, the literal full-time librarian? Did you ever think that maybe she’s a bitch because no one has ever engaged her help on a research project (i.e., respected her enough to let her do her job)?? Instead of doing that, Harry gets a lantern and the cloak and creeps over there himself.
Again, I know that magic is “better” than technology, but maybe the Wizengamot could revisit the no-computers thing? There’s no internet, so these kids can’t google Nicolas Flamel, and there’s apparently not even a library catalog? You just have to pull books off the shelves at random? And you don’t even have a fucking flashlight? You have to bring fire into the library?
Harry finds no information (OF COURSE) and nearly burns down the building. On the way back to bed, under the invisibility cloak, he encounters Snape threatening Professor Quirrell. “You don’t want me as your enemy, Quirrell.” Okay, so, what does Snape know here? Does he suspect that Quirrell is working with Voldemort at this point? HOW? And if so, don’t just wedgie him in the hallway, man—Floo powder 911!!! (I apologize for the bone-chilling granularity of this parenthetical, but the only explanation that makes any sense is that Snape just thinks Quirrell is trying to steal the Sorcerer’s Stone for non-Voldemort-related reasons, but then what about the part when Quirrell was trying to murder Harry during the Quidditch match? Who did Snape think was doing that? Also, why was there no formal investigation into that ATTEMPTED CHILD MURDER?? And why didn’t Snape just tell Dumbledore that Quirrell was after the stone, so they could have, just brainstorming here, fired him for being evil??????)
Harry ducks into a random classroom where he finds the Mirror of Erised, a magical artifact that shows you a reflection of the thing you most desire, which is erised backward, please kill me. If I looked into that mirror, I would see myself blissfully smiling in a universe where I’d never heard writing as bad as “Mirror of Erised”!!! (See also: “Death Eaters.” PLEASE, is this a scary story I wrote when I was nine?) In that universe I also have amazing jugs. :) Harry sees himself reunited with his dead parents. :(
They go visit Hagrid again, who is in the process of hatching an illegal baby dragon named Norbert. Norbert is only in this movie because fans would have been mad if he weren’t, which is not a good way to make a movie. Dumbledore ships Norbert off to Romania instantly with zero complications. Norbert story line concluded!
While they’re meeting Norbert, Malfoy spies them out of bed after hours and tattles to McGonagall, who gives them all (including Malfoy, haha) detention with Hagrid. Hagrid takes them into the Dark Forest in the middle of the night to investigate what kind of eldritch horror is killing unicorns and drinking their blood. HAGRID, ARE YOU SURE THE CHILDREN SHOULD BE ON THIS TRIP?
He sends Harry and Malfoy off by themselves (SURE!), so of course they run into Lord Voldemort sucking a unicorn dry. Okay, what IS Voldemort at this point? I truly don’t know. Because he walks toward Harry like a dude, but then he flies away like a tiny ghost. And also I thought his whole deal was that he didn’t have a body?
Anyways, they’re saved by a centaur. Centaurs are irritating. It seems like if they’re really half-man/half-horse they should either have no arms or they should have to balance on two horse legs. This is a half-man/two-thirds-horse. Disrespectful.
FINALLY they go try and tell Dumbledore that someone’s trying to steal the Sorcerer’s Stone, but McGonagall tells them he’s not home, so they decide that the ONLY WAY is to go get the stone themselves. (WHYYYYYYYYYY?) Neville stands up to them because they are breathtakingly selfish and he’s sick of getting in trouble for it, and Hermione petrifies him! Petrificus totalus! Such a brutal spell to use on a person who is ostensibly your friend, and then she just LEAVES THIS CHILD PARALYZED ON THE COLD FLOOR ALL NIGHT. I’m a Hermione loyalist, but this move is insane. Way worse than stealing his Remembrall!
They head to the forbidden corridor on the third floor only to discover that somebody got there before them (presumably Snape). Now would be a great time to go back to McGonagall and be like, “SERIOUSLY,” but instead they just squeak past Fluffy and jump down into a trapdoor. The Sorcerer’s Stone is guarded by a series of trials, each designed by a different teacher at the school. They have to escape from an evil plant. They have to catch a little flying key. They have to figure out which potion to drink. It goes without saying that Harry and Ron would have been instantaneously deceased without Hermione, but as usual, Harry’s the fucking hero.
The second-to-last trial is a game of giant wizard chess, where they each have to ride around on a giant chess piece while they beat the shit out of each other. Fortunately, just as Harry’s singular talent is flying and Hermione’s singular talent is literally everything else, Ron’s singular talent is chess. Convenient! Hermione is injured, and Ron sacrifices himself to win the game, so Harry has to carry on alone.
“You’ll be okay, Harry!” cries Hermione. “You’re a great wizard.” Um, he’s had one semester of wizard elementary school.
Harry gets to the final trial and finds not Professor Snape but Professor Quirrell trying to steal the Sorcerer’s Stone! Wow! What an upset! He’s staring at the Mirror of Erised and stomping his little foot. Why won’t the stone come out of the mirror?? A creepy voice tells Quirrell to make Harry get the stone. Who is that creepy voice? Oh, it’s only VOLDEMORT HIDING UNDER QUIRRELL’S HAT! Quirrell’s got male pattern VOLDNESS.
Voldemort explains to Harry that he needs the stone so he can get his body back and return to being evil full time, okay?? Harry uses his pure heart to erised the stone out of the mirror and then Quirrell jumps on him. But it turns out that Voldemort can’t touch Harry’s skin because it’s infused with the power of a mother’s love! Quirrell catches on fire! Then Voldemort turns into smoke and flies straight through Harry’s chest, which I guess is no problem.
Harry wakes up in the hospital wing. Dumbledore awards each of them a ton of points for being blisteringly stupid and reckless. No one is punished for the torture of Neville Longbottom. They all live to see another six years of being absolutely maddening impulsive narcissists! Cheers!
RATING: 6/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Footnotes
1 OHOHOHO, but he had the help of two other teenagers!!!!!!! Truly incredible counterargument, Casey Novak.
2 I know this information is almost certainly available on like Weasleys-Wizard-Wiki-dot-toadspot-dot-cauldron because J. K. scrambled for an answer in a Pottermore interview once or something, but, paradoxically, the word of J. K. “Wizards Used to Shit in Their Robes and Then Vanish the Diarrhea” Rowling is actually not canon! Sorry!
Big Boy Freaky Friday
I rewatched a lot of movies for this book, and going into it, I thought I had a handle on which movie characters I hated the most. Jason Biggs in American Pie. Bernard from Lost in Forrest Gump. Scorpion in Honey I Fed Our Kids to a Scorpion. But that’s what happens when you go twenty years without rewatching Face/Off, you idiot! You forget about the number-one biggest dud of a fuckin’ guy ever made, America’s Next Top Worst Best Friend, and that includes Elsa from Frozen:1
FBI Special Agent Sean Archer, as portrayed by John Travolta and Nicolas Cage but especially John Travolta. BOO, SEAN ARCHER, BOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
In case you don’t know what Face/Off is about (hold on to your face!!!!!!), it’s the story of a straight-laced FBI agent named Sean Archer who has to go undercover as his nemesis, master criminal Castor Troy. How do you go undercover AS somebody else? WELL, THE TITLE OF THIS MOVIE IS A CLUE, BUT I WILL TELL YOU IN A MINUTE.
We open in the past, when Special Agent Sean Archer is enjoying a nice carousel ride with his son. I have never understood what is so fun about a carousel, sorry. I already have a fake horse with a long pole that I ride around in circles for hours—it’s called YOUR DAD. Just kidding!!!! Your dad’s pole is only medium. Just kidding!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Don’t worry!!!! I am repressed!!!!!!!!
Sean Archer (John Travolta) is on the carousel with his son, and they have this positively pestilential face thing they do where Sean Archer drags his big unwashed mushy palm down over the kid’s entire face—eyeballs, nose, lips, teeth, and tongue. The kid loves it. They hug. Just then, Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage and, wow, his mustache) pops up and shoots Sean Archer in the back. Aaaaaaargh! Then some loose balloons drift away into the sky, which is international semaphore for “a kid died.”
It’s six years later. Archer survived the shooting, but if he had any good personality traits before, those tragically did not make it. To put it kindly, Sean Archer is an uptight lil weenie. He neglects his family and he is mean to his employees and he has no sense of humor and he is no fun. He only cares about one thing, which is crushing, killing, and destroying Castor Troy, and he is not even very good at that! Like, I can tolerate a workaholic with a shitty attitude if he is some kind of interesting genius (Sherlock Holmes2), or I can tolerate a big uptight dork if his devotion to his family comes into some kind of interesting tension with his job (Ned Stark). But Sean is a shitty boss AND a shitty husband! I hate him!
Meanwhile, Castor Troy is smoking a cigarette while dressed like a priest, which was the kind of edgy shit we incinerated our panties for in the ’90s. He’s an indie terrorist with extremely opaque goals (uh, being a bitch?), who is arming some kind of big sexy bomb in order to kill Los Angeles with it.
It is madness, by the way, that every director does not do whatever it takes—financially, spiritually, erotically—to put Nicolas Cage in everything they make. He is the only person who ever does anything interesting in any movie. Yeah, I said it! Do I mean it? I don’t know. But I do know that sometimes I forget about Nicolas Cage for weeks or even years at a time, and then I watch a Nicolas Cage movie again and it feels like coming home—to a house where your dad is cocaine and your mom licks your face if you’ve been good AND if you’ve been bad. I’m happy there!
Archer gets intel that Pollux Troy, Castor Troy’s little brother, has chartered a private jet, which can only mean one thing: Castor is at this very moment walking toward it in slow motion! What’s that??? The source also says he’s wearing a shiny maroon suit and the world’s worst tiny octagonal sunglasses!?!? This is more serious than I thought. The entire FBI races for the airport.
Castor boards the plane and starts sexually assaulting the flight attendant before they even take off, making her sit on his lap so that he can whisper what is scientifically the worst phrase utterable by the human mouth: “You know, I can eat a peach for hours.” This combination of sounds is profane even in alien languages from the coldest depths of deep space, and is actually used as an emetic by the worm lords of Xooxoo-12. If you say, “You know, I can eat a peach for hours,” in the presence of a gaseous one from Quabzab 971bb7cx80001, he will straight up ruin your face.
Archer gets to the airport and begins chasing the rapidly accelerating jet in his FBI car. On board, unaware that the feds are closing in, Castor is like, “Hey, if I were to let you suck my tongue, would you be grateful?” and the flight attendant is like, “YUM YUM, OH BOY,” and she does it!!! She does it! Even worse, it turns out that she’s not a horny flight attendant at all—she’s in the FBI. She’s an undercover FBI tongue-sucker! Are there really civil servants out there sucking terrorist tongues for my freedom? I didn’t ask for this! Castor shoots her.
It would be a real letdown if the last thing you did in your life was suck Nicolas Cage’s tongue. And I say that respectfully, as a fan.
Okay, I looked away from the screen for one second and John Travolta is somehow flying a helicopter.
Helicopter Sean shoots out an engine on the plane, so Castor kills the pilot, and now he will drive the plane himself. But instead he just crashes it into a building, which doesn’t help at all.
The FBI storms the hangar where the jet is on fire, so Castor jumps out of the plane sideways shooting his two golden pants-guns, which is absolutely the most functional maneuver and truly his only option at this point. Margaret Cho captures Pollux, which Castor hates, because Pollux is his baby, so he shoots many more FBI agents to death. A flawless operation.
Now Sean Archer and Castor Troy face off. It is just Travolta vs. Cage. (Chilling to remember that these were the two biggest movie stars in the world in 1997, which by my reckoning was about two weeks ago, but my kids have absolutely no idea who Nicolas Cage is and John Travolta is “the mom from Hairspray.”) The guys chase each other around the place for a while until Castor gets blown down a wind tunnel by a big jet engine—by far the coolest way to arrest someone. Sean Archer’s life’s work is achieved at last. Now he can finally go home, have sex with his wife for the first time, and stop his daughter from being goth.
A happy ending, right?? Yeah, for like ONE MILLISECOND.
Sean goes back to work where everyone claps for him because they are nice and he just fulfilled his singular all-consuming quest to avenge his son, and he, a dick, yells at them for it. In his office, he opens up his son’s murder file to stare at it meaningfully (the file is under “carousel sniper victim”—what filing system is that??), when, uh-oh, Special Ops want a word! And it’s not “keep your face on”!
The Special Ops agents, CCH Pounder and Tito, show Sean a zip drive containing a horny cartoon who’s like, “My name is Sinclaire, and I am going to blow you……….…AWAY!!!!!!!” because in the ’90s we were really worried that bad guys were going to use computers to do scary stuff to us like send sarcastic e-cards about bombs. We didn’t realize they’d just trick us into using our own computers to voluntarily destroy ourselves! Sinclaire is the name of that big bomb I mentioned earlier—“enough [bomb] to flatten a square mile and unleash a biblical plague on LA”—and Pollux is refusing to tell the FBI anything about the bomb unless they let him see Castor.
So, okay, let him. Problem solved, right?
No? You guys have a different idea? I assume it won’t interfere with my 2:00 p.m. lovemaking appointment with my angry wife, haha, right, guys?
Guys?
CCH Pounder and Tito take Sean to a top-secret underground medical facility. Castor Troy is there, asleep in a hospital bed, and apparently Sean thought he had died? He screams, “Oh, god, you’re keeping him alive!” And instead of saying, “Yes, Sean, even incarcerated criminals have a right to lifesaving medical intervention,” they’re like, “Relax, Archer, he’s a turnip.”
Now the secret lab doctor explains the plan. Pollux Troy will only talk to his brother, right? So what we’re gonna do is take this turnip’s face off, and take your face off, and then put his face on your face. Then you’re the turnip and you can talk to the brother! It’s the only way to save Los Angeles, sorry.
Sean Archer is like, “Exqueese me?” And the doctor is like, “A sphincter says, ‘No, thank you, I do not want to have my face taken off,’” and Sean is like, “Touché,” because nobody wants to be a sphincter! So now he has to do it because in the ’90s this qualified as a binding contract. Only the highest court in the land can overrule a sphincter clause!
Sean Archer has to take his face…off.
It’s the only way. It’s literally the only
way. No one in the entire FBI can possibly think of any other way. There’s obviously no other way! And Sean is definitely the only one who can do it. They can take someone’s face…off, but it would be absolutely impossible for anyone else in the FBI to memorize some stuff about Castor Troy’s life! Come on, Sean! “If you don’t, the bomb will blow, and Castor Troy will win.” Love 2 be emotionally abused by my job into taking my face…off!
“You’re asking me to break the law, risk my neck, and you’re asking me to put in the dark all the people that love me and trust me…I’ll do it.” You dick.
He heads home to break the news to his wife that, sorry, he’s just going to disappear for an undisclosed period of time and almost definitely die on one last secret mission that he can’t tell her anything about, but before he can get to all that, she jumps in: “I’m glad it’s you that woke me, and not a phone call telling me you won’t be coming home. But that’s a fear I can finally let go of.”
He looks at her like a golden retriever that just ate a whole beef Wellington. “Well………”
DUDE.
GO DIE.
MA’AM, THERE ARE OTHER SEANS WITH BAD PERSONALITIES OUT THERE. PLEASE UNCHAIN YOURSELF FROM THIS FUNGUS.
It’s time for the procedure. Archer shows the doc the hole from the bullet that killed his son and asks if he can “put his scar back on” after he’s done being Castor Troy. I don’t even know why they’re bothering to take it off (or how?), but doc says no prob. Sean takes his wedding ring off and gives it to Tito.
Then they take his face…off.
And they take Nicolas Cage’s face…off.
They cut around the face and then they use the face vacuum to slurp up the face.
Now Travolta’s face is in a tub.
Now they give John Travolta the horrible baby bangs of Cage.