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.

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.

but the framing story with Bobby Driscoll and his white family is pure crap to the point where someone else I talk to about movies proposed that the film actually would be great if it were just Uncle Remus in the animated world, which might make some sense actually.

I would have agreed when I saw the 1986 theatrical re-release at age 3. Jonathan Rosenbaum South of the South as our first movie theater memories (he doesn’t like it either).

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

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

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.

Dehumanizer is okay. “I” is a good song, but it always bugs me that he says “I am legion.”

Done With Mirrors is pretty boring. Let the Music Do the Talking, a rewrite of a Joe Perry Project song, is the classic that lasted on stage, but the live version on Classics Live II is way better. They did continue to play some of the other songs on the next tour, but I don’t think they played any of them ever in the ’90s or 2000s.

It’s going to be weird thinking that I’ll probably like some of the comeback/sellout albums more than this,

I don’t think it’s weird. The next two albums are sure better.
Althought these songs are sub-par, I think they could have been better with a little more work. The band claimed that they didn’t know they were recording the final takes when they cut them, and thought they were just practicing, or something like that. I think they were trying to use that to blame producer Ted Templeton for the album being so dull, 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 think anyone thinks it’s a classic,

Maybe I do? I at least think that it’s very good.

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?
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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.

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.
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.

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.

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?
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? 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.

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.

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:
First and foremost, can anyone who said, back in the 90s, that the first movie hadn’t held up because the stop-motion had aged so badly, look at the CGI in the scene in this movie that explicity calls back to that scene, and tell me if it looks good now. I know these inflation calculators are kind of dubious, but this one

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

says that $6.4 million 1984 dollars (the budget of the first movie) was worth $11.33 in 2003. Wikipedia gives the budget of T3 was $187.3 million ($167.3 million excluding production overhead). If anything, the first movie’s stop motion looks better now than it did by the time T2 came out. And the first movie’s other special effects all look better than anything in this movie.

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.

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.

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.

I hate these two sequels, and I hate myself for watching them.