Arnold Schwarzenegger Top 10 Part II

Three boobies, what an age to be alive.

This is the second half of my list of the best Schwarzenegger movies of all time (check out part one here).  Pass it around and feel free to write back in the comments section or facebook me about the list.

5. Total Recall

Two weeks...

This movie contains many of the same themes as Vanilla Sky.  The biggest difference between the two movies being that Total Recall is better in every single way.  Quiet introspection is replaced with machine gun fights; Jason Lee is replaced with Michael Ironside; and Cameron Diaz is replaced with a young Sharon Stone.  The romantic lead in Total Recall is kind of fug and can’t hold a candle to the always sexy Penelope Cruz, but this is completely overshadowed by a woman with three boobs.  You read that right, three boobies.  The special effects, plot, and action sequences in Total Recall are all undoubtedly awesome but a woman with three boobies puts this movies completely over the top.  This movie also has one of the best examples of henchmen syndrome: when those dudes jump Schwarzenegger and they’re all armed and he disarms and kills a few of them why don’t those guys take off when he gets his hands on a gun?  He already kicked their asses and now he has firearms.  The only thing in this movie less plausible than that is when Sharon Stone offers to go at it one last time and Arnie is still able to suss out that it’s a trick.  If I was in his place, I would have most definitely died at that part. 

Penelope Cruz's butt

4. The Terminator

Nice pants gross dude.

Remember that part when he kills all those cops?  Or that part where he rips his own eye out?  If you watched it on TBS or WGN you probably don’t, which is part of the problem most people have when ranking this movie within the Schwarzenegger pantheon.   The only problem I have with The Terminator is the part when Kyle Reese takes that homeless guy’s pants.  Dude didn't even have underwear on.  He wears them for the rest of the movie and as far as I know he never washes them.  I know he’s from a dystopian garbage future, but that’s fucking gross.  Couldn’t he change or at least wash them or something?   Terminator holds the distinction of being the first R rated movie I ever saw and I assure you that if you’ve never seen it uncut you are depriving yourself of an awesomely violent action movie.  Spoiler Alert:  you see Linda Hamilton’s boobies.  These are the first boobies I ever saw that didn’t belong to a saggy black woman in National Geographic. 

3. True Lies

Lots of movies attempt to blend action and comedy with varying degrees of success, but True Lies stands head and shoulders above the competition.  Part of the success lies in the fact that it could stand on its own in either genre.  You could take out the jokes and have a perfectly serviceable action movie, or take out all the machine gun fights and have a movie about…well without gunfights I don’t know what it would be about, but I bet it would still be pretty funny.  True Lies is also Tom Arnold’s best movie.  I guess that’s not saying much, but if you’ve only seen Little Giants and never seen True Lies I assure you this is a vastly superior movie.

Eliza Dushku is the daughter in True Lies

2. Conan the Barbarian

Become slave of Thulsa Doom, tap two manna for each action

Conan is based on a character created by Robert E. Howard, and most fans of the original stories hate the movie.  I on the other hand, like them both, but then again I’m not an annoying fucking fanboy douchebag.  Things aren’t exactly the same as the book?  Maybe that’s because they’re two different artistic mediums.  Conan is about yelling “Crom” and punching camels and this movie had plenty of both.  I always liked this movie, but after I read the aforementioned short stories it’s become one of my favorites.  In this one Arnie the plays the titular (tee hee) character: Conan the Barbarian.  When asked, “What is best in life?”  Conan replies “crush your enemy, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of the women.”  That line really sets the tone for the movie, because for Conan it’s not enough to defeat your enemy in combat, you have to make his wife cry about it.  The rest of the movie follows that general tone.  When Conan isn’t decapitating snake cultist, he fills his time drinking tankards of ale and having sex with beautiful sluts.  Along the way he teaches us the riddle of steel and we don’t even have to drink Steel Reserve.

1. Terminator 2: Judgment Day

I’m going to get kind of spoiler-y in my description of T2 AKA the greatest movie ever made.  I don’t know why I bothered warning you.  If you haven’t seen this movie by now you are either

 A.) Lame

or

B.) too young to be reading this blog (you kids still listening to Fallout Boy?)

A scene from Wayne's World that kids are too young for

Beautiful CGI

Why do I love this movie so much?  Well the action scenes are unparalleled awesome: like when the T-1000 is ramming the pickup truck and Arnie walks from the bed of the truck onto the hood of the semi and machine guns the T-100 right in the fucking face.  You never see something like that in a movie today, unless it’s done with bullshit computers.  Kind of an odd coincidence I guess, since this movie was one of the pioneer CGI films.  Unlike most CGI films though, T2 perfectly blends CGI with conventional effects.  This movie came out 20 years ago (shit I’m getting old) but still looks really good. 

The dominant theme for the movie is that there is no fate, and we set our own future.  I’ve never been a fatalist myself so this resonates with me.  It also flies in the face of the two subpar sequels that followed T2 but what can you do?  I don’t know, but you should definitely not watch those movies unless you’re happy burning two hours of your life that you’ll never get back.  I guess if you saw them you could go back in time and warn yourself not to see them, but then why would you warn yourself?  The movie handles this problem brilliantly by creating a time loop.  Miles Dyson creates Skynet from the chip in the first Terminator’s head.  Skynet goes on to build the Terminator, which gets sent it back in time to get crushed in the first movie.  Miles Dyson takes that chip etc.  I guess it’s kind of hard to wrap your mind around, but at least it’s not goddamn insulting to your intelligence like most time travel movies.

Saddest part of any movie ever.  Literally makes me tear up.

I guess that about sums up this top 10 list.  If you haven’t seen any of these movies you should definitely correct that problem.  I’ll be back next week with for my Top 10 Eric Stoltz Movies Part I, so come with me if you want to live.  Until then hasta la vista baby and um…I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle.