Dr. Nick*#3

Like the other reviewers, I caught this late at night, sat there stunned and mesmerized, and I've since tried to get my hands on it. It's the kind of thing the motion picture camera was invented for, but to go into detail would be pointless. Find it, somehow, and watch it.

I found the first Terminator scary and the second a perfect piece of pop entertainment. The third is just what you think it is: little better than an afterthought. The parts are there: The situation is urgent, The new Terminator is terrifying, and Arnold's bot is milked for even more genuinely funny deadpan, but with a surfeit of choppy action and dearth of any other emotional material, you're left with a movie that doesn't take itself seriously enough to warrant the audience's loyalty. Not to mention the unforgivable lapses in logic and decidedly unintelligent hunting techniques of the new cyborg. The buddy I went with remarked about the lack of pause or reflection that made the previous films relatively moving experiences and I agree; without them, the franchise has devolved into an extended chase sequence.

Part 1 - A young aspiring writer with a cerebral palsied writer boyfriend both attend writing class taught by a seething, viciously critical novelist.

Part 2 - A schlubby wannabe documentary filmmaker finds his perfect subject: an abjectly apathetic teenager living in privilege with his volcanic father, dithering mother, jock brother and supremely smug, tactless baby brother.

There's nothing in movies more frustrating to me than when a director/writer finds fertile soil and only digs two inches deep. They're precocious enough to stumble upon a great subject but they're content(or shamed or frightened into) going on autopilot from there, lazily applying whatever moldy stylistic preconceptions they made their name with, their auteristic "trademarks", if you will(in director Todd Solondz' case, it's awkwardness, embarrassment, and pain heaped upon pain). I don't have a problem with Solondz' unpleasant modus operandi so the self conscious apologias and justifications found here are superfluous for me - what I wanted out of the film is a deeper examination of the themes of race, fetishistic exploitation, and lack of compassion Solondz is so quick to point out but not address to my satisfaction. His indictments of other films(American Beauty, American Movie, whose resident burnout Mike Schenk gets a cameo here) are impassioned but unconvincing. On the whole though, I think I mainly had a problem with what's not here. Truth is, there was great acting all around, and it was suitably provocative.