Terminally speaking

By all accounts I no longer have to think about the horror of millions of befuddled Californias voting for Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor. Or at least not this time around anyway. Its possible he might stand at a future date, probably when we've all had to endure the pain of cleaning up the huge deficit the "free market" power debaucle left us with. Of course none of those "free market" exponents are making much of how it actually meant shovelling money into the pocket of Enron who had interpreted it to mean "free money".

Anyway, I digress. Suffice to say for a while longer I can now watch Terminator, without having to worry about mixing the fiction of Arnorld "The Terminator" working for SkyNet (the evil power mad machine), with the reality of the Arnorld "The Governor" working for GW. Bush (the evil power mad humman).

Joanna bravely said she'd come with me to see Terminator 3 "The Rise of the Machines". As she hasn't seen the first two movies I insisted we rent those on NetFlix and catch her up and meanwhile give me a welcome refresher and a break from "chick flix". Now I'll be the first to admit I always liked the Terminator series which are some of the earliest and finest examples of the genre I call "Dick Flix" (I'm told that has a different meaning in the gay community so I'll probably have to find another name for it). But I've heard and read some reviews that indicate T3 isn't going to be up to snuff. Even so I'm sincerely hoping that T3 has at least some redeeming qualities. If it turns out to be like Alien 3 then I''ll be wishing I never saw it (Alien 4 was a mild improvement over 3).

However after re-watching the movies on DVD I can honestly say my opinion of them has improved even more, especially Terminator 2. The reason was a bunch of deleted scenes for Terminator they dug up and the extra 15 minutes of footage in the T2 "Extreme" version. It turns out that both versions had some very substantial and important material added. The ending of the first movie takes on a whole new significance with the delete scenes. And Terminator 2 gains some significant character development and has a much more human story as a result.

For anyone who enjoyed the movies (or hasn't seen both) I can highly recommend you get go rent the DVDs and check them out. Furthermore for the extreme movie buffs, the T2 Extreme DVD has an interactive mode. With it you can watch the entire movie with continuous subtitles and overlays indicating all kinds of information on the movie including information on where every scene was shot, how it was shot, stuff about the location, music, lighting and even background info on movie making. Plus the regulation voice over sound tracks, and a whole second disk of material I didn' even see (NetFlix doesn't include it).

Now having got Joanna to suffer through four plus hours of brutal dark portent, I'm just hoping she's still up for seeing Terminator 3 "The Rise of the Machines".