Han Solo never shot first. And the Stormtrooper never hit his helmet on the door.

Perhaps Cameron's "special submarine" will have a screen door.

She incorporated the only two songs of hers I actually enjoy, "Vogue" and "Music." Unfortunately, she also incorporated the fatuous and mush-headed "spiritual" "Like a Prayer." (Were the choir's robes meant to echo priestly vestments, or were they supposed to be some sort of Jedi?) At least LMFAO was good.

One does not simply buy a farm in Mordor.

I'm always intrigued by the "I didn't like any of them, a plague on modern movies" comments. And even more so by the "I never watched any of them" comments. Ooh, you never saw them. You iconoclasts, you! What do you want, a cookie? You're missing out on some fine movies here.

John, you had pretty much the same reaction to No Country For Old Men as I did. Except I'd already read McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN (now THAT would make a terrific, but stomach-churning movie) and THE ROAD, so I should've seen that ending coming. McCarthy's theme -- throughout all of the books of his that I've read -- is that everything dies. The current order of the world is being replaced by one more brutal and death is the only way out. It's not an uplifting message, but he portrays it well, and the Coens did a fantastic job of getting that on the screen.

Fair point about going in a different direction, but if the different direction you go in requires the *complete* dismantling of whatever good was gained in the previous movie, it might not be the right direction.

As for ESB, it does make the point that friendship and devotion aren't always enough to overcome evil in the short term, but it ends on a note of hope ("I'll meet you at the rendezvous point on Tattooine") that the hard-won order of the world will be restored in the next movie. T3 offers only the hope that the way things *were* (before the events of T2) IS the order of the world, and that's scant hope indeed when you're talking about machine-driven thermonuclear annihilation and the attempted extermination of the human race. Alien 3 was a lot more nihilistic, implying that self-destruction is the only rational choice.

You can go a different direction, in other words, as long as you don't dispense entirely with whatever statement the previous movie made about the world. T2's statement was "You can change your future." T3's was "No, you can't."

I didn't like the ending of T3 for the same reason I didn't like Alien 3: because it took the hard-earned hope of the previous film and trashed it in pop nihilism. T2, whatever its flaws, has an optimistic message at its core: our future isn't set, and we can prevent disaster through courage and trust. Likewise, Aliens was a paean to the strength and power of motherhood, and to the redeeming quality of maternal love. Alien 3 dispensed with all that in the first five minutes; at least it took T3 until the final reel to let us know that yes, we will be crushed by our inevitable destiny. Which may be true, but dadgum if it isn't depressing as can be.

The Terminator series jumped the shark early, when Arnie wasn't allowed to kill anyone in T2. Compare and contrast the following James Cameron-generated notes from T1 and T2:

On Kyle Reese in T1: "He's a hotwired rat in an urban maze."

The story of T2: "Young John Connor and the Terminator who befriends him."

They need to get back to the intensity, desperation, and taut story of the first. Also, limited CGI and no shakycam.

"Justin Long" and "star" do not belong in the same sentence. If you hadn't mentioned "Live Free or Die Hard" (what a credit; talk about damning with faint praise) I might not have placed him at all. His only other claim to fame is as Mac in Apple's Mac vs. PC commercials, which John Hodgman absolutely stole, and which succeeded in making Macs look like computers for hipster douchebags.

A George Lucas film strong on spectacle and short on story or characterization... well, we weren't expecting THAT, were we?