Avatar 2009

Notes: rather than a pre-publicity column, this thread is for film criticism and review, please don't take offense, Johann.


“Avatar” presented in Real 3-D, directed by James Cameron

Rarely in our lives are we present at a monumental moment in the history of film… I can recall a few: the first time I saw “Citizen Kane;” seeing 70mm “2001: A space odyssey” at the Cinestage in Chicago; watching “Animal Crackers” seated next to Groucho Marx; sitting with holocaust survivors during a screening of “Schindler’s List”… these come to my mind.

As I sat in that theater with my son (reluctantly pulled away from his video games), those moments came back to me… for this film is more than just a great technical movie, this is an outstanding film event, a once in a lifetime event, an event that will change forever the course of all film to follow. When you see “Avatar” in the next few days, and you must, you will be a witness to history. One day you will look back and fondly recall the days around this time just as clearly as you recall events around a disaster or wondrous moment in your life. The term “visually stunning” stands as a cliché next to this superb effort by its author, James Cameron. Nothing compares to it. “Avatar” stands alone as one of the greatest science fiction/fantasy films of all time, an achievement I would not have thought possible after “Lord of the Rings.”

The plot is very simple and nearly a distraction. A soldier goes native and saves indigenous people. However, the presentation of that story is everything. This is one instance where criticism of the film based on storyline alone cannot be a valid criticism, as the eye-feast is so unique, so impressive, and a story unto itself, that critical review based on “rehashed plot” or anything along those lines is just plain ignorance. I defy such criticism as baseless and lacking in sensitivity. That is intellectual masturbation at its most self absorbed.

Cameron has created a new world, never seen, never imagined, with such detail and with such depth, it is the true story to this film event. The 3-D effect only enhances the true quality of that detail. This extra film process assists the director in this particular case, by bringing to the foreground the minutia present in the natural world. The scale, the scope, and fertile image surpass anything on record in terms of staying power. In the past, we had seen CGI flyovers meant to impress us with a brief overview of some alien world. In this instance, Cameron moves his camera through the density of this world with such clumsiness that we are most certainly there… we must be there… it is real, this world, this place, it must be real. It feels so real… we feel it, deep, like the roots of a tree that thrusts its life into the ground.

By the end, we believe in the characters, we believe in the setting, and we cheer for their triumph… not the triumph of plot, but the triumph of spirit, that life is precious and needs protecting, a thought not lost on current endeavors. “Avatar” is currently playing in two versions. I highly recommend the 3-D version. This is Best Picture stuff, folks.

(Author’s note: I purposely did not see any previews, interviews, clips, nor did I read critical reviews or the in-depth Filmwurld opinions on this film prior to this review based on my viewing just now…)

FYI: Rottentomatoes.com "cream of the crop" had a rating of 97; while Metacritic (with its graded reviews) had 82, however, Metacritic gave additional negative weight to the one critical review: Salon.com (remember that intellectual masturbation I mention? Just so...) I read most of the reviews. Across the board, every valid critic in America gave Cameron his due... The New York Times review hit it full bullseye.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/12/18...vatar.html?hpw

Well, if every valid critic liked it, it must be great.

You've drunk the Kool-Aid, bigt-time, I see. Needless to say, I think you've gone overboard, but as you point out, you are not alone. Neither am I, however.

Your claim that the story is really a distraction makes one then ask: why is there a story, if so? What you say proves the quote I gave earlier from TimeOut London is still germane to our discussionn:

Quote:

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Ultimately, Cameron's signature achievement may have been to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the oldest of all Hollywood maxims: all the money in the world is no subsitute for fresh ideas and a solid script.

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However, you think the images disprove that. I find them ultimately kitsch. But I repeat, this is an enjoyable movie, till it goes on too long, and there are lots of parts I like. I'm willing to consider it one of the best or runners-up for the best of the year's American movies, but it's turning into one of the yesr's most overrated ones.

So okay, I'll post this here too, since it is true, I wrote a review.

James Cameron: AVATAR (2009)

Shock and awe: separating the beauty from the hype

Avatar is a fancy word -- an appropriate one, I guess, for a movie that is both awesome and silly. As the movie explains, it's a Hindu term for the incarnation of a god on earth. But actually, just as in the recent movie Surrogates (which Cameron was involved in) and The Matrix, somebody is lying in a room all wired up while he or she is running a virtual second self doing stuff out somewhere. That's what an "avatar" is. In Surrogates the virtual selves are mainly just misbehaving. In Avatar, we're on the planet Pandora, where a private corporation, RDA, whose boss, a pale nasty named for a British department store, Selfridge (Giovani Ribisi), is aiming to extract major quantities of a super-valuable mineral called (I said silly, remember) Unobtainium. There's a bunch of gung-ho racist military earthling types headed by a Robert Duval substitute called Col. Quartich (Stephen Lang), ready to speed up this enterprise by blowing away the "humanoid" locals, which they refer to as "blue monkeys," who're sort of sitting on the Unobtainium, in a lush forest. As in Duncan Jones' rather intriguing little movie Moon (released in June), earthlings in Avatar's world, set over a century in the future, have run out of terrestrial power sources and gone to outer space for new ones.

There's an opposing group of culturally sensitive scientists headed by the ever-tough and soulful Sigourney Weaver (known here as Grace), who know better. They realize that the tall, thin, and yes, blue indigenous people of the region are in fact the Omaticaya clan of the Na'vi. They, led by Grace, have been learning the Na'vi language and making friends with the Omaticaya -- winning the "hearts and minds," you know? They work with the Omaticaya in the form of "avatars" that are tall, blue, skinny people like them. This allows them to "pass," so to speak, and make up for the fact that the air on Pandora is too thin to breathe. Meanwhile Quaritch and his boys are talking "shock and awe" and "fighting terror with terror." Yeah, the references are as simple and schematic as that.

There's a whole lot going on in Cameron's's Avatar -- and at the same time not very much. It takes a while to explain the setup, but after that it's pretty simple what happens.

Grace is very disappointed when Jake Sully arrives on Pandora. He's a Marine corporal sent to replace his dead twin brother, because he's got the right DNA to operate his brother's avatar, but while his brother was a scientist, he's just a jarhead who's been rendered paraplegic in a recent war. Jake's background makes him appeal a lot to Col. Quaritch, but Grace starts to like him when he takes so well to working his avatar that he connects right away with Omaticaya princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and is quickly adopted by her tribe. It's sort of an Emerald Forest-cum-Dancing with Wolves situation -- Jake goes native. And he picks up a good speaking knowledge of Na'vi -- though the locals, due to Sigourney's teaching, tend to speak excellent English -- which might disappoint Professor Frommer of USC, whom Cameron engaged to invent a complete Na'vi language. Pronunciation of this name varies. Some, with a native touch, say "NA'-vee", with accent on the first syllable and a pronounced glottal stop. But most say "nah-VEE," as in Gilbert and Sullivan's immortal lines, "I polished up the handle so carefully, that now I am the ruler of the Queen's Navee." There are speeches in Na'vi (with rather ornate subtitles, as if it were a medieval language), but the whole cultural thing is focused more on what we might call the neuro-spritual element.

Cameron has spent hundreds of millions of dollars and engaged thousands in making this movie, and the fun of it is, for a while anyway, in the elaborate way the details of Pandora have been worked out. Quaritch describes it as worse than hell, and the six-legged dino-horses, hammerhead rhinos, shell-covered snarling tigers, four-armed lemurs, and so on, as well as the little floating jellyfish creatures, are pretty challenging for avatar-Jake his first night in-country. But since he bonds with Neytiri right away (her name even sounds a bit like Tommy/Tommee's Amazon forest girlfriend Kachiri in Emerald Forest), and learns to turn terrifying flying beasts into his docile steeds by connecting the end of his pigtail to their neural tendrils, Jake's avatar life becomes way more exciting than anything he's ever done before, and in a running video journal he keeps, he admits he's begun to forget what the rest of his life was even like before this.

New York Times film critic A.O. Scott exclaimed recently that Avatar is unusual as a blockbuster in that "it doesn't come from a comic book, it doesn't come from a novel, it doesn't come from a line of toys, it comes from James Cameron's imagination." Well, the material here is very much like lots of sci-fi novels (the kind I used to read as a teenager), comic books, lines of toys, and video games, so there's nothing so extraordinary about Cameron's imagination. What's extraordinary is the mise-en-scene, and the way "motion-capture" is used to give the avatar's expressions and movements, and then they're digitalized to incorporate them in these rather sexy tall skinny figures with their rather corny Amerindian outfits and hairdos; and the elaborate flora and fauna of Pandora.

Unfortunately it all ends in a noisy, protracted shoot-out that makes it like the dreadful, but intermittently atmospheric, Terminator: Salvation -- which, lo and behold, co-starred Sam Worthington. Watching this, as the noise and explosions became steadily drearier and more familiar, I realized that Cameron's Titanic, which I loved much more than this, mainly because it had real people and events in it, however romantically magnified, also went on far too long. There are things about Avatar that are very fun and Pandora is gorgeous at first, but the Na'vi, even at their sexiest, still look like plastic-y video game dolls, and those who declare this to be a cinematic spectacle that's wonderful beyond anything since 1915 and D.W. Griffith (David Denby in the same interview) are really falling prey to the hype.


http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/7272/avatarbigo.jpg
JAKE SULLY (SAM WORTHINGTON) AND HIS AVATAR (THE IMAGES ARE GORGEOUS, AT FIRST)

thank you, Chris. Now we can continue our bickering here.

Oh please don't let's call it "bickering." We're discussing the merits of the film.

In addition to the reply I posted on the other four page blog, I'd like to add the following:

From Variety...

Exit polls indicate "Avatar" one of the most positive films of the year

3-D theaters polled higher than 2-D theaters

"Avatar's" one day Friday only (est.) take of 30+ million is highest ever for a December opening

Hollywood reporter:

"Avatar" one day take est. for Friday at 26.7 million which excludes the 3.5 million from the "midnight" take.

L.A.Times film critic Kenneth Turan:

"Think of "Avatar" as "The Jazz Singer" of 3-D filmmaking. Think of it as the most expensive and accomplished Saturday matinee movie ever made. Think of it as the ultimate James Cameron production.

Whatever way you choose to look at it, "Avatar's" shock and awe demand to be seen. You've never experienced anything like it, and neither has anyone else.

Say what you like about writer-director Cameron -- and take it from me, people have -- he has always been a visionary in terms of film technology, as his pioneering computer-generated effects in "The Abyss" and "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" testify. He is not a director you want to underestimate, and with "Avatar's" story of futurist adventures on a moon called Pandora, he restores a sense of wonder to the moviegoing experience that has been missing for far too long.

An extraordinary act of visual imagination, "Avatar" is not the first of the new generation of 3-D films, just as "Jazz Singer" was not the first time people had spoken on screen. But like the Al Jolson vehicle, it's the one that's going to energize audiences about the full potential of this medium.

That's because to see "Avatar" is to feel like you understand filmmaking in three dimensions for the first time. In Cameron's hands, 3-D is not the forced gimmick it's often been, but a way to create an alternate reality and insert us so completely and seamlessly into it that we feel like we've actually been there, not watched it on a screen. If taking pleasure in spectacle and adventure is one of the reasons you go to the movies, this is something you won't want to miss."

Maybe so, maybe not. It's definitely innovative -- but Pandora still looks unreal, and the Na'vi still look like what they are, virtual people rather than real ones. I can't resist quoting again from one of the two Guardian reivews, that "obscure" major London newspaper, by Peter Bradshow:

Quote:

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After a run-up lasting 12 years, James Cameron has taken an almighty flying leap into the third dimension. His first new film for over a decade is in super-sleek new-tech 3D, and it is breathlessly reported to have taken the medium of cinema to the next level. And who knows? When Michelangelo completed his sculpture of David in 1504, he probably thought it made flat paintings look ever so slightly Betamax. Maybe he put a consoling arm round the shoulder of Sandro Botticelli as the two men looked ruefully at Primavera, and murmured caustically: "Little bit eight-track, isn't it darling? A touch Sinclair C5, a smidgen video top-loader – compared to, you know, sculpture?" That extra dimension makes the difference, and a recent village fete in Ilfracombe offered an absolute game-changer of a hoopla-stall in hi-def first-person interactive 3D – or 4D, come to think of it, if you count the time dimension.

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In other words, today's amazing innovation is tomorrow's ho-hum passe' technology. All this is about 3D, which still feels to me like a quaint Fifties idea, with the cardboard glasses people used to make fun of decades ago. They're still basically the same glasses!

You like concluding with a Latin tag; I'll conclude with a French one:

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

P.s. I prefer John Hillcoat's THE ROAD, a film that I find much more moving and significant. And it's pretty innovative too; any good movie is, except when an artist works in a strict style, like Jerry Lewis or Eric Rohmer (come to think of it James Cameron repeats a lot of stuff too, and remember Johan's quote from Fellini, about how he always makes the same picture?). "Innovation" isn't everything. I've been working on my review of THE ROAD, which is here.

I would also say that COLLAPSE is a film that is far more significant and intellectually stimulating. But then, it's not the greatest thing since sliced bread, like AVATAR -- if you drank the Kool-Aid.

P.p.s By the way, despite my dislike of the association with DANCES WITH WOLVES, a go-native movie that I like a lot is THE EMERALD FOREST. That is a long-time favorite of mine. So I have no objection to this kind of theme. But I forget: you're not interested in what AVATAR is ABOUT. You're only interested in the cool visuals.

You tend to assume, and rightly so, that the visuals overwhelmed me. You are right. They did. The three-dimensional view helped significantly. However, as I watched, I realized that no filmmaker had ever tried to create a completely different alien world from scratch with such splendor. There is a point during which most filmmakers move to the studio, mostly due to cost. Cameron threw off those impulses and took us into the heart of this jungle. He made us feel it was worth saving. Therefore, when they attack the big tree, this moment alone becomes a heartrending moment in the film. You might say this was expected, because you and I are jaded by past films whose similar themes have played out on a less grand scale. But for my son, this moment was as painful as me watching Kane slowly reject his beautiful wife in that brief yet poignant montage Welles made to reflect his changing attitude. We are moved by those images. I let go of my learned mind and let Cameron take me away during a "child-like" moment, where I had not seen a thousand movies, studied film, film theory, and film criticism... where I was just a boy, seeing something new and wonderful. That scene tore my heart out, for I discovered I still had one, one not stiffled by cynicism.

Good comment. However, if you think this movie will ever be spoken of in the same breath in future with CITIZEN KANE, you may be disappointed.

Originally posted by cinemabon
From Variety...
Exit polls indicate "Avatar" one of the most positive films of the year

3-D theaters polled higher than 2-D theaters

"Avatar's" one day Friday only (est.) take of 30+ million is highest ever for a December opening
Indeed. AVATAR is doing extremely well at the box office. What I find most impressive is that exit polls show that the film was equally liked by teenagers and senior citizens. And that the weekend take would have been much higher if the Northeast had "normal" weather this weekend.

When you started this thread, cinemabon, you said "this thread is for film criticism and review". But now it's drifted into statistics and hype, like the one you labeled as a "pre-publicity column."

Well, we need an editor. But this is the Web, where those are hard to come by. And that's the fun of it, I suppose.

AVATAR is a fusion of DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990), ALIENS (1986), ROBOCOP (1987), STAR TROOPERS (1997), JURASSIC PARK III (2001), and the novel DRAGON RIDERS OF PERN by Anne McCaffery (1988). In my mind, in order for a movie to be a classic it requres that ALL the elements work together and be of exemplary quality and as such AVATAR, however, does not meet that threshold.

What AVATAR has demonstrated is that live actors may not be necessary in less than a decade as the distinction between animation, special effects, and real human actors appears to be close to being negated. Such a transformation of the medium will have both serious positive and negative consequences of which is an entirely separate discussion.

The problems with the visual imagination and cultural immersion of Cameron's AVATAR is that for whatever reason, perhaps public acceptance and marketing. The hard core sci fi elements have been popularized for the general audience consumption and the true grounding of this movie is overtly human in origin, not extra-terrestial in nature. All the visuals and all the aliens have in their essence not extraterrestial characteristics but obviously earthly derivations. the aliens are humans with added size and different looking features, but are strongly humanoid with strikingly similar native-American cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The alien animals and plants are also just merely variations of earthly insects and animals on earth of which most of us can relate to the rhinos, dragons, jelly fishes, and such.

More serious flaws occur when the lead character supposedly becomes native, but the narrative continues mostly in English, whereas, with DANCE WITH WOLVES, there is a strong commitment to using the native language to promote authenticity and coonsistency with the native culture and nuance. Another technical incongruity is that continued existence or use of machine gun and bullets in the year 2154, which is somwhat incredible to believe that in more than a century, advance military weaponry hadn't advance further along with the more than convenient failure of the the enemy/millitary troopers bullet-proof windshields when the same transports convenient are resistance to such damage when the "good" characters steal one.

The storyline is, in my opinion, important and needs to be considered for any classic, for an overly simplified, overstereotypical characters as found in AVATAR are also imbalance to the rich and fabulous setting in which we find such characters. If this movie was to be a classic, the story must hold up its end of layered sophistication of plot and character as much as the detailed landscape and beauty of this alien world or else this partial "classic" will be easily surpassed by a production that encompasses in its entirety the whole theatrical experience in its surperb totality.

Even though I'm in the minority when it comes to enjoying and embracing Harrison Ford's voice over in BLADERUNNER, the use of the voice over in AVATAR for the most part is so talking down to its audience as if we were children needing spoon fed explanations that personally I felt it distracting and in many instances unnecessary, a lazy device that could have been eliminated and incorporated more authentically in the directing and acting and actual dialogue of the movie instead of having a lot of the background being offered in part as a recording and in part as a director's device to supposedly help the audience in knowing what's going on. But I would hope that the most of the audience members would be more sophisticated than this.

I'm glad to see you didn't drink the Kool-Aid. You make a lot of good points: AVATAR'S lack of impressiveness or originality in some of its key elements, notably the storyline or narrative, the content vs. the look and setting. Make no mistake the visuals and the setting are beautiful and make AVATAR one of the fun mainstream blockbuster watches (and far from the usual run of the genre) for the year, but also far from fully achieved enough to become a classic, as you state.

AVATAR has many predecessors; including those you mention, A MAN CALLED HORSE is another going-native film with powerful content. Many have noted how derivative AVATAR is in content, which is funny since its fans are insisting that there has never been anything remotely like it, that it's a whole new threshold of film-making!

You're also right about how AVATAR is unoriginal and timid in presenting us with such human-like aliens, and its surprisingly limited use of Na'vi by Jake even after he "goes native." This is a paradox given that (as I noted before) Cameron engaged a linguistics professor at USC to create a whole new language (1,000 words) for the film, that he then chose to resort to the rather ridiculous excuse that the Na'vi people have all been taught English by Grace, so Jake can go on speaking English to them most of the time. In THE EMERALD FOREST also Tommy, who becomes Tomee, naturally speaks only the Invisible People's language after he's joined and been raised by them.

The whole thing is that joining a people in surrogate/avatar form is only joining them provisionally, not fully.

Indeed storyline is always of essential importance in any film that has one. If a film has no storyline, okay, we can appreciate it purely for its look or setting.

Do most people prefer BLADE RUNNER'S Director's Cut absence of voiceover? I don't; I like the voiceover, the way it adds to the hardboiled noir feeling. This is a good point, that Jake's "journal" is in terms of the information it explicitly conveys to us, unnecessary. However it's used to show that he is being spied upon, so that Quartrich finds out he's gone native and sets out to stop him. It also makes the audience feel more intimate with Jake, so there's more focus on his personal experience and we're not too swept away by the rich scenic aspects of the movie. In that sense the voiceover has two values to the filmmakers. Nonetheless you are right that what he says is often too obvious for words.

I think that Cameron has made clear in so many words that he has to dumb down his ideas for his intended mass audience.

But I think a worse fault of AVATAR is that it turns into a video-game battle that even one of its greatest admirers in print, David Denby, admits goes on "forever"; that what early in the movie is a situation with rich enough psychological aspects -- I especially sympathize with how Jake jumps into the avatar life to enjoy being (vicariously) a whole, vigorous man again -- degenerates into a Good Guys vs. Bad Guys balls-out shootout.

Didn't that happen in STAR WARS? While A.O. Scott in his Charlie Rose interview about AVATAR talks about how as a youth STAR WARS defined movies for him and took him into a whole new cinematic world, I can remember watching it with my father (as an adult) while he kept dozing off and I couldn't, but sympathized as the battles and tiresome explosions kept going on and on and on. Spectacular visuals again, turned into boredom.

According to Paul M. Sammon writing in "Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner" (1996) in Chapter XIII about what has become one of the most controversial aspects of the movie stated that most people preferred the absence of a voice-over (pp. 291-99) though he was surprised that there was a substantial minority who thought otherwise.

Thanks; I didn't know that. I don't understand it, because the original studio version had the voiceover.

According to Sammon, there were three total recording sessions for Harrison Ford's voice-over which he himself detested. Two prior to the Denver/Dallas sneak previews which released a workprint version of the movie that contained a few lines of voice- over. In part, as a result of a mixed public response, a third voice-over session was undertaken that increased the voice-over narration significantly for the original theatrical release. This voice-over of the original release, that was taken out for the director's cut that was released years later, has been criticized according to Sammon by various people involved with the production and that supposedly "the majority of viewers find BR's narration grating and intrusive."

Hmm. I see.

First of all, I do not like Kool-aid. I do not drink it. When I enter a theater, I do so with a blank slate, or as close to one as I can get. Every film has strengths and weaknesses. When I criticised "The Ten Commandments" as being extremely weak in acting to the point of being pretentious, I was barbecued for my blasphemy. In the case of "Star Wars" Lucas took the plot from a western. It is far from original in any shape or fashion. Nor is the acting even close to Academy level. However, it was nominated for Best Picture of the year. Why?

I'll tell you why.... the damn visuals, that's why!

John Barry's sets, John Dykstra's special effects, and Richard Elund's models were unique and impressive in 70mm and anamorphic Superpanavision. However, thirty years later, Lucas had to go back in and change them digitially to reflect how much things have changed (such as visible lines that followed traveling mattes). When "Lord of Rings" first came out, we were blown away by the hordes of men that flooded onto the battlefield, again a new special effect and impressive visuals. Bingo! Nominated for Best Picture of the Year!

It's not that I drink some mind altering drink or join with some cult, I believe some people have their intellectual blinders on!

73 million at the BO. Third best BO ever in the history of film for this time of year... and like Oscar said... had the snow storm not been so severe... "Avatar" picked up another 16 million in sales yesterday on Monday, not reflected in the totals below.

And where the hell is Johann? You've been trumpeting this horn for weeks. Have you seen this movie or not?

The numbers by "The Numbers News":

"Fox have announced their estimate for the opening weekend of Avatar: $73 million. The daily breakdown is estimated as Friday $27 million, Saturday $25.65 million, Sunday $20.35 million. Despite falling short of the most optimistic predictions, in part thanks to poor weather on the East Coast, the movie ranks high among the best opening weekend for non-franchise movies. It stands to open in third place on that list, behind The Passion of the Christ and December record holder I am Legend, and takes the record for the biggest opening for a wholly original production. IMAX sales are reportedly through the roof, with every single seat sold throughout the weekend. International sales are also extremely strong, with Fox reporting $159.18 million so far for a worldwide total of $232 million."

available also at this link:

http://www.the-numbers.com/interacti...hp?newsID=4690

I haven't seen the movie yet.
But I'm enjoyng all the posts about it...

I don't see what the box office has to do with the merit of the movie or how that plays into this thread that was supposed to be not promotional.

Johann, why not yet?

I've got crowd-a-phobia right now.
Maybe Christmas day?

I know without even seeing AVATAR that it is an awesome film.
The trailers give you that much.
Chris might have a point about it being silly and that the Na'vi are plastic. You can see from miles away that they are CGI.

I think the main thing to remember with this movie is that Cameron said he put everything in it that he's ever wanted to see in a movie.
So we're experiencing James Cameron's vision, end of story.
Either you give it up or you don't.
He's Canadian and he's got real cinematic balls and I give it up for his work. He's not my favorite filmmaker, but he was inspired to become a director by Stanley Kubrick & George Lucas.
I just watched The Terminator this week to "bone up" on Cameron and he's been a visionary for a long time.
His filmography is damn impressive, and his latest film from all I've read is the most impressive of all.

Running time might be an issue. I've made a mental note about it.
I'm in London Ontario for the holidays, and I think I'll have to wait to see it back in T.O. (in 3-D). Not too many awesome theatres in London...

Thanks for commenting anyway. And this is stimulating. It is interesting to compare Cameron to Kubrick and Lucas. He genes from both, but he came out different.

I'm just glad that this kind of movie is being made. By anyone.
Huge scale vision, like Lord of the Rings, which inspired Cameron too- he saw the rendering of Gollum and figured it was time to make his ultimate major epic sci-fi film.
The cost is staggering, but I trust that it all went up on the screen.

Happy Holidays to everyone, before I forget.
It's been another interesting year.
Hope the next decade destroys the last one.
I'm still stunned by what happened from 2000-present.
What an insane ten years...

Keep going to those movies and keep posting!

With eggnog in hand, I salute all members. Cheers.

Thanks, and the same from me to everybody!

Goodbye and good riddance, in ten days, to "the Noughties." I am often thankful that my dear mother passed away after the first of them, missing 9/11 and all the horrors that have followed.

Well said. Indeed, Happy Holidays to my Filmleaf friends. Peace and Love to y'all!

As much as I want to watch AVATAR, I cannot afford to let people texting and walking in and out of the theater to buy junk food and sticky, buttery floors ruin the movie for me. So I will go to a matinee show on a weekday sometime next week or the following week and I'll make sure it is on digital 3D.

Stanley Kubrick missed it all too- just like your mother Chris.
His lack of faith in the human race was fully justified..

I'm studying Robert Anton Wilson's book Prometheus Rising right now (one of several books I'm immersed in) and it's amazing. He's taught me a lot about myself with that book, how the left and right parts of the brain work. I'm even trying to teach myself to write with my left hand, like Aleister Crowley taught his students to do. It's weird how these kinds of "alternative" books land in my lap...Wilson is pro-weed/LSD (consciousness expansion), pro-cinema, pro-Jung & Burroughs & Beethoven...he's a brilliant man, and I only just found out about him 2 months ago.


Oscar, I have the exact same gripes about seeing Avatar.
Just sitting in a theatre waiting for a movie to start is enough to make me flee. All these kids jabbering away about nothing.
As Nobody said in Dead Man: "Talk much. Say nothing."
Texting is just lame.
Twittering is even lamer.
Egomaniacs use that junk, not real people. (just my opinion)
But I guess I could be accused of the same- I text on a website!
Do I have a halo? Nope.

Saint Johann.

Saint Jason.

I began this year wondering about the impact that 3-D would have on the movie industry this year and had initially believed that it would have a great impact and then I was persuaded that 2-D still have a powerful place in movies that could rival 3-D. I saw AVATAR in Wendover, Utah (some may have to look the place up on a map) in 2-D and was inspired and dazzled by the movie minus the content. Whether or not 3-D would put the movie into a rarified place in movie history, I haven't a clue.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Chris Knipp
Saint Johann.

Saint Jason.

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Oh yeah. That's me alright.

*rolls big blunt, uncorks another bottle of Greg Norman's Cabnernet Merlot, scratches bum, yawns, yells at cat*

None of that will keep you from going to heaven.

Merry Christmas to all and to all... well, they are showing four new films Christmas day... anyone going? Last day to qualify...

I'll reserve any comments on the past decade for next week.

Tuesday's numbers? Another 16 million! For Monday and Tuesday alone, that's over 32 million, better than "The Princess and the frog" did on its opening weekend. $109 mill for total domestic gross. Merry Christmas, indeed... butter and all, a good night.

Post Script: Nationwide - IMAX theaters are sold out through Christmas break... sold out, Chris.

Super popularity is a rather fascinating phenomenon. Take 9/11 for example - it was immensely popular in an insidious manner in that it grabbed the world's attention, yet a vast majority wouldn't consider the event the most aesthetic nor positively valuable experience. JAWS (1975), CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), ABYSS (1989) have similar special effects at the time of their release and exciting scenes, yet in some ways JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS might be considered even more creatively connected and consistently superior productions in their entirety.

Cameron's TITANIC (the same director of AVATAR, probably not by coincidence) remains the most popular and yet there are those detractors that might suggest that it was an overly romantic, simplistic movie that depended more on the psychological emotive buttons and special effects than the script and the superior quality of the movie itself that allowed this super popular movie to make history.

Thus AVATAR is an delightful piece of eye candy like a LSD hallucinagenic drug that invites its audience on a Disneyland ride of super visual entertainment.