The Johnny Bacardi Show

What do you MEAN, I should wear light colored clothing when I jog?

Don't know if you guys ever watch the Late Night With Conan O'Brien show, but if you do, then you'll know what I'm referring to when I bring up the fact that I can't scan the title for Ah-nold's latest Terminator flick without hearing the voice of the fellow who does those TV screen interviews (you know, moving mouth, still photo on screen) imitating the Gov of Cali: Tuh-minatah TREE! Rise uh duh MACHEEENZ!

Which, in my roundabout way, is my way of bringing up that I watched most of Termninator 3: Rise of the Machines last night when it aired on HBO. I say most because after about 15 minutes I got unbelieveably bored and restless and started flipping back and forth between ESPN News, the Lakers-Pistons game, and the movie. Navy NCIS was a rerun I had already seen. Anyway, what a lazy, cynical, by-the-numbers, clichéd sequel T3 is. The performances aren't bad, but the script, oy. It's essentially a rewrite of T2, except that the killer 'bot is now female (and a quite comely one, I might add) and we don't have Linda Hamilton's muscles to stare at when the going gets slow. I feel sad (well, not that sad- she probably made more for this film than I'll make in the next ten years at my job) for poor Claire Danes, who is apparently getting less than adequate advice from her agent and is headed down that slippery slope to becoming as irrelevant as Jamie Lee Curtis, who I could swear she resembles in some of the lesser-lit scenes. Of course, Ah-nold has the requisite amount of moments when the music swells, then stops, he utters a quip of some sort, and something gets blown up or someone gets hit. Just awful, and Schwarzenegger, who managed to be fearsome in the first one and sympathetic in the second, just looks like a big teddy bear now since he's spent the last 20 years trying to soften his onscreen image. The scene towards the end, in which he has to reboot himself or kill Nick Stahl's character is unintentionally hilarious. In fact, that's what it had devolved to by the time me, my son, and his girlfriend got to the end of this flick- we were doing our best Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot and Mike impersonations. If you can avoid this film, please do so. If you're curious, don't be. If you are such a rabid Ah-nold as the Terminatuh fan that you absolutely MUST see this, then God help you, 'cause you probably already own the DVD.

More sequels? Please, Arnold, say "not to be".