These have been difficult days for me. As a die-hard Terminator fan, I went into a screening of Terminator: Salvation knowing that the movie was getting bad reviews, but still holding onto a sliver of hope that this latest installment to my beloved franchise would remain true to the “real” Terminator and right the many wrongs of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

As we all know now, the movie was a sloppy, shoddy disappointment (you can listen to me rant about its shortcomings in this podcast episode; I won’t retread that territory here). That disappointment was bad enough, but in the ensuing weeks after seeing Terminator: Salvation, an even worse thing happened: I came to the sad conclusion that a huge part of the Terminator ethos, the franchise’s mantra and guiding light, is one big fat lie:

“No fate but what we make.”

For years, I fooled myself into holding onto this phrase like some sort of holy writ, but now, at this nadir moment, I must recognize the truth: “no fate but what we make” is demonstrated poorly at best by the movies/TV shows–even in the greatness that is Terminator 2–and flat out contradicted by the meta-narrative of the franchise.

“No fate but what we make?” My ass.

Recently, I’ve been doing film reviews for The Rotten Tomatoes Show on Current TV. Or rather, I’ve been doing pieces of film reviews. Current gets a bunch of bloggers, comedians, and other web-types to weigh in on each movie, and then splices them together into frankenreviews. So here’s 10 seconds of me talking about Knowing.

Of course, I had a little more to say.  (Consider this a blanket Spoiler Alert. If you want to remain fresh for Knowing, go read about porn.)

This week marked the 10th anniversary of the sci-fi sleeper blockbuster, The Matrix. It’s hard to imagine, but there was a period in American culture when no one had heard of the Wachowski Brothers, Hugo Weaving or Propellerheads. Keanu Reeves and Lawrence Fishburne re-ignited their careers, playing freedom fighters armed with gravity-defying kung fu and submachine guns, locked in eternal war in a digital prison.

Audiences flocked to theaters for the blistering action, the revolutionary visual effects, the throbbing techno soundtrack and the wirework. But critics picked up The Matrix for another reason entirely – its throwaway references to classical philosophy.

Philosophy professors and hyper-literate college students (OTI’s target demographics) claimed that The Matrix showed clear influences from: