#((it was a big part of season 3; that whole 'terminal christianity' thing; and now chucky's back to doll form))

[theheadlessgroom]

@beatingheart-bride

"I say to just go with your heart," Randall smiled, as he pulled up a chair in front of the changing rooms, very eager to what Emily picked out as her wedding dress: He knew there were plenty of superstitions surrounding the bad luck that came with the groom seeing the bride in her dress before the wedding day proper, but honestly, he wasn't thinking too hard about that now. He'd had his fill of bad luck in his past life; in this new one, he felt there could only be good things from here on out.

Of course, he knew his advice wasn't exactly the most helpful he could give, but to tell the truth, he had faith in her ability to find the perfect gown. This would be her own dress-not an heirloom passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter, meant to be worn out of duty, but one she herself chose-just as she chose her own husband, so too would she choose her own dress, and no one would impede her.

"We've got a lot of variety, so you certainly have plenty of options," he chuckled, as he took his seat. Hopefully not too many, he thought, as he made himself comfortable, excited to see what she chose-no matter what she chose, of course, he would love and find her beautiful in it; what was most important to him was that she was happy with her choice, and would look back on it fondly.

[crowdvscritic]

round up // JULY 21

‘Tis the season to beat the heat at the always-cold theatres and next to fans set at turbo speed. While my movie watching slowed a bit with the launch of the Summer Olympics on July 23rd, I’ve still got plenty of popcorn-ready and artsy recommendations for you. A few themes in the new-to-me pop culture I’m recommending this month:

Casts oozing with embarrassing levels of talent (sometimes overqualified for the movies they’re in)

Pop culture that is responding or reinterpreting past pop culture

Stories that get weEeEeird

Keep on-a-scrollin’ to see which is which!

July Crowd-Pleasers

1. Double Feature – ‘90s Rom-Coms feat. Lots of Lies: Mystery Date (1991) + The Pallbearer (1996)

In Mystery Date (Crowd: 7.5/10 // Critic: 6/10), Ethan Hawke and Teri Polo get set up on a blind date that gets so bizarre and crime-y I’m not sure how this didn’t come out in the ‘80s. In The Pallbearer (Crowd: 8/10 // Critic: 7/10), David Schwimmer and Gwyneth Paltrow try to combine The Graduate with Four Weddings and a Funeral in a story about lost twentysomethings. If you don’t like rom-coms in which circumstances depend on lots of lies and misunderstandings, these won’t be your jam, but if you’re like me and don’t mind these somewhat-cliché devices, you’ll be hooked by likeable casts and plenty of rom and com.

2. The Tomorrow War (2021)

I thought of no fewer movies than this list while watching: Alien, Aliens, Angel Has Fallen, Cloverfield, Interstellar, Kong: Skull Island, Prometheus, A Quiet Place: Part II, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith, The Silence of the Lambs, The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and World War Z. And you know what? I like all those movies! (Okay, maybe I just have a healthy respect/fear of The Silence of the Lambs.) The Tomorrow War may not be original, but it borrows some of the best tropes and beats from the sci-fi and action genres, so much so I wish I could’ve seen Chris Pratt and Co. fight those gross monsters on a big screen. Crowd: 9/10 // Critic: 6/10

3. Dream a Little Dream (1989)

My July pick for the Dumb Rom-Com I Nevertheless Enjoyed! I CANNOT explain the mechanics of this body switch comedy to you—nor can the back of the DVD case above—but, boy, what an ‘80s MOOD. I did not know I needed to see a choreographed dance routine starring Jason Robards and Corey Feldman, but I DID. All I know is some movies are made for me and that I’m now a card-carrying member of the Two Coreys fan club. Crowd: 8/10 // Critic: 6.5/10

4. Black Widow (2021)

The braids! The Pugh! Black Widow worked for me both as an exciting action adventure and as a respite from the Marvel adventures dependent on a long memory of the franchise. (Well, mostly—keep reading for a second MCU rec much more dependent on the gobs of previous releases.) Crowd: 9/10 // Critic: 7.5/10

5. Liar Liar (1997)

Guys, Jim Carrey is hilarious. That’s it—that’s the review. Crowd: 9/10 // Critic: 7/10

6. Sob Rock by John Mayer (2021)

It’s very possible I’ve already listened to this record more than all other John Mayer records. It doesn’t surpass the capital-G Greatness of Continuum, but it’s a little bit of old school Mayer, a little bit ‘80s soft rock/pop, and I’ve had it on repeat most of the two weeks since it’s been out. Featuring the boppiest bop that ever bopped, at least one lyrical gem in every track, and an ad campaign focused on Walkmans, this record skirts the line between Crowd faves and Critic-worthy musicianship.

7. Double Feature – ‘00s Ben Affleck Political Thrillers: The Sum of All Fears (2002) + State of Play (2009)

In The Sum of All Fears (Crowd: 8.5/10 // Critic: 7.5/10), Ben Affleck is Jack Ryan caught up in yet another international incident. In State of Play (Crowd: 8/10 // Critic: 7/10), he’s a hotshot Congressman caught up in a scandal. Both are full of plot twists and unexpected turns, and in both, Affleck is accompanied by actors you’re always happy to see, like Jason Bateman, James Cromwell, Russell Crowe, Jeff Daniels, Viola Davis, Morgan Freeman, Philip Baker Hall, David Harbour, Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren, Liev Schreiber, and Robin Wright—yes, I swear all of those people are in just those two movies.

8. Loki (2021-)

Unlike Black Widow, you can’t go into Loki with no MCU experience. The show finds clever ways to nudge us with reminders (and did better at it than Falcon and the Winter Soldier), but be forewarned that at some point, you’re just going to have to let go and accept wherever this timeline-hopper is taking you. An ever-charismatic cast keeps us grounded (Owen Wilson, Jonathan Majors, and an alligator almost steal the show from Tom Hiddleston in some eps), but while Falcon lasted an episode or two too long, Loki could’ve used a few more to flesh out its complicated plot and develop its characters. Thankfully, the jokes matter almost as much as the sci-fi, so you can still have fun even if you have no idea what’s going on.

9. Double Feature – Bruce Willis: Die Hard With a Vengeance (1995) + The Whole Nine Yards (2000)

Before Bruce Willis began starring in many random direct-to-DVD movies I only ever hear about in my Redbox emails, he was a Movie Star smirking his way up the box office charts. In the third Die Hard (Crowd: 10/10 // Critic: 7.5/10), he teams up with Samuel L. Jackson to decipher the riddles of a terrorist madman (Jeremy Irons), and it’s a thrill ride. In The Whole Nine Yards (Crowd: 9/10 // Critic: 8/10), he’s hitman that screws up dentist Matthew Perry’s boring life in Canada, and—aside from one frustrating scene of let’s-objectify-women-style nudity—it’s hilarious.

10. This Is the End (2013)

On paper, this is not a movie for me. An irreverent stoner comedy about a bunch of bros partying it up before the end of the world? None of things are for Taylors. But with a little help of a TV edit to pare down the raunchy and crude bits, I laughed my way through and spent the next several days thinking through its exploration of what makes a good person. While little of the plot is accurate to Christian Gospel and theology, some of its big ideas are consistent enough with the themes of the book of Revelation I found myself thinking about it again in church this morning. (Would love to know if Seth Rogen ever expected that.) Plus, I love a good self-aware celebrity spoof—can’t tell you how many times I’ve just laughed remembering the line, “It’s me, Jonah Hill, from Moneyball”—and an homage to horror classics. Crowd: 8/10 // Critic: 7/10

July Critic Picks

1. Summer of Soul (…or, When the Television Could Not Be Televised) (2021)

Even director Questlove didn’t know about the Harlem Cultural Festival, but now he’s compiled the footage so we can all enjoy one of the coolest music fest lineups ever, including The 5th Dimension, B.B. King, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, and Stevie Wonder, who made my friend’s baby dance more than once in the womb. See it on the big screen for top-notch audio. Crowd: 8/10 // Critic: 9/10

2. Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)

Robin Williams takes on the bureaucracy, disillusionment, and malaise of the Vietnam War with comedy. Williams was a one-of-a-kind talent, and here it’s on display at a level on par with Aladdin. Crowd: 8/10 // Critic: 9/10

3. Against the Rules Season 2 (2020-21)

Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball, adapted into a film starring Jonah Hill), is interested in how we talk about fairness. This season he looks at how coaches impact fairness in areas like college admissions, credit cards, and youth sports. 

4. Bugsy Malone (1976)

A gangster musical starring only children? It’s a little like someone just picked ideas out of a hat, but somehow it works. You can hear why in the Bugsy Malone episode Kyla and I released this month on SO IT’S A SHOW?, plus how this weird artifact of a film connects with Gilmore Girls.

5. The Queen (2006)

Before The Crown, Peter Morgan wrote The Queen, focusing on Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) in the days following the death of Princess Diana. It’s a complex and compassionate drama, both for the Queen and for Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen, who has snuck up on me to become a favorite character actor). Maybe I’ve got a problem, but I’ll never tire of the analysis of this famous family. Crowd: 8.5/10 // Critic: 9.5/10

6. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)

This month at ZekeFilm, we took a closer look at Revisionist Westerns we’ve missed. I fell hard for Roy Bean, and I think you will, too, if for no other reason than you might like a story starring Jacqueline Bisset, Ava Gardner, John Huston, Paul Newman, and Anthony Perkins. Oh, and a bear! Crowd: 8.5/10 // Critic: 10/10

7. New Trailer Round Up

Naked Singularity (Aug. 6) – John Boyega in a crime thriller!

Queenpins (Aug. 10) – A crime comedy about extreme coupon-ing!

Dune (Oct. 1) – I’ve been cooler on the anticipation for this film, but this new look has me cautiously intrigued thanks to the Bardem + Bautista + Brolin + Chalamet + Ferguson + Isaac + Momoa + Zendaya of it all.

The Last Duel (Oct. 15) – Affleck! Damon! Driver!

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (Nov. 11) - I’m not sure why we need this, but I’m down for the Paul Rudd + Finn Wolfhard combo

King Richard (Nov. 19) - Will Smith as Venus and Serena’s father!

Encanto (Nov. 24) – Disney and Lin-Manuel Miranda making more magic together!

House of Gucci (Nov. 24) - Gaga! Pacino! Driver! 

Also in July…

Kyla and I took a look at the classic supernatural soap Dark Shadows and why Sookie might be obsessed with it on Gilmore Girls.

I revisited a so-bad-it’s-good masterpiece that’s a surrealist dream even Fellini couldn’t have cooked up. Yes, for ZekeFilm I wrote about the Vanilla Ice movie, Cool as Ice, which is now a part of my Blu-ray collection.

Photo credits: Against the Rules. All others IMDb.com.

[lordnegan]

ON THE SUBJECT OF NEGAN’S PAST:

( AS A NOTE: this does contain some triggering content: alcohol & suicide & emotional abuse being the big ones )

Negan North was born and raised in northern Virginia on April 17, 1970 to Marilyn and James North. Negan was a relatively normal child, if maybe a bit abrasive and rambunctious (thus a natural troublemaker), and had a decent childhood, despite the fact that his father was a bit of a workaholic and wasn’t around much for him or his kind and caring mother.

Around the age of 8, however, his mother became severely disabled from a car crash as she was on her way to pick him up from school. His father had to come pick Negan up from school whereupon they went to the hospital, awaiting any news of her condition. Several, several hours later, they were told she would never walk again, paralyzed from the neck down and was expected to essentially be unable to care for herself from this point on in her life.

Negan's father had to stop working so much, sending their income down the drain and heavily reliant upon the disability checks they would receive for Marilyn's condition. Negan helped in whatever way he could, but more often than not, his father insisted on doing it all himself, as though he didn't trust Negan to be any good help.

"You're just a damn kid, this isn't your responsibility," James would always tell Negan. And soon that line got a lot more abrasive and fueled by much more alcohol as James began to turn to abusing the substance. As the years passed, Negan's father became much more emotionally abusive, berating him and turning the blame for Marilyn's condition onto Negan.

"If she didn't have to fuckin' pick you up from school that day, we wouldn't be in this shit situation," he'd come back to that accusation again and again, whiskey strong on his tongue.

Negan took it in stride, Marilyn always trying to support him nonetheless, reassuring him that none of it was his fault and all that mattered was she was still alive to watch him grow up.

The day after Negan's 11th birthday, however, was when everything changed forever. He'd come home from school to find both his parents dead, covered in blood with gunshot wounds to their heads. James seemed to have snapped, fueled by a drunken rage, that caused him to take not only his wife's life by an old pistol, but his own life as well, leaving a note behind detailing how he couldn't stand what their family had become and wanted to free himself and his wife from the torment.

Being just a distraught and terrified child, Negan did only what he knew to do, and that was call the police. He didn't remember a lot of what happened following those events, a lot of questions from adults and being shuttled around by DHS as they tried to figure out what to do with him. Eventually, he ended up being stuck with his uncle, James' brother Christian, a man that Negan had probably only ever met once or twice in all his life.

Things tried to return to normal after the joint funeral, Negan going back to school under the care of Christian, a forty-year-old man that had never married and never had children of his own, and for good reason. He was never a very interpersonal man, leaving only small talk between them and simply being a chaperone for the following years of Negan's life. To put it bluntly, Christian wasn't a good parental figure, although neither was he terrible, simply there.

This lead Negan to seeking his outlet in middle and, especially, high school, finding that he was good at being the "Alpha Male" figurehead in his group of friends. He'd stay out late, pick on those smaller than him (figuratively and literally), and to put it plainly, he became a high school bully, skitting quite close to being expelled for his behavior. It wasn't an unusual sight for Christian to open his door to see Negan flanked by a couple of officers and a split lip.

Finally, Negan turned 18 and that was the moment he packed up what he had owned and earned from a collection of part time jobs, and headed out to get his own place. He lived from paycheck to paycheck in a small apartment, relatively aimless in his life for the following years. He fell in and out of relationships like the seasons came and went, even had a small bout of a sexual awakening that lead him to realize he was bisexual. An identity he quickly embraced, despite it blindsiding him, and it brought with it a strange sort of acceptance of himself that hadn't been there prior.

One day, after a particularly rough relationship had fallen out, a 26-year-old Negan decided to find his way to his parents' grave. Something he'd never done (thus required quite a lot of remembering where exactly they'd been buried) and he wasn't sure what brought him there either. But there he'd been, staring down at their grave on a cool winter day, their names etched in the stone. And it brought a realization upon him that if he didn't do at least something with his life, he'd end up down in this very ground with nothing to be proud of in his life. Nothing to be remembered by.

That next day, Negan gathered up what he'd saved, applied for the right loans, and fell into the next four years of his life towards receiving a bachelor's degree in teaching, more specifically in becoming a physical education teacher. As a kid, P.E. had always been his favorite subject and as he grew older, the fondness for those times of getting out all the energy he'd built up was a strong pull. Not to mention, he couldn't think of a better way to make himself something to remember, to give himself something to be proud of. It also helped that he had a soft spot for kids ( maybe his own way of making up for the kids he'd picked on when he was younger, who knows ).

So there he was, at the age of thirty and entering into his first middle school physical education class as Coach Negan, a name he owned every sense of and was damn proud of. He found an immense joy in getting to yell at the kids to push themselves harder, to run more laps, to throw balls at each other and call it physical education. After five years, he had been transferred to teaching high school students, a higher bracket of kids that were much more assured of themselves and, as such, pushed his buttons a little more than the younger ones.

With this transferrence, he'd been put in charge of the sex ed. course that was being newly introduced as part of the curriculum. Being physical education, the schoolboard thought it made sense, but Negan didn't care either way, it just meant he got to tell his kids to repeat the word 'penis' a million times until either he or they stopped giggling about it first.

Perhaps that had been either the best or worst thing to happen to Negan then, as with the introduction to the new program came the proper introduction to the school counselor, Lucille, the two of them to work together on the new program. A woman that he'd immediately been attracted to, causing him to boldly flirt with her and even ask her out on a date right off the bat.

"You can teach me about sex ed any time you want," Negan had probably said, to which it received not the warmest reception, but she'd definitely laughed.

Several months later, they were steadily dating and many more months after that, teetering on nearly a year after they'd met, Negan found himself proposing to her, never having been in love with someone as much as he had for her. Their wedding date had come and gone and they were settled into a normal routine that was that of a newly wed couple.

The both of them wanted children; it was something they spoke about candidly since the early days of their affections. And now that their situations were steady, they tried to start their family. And they tried. And they tried. Months passed by without any sign of pregnancy for Lucille, to which it prompted a visit to the doctor. The news couldn't have been any more devastating to the couple; the news that Negan was incredibly infertile, the chance of Lucille becoming pregnant anywhere from a low, low 1-3%. And that 3% was being generous.

Devastated, Negan had nearly turned to alcohol, a habit that reminded him far too much of his father and he quickly abandoned it, but there was a hole within him then. Their relationship became strained for the five to ten years following, to which Negan began seeking out the carnal company of others. He'd lost sight of what had been important, leading him to become like he was in his early twenties, wandering and uncertain.

It was only when Lucille had alarming symptoms that sent her to the ER on more than one ocassion that the right tests were done and she was found to have a late stage cancer. Inoperable. Barely treatable. Yet again, Negan was struck with heartache, realizing her time was limited and he was going to lose her at some point.

The terminal illness drove him to confess his affairs and that he'd given them up to be with her, wholly and completely without reserve. To which Lucille only chastised him not necessarily for cheating, but for choosing her, the sick one. It didn't deter Negan, the whole situation awakening him to the reality before him and he stuck by her side, vowing to never leave her for even a moment. In a way, it was almost his own way of spiting his father, being better than his father, striving to never give up like James had.

It'd been a cloudy day in the hospital when the outbreak happened. It was chaos and Negan did all he could to keep the dangers away from their room, barracading it despite not fully knowing what was happening. Soon enough, however, Lucille would pass, the virus would overtake her corpse, and it would spiral Negan down into the persona many know and expect.

[duhragonball]

The dumbest part of Terminator Genisys is also the most memorable, because it’s a title drop repeated several times in the movie.  Personally, I like this movie.   Watching T4, I couldn’t help but look forward to watching this one, because I knew it would be more fun.   But T5 was a commercial and critical failure, so I guess I’m in the minority.  I read an article yesterday that talked about how no one even understands why the movie wasn’t more successful, but I think the whole “Genisys is Skynet” thing sums it up pretty well.  I’ll unpack that under the cut.

So in the article I read, it talked about how there was a lot of “chaos” behind the scenes, but no one seems to know exactly what that “chaos” was.   I like to imagine a 67-year-old Schwarzenegger exchanging catty comments with Emilia Clarke, or maybe Matt Smith’s weird face frightened the child actors on set.  The article suggested that maybe T5′s convoluted plot might have been a source of contention, but that’s ridiculous.   Arnold was in Total Recall and Last Action Hero, and Emelia Clarke was in HBO’s Game of Thrones TV series.  They’re used to dealing with nonsense storylines.   Besides, they film these things out of order, and with a big budget sci-fi like this, half the shots would be in front of a green curtain, so they probably had no idea what the plot even was, good or bad.

I think the bigger issue is that they made a fifth movie 31 years after the first one.  How many movie franchises even make it to a fourth sequel?   James Bond, Star Trek, Star Wars, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man.   Some horror movie characrers.    There’s a decent list, sure, but they’re still pretty exceptional franchises.   Also, the thing I notice about a lot of these examples is that the rights to the characters were kept under firm control.   One of Terminator’s problems was that the rights kept shifting from one company to another, and all these legal hassles had to get ironed out before a new movie could be made.  I don’t think that hurt the quality of the films too much, but it spaced the movies out further apart.   T3 was supposed to cash in on the red-hot success of T2, except the movies came out 12 years apart.   That’s a long drought.   Long enough that a lot of potential fans would have moved on to other things. 

T4 was probably supposed to rebuild the franchise, alongside the Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series, but they were trying to do this without Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, or James Cameron.   But why?   T3 and T4 weren’t that big a draw, so why keep at this?   Someone thought that the rights to this series was still worth something, and if they just kept making Terminator content it would bring back the glory days of 1991.   And then the rightsholders would go bankrupt and someone else would purchase the hot potato and try all over again.

Somewhere around the late 2000′s, all these big shot movie people decided that everything needed to be a trilogy.   Maybe the success of Star Wars had something to do with that.  My biggest gripe with the 2011 Green Lantern movie was that they could have made Sinestro the main villain, but they waited until the very end of the movie to show him turning evil, all to set up a tease for the sequel.   Except there would be no sequel because the movie they made wasn’t successful enough.    So instead of putting everything they had into the one movie, they deliberately held back for the sake of two or three movies, only to sabotage the one movie they actually got to make.   T4 was supposed to be the first part of a trilogy, but it flopped, and then someone new started over with T5, which was also supposed to be the first part of a new trilogy.   Except it flopped too, which led us to T6.   I don’t know if Dark Fate is supposed to be the first part of a new trilogy, but it doesn’t matter, because now it can be part of the “Failed Trilogy” Trilogy with T4 and T5.

I think about this sort of thing a lot.   Entertainment marketing is always in your face, always trying to convince you that this new product matters, and you need to get invested in it, because it’ll be worth your time.   That’s why people were so pissed off about the final season of Game of Thrones.   They went into the series expecting everything to follow some sort of big plan with a huge payoff, and then the showrunners just improvised a bunch of stuff at the end.  So all the time they put into the early seasons just feels like a big waste.   The entertainment industry is aware of that phenomenon, but they don’t understand how to deal with it.   The solution is to make solid storytelling plans, well in advance.   The industry thinks the solution is to pretend they did that, and hope the customer believes it long enough to pay for admission.

I don’t know if the general public thinks about this stuff as much as I do.   Maybe they think about it even more, but either way, I think it’s possible to catch on to the game without being fully aware of it.   They made T5 hoping to remind people of how much they enjoyed T2, and people watched the trailer and saw Old Man Arnold and thought “This looks like that T3 movie my dad made me watch as a kid.    Pass.”    Or they were like me and thought “They made a fifth one?”   Or they thought “Where’s Christian Bale?” because they enjoyed T4 and wondered why the sequel had nothing to do with T4. 

A big problem with T5 was how they refused to call it “T5″.  They wanted to do a “reboot”, kind of like how T4 was a “reboot”, except that one didn’t do the trick, so now they were going to reboot it again.  That should have been their first clue that this wasn’t going to work, but instead they went in the opposite direction from T4.   “Okay, the new cast and new direction wasn’t what people wanted, so we’re bringing back the old characters from T1 and all the big special effects from T2, and we’re going to make nonstop callbacks to all the classic movies.   But it’s not a sequel!  No, this is a whole new story!  We’re starting fresh, which is why we cast the guy who starred in the original movie!”

Let’s be clear: Using Arnold Shwarzenegger in your Terminator reboot is like casting Adam West to star in Batman Begins.   I don’t care if he still looks good for his age, and I don’t care if he’s the only actor who can do the character justice, and I don’t care if they came up with a plot device to explain why the cyborg looks like an old man.    His age isn’t the issue.  The issue is that you keep putting the same guy in every movie and expecting people to think this is a clean break from the previous movies.   Well it isn’t.   Terminator Genisys is Terminator 5.   The screenwriters supposedly made a big whiteboard with all the timelines, and they didn’t count T3 and T4 in their “canon”, and the fans can make all the multiverse diagrams they want, but it doesn’t matter.   The only timeline in this franchise is a straight line that counts 1, 2, 3..., and this is 5. 

You can say, “Well it has to be hard reboot, because of all the things that contradict the previous movies!”   But to that I say “This whole series is about altering the past to change the future.   Literally any discontinuity can be handwaved as a change in history.   Kyle’s backstory in T5 is very different from his backstory in T4, but it doesn’t matter, because I can just say that these were alternate timelines, or it’s the same timeline that’s been mutated by all the time traveling.  Terminator Genisys embraces that concept, because Kyle’s childhood gets altered within this movie, so it’s impossible to suggest that T4 and T5 are incompatible with each other. 

And that’s what went wrong with this movie.  They were so determined to present it as multiple, contradictory solutions to the same problem.   They wanted this movie to be a reboot, but they also wanted it to be a back-to-basics approach, while at the same time they wanted to go in a bold new direction, while simultaneously making the whole thing nostalgic.   And in trying to check off all of those boxes, they wound up satisfying none of those objectives.  Audiences got confused.   If the plot didn’t confuse them, then the branding of the movie certainly did. 

The plot reads like a fan theory: The whole series has involved this cycle spanning 1984 to 2029.   Kyle leaves 2029 to travel back to 1984, and every movie happens in between those years.   Okay.   So what if someone from after 2029 sent a Terminator back in time to before 1984?  All bets are off, now, right?   John Connor won’t expect this because he only knows about things up to 2029.   And everyone has assumed that world history up to 1984 has been static.  

T5 introduces “Pops” a T-800 sent back to 1973 to protect Sarah Connor as a child.   He becomes her surrogate father, and they plot to prevent Judgment Day.    So when Kyle Reese goes back to 1984 to save her, he finds a completely different situation, because history’s already been changed. 

Back in 2029, just as Kyle leaves for his trip to the past, John Connor gets assimilated by The Borg  Doctor Who   a T-5000 Skynet.  I guess it was just waiting for him to think he won the war before making its move.   Skynet converts John into a T-3000, an experimental model that replaces and duplicates human tissue at a cellular level.    The result is a black sand monster that looks and acts like John, with all of John’s memories and personality, but now it’s loyal to Skynet.  Skynet sends T-John back in time to ensure that Judgment Day proceeds without a hitch.  

So after that, it’s basically just the standard formula from T2, 3, and 4.   The good guys have to infiltrate and destroy a building to kill Skynet, while a Terminator hunts them down.   Except this time the Terminator is John Connor, and he’s actively fighting to protect the infant Skynet.   They defeat him, blow up the building, and everything seems pretty cool, except Skynet’s still backed up in the basement, so if anyone digs it up we’ll be right back where we started.  

I don’t think this is too awfully complicated.  I mean, it’s a time travel story, like every other movie in this series.  The goofy part is that this movie tries to account for alternate timelines, and characters being aware of changes in history, and that’s a tricky thing to do.   For example, T5!Sarah is very different from the original version played by Linda Hamilton, but she knows what was supposed to happen to T1!Sarah, even though that version of Sarah no longer exists.  

And this is where that screenshot comes in.    See, Kyle has no idea what’s going on when he arrives in 1984, but he had a vision of his younger self during his time trip.   He somehow remembers things that didn’t happen to him, but his alternate timeline self.  This never gets adequately explained; Pops just says “Yeah, that’s a thing that could happen, I guess,” and everyone moves on.    The point is, Kyle sees his younger self reciting “Genisys is Skynet,” and “Judgement Day is in 2017″, and that’s how he knows when and where to go to defeat Skynet.  Sarah wants to time travel to 1997, because that’s when Judgment Day was originally supposed to happen, but Kyle convinces her that they need to go to 2017 instead, and it works.   Then at the end of the movie, they have to track down Kid Kyle and ask him to recite the same message over and over again.   That way, Kyle can hear it when he makes the trip from 2029 to 1984.  

And... that’s pretty dumb.   The whole movie insists that everything has changed and nothing in history is static.   We never find out who sent Pops to 1973, or who sent the T-1000 to kill Sarah and Kyle, but the point is that history got completely overhauled because of these things.   And yet, Kyle seems to think that he can arrange a predestination paradox to ensure his victory over Skynet.   Why would that work?  John was trying to arrange a predestination paradox to ensure his victory over Skynet, and then T-John was trying to arrange another predestination paradox to ensure Skynet’s victory over him.  But none of it worked because history is apparently too fluid for that to matter.   It worked in the earlier movies (or at least it seemed to work) because those films didn’t push too hard on the idea of changing history.    John and Skynet could nudge fate, but they could never push things too far.  T5 declares all bets are off, but it keeps laying odds anyway. 

I think that self-contradiction is what bothered movie-goers in 2015.   It’s a reboot starring the old guy who was in the first movie, and it tells a story of altered timelines while also insisting that certain events can be made permanent.   So people leave the theater wondering what the hell the point was supposed to be, and word-of-mouth convinces audiences to steer clear.   There’s also a lot of plot danglers in the movie, like the question of who sent Pops back to 1973, or how he knows so damn much, but the answers were left for a future movie, one that never got made.   I think audiences in 2015 knew that they’d never get their answers in T6.   They knew T5 had nothing to do with T4, and they didn’t trust the studio to follow through on any of this. 

Oh, and “Genisys” is just the name of a fictional operating system, one that promised to do a lot of the same things Skynet was designed to do in T3.   It just had a different name, probably to keep nosy time travelers from finding it until it was too late.  T-John didn’t count on Kyle having that weird vision during his trip.  Like so many other elements of T5, the title was just slapping a new coat of paint on an old idea.   It looked mysterious and intriguing on a movie poster, but you go to the theater and find out it’s just Skynet again, and we know how Skynet operates by this point.   

With all that said, I do like this movie in spite of the marketing arrogance that fueled it.   They wanted to fix up the franchise and failed, but the movie itself is fun to watch.   T4 takes a friggin’ hour to get started, but T5 opens with a big future battle with lots of robots, and then you see two T-800′s wrassle, and then you see a T-1000 kick ass until it gets corroded to death with hydrochloric acid.  John turning into a T-3000 is kind of bizarre to me, but he works as a villain, and his black sand body makes for some cool effects.   Magnets seem to be his main weakness, and the movie does a lot of cool stuff with that.   There’s also a part in the hospital fight where he whacks off the valve on a pressurized gas cylinder, and it flies all over the place like a rocket.   And there’s a helicopter chase.   I’m not hard to please.  

I think the big problem with T4 was that most of its action sequences were too grounded in reality.   There are parts of T4 that look like a present-day war movie, or some other sci-fi film, like Independence Day, or Starship Troopers.  The Terminator movies were all about cyborgs hitting each other with present-day stuff, like trucks and toilets and school buses.   T4 can’t deliver on that, but T5 can, which is why I like 5 better than 4.  It also does a better job at holding my attention.   Both movies use the same twist and reveal it at the same time.   Marcus Wright finds out he’s a cyborg about halfway into T4, and John Connor reveals himself to be a T-3000 about halfway into T5.    But when T5 makes its play, I feel like I’ve seen a lot more stuff happen up to that point.   It helps that they didn’t give away the Evil John twist in the trailer. 

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Puck Lists: 7 places the Coyotes should be that are not in Arizona

GLENDALE, AZ – FEBRUARY 11: Head coach Dave Tippett of the Arizona Coyotes watches from the bench during the third period of the NHL game against the Pittsburgh Penguins at Gila River Arena on February 11, 2017 in Glendale, Arizona. The Coyotes defeated the Penguins 4-3 in overtime. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

Boy oh boy, gang.

Here we are again. Only a few years after the league fought pretty damn hard to wring a few million more a year in taxpayer money out of the good — also: gullible — people of Glendale, the league is also now saying the Glendale situation is really bad and no one could have foreseen how bad it is and by golly it’s just gotta change at this point.

This week Gary Bettman sent a letter to state lawmakers to let them know the Glendale arena is “not economically capable of supporting a successful NHL franchise,” which, y’know, who could have seen that coming? The city terminated its long-term agreement with the team, which it shouldn’t have signed in the first place, and that’s why we’re at where we’re at.

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So hey it turns out they need a new arena because the team “cannot and will not remain in Glendale,” which is very fun. All involved apparently remain committed to keeping the team in Arizona — after all, you can’t produce Auston Matthews and then have the league ghost on you — but now Bettman is rattling his saber pretty hard about not letting state or local lawmakers in the region buy into Glendale’s song and dance about not letting the Coyotes move there.

“The team has got a number of options and is going to pursue them so nobody should think that team is moving other than out of Glendale,” Bettman told reporters. “But short-term they’re going to stay in Glendale while they’re pursuing the options.”

Honestly, at this point, just get out of Arizona. This is such a dumb thing. They just moved to Glendale eight years ago. The league had to own the team for a while because it was such a disaster and no one wanted it. While I’m sure all involved will work hard to stay in the greater Phoenix area, here’s are six backup plans so we maybe don’t have to do all this again in less than a decade:

7. Brooklyn

I’m just kidding.

6. Kansas City

Hey, remember this? This is one of the hits, baby!

Whenever teams were in trouble about 10 years ago, it was all, “Oh Kansas City new rink new fun market they have an NFL team and a baseball team so why not an NHL team? Maybe the Penguins! Maybe the Sabres! You won’t know whether you’ll like it until you try it out!”

And sure, now the Sprint Center — opened in 2007 — is getting up there a little bit in terms of arena age. The features aren’t all as nice as you’d perhaps like them to be. But you know what it’s near? A population center. And you know who might show up there? More than like 13,000 people.

They sold out a Kings/Penguins preseason game there once, and isn’t that so nice? Oh but wait, just this year the Capitals and Blues played there and less than 12,000 people showed up.

Y’know what, maybe never mind.

5. Portland

It was only about a month ago that there was a report out of a Glendale paper saying the Coyotes sent team officials to Portland and Seattle. The report came out right after the Tempe arena deal with Arizona State fell through, quoting a spokesman from Key Arena in Seattle who said the Coyotes were “part of” a cadre of potential ownership groups that recently toured the building.

No source was directly quoted for the Portland link.

But hey, they have a thriving young population in Portland, and people there are crazy about both the Trailblazers and the Timbers. And we know the Moda Center can support hockey, since the Winterhawks play part of the season there. Accommodations could likely be made for an NHL team.

Of course, the Coyotes came out and forcefully denied the report, which kinda makes sense. I don’t know. I think I just want a team in Portland so I can move there and cover it. Get at me, Portland newspapers.

4. Seattle

This is the big one for the NHL, you’d have to think.

Bettman has almost certainly been drawing little hearts around crude drawings of the Seattle skyline, but there’s no arena and no real plan to get one built any time soon. The whole thing still seems really dependent on the city getting an NBA team again first.

And more to the point, the words Bettman is writing next to the heart-y skyline drawings are, “Mr. and Mrs. Seattle Expansion Team.” One imagines the league would very much prefer not to actually just have someone relocate to such a good market. As a last resort? Sure. As a first choice? Probably not.

3. A Little Place You May Have Heard Of Called…….. The Greater Toronto Area. Ever Heard Of It?

Leafs ownership hates this one simple trick for the league to print money!

The idea of a second team in or near Toronto is a really good one given that the Leafs are the money-makingest franchise in the league by a decent margin. Would people show up for a brand new team, especially one as rotten as the Coyotes appear poised to be for the next few years? I can’t imagine, especially because the Leafs likewise appear poised to take off in that same time.

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But with that having been said, if you can have two even remotely successful franchises in that region, look out. Salary cap at $89 million very soon! Ratings through the roof every night! Another rival for the Leafs to pretend they care about (sorry Ottawa)!

Of course the Leafs aren’t going to let that happen without a big payday. The Coyotes do not have the money to give the Leafs a big payday, a small payday, or maybe even a Payday bar.

So, sorry.

OTTAWA, ON – JANUARY 14: A Quebec Nordiques fan shows his support for their return to the NHL at a game between the Calgary Flames and the Ottawa Senators at Scotiabank Place on January 14, 2011 in Ottawa, Canada. (Photo by Phillip MacCallum/Getty Images)

2. Quebec City

Even if it’s just so we never have to hear about how Quebec needs a team and so those mean Francophones will stop picking on the poor Hurricanes.

They have the arena, which is the most beautiful hockey venue in the world, so we’re told. Wouldn’t it be so good to put a team there where they belong and take it out of Arizona where everyone actually hates hockey and Auston Matthews is really from Manitoba anyway.

Of course, this is another big “Wouldn’t the NHL just want the expansion money?” market, and moreover with the addition of Vegas the last thing we need is another Eastern Conference team to un-rebalance the standings. We need teams in the West, and the Red Wings and Blue Jackets will complain forever if you try to make them go back.

1. Literally Anywhere In The United States. I Really Don’t Care. Just Not Arizona

Please, I am begging you. My family is sick.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

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