I’ll accept that Avatar might be mainly spectacle. The trailers didn’t claim much more for it. But only spectacle? Let’s not forget this is one of the most expensive and widely seen “cultural” artefacts in the history of humanity. (Sobering thought eh?) Is it so much to ask that it be able to walk and chew gum at the same time? That it show a bit of “craft” beyond the tech? And the Rollercoaster/Proust argument is just a bullshit excuse: nobody’s asking for Proust here and the movie is not just a rollercoaster: it has dialogue, characters, story - and a director who can’t be bothered to do anything even remotely original or interesting with them. His film is enslaved to the spectacle just as Sixth sense is enslaved to the plot twist.
I don’t think the argument here is that Avatar should have been a deep, mind-warping philosophical entreaty on the sameness doctrine of polyaxiomatic abduction logic, but that it merely attain a degree of rightness with itself and the audience. I think this thread has brought up a number of “loud and dumb” movies which are extremely successful and entertaining to watch no matter what the medium. My main problem with Avatar is that nearly every scene felt like watching the spaceliner assistants walk the hamster cage in 2001. You know the only reason they’ve got five minutes of someone walking around in a circle is to be “cool”. That’s what nearly ever minute of this film was like. Was it cool? Yes, but… after a while, who cares?
Yeah, Godfather III was pretty bad.
You mean like Shrek 2?
Now you’ve gone to far…
bane of my existence…
barryhf - Yes, The Prestige - that’s a great movie. Although I was an idiot and read the Wikipedia synopsis before seeing it after reading about it online somewhere, and kicked myself for doing so.
As for the spectacle thing:
First, yes, the opening shot of Star Wars was, at the time, mind-blowing. The first three Star Wars films were all amazing spectacle - but they were also underpinned by an amazing journey for the characters.
Leave those poor old straw men alone, Mr Coffee! 
I don’t think anyone criticised Avatar for not being intellectual sf - certainly not me. I’ve made it abundantly clear throughout this thread that I enjoy big brainless action blockbusters, sci-fi or not, as much as I enjoy intellectual puzzles of films. Just try to peel the smile off my face as Bruce Willis takes down a fighter jet - a fighter jet! - pretty much by hand in Die Hard 4. Damn that’s fun. And you don’t see me complaining when Jason Statham turns into a giant, Godzilla-sized rubber man in the most insane onscreen fisticuffs for years in Crank 2. No, I’m criticising Avatar because it was just stupid without being much fun, because it didn’t seem to know it was stupid. And hey, the whole plot of Star Wars could have been avoided had that idiot Imperial officer just shot down all escape pods, regardless of life readings (did nobody tell him they were trying to retrieve vital information that could be smuggled out?). But in avatar, there wasn’t even any point in having, y’know, avatars.
Hell, I thoroughly enjoyed Transformers. Now that’s spectacle and not much else. But for the same reason I hated Avatar, I hated Transformers 2 - because Transformers 2, like Avatar, was just a bunch of set-pieces strung together without much you could care too much about. Sure, I enjoyed the big setpieces in Avatar - I’m not denying there was some fun spectacle and action scenes in there - it was just that sitting through the process of getting to them, the setup, and the scenes in between, my own intestine started trying to strangle me; it was like sitting through Vogon poetry.
Maybe not, but that’s why I love DVDs - not only do you not have to sit among strangers crunching and slurping their way through junk, but you can pause to pop to the toilet or check the web while your better half pops to the kitchen for wine. Anyway, if a film doesn’t make you desperately want to get back to it, it ain’t doing a great job.
I watched The Godfather for the first time recently. Frankly, for me they could cut out everything except the James Caan scenes. I guess it must have been revolutionary for the time.
There are plenty of films that deliver spectacle and have a lot more fun with it. I’m sure in 3D Avatar was an amazing spectacle - but in 2D there’s not even much spectacle there. Almost everything in it has been done before - although I fully admit that much of it was done by Cameron himself originally; it’s just that what blew me away when I saw it in Aliens twenty years ago wasn’t as impressive this time around.
Meh. I’m being overly negative just for argument’s sake. Some of it did look pretty cool. I guess in 2D it’s just not as spectacular as many other big dumb films that I’ve enjoyed more.
All the best,
Keith
I know that I’m grinding this axe way too hard, but I guess I just find it worrisome that I couldn’t find the movie more engaging, it’s somehow insulting to feel that cut off from the mainstream audience.
One of the few other big movies I saw at the plex this year was “Sherlock Holmes” and I literally slept through at least half of it. It was like going to the opera. I felt like telling the wife: “wake me when the action’s over and they let Downey act.”
Maybe I’m just getting old, but part of me hopes the young folks are going to get tired of this crap eventually too. We’ve had decades of it. Time to try something really new.
I wonder what James Cameron would say if someone told him the only thing that makes Avatar worth watching is the 3D?
I imagine he has a thick skin for that kind of thing. But maybe if he had tried to make a more well rounded film he would have won a couple of those Oscars instead of just being nominated. Let’s hope that stung him enough to make him try harder next time.He is capable of making a decent film - I loved Aliens - but he’s got to be hungry. No more “King of the World” overconfidence.
By the way, apparently today is Star Wars Day: “May the Fourth be With You”. Does anyone seriously think there’ll ever be an “Avatar Day”?
Agreed!
I’m only happy when I’m able to beat a dead horse with a straw man.
Hm. Let’s not have that conversation.
Have you recently hit your head?
While there is something to be said for the forced focus of a public theater, I think you’re right about this. I can enjoy a good movie pretty much anywhere. In fact, I actually prefer to watch most movies with headphones at my monitor. (There’s a scene in Crimes And Misdemeanors where Woody Allen talks about watching movies on an old movieola… same kinda thing.)*
Funny, I’m being over positive just for argument’s sake. I enjoyed my time in the theater with Avatar, but the experience was fleeting. I frankly can’t even remember any of the characters’ names.
I can’t. I have never enjoyed a film seen on an aeroplane, for example. I have watched several appalling films on flights in the past, only to find out later that the films are recognised works of genius, or a jolly romp, or whatever. Rewatching these films on DVD or television, back on terra firma, has always proved to be an eye-opener because they are never, ever as bad as I remember them being, and some of them even turned out to be good once I abandoned the prejudice of my initial viewing. I blame the aeroplane environment.
I like watching films in my own living room, and in some cinemas, but there are some cinemas that seem to spoil films for me (either that, or I have just been unlucky in the films I have chosen to watch there). Some companions inadvertently and inexplicably ruin films for me as well.
But what I have never understood is why anyone would want to watch a film on one of those little hand-held DVD players. Next to where they keep the trolleys at the door of the supermarket, I once saw a man watching something on one of those (presumably waiting for someone), and I wondered what on earth he could be getting out of it, with the car park noise, the Saturday morning supermarket bustle, the bolshy children, the angry mothers, the fragmentary viewing period, and the constant interruption as people squeezed past him to get a shopping trolley. Definitely not an immersive environment.
One of the myriad manifestations of stress, Mr Coffee.
The burgeoning phenomenon of, Man, in thrall to his masochistic tendencies’.
Do Take care
Dr. Mulality.
Ha, I know. The look on people’s faces when I say that confirms my fear that I am, in fact, an utter philistine. But I still say Al Pacino went from nice-guy-who-doesn’t-want-part-of-the-family-business to heartless Godfather with nary a care for character consistency. I shall now go and duck behind a large transforming robot…
No, but coming out of the second one I felt as though I had. Repeatedly. Against a giant shiny robot bellowing, “Forget the plot - look! Robots! Guns! Arrrmy men!”
Right, next: Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood…
All the best,
Keith
Right. Can I now speak up for Vogon poetry?
H
“Gladiator in Tights”. Looking forward to it. “Prince of Pirates of Persia” should also be great fun.
Y mean like thisere`n:
On a lurgid bee
That mordiously hath bitled out
Its earted jurtles
Into a rancid festering [drowned out by moaning and screaming]
Now the jurpling slayjid agrocrustles
Are slurping hagrilly up the axlegrurts
And living glupules frart and slipulate
Like jowling meated liverslime
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me
With crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or else I shall rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon
See if I don’t.
So, um… at the risk of this already being asked: Why do the Na’vi have hair?
Not a single other creature was depicted as having anything even resembling fur. They pretty much looked like they had amphibian skin. With as much attention as was paid to the idea of the biology of this planet, why hair?
Also, the banshees are depicted as tetrapods and the clearly very closely related toruk is a hexapod.
And nipples. The Na’vi men are shown with nipples.
And the Na’vi have only two eyes. Everything else has four.
Il n’y a aucune uniformité.
Better apparently, though, than that of Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings (of Sussex).
Everything is relative.
That sounds awfully typical of the discourse encountered on a regular basis, in the Cocktail Lounge of the RED LION.
Primer is now in the collection and is still on snort’s “no-watch” list.