...that I'm the only person on the whole Web who's ever quoted the "we are cool, we are badasses" line from True Lies?
Go on, look for yourself. Hyphenate "badasses" if you like, split the quote up into two phrases, look on Usenet, go nuts. The closest I could find, besides my two pages, was a comment on some illegible MySpace page that now only seems to exist in Google's cache.
The line is not even, as I write this, in the IMDB quotes for the film.
[Although, now that I look again, IMDB does have "We're cool, we're badasses...", which I accept as being much the same thing since Arnie is unable to pronounce "we're" and "we are" so that they sound different. There are still, as I write this, only four Google hits for even that, though; two are the same IMDB quotes list, and one's another single MySpace page.]
The line is, of course, spoken by Arnie as he translates the Scary Terrorist's self-promotional ranting. It's an enormously useful quotation to use (preferably in as authentic an Austrian accent as you can manage) whenever someone starts big-noting themselves. I tend to mutter it while reading press releases.
I came to search for it after I looked up the Biblical source for the title of Stephen Fry's autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot. Fry doesn't see any need to explain the title in his book's text, since everybody obviously already knows it's from a couple of near-identical Psalms. God Himself is alleged to make this observation about a million acres of the Middle East, among other I'm-so-great-I-kick-ass claims.
Why, exactly, the author of those Psalms felt that an infinitely powerful being needed to come on like a self-aggrandising blues/rap artiste, I'm not sure. But the quote fits just fine:
"Gilead is mine, and Manasseh is mine; Ephraim also is the strength of mine head; I am cool; I am a badass."
Incidentally, True Lies is that rarest of birds, a Hollywood remake of a French film which does not stink. (Well, except for the dodgy title.)
If you're familiar with True Lies, you're also familiar with La Totale! (or "The Jackpot!"), because Lies is virtually a shot-for-shot remake of that French movie, only with huge super-expensive effects sequences added.
All of that weird misogynistic stuff in the middle of Lies, with the one-way-mirror interrogation room and such, becomes less mystifying when you know that three Frenchmen actually conspired to create it.
16 October 2006 at 10:55 pm
Well, that quote appears to be in the IMDB now. It's a good line, possibly matched only by Willem Dafoe in the Boondock Saints: "We'll start the arse kissing with you..."