Futnuckery 2: The Way of Blunder, exentuensis the first: why people enjoyed his films, the fact eludes him, James Tiberius Fern Cameron.

Indeed, it was the early 90s and he was a kind of "hitman", a person expected to make big-budget, high-profit, widely-appealing action films.  He had a singular hit with the original Terminator, and through the years, with his own Terminator sequels, and a few other things, he clearly demonstrated time and time again that he did not quite grasp how to do those really big films that demanded his attention as a "hitman".

Terminator 2, where he supposedly establishes kind of a precedent for later Terminator work, was itself the recipient of a dividend of attention based on the success of the more modest original film, beloved and known, constantly repeated on video and cable.

Terminator 2?  Not so much.  Consider people went to see it, flocked to it, in part on the novelty of certain gimmicks introduced in the film, but largely because of the prior enjoyment of the first film.

Around the same time, we were given Predator 2, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 and a few others.

Weekend at Bernie's 2 was vastly superior at reflecting the era, perhaps, and with its own dualities and pooka personality, a kind of cosmically-misaligned foray into a hatred of fate that Cameron would rather briefly touch-on in his Terminator 3.

Bernie at least could dance.  Arnold, it seems, could not, and had embarked on his own pillage of box office dollars, even making the bomb Last Action Hero satiring not his own movies, but others, mostly, dragging in a fictituous action hero with his own equally fictional canon of work that was constantly referenced on film without real world audiences batting an eye, zero emotional impact, zero intellectual impact: as much fluff and filler as some of the stunts and crashes in Terminator 3, perhaps, reflecting more of the current day, maybe, jaundiced, crutched by a misunderstanding of its own appeal, the Terminator sequels.

Now we come to one of the so-called "great" films in Avator and its sequel.  A film, originally, shot on a new 3D method, but clearly not the first 3D film, but it was meant to yet be a first for a plethora of new presentation techniques in cinema, the now-defunct impetus towards "3D everything."  The film meanwhile not great in story, not great in celebrity cache and not particularly action-oriented, marched its way through profitability for reasons few might understand, a kind of maybe, "mass-pychosis" as if Sky Net had cursed the fate of humanity to be herded into long lines for one or two big box-office presentations per year.

Bernie's had the Gestalt of existentiale malaise, borrowing on that mass psychosis decades prior, with a man who simply danced to the music, just like the promotion of Cameron's box office fodder, but constant music, the film equivalent of music's widely lamented but every selling Drake, Dreck the Impala.

Indeed, the perpetual appeal of the original Terminator lies not so much in script or mythos so much as it is reflected scene-to-scene.  And the most recent Terminator features the unstoppable machines being, in fact, stopped, time and again.  And the beloved boy, butcher as part of a dream-like flashback.  Ideas not probed properly was the continued psychic evolution of a Terminator, his "mental evolution" past being a killing machine.

I would have expected more from them all, had I cared.

The wanted me to be that, Weekend At Bernie's 2, they wanted us all, dancing or inducing dancing, feeding the mass-hypnosis, and around the same time, Jurassic Park, between a doldrum marking a recapitulation between Die Hard 2 and Die Hard 3, where the original mastermind some soul searching, John McTiernan, and he comes back for another enjoyable foray into the action film business.

During this growing pain of Western Civilization, we saw Bill Clinton get elected, and Bret Hart was WWF champion TWICE.  Hulkster turned his nose at the old boss and testified against Vincent Kennedy McMahon; people had a taste of the evolution from the 80s to the 90s, and didn't quite like it, it seemed.  It was Jurassic Park, from another box-office hit machine of a man, that kept the whole thing afloat, maybe.  Even the maga-popular Rush Limbaugh had an unsuccessful safari into television, but countered that by writing a best-selling book.

Dare we add Batman to films that did not understand their own appeal?  I saw Batman Returns in the red curtained cement floor alley of the old Carmike cinema, and cleary, the film did not understand itself, and was uncertain as well about the appeal of the first film, as to what kept an audience's attention.  It was phenomena, not just box office success, but later home video success. 

Lethal Weapon built on its appeal with films two and three, even adding the great Pesci, who, just going for the money, threw himself into his work with the zest and effort a great thespian, that if he were some shoeshine loveable sidekick, he really put energy into that role, elevating the character and almost stealing some of his scenes.

Need I mention Limbaugh, love or hate him, agree or disagree, had plenty of energy and thought to cover three hours of radio five days a week.