I apologize for not being able to discuss Gulliver’s Travels with you and how you’re wrong and it’s actually great, but I keep putting off reading it.

Oh I’m not bothered by its status as a classic. I just found the prose style hadn’t aged that well for my tastes personally. Hey, I didn’t like reading Tristram Shandy at ALL, really.

I don’t know anything about Lake Mungo, but Noroi: The Curse is a found footage movie that I like. It’s available to me on Hoopla. I think what’s on Hoopla varied >depending on your library? Not sure.

Uh, I’ll make note of that movie you mentioned. I have Kanopy, but have only used it to watch Petite Maman.

I do not apologize for being unable to discuss Dune 2 with you. I never going to watch it.

Honestly, there’s little to discuss. I’m also not happy to learn that Villeneuve is going to try to do a third film, incorporating parts of the second and third books. I should also note that absolutely nothing in this film has any emotional resonance whatsoever, and there’s like four or five scenes where a Harkonnen kills a servant or someone just to kill them. That gets real old real fast. I don’t think the music was any better this time around, either.

I like the Live Ummagumma, but not much of the studio side. “The Narrow Way” is in Mario 2 though.

Yeah, that does sound a little bit like the “underground” Mario 2 music, doesn’t it? Pretty good considering Gilmour said he was “bullshitting my way through it”! This reminds me, I found out last year where the original Mario “Starman” music was taken from, but I’ve forgotten.

I like that Rainbow album, and the others with Dio. “Sixteenth Century Greensleeves” is good, but it’s better live, and I agree that Rainbow in general was better live.

I don’t think it’s weird. The next two albums are sure better.

I think they were trying to use that to blame producer Ted Templeton for the album being so dull

I’d forgotten they used Templeton. Maybe Steven Tyler should have added “one break, cooooomin’ up!” into a song or something. What I recall reading was “we just did that album and moved on,” I think Joe Perry said that.

if you want to buy “it’s not our fault we were so high that we literally didn’t know what was going on” as an excuse. That’s all from memory, but I hope I got it right because I think it’s funny.

I don’t recall them saying that, but I do recall them saying that with regards to pretty much everything from Toys In The Attic thru Rock In A Hard Place.

Hey, I just watched four movies. They’re all from the same series. Two are classics that we’ve already discussed to death, and two are TOTAL SHIT that I had never seen before and that I hated and hated myself for finally watching. Can you guess which four movies they are?

Well, theoretically you could be talking about the first four Alien movies, which was also a “two good, two bad” thing.

The Terminator - This is still my favorite, because of the grittier action and the neon-cyberpunk noir atmosphere. Man, 1984 was the perfect time for this to come out. Our was it actually 1980 or 1981??? I don’t have anything new to say about this, and everthing that I want to re-say is better said in contrast with the third movie.

Mmmm…the “Tech Noir” club and the style and the clothes people were wearing would seem too late for 1980-81. Certainly I couldn’t imagine Bess Motta (Sarah Connor’s friend with the aerobics hair) in 1980-81. But yeah, it’s from 1984!

This is the first time I’ve watched this since reading the Harlan Ellison story Soldier, and watching the Outer Limits episode he adapted from it. He sued for plagiarism and got a movie credit. I assure you that this was totally meritless. He’d have been better off claiming that I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream was the inspiration for Skynet.

Aside from knowing Ellison was a jerk, I haven’t really looked into the similarities between this film and his work, but I did know about it.
I have probably forgotten to tell you that I really haven’t read his stuff very much yet. Maybe I’ll do that next once I finish this 840-page Neal Stephenson behemoth I’m hacking my way through with a machete.

You know what’s funny about this? J-Ro rightly pointed out that The Terminator owes alot more to Philip K. Dick’s story The Second Variety (which was made into the 90s b-movie Screamers). The 90s point-and-click computer game adaption of I Have No Mouth was written by Harlan Ellison, and introduces a plot point that wasn’t in the story and is straight out of Second Variety, but is not in the Terminator movies. I think that’s a weird coincidence. Second Variety appears to be in public domain now, but I’m >not sure when that happened.

I wish I knew all these sci fi short stories as well as you did. I read nine PKD novels and still feel like I was barely scratching the surface with him.
That’s a weird coincidence, maybe Ellison got the idea from Michael Crichton trying to write computer games in between Congo and Sphere? He did do that.

Terminator 2 - So I’ve always preferred the first one, but you know what I think this one does better, aside from the special effects? Out of both of these two movies, Sarah Connor in this one is really the only real “character story arc.” It’s kind of weird to think that the sub-plot carries more thematic weight, and John Connor’s relation with the Terminator is kind of the comedic low-plot, but the movie feels perfectly constructed despite that dramatic weirdness. So that’s what I noticed this >time.

I think both are five-star classics, but the slightly kid-friendly $100 million summer blockbuster early 90s feel has always put T2 a notch ahead. Hell T2 is the best big budget summer blockbuster type movie ever, IMO. And I didn’t even see it until I was 23. Total Recall could be a moderately fun link between the darkness of T1 and the summer blockbuster big budget feel of T2.
Uh, yes, though, Sarah Connor is far and away Linda Hamilton’s best work as an actress. Let’s face it, she wasn’t that great in much of anything else. She also got a lot of credit for pioneering strong female characters, as did Cameron.
There’s a deleted scene where an old Sarah Conner gets drunk when Judgment Day has been averted. I don’t know if that would have fit back into the movie very well.

Sorry to speak ill of the dead’s most famous role, but I think that Earl Boen’s character is the worst part of both of these movies. It’s not his fault though. I just >think this character is cringey. Wouldn’t that part in the first movie where he shows his interview with Reese to Sarah Connor be highly illegal?

Probably, but all authority figures in these two films are depicted as being cynical and weary. A trope that got more and more obnoxious in summer/action movies from the 80s onward (probably started with stuff like Dirty Harry.). Probably good that Lance Henriksen is in the movie, he’s perfect for that sort of thing.
I cringe thinking that I am now three or four years OLDER than Boen would have been in the first movie (he’d have been around 38, but looks far older.)
I sort of liked that character. The big stinkeroo for most people now regarding T2 is Edward Furlong’s acting, and not just because Furlong ended up being another effed-up former kid star (do not look up pictures of him from recent years.)

Both this and Twelve Monkeys are time-trave sci-fi that villainize of mental hospitals in ways that I suspect would be considered problematic now. Is that scene of the guy licking Sarah’s face just in there so that we’d be okay with how brutally she beats him a couple minutes later?

Yes it likely is, and I seem to recall some story about Linda Hamilton hating the guy and actually hitting him with that club or something like that.
When Arnold throws that guy out of the truck at the beginning of the truck chase, the guy didn’t land right and actually really hurt himself, too.

At first I wondered if we were supposed to think that she killed him, but then Arnold beats up a bunch of people just as badly, while we’re supposed to think that all the force he’s using is non-lethal, just like when he shot those security guards in the femoral artery. I looked to see if youtube had a “Trauma surgeon reacts to >Terminator 2” video, but was disappointed.

I sort of laugh-cringe at how he handles the female police officer, by putting his hand on her face and shoving her back rather than, gasp, HITTING her.

This one mostly ditched the first movie’s horror elements, so I’m going to call out the scene where T-1000 is above them in the elevator and the one that I still think feels like a horror movie.

The “liquid metal” effects all still work in that they’re used well, but it probably takes alot of historical perspective for “kids these days” to appreciate how groundbreaking this was at the time. Watching it now, seeing real car stunts without a bunch of obvious CGI or garbage jump-cuts is more impressive, and I probably now >enjoy the moped chase more than the climactic fight in the factory.

One bit of historical perspective is that T1000’s “morphing” into other people apparently became a big deal because of this movie specifically, even more than Michael Jackson’s “Black Or White” video, and then the effect got beaten to death as a cliche as the 90s went on.
I love the moped chase too, even though the suspension of disbelief has to be itself suspended to be believed (err…disregard that grammar)–no way would they have survived getting “bumped” from behind by the truck, and the truck obviously would have caught them by then. Or Arnold even catching up to them on his motorcycle. That is one long-ass asphalt canyon they’re driving in, too.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines - You know that feeling you get when you refuse to watch a movie because you know it will suck, and then nobody else really likes it much anyway, and everybody forgets about it, and then you finally watch it 21 years later and it’s ALOT WORSE than you ever expected it to be? I could go on about all the >reasons it’s awful, but will anybody else even remember it well enough to know what I’m talking about? But a couple things:

I have watched a few hated failures long after everyone has stopped hating them, and sometimes I find them sort of fascinating anyway, but they’re things like Bonfire Of The Vanities. As you and I have discussed, it isn’t interesting when some summer comic book movie or zillion dollar action spectacle flops anymore–it doesn’t seem like anyone aside from some faceless corporate goons end up being the “pariahs” anymore the way Michael Cimino did around 1980. Does anyone really lose their career anymore? I considered watching the 2006 Poseidon movie, which lost about five trillion dollars at the box office and was completely forgotten, but decided against it.

This is not a well made movie. The entire visual style is “director who grew up on pan’n’scan VHS, and couldn’t make a 2:35 movie that looked even that good” shit. >Compare the jumbled, chaotic crane chase to the car chases in the first two movies. The only think more insane than the fact Arnold was paid something like $36 million dollars for this phoned in peformance is the fact that he gave back 1.5 of it to keep the scene of the crane smashing into the building in the movie, and then they ruined >it with shit editing.

I didn’t know about that. I only generally remember that chase scene, but I don’t think ANYONE would prefer it to Cameron’s.
I didn’t hate Arnold’s performance in the movie, I sort of liked that he played the character as a technololgically out-of-date machine as what would have been a note for him to go out on before becoming governor of California, but then he blew any goodwill from that Michael Jordan-style and came back to acting afterwards. Pffft. That, and nobody’s given a crap about anything he’s been in since coming back, like at all.
The director made U-571, which I didn’t like. I don’t know what he’s done since. But I don’t know who likes T3.

The story is terrible and betrays the second movie and is full of plot holes and outright nonsense, but the only thing I feel like pointing out is that when they deliberately retconned John Connor’s age in the first movie from 10 to 13, they never figure out how they wanted to fix the timeline, and then ended up putting explicitly conflicting information into the script. They outright say that T2 took place in 1997, but then say a bunch of other things that could only be true if it was in 1993 or 1994 (it was originally supposed to be 1995, even if it’s clearly 1991 when they shot it). Since something there has to be a mistake, I think it has to be the 1997 date >for T2.

I like the idea of kids in 1995 or 1997 wearing mullet haircuts and Public Enemy T-shirts to listen to Guns n’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion II while biking to an arcade to play Missile Command and that Sega shooter game that predates the Master System. IN NINTEEN NINETY SEVEN. Hey, you remember that, huh? I know all the kids at MY school brought their Walkmen to school to listen to GNFNR.
But yeah, they just plain blew it with the dates. In my mind T2 is taking place in 1990 when they shot it.
I do not recall seeing the blonde chick who played the T-X in any other movie ever. I’m blanking on her name.
Oh, and the Judgment Day scenes at the end of T3 have the least emotional impact of any mass-casualty disaster scenes in any movie whatsoever, including the collected works of Roland Emmerich or that GI Joe movie where they drop a rod from space onto London and blow it to smithereens.

Terminator Salvation - This is so boring that, unlike T3, I really have almost nothing to say about it. The color palatte is a butt-ugly green & gray. Other than that, it’s at least more technically competent than T3. I guess the plot makes more sense, but it barely registered. It doesn’t match the aesthetic of the future war saw in the >first two movies (and really, a whole movie of that is actually the only post-T2 sequel/prequel I’d have wanted to see). Arnold wasn’t available, so they CGI’d his face on someone else’s body for a scene where a Terminator shows up for a fight, but he doesn’t talk. You know, even in the second movie I thought that the fact that the >Terminator looked just like the one in the first movie required alot of suspension of disbelief, so I don’t know why they needed to do that here. Or to explain scars >that John Connor had in another timeline.

Yep, the CGI Arnold on another guy’s face was pretty goofy. I remember when people used to talk about that special effect technology as something mind blowing, now it just gets laughed at.
Anton Yelchin was probably technically a better actor than poor old Michael Biehn (who I remember as being kinda bad in any non-Cameron role he’s played) but did he seem like Kyle Reese to you? Then again, none of the actors playing John Connor ever matched up with one another.
I always totally loved the 2029 AD scenes that begin the first two films, so seeing a whole movie set in post-apocalyptic LA should’ve been awesome, but it was just pedestrian.
Christian Bale had the famous “Bale Out” on-set meltdown while filming this movie, and put more energy into yelling at that lighting guy than he did in his performance as John Connor. He could have just as easily been playing someone else. Hell, Sam Worthington gave a more interesting performance, and he’s SAM WORTHINGTON, one of the more sneered-at lead actors we’ve had.
One cool detail I loved was the old survivor woman, played by acting legend Jane Alexander, who gave a heart wrenching performance back in the 1983 nuclear-war film Testament and could have been playing the same person in this film. That was nice I guess. But I’ve never revisited this movie.

On the whole, this series’ legacy is based around Cameron and the awesome first two movies, though, as you already knew, and the series should call it quits. But, I bet it won’t.
I never felt like watching Genisys or Dark Fate.