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Thread: James Cameron's Avatar

  1. #31
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    What "showy new technologies" am I crazy about?
    I asked cinemabon why he didn't want to review 2012.
    Maybe he meant another movie?
    "Set the controls for the heart of the Sun" - Pink Floyd

  2. #32
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    Wasn't "Bad Lieutenant" an old Harvey Keitel movie from like seventeen years ago? I remember there was controversy about the rating at the time because the director's cut was supposed to be "X" rated. Is there a new cut? Keitel supposed worked out for weeks to prep for the nude scenes in this movie.
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  3. #33
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    Yes, but Chris is referring to the remake made this year, by Werner Herzog, starring Nicolas Cage.
    "Set the controls for the heart of the Sun" - Pink Floyd

  4. #34
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    Bad lieutenants I have known.

    How loyal I am to Johann (though we disagree on the merits of Roland Emmerich's new movie): a couple posts back I said my ist of current iflms to see was

    COCO BEFORE CHANEL (not even new now, but I still want to catch it)
    BAD LIEUTENANT
    RED CLIFF (John Woo)
    WILLILAM KUNTSLER: DISTURBING THE PEACE
    THE ROAD (John Hilcoat)
    WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE (Spike Jonze)

    But instead I have seen only 2012. I think I've missed WILLIAM KUNTSLER: DISTURBING THE PEACE. I still want to see the others. I am pretty much an admirer of the Abel Ferrara cult film BAD LIEUTENANT, but I was referring to the new Werner Herzog one, with Johann might be interested in, if he thinks he's the greatest living director. It is currently in limited release in US cinemas.

    Fun with made-up languages.

    Interesting new item I just saw about AVATAR. A LA TIMES story tells how a USC linguistics professor named Paul R. Frommer. was hired to create a whole language for the Na'vi tribe aliens in Cameron's movie. Frommer spent four years designing the Na'vi language, which the actors have found very difficult but have attacked with remarkable dedication. They had to read a page of it as part of their auditions. The professor is so into it he hopes it will catch on and people will want to learn it. He goes around campus talking to himself in the invented language and inventing poetry in it. He just wishes he knew somebody else who knew how to speak it.

    What other movies can you name that have made up languages in them -- really good, convincing ones, with a consistent structure and vocabulary?

    I think John Boorman's THE EMERALD FOREST has one that the "Invisitle People" who adopt Tommy, AKA Tomme', speak is such a language, but I am not sure.

    Frommer mentions Klingon in STAR TREK, which he says was also designed by a linguistics expert and "is very, very well put together."

    There is Tolkien's Elfish, but that was not invented for a movie.

    The most important invented language is Esperanto. There have been studies of invented languaes, such as Arika Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language.

    There is a branch of the Army that is trained exclusively to participate in war games, and some of their members are trained to speak fluently in Esperanto, to play the role of "border crossers" or "prisoners" who speak a foreign language that the soldiers participating in the exercise couldn't possibly know have to get an interpreter to communicate with. Esperanto was specifically designed to be easy to learn (at least for Europeans), but Na'vi wasn't really devisted with such kindly intentions -- only to appeal to Cameron, and to sound like an alien language but be made up of sounds humans can get their vocal cords and tongues around.
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 11-29-2009 at 01:26 AM.

  5. #35
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    WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE is goofy and eccentric. I really liked it. If you want to watch it, go NOW since it is almost out of theaters. I will watch COCO BEFORE CHANEL tonight (The last French film I watched was PARIS, the fourth ensemble film by Cedric Kaplisch). ANTICHRIST on Friday!

  6. #36
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    Navajo Native American's revived their "dead" language during World War II to speak in code to one another and pass along sensitive information. The language so baffled German and Japanese experts that its code remains unbroken to this very day. The 2002 film, "Windtalkers" with Nick Cage and Chris Slater covered this topic. Also, Charles Bronson appeared briefly as a Navajo "Indian" in the 1959 film, "Never so few."

    Wiki source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker
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  7. #37
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    Real language as code, yes. Different thing, but interesting. I've heard that in Vietnam American soldiers used their version of Vietnamese to baffle the enemy. It was so off the Vietnamese couldn't understand it.

    I noticed that the trailer for AVATAR had nary a ord of N'vi in it.

  8. #38
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    WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE is goofy and eccentric. I really liked it. If you want to watch it, go NOW since it is almost out of theaters. I will watch COCO BEFORE CHANEL tonight (The last French film I watched was PARIS, the fourth ensemble film by Cedric Kaplisch). ANTICHRIST on Friday!
    PARIS was okay, but not very memorable. I'm still triyng to get to see COCO and WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. I will heed your warning on the latter. I had failed to notice where it was showing in Berkeley. Did you see the big piece on ANTICHRIST in FILM COMMENT?

  9. #39
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    4 stars from Roger Ebert for AVATAR.

    He said it reminded him of Star Wars and that James Cameron knows how to spend 300 million dollars wisely.
    Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts on it.
    "Set the controls for the heart of the Sun" - Pink Floyd

  10. #40
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    Originally posted by Johann
    4 stars from Roger Ebert for AVATAR.

    He said it reminded him of Star Wars and that James Cameron knows how to spend 300 million dollars wisely.
    Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts on it.
    I watched it yesterday in London, in BFI IMAX.

    It's an ingenious film in spite of its flaws. James Cameron yet again proves he's the King of Hollywood that can create a masterpiece even based on a mediocre story. "Avatar" is visually the best thing ever made for the big screen, but it's also a highly emotional picture and a great fun to watch. And all despite the fact that it has been flattened and intellectually adjusted to the average cinema-goer. The Academy Awards are gonna be a no-brainer this year. It's certain as death and taxes.

    Planning to write a review during the weekend...
    Borys 'michuk' Musielak

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  11. #41
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    michuk,

    I don't quite buy the idea that a movie can be dumbed down ("flattened and adjusted" are euphemisms for that) and based on a mediocre story and still be "Visually the best thing every made for the big screen."

  12. #42
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    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 is 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.



    JAKE SULLY (SAM WORTHINGTON) AND HIS AVATAR (THE IMAGES ARE GORGEOUS, AT FIRST)
    Last edited by Chris Knipp; 08-06-2014 at 03:19 PM.

  13. #43
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    "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."

    Don't you think it's a bit judgemental? The fact that it did not impress you does not make everyone else amazed by the film hype-followers unable to make their own judgements.

    I'm usually very critical about film, but Avatar just got me... I sat in the chair and just admired the whole new world Cameron created. And no, the Na'vis did not look plastic to me. To be frank I think they "acted" much better than the human characters :>
    Borys 'michuk' Musielak

    Filmaster.com -- film buffs community, social movie recommendations

  14. #44
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    My reservations about this entertaining and beautiful if sometimes vacuous movie have nothing to do with others' falling prey to the enormous hype surrounding it.

    The effects of the hype I observe independently. When The New Yorker's David Denby's suggests on Charlie Rose that this is the most impressive cinema spectacle since D.W.Griffith's BIRTH OF A NATION, he clearly shows he's fully under the spell. (Watch the interview on http://www.charlierose.com/ and see what you think.) And you've got to acknowledge that the hype has been and continues to be enormous. The VARIETY review of AVATAR begins by calling the director "The King of the World." Where's the critical detachment? McCarthy barely touches on the movies' flaws.

    The movie opened a day earlier in your part of the world and the Guardian reviewers, for one, were underwhelmed. Peter Bradshaw:
    After the extremes of hype and backlash attending Cameron's solemn "unveiling" of a taster-trailer earlier this year, the film itself emerges as a watchable and entertaining if uncompromisingly ridiculous sci-fi spectacular, unable to decide if it wants to kick the ass of every alien in sight or get all eco-touchy-feely with them. It's a Dubya movie trying its darnedest to get with the new Obama programme.

  15. #45
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    I still think you should have posted as a review and not tagged your review at the end of this long discussion. However, that said... I'll try to respond:

    You focused on the story, whereas the rest of America's critics focused on the visuals. This story is a work of art, and you Chris of all people should recognize that. No, instead you chose to intellectualize on the story. This is a spectacle. Stories are lost in spectacles. I don't believe the issue here is that the acting is poor. In fact, the acting is top rate. The real issue with SOME critics, and they are few, is that the story lacks depth. Cameron chose to focus on the creation rather than the telling. I cannot fault him for that. A. O. Scott did not review this film for the Times. He merely commented on it. Bully for him. Dargis wrote the review and I could not more agree with her assessment, as well as Ebert's.

    You chose to mention visual in passing by stating theres this creature and that... blah blah. Only you failed to mention the wonder that people when they first step through to this world. This was especially true with the audience that saw in 3-D, which I believe makes a world of difference in the presentation. As other critics pointed out, Cameron does not "hit you over the head" in this film with 3-D, it adds to the splendor of the setting... the lush setting... the setting that is the focus of the film, filled with such detail that it is difficult if not impossible to decribe. This is so new and so complex that it defies description.

    I don't understand... did you, as a visual graphic artist, somehow miss out on the visuals... or did you see the film in 2-D and chose to ignore them? Please explain.
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