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"Yeah, that one I really didn't like too much."

"What? You didn't like Star Trek? Sure it's not a masterpiece, but I thought it was pretty darn good."

"But there were scenes, like you said about Terminator, that would just never happen. Like when that monster chased him on the snow planet."

Okay, he had a point. That sequence before Kirk meets the older Spock is mindless CGI filler but it can easily be lifted out of the film. Overall, Star Trek is a perfectly solid flick, with sharply drawn characters and a decent plot that is shrewdly constructed. It's head and shoulders above the explosions on top of explosions on top of a good trailer that was T4.

I made my case, which he went along with, but it was clear I wasn't about to change any minds. I decided to let the thing go before I went into neurotic cinephile rant mode, this was a family gathering after all. Looking to close the book on the subject I said. "Well, at least Star Trek was better than Wolverine."

"Yeah, that one I really enjoyed!"

Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Okay, this had to be a joke. Buying a ticket to that movie was basically paying for a live MST3K. I didn't want to push the envelope and get into the nuts and bolts on why he liked Wolverine. Clearly we pronounced tomato in different ways and it was time to call the whole thing off.

But that night, while lying in bed I swirled this idea around in my skull. He liked Wolverine. He liked Wolverine. What does that mean?! I tried replaying the film in my head. The tired CGI. The lazy script. That dreadful scene where Logan's girlfriend talks about Indians and the moon it somehow results in the genesis of Wolvy's namesake. Someone watched this, enjoyed himself, and admitted it to someone he doesn't know very well. I mulled on this for a while before coming to this conclusion: He is going to love Terminator Salvation.

No doubt about it. Obviously the bad writing, bad pacing and tired formulas didn't bother him in Wolverine so they won't in Terminator. He'll just have fun watching the big machines crashing into each other. Huh. And then my mind stumbled on to a real bombshell. I wonder if most moviegoers feel this way. Vertigo zoom onto Tom's face.

Most moviegoers feel this way.

The average moviegoer doesn't think about movies 15 hours a day, which is still difficult for me to grasp but I do believe is true. They just want to be entertained. And for a lot of them a fireball is entertaining, regardless of whether it's surrounded by good narrative structure.

I pondered this conundrum, looking at it from different angles, trying to put myself into the misguided shoes of the general public, even digging into my own psyche. In doing this, I found my thoughts curiously drifting back in time. Way way back to a time I remembered well but I now see had been largely forgotten. It was in this period that I discovered the answer. Now, I see the truth. It was 1996. I was 13. And it was one of the greatest years of my life. It was the year that I had my first girlfriend, the year the Yankees won the first World Series of my lifetime, and the year in which both Broken Arrow and The Rock were released.

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