It could’ve been worse.

When I was a teen-ager, I found great joy in Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. And even then, I was a budding movie critic, so I knew, more or less, that my joy was not based in some aesthetic appreciation of his acting, or the films surrounding him, or even in the often great special effects that would accompany those movies. Even then, I recognized that much of the appreciation of Schwarzenegger was in his ridiculousness: his affectless line delivery, his steroidal body, his morally absolute characters, and his thick Austrian accent that never changed over decades in America. Continue…