Three Films

So last week, as part of our ongoing cultural exchange, I finally persuaded Lady Chocolat to watch "Highlander", "Independence Day", and "The Terminator". The results were distinctly mixed.

I hadn't watched "Highlander" for several years, pretty much since I first got the DVD. And it just hasn't aged well. It probably didn't help that it's actually one of the worst DVDs I own, in terms of sound and picture quality; even the otherwise-excellent soundtrack was distinctly patchy. We watched for fifteen increasingly-uncomfortably minutes, before I suggested abandoning it.

"Independence Day", on the other hand, was a rousing success. We watched the special edition version, with the 9 minutes of restored footage (which, to be honest, don't add anything). And it was good - better than I remembered, in fact. It's an easy film to mock, what with the whole "defeat the aliens with a MacBook" climax, but if taken as a big, stupid blockbuster, it's actually well done. (Plus, it blows "The Day After Tomorrow" and especially "2012" out of the water, so that's something.)

And then there was "The Terminator", which LC had particularly resisted because of the bad taste left by "Terminator 3", the one film in the series that she had watched. (Also the worst film in the series, although opinion seems to be divided between that and "Salvation".) Anyway, T1 was another film I hadn't watched in years, again, probably since just after I first got the DVD.

We got about 50 minutes into this one, and LC was actually enjoying it a great deal (as expected...) when suddenly the film just froze. I tried cleaning the disk a couple of times, but to no avail. It seems that disk rot has taken it. So, we'll try to borrow a copy to watch the rest at some point, and then that's probably another one to upgrade to blu-ray when it is released.

(But why, oh why, couldn't the disk rot take the bad films instead? It's not like there's a shortage in my collection - there are two "Transformers" films and two "Dungeons & Dragons" films it can take, for starters! Plus the aforementioned T3, and indeed at least one of the "Highlander" sequels they never made.)