Movies I've Seen Only Parts Of: Fantastic Voyage (1966)

A politician gets shot in the head through the rear windshield of a town car—and I watched this as a pretty little kid* and for years afterwards was always just ever so slightly worried about getting shot in the head through the rear windshields of cars. (Great, now I'm scared of it again.) Anyway, these doctors need to get shrunk down and drive a submarine through this guy's veins, where they're nearly crushed by the heart—I may be remembering Innerspace here—and up to the brain, at which point it turns out that someone on the sub is a saboteur, and then my parents were like, "OK, time to go," and they turned off the TV, and I never found out what happened. I assume the submarine got big again and the politician's head blew up.

I think this is the brain...but where are the file cabinets?

* By which I mean that I was pretty little, not that I was pretty and little—although I was pretty gorgeous.

Movies I've Seen Only Parts Of: The Last Action Hero (1993)

In this Purple Rose of Cairo remake Charlie Kaufmanesque masterwork,* Arnold Schwarzenegger plays an Arnold Schwarzeneggy action hero, and some fucking kid goes into a wardrobe or something and finds himself in Arnold's fictional action-movie universe—after which I think he and Arnold and the main bad guy jump back to the real universe, where Arnold sees a cardboard life-size stand-up of himself in a video store and has feelings about it.

I remember watching much of this movie on TV, late one night in high school, alone—and keeping on watching it, waiting for it to turn a corner and get better—then ultimately giving up and feeling, painfully and acutely, that I had wasted part of my life. I'm not joking about this even a little: I went to bed feeling bad. What we have here is a memory of existential despair.

One-word review, then: "Nausea."

"If I were you, I'd run the rest of Gremlins 2 right now!"

* No.

Movies I've Seen Only Parts Of: Grease (1978)

Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta had a summer fling but now it's over because they're from different worlds. The boys and the girls discuss this separately but simultaneously. Then there's a car race, and she sluts up and wins his heart at an amusement park. Oh, and for the sake of completeness I should note that I know that it's of course a musical.

I think I like her nice-girl incarnation better. This one looks like Traci Lords in Cry-Baby.

Movies I've Seen Only Parts Of: 9½ Weeks (1986)

Pretty sure I just fast-forwarded through this to watch the sex scenes...but I can't remember even those, so I guess it's a wash.

Oh, an art film, eh?

Movies I've Seen Only Parts Of: The Black Hole (1979)

A robot on wheels goes down a curving hallway on a spaceship. It's possible that I actually haven't seen this movie at all (especially since I think I might just be describing R2D2 in the first moments of Star Wars).

Yeah, I think maybe I just wanted to see this.
(Still do, turns out. This guy is awesome!)

Movies I've Seen Only Parts Of: Titanic (1997)

The boat sinks, the bad guy handcuffs Leo to a pipe, and there's a lot of swimming through hallways (maybe one with a closed gate, in a very tense scene?). I gather there's a class issue, here, with Leo being the wonderful poor kid and Kate Winslet being engaged to a rich monster. I know Leo draws Kate naked on a couch, I know he freezes in the water trying to save her, and I know the old lady drives a submarine down to the sunken ship looking for her jewels. That's all I remember (and I am acutely aware that the movie is like four hours long).

NOTE: Every time I turn on the TV and this movie is on, either the boat's about to sink or Kate Winslet is about to get naked. And for that I am grateful.

Like one of Leo's French girls.