Hard News: Holiday Musings
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I just wish a fraction of the painstaking care and ingenuity expended on the FX had gone into the story.
BTW, I'll call bullshit on the idea that "fantasy" (or any other form of genre storytelling) gives you a pass on banal and lazy story-telling.
Quite. I had my hopes up for Avatar, in part because usually reasonably reliable film reviewers seemed surprisingly impressed. Dan Selvin* called it "the finest example of commercial blockbuster entertainment in years but still containing more than enough subtle surprises to satisfy the film nerds."
I can think of a number of superior blockbusters, and what are these surprises to which he was referring?
It was dopey as all get out, with a trite message and unoriginal story - I was prepared for that. But to add to the disappointment, I couldn't even enjoy it much as pure action spectacle. The action set pieces were very average - and Cameron can do good action. It seems all his attention was on perfecting the spectacle from a technical angle, and in terms of the broad creation of the world/environment, such that nothing stood out as a memorable action set piece.
*Mind you, Selvin thought Slumdog Millionaire was the best film of the year. -
oops, I should at least spell the guy's name right: Slevin.
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And because we've gone too long without a crazy-gram from Glenn Beck's planet...
The Junior Senator-elect from the great state of Massachusetts gets a poo facial of more than usual vileness.
Money quote:
I want a chastity belt on this man. I want his every move watched in Washington. I don't trust this guy. This one could end with a dead intern. I'm just saying. It could end with a dead intern.
Brown's offence again the delicate sensibilities of the Tea-Bagger-in-Chief was a lame and tasteless gag in his televised victory speech about his teenage daugters being "available".
Opining that the victims of the Haiti tragedy were just getting some divine payback for their slave ancestors consorting with the Devil to gain their freedom? Not so bad.
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It was dopey as all get out, with a trite message and unoriginal story
The ending, with teh evil colonisers being shipped back to earth seemed like Cameron's attempt to redress his countries disgraceful history toward the indigenous tribes.
Wounded Knee still happened Jimmy, you can't fantasise it away. -
Cameron's attempt to redress his countries disgraceful history toward the indigenous tribes.
James Cameron is Canadian. He has no more to do with the battle at Wounded Knee than you or I.
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And Murdoch is Australian and the film was made in New Zealand. It's a poscolonial fruit salad.
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James Cameron is Canadian.
I take it all back then. Shows how much interest I have in JC.
The shit storytelling, and all the gushing about the "understated ecological message of the film" ....not my cuppatea.
Battle? It was a massacre. -
Canada has more than a few first nations to feel guilty about. We're all colonial.
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the "understated ecological message of the film" ....
understated ??
Where's that quote from, Andin? (Or is that you paraphrasing?)
The messages in Avatar were about as understated as a Lady Gaga music video.
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Where's that quote from, Andin? (Or is that you paraphrasing?)
I saw both Cameron and Weaver talk about the ecological backstory/message in the film in i/v's on tv and say it was subtle(not quoting directly). I guess in relation to the cardboard cutout characters and the emphasis on the technology to them it was.
I'll go back and look Sigourney Weaver's i'v on The Daily Show that's the first place I remember seeing it.
Then I saw Cameron in an i/v voice a similar sentiment on a News clip I cant tell you the channel. -
Its wasn't the Daily Show IV I'll keep looking. My bad.
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China Mieville on CGI effects rotting science-fiction from the inside.
(And he should know, being a science-fiction writer and all. Cross-threading, just like that, look at me go.)
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It seems all his attention was on perfecting the spectacle from a technical angle, and in terms of the broad creation of the world/environment, such that nothing stood out as a memorable action set piece.
Really? I thought the Really Big Fight At The End was brilliantly realised -- or, as our in-house action movie expert put it, "exhilarating". I'm really not sure what recent action spectacle you'd be unfavourably comparing it to.
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I'm really not sure what recent action spectacle you'd be unfavourably comparing it to.
Other than the fact that it was trite, boring and predictable in its outcome, you mean? There is a difference between technically accomplished - brilliantly realised as you put it - and imaginative and memorable. Seeing that there is nothing that sets that scene apart (compositionally, in terms of how it is written), as soon as it gets superseded from a technical standpoint - which ought to happen in about twenty minutes from now - it will be completely forgotten.
The action scenes in Aliens or the two Terminators are worlds apart, there is absolutely no comparison. Seriously, the exoskeleton thing, again? For crying out loud. And incidentally I think it's what ruined the otherwise excellent District 9 too, which turned about halfway into yet another derivative sci-fi action film. They're all mostly copied from Aliens, but that doesn't give Cameron a pass just because he's copying from himself.
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Yeah, Avatar had no emotional impact on me at all. I was mightily impressed with the technical side of it, but everything else left me cold.
I refer everyone to John Rogers' best post ever on Kung Fu Monkey, the moral of which is "Don't write action scenes. Write suspense scenes that require action to resolve."
I felt no suspense at all in the big action scenes in Avatar - Michael Bay could have done them just as well.
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Really? I thought the Really Big Fight At The End was brilliantly realised -- or, as our in-house action movie expert put it, "exhilarating". I'm really not sure what recent action spectacle you'd be unfavourably comparing it to.
Now you're asking the hard questions. But I suspect even having a Really Big Fight At The End is part of the criticism. It should have ended like "The Mission" with our hero bleeding out watching his new found home destroyed by brutal colonial bastards with sad, distant music. Perhaps his girlfriend enslaved, and the scientists all rounded up for some kind of public execution. Only then could the critics feel an emotional connection.
I found it exhilarating, not least for the enormous number of computer game references which may have simply gone right over the top of the head of the ardent moviegoers. The genre gap is almost like a language gap, and I can see that for a lot of people it just seemed like a flat rendering of a foreign poem.
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Ehhhhh.... if it was supposed to be primarily a game-referencing film, that argument would be triffic. I don't think Cameron was aiming for that, though, was he? The man spoke in *his own made-up language* when accepting that first Golden Globe (I seriously cannot get over him doing that). He has Grand Messages About the World to Give Us All, not 'oh cool, that bit of the film has something to do with Resident Evil'.
(Also, now that someone has pointed out the whole Anne-McCaffrey-rip-off thing to me I sort of want to poke him in the eye.)
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(Also, now that someone has pointed out the whole Anne-McCaffrey-rip-off thing to me I sort of want to poke him in the eye.)
I think the scene is too ridicolous to warrant a lawsuit from McCaffrey. This thing has happened what, three or four times in the history of the Na'vi? White fella comes and says look, the dragon is such a badass it will never expect to be attacked from above. Easy! So much so he doesn't even bother to do it on screen.
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My eye-poking desire is centred more generally around the whole 'you ride a dragon and it chooses you and you mate for life' concept, though...
Can I just poke him in the eye anyway? Please?
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I suppose.
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The messages in Avatar were about as understated as a Lady Gaga music video.
Oh farrrk, Steve! I just had a mental flash of James Cameron playing dress up at Lady Gaga's. Not. Remotely. Pretty.
Anyway, sorry for the tangent, but I've got to give the raging egomaniac props for a sweet and generous shout out at the Golden Globes to ex-wife and fellow nominee Kathryn Bigelow.
Just when you written the guy-off as a quantum singularity of self-regard...
My eye-poking desire is centred more generally around the whole 'you ride a dragon and it chooses you and you mate for life' concept, though...
I'm feeling squicked out at the idea that the Na'vi use the same Frech braid for bonding with space horses and hot, sparkly only-on-the-Special-Edition-DVD hair-sex. Really, Jimmy, nobody said to you "Eww-some, dude"?
I think the scene is too ridicolous to warrant a lawsuit from McCaffrey.
And why the hell would McCaffrey want to waste her time and what would inevitably be millions of dollars on it? She's not really my cup of tea, but she's made a lot of money making a lot of people very happy. And if I was 83, I could think of infinitely better things to do than getting in a pissing match with James Cameron.
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I'm feeling squicked out at the idea that the Na'vi use the same Frech braid for bonding with space horses and hot, sparkly only-on-the-Special-Edition-DVD hair-sex.
And by "bonding with", you mean "wrestling to the ground and forcing yourself upon" -- eww-some barely begins to cover it. And then they start doing it with trees.
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Coupla things: the wormy fibres in the French braid were Na'vi nerves I take it? Growing out from their skulls???
And many thanks Giovanni for linking to the China Mieville comments: I love a lot of the man's work, and he's not wrong about CGI. There is sooo much more that can be done with it - and will be - but really real it aint (yet.)
O, anyone else slightly disturbed by the Na'vi head-to-body ratio? I gathered they were supposed to be evolved from the Pandora lemurs, but even so...
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Coupla things: the wormy fibres in the French braid were Na'vi nerves I take it? Growing out from their skulls???
That was one of the interesting bits I thought, if you combine it with the idea that the whole planet is a big bionetwork. Like Sigourney says, they upload and download information at will... not that it makes a blind bit of difference when wartime comes, but hey.
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tEhhhhh.... if it was supposed to be primarily a game-referencing film, that argument would be triffic.
What argument?
I think it was primarily meant to make money off an appreciative audience. That audience is mostly young, has been brought up with virtual reality as a fact rather than a fiction, sees immediately what the film is about, how intoxicating an avatar would be to have, how the boundaries between your real life and your virtual life would blur, how the dis-empowered would love it the most of all. How addictive it can be, how you can fall in love with it, what can be done with it. That mixed with the 'going native' story makes for a different level of connection, a different side of the same coin.
You are not meant to ponder these points. You're meant to directly experience them. If you can't or won't, fine. Don't. Be critical, it's really, really easy. That's why the critics are dominating the threads on it. No one else can explain it to them, it's not something to be explained.
Why would I like Avatar? Why would I like a really good computer action game? Same answer. If you don't like them, it's probably for the same reason you wouldn't like Avatar.
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