A Year of Movies #5: Avatar (or a $150 million, 2.5 hour CGI remake of Dances with Wolves)

I will say from the start that I liked Avatar. The Title of this post boils down the movie to its essence, but it is still a fun film. That said, the main draw to this movie is the CGI. I had the fortune to see this movie in 3D and it was even more spectacular.

James Cameron is not known for his small indie budget films and this one certainly doesn't disappoint. Within the first five minutes he probably spends the $4million budget of "The Hurt Locker" just on an animator to make the grass flow naturally. Ten years in the making though, I wouldn't expect much less.

The film follows a paraplegic Marine who just happens to have a twin brother that was accidentally killed a week before he was to fly off to Pandora to help a group of scientists convince the native people of that planet to abandon their way of life so that our country can wreak havoc over the land and mine the planet for a futuristic fuel source.

The problem begins when Jake Sully, the wounded Marine, finds a new life in his avatar (remotely controlled body that looks like the native people) and begins to buck the system, and slowly becomes more of a Na'vi than human. That sounds strangely similar to the plot of "Dances with Wolves" don't you think?

Without spoiling anything the whole disagreement between the native Pandorans, the Na'vi, and the not-so-welcome invaders who wish to rape the planet of it's resources for their own profit, "Us", comes to a head in a battle royale that stretches the limits of what CGI can produce.

This movie is a technical marvel. It is glorious to look at, but that is about where it ends. It is a fund movie and the performances are strong, but the characters are a little too polarizing. The bad guy is hardcore evil. He is so bloodthirsty he probably substitutes his bloody marys with actual blood instead of tomato juice. The "corporate" character is a greedy slimy little worm who has an equally non-existent backbone. Siqourney Weever is the typical tree hugging scientist that will lay down in front of a bulldozer to stop the destruction of a natural habitat. The problem being that the bull dozer has now issue with running over her patchouli scented butt.

All that to say that the only person who really goes through any sort of change in the film is the main character. Everyone else pretty much stays the same throughout, and that is fine really because we are ultimately watching a film about how a man finds redemption in a new world, and how he becomes "complete" again.

The only other issue I take up against Avatar is the preachiness that Cameron puts in the subtext of this movie. The fact that Jake's body is neglected because he spends more and more time in the Avatar machine is a good example. It is pretty obvious and while it doesn't take you out of the movie experience, it is (to me) needless exposition on Cameron's opinion of what online gamers do to themselves all for the sake of their "other world experience".

Being a recovering World of Warcraft addict I can see what he is saying, but is this film about MMOs and the general lack of exercise that our country gets or is it about a re-imagining of history where this time the native americans kill the settlers before they can take their land and spread their "white man diseases"?

Overall this movie was a lot of fun to watch...once or twice. I really don't see this movie as being one that I would watch over and over like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" or even Cameron's earlier work "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" when TNT has an all day marathon of it.

A Year of Movies #4: Julie & Julia

There isn't really a lot to say about this movie. It was made by Nora Ephron who directed movies like "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail" so you should have a good idea of what to expect from the outset. The movie follows Julia Child as she begins her life as one of the foremost experts of French cuisine. It follows her as she starts to learn about cooking as well as the French culture and then, with the help of a few friends, begins to write the cookbook that is one of the best selling cookbooks ever.

The Julie in the title is Julie Powell. She lives in Queens, NYC and in 2002 decides to start a blog that will document her quest to cook every recipe in Julia Child's cookbook (over 500 of them) in one year. The obvious happens with this half of the story: the husband who initially supports the project begins to feel neglected by his wife because of it, they fight, they get back together, all is love.

There are very few "twists" in this movie for obvious reasons, but there are a few things at the end of the movie that are atypical for this type of film. Overall it is a cute film, but it has about as much cinematic relevance as the rest of Nora Ephron's film credits will show.

It is, however, a great movie to watch with your wife if she is tired of watching movies like The Seven Samurai or Star Wars with you.

A Year of Movies #3: The Hurt Locker

It is always nice to see a director like Kathryn Bigelow (director of such commercial garbage as K-19: The Widow Maker, and Point Break) make a little indie film, and completely blow the doors off a movie like Avatar. Her film was made on a small budget, especially compared to the budget of Avatar, and she managed to make a movie that was as thrilling and important to the cinematic experience as any modern war film I have seen in years.

The film centers around a squad of soldiers in Iraq that are assigned to disarming bombs. The film packs a lot of action into the 2 hour running time, but the primary focus of the film is the type of person that it takes to risk their life day after day to disarm bombs. as you might have guessed, there is one soldier in particular that the film focuses on, and similar to Patrick Swayze's role in Point Break, William James is a bit of a cowboy. He bucks the system and really pushes the limits of how much a soldier can be an individual in an organization that stresses teamwork. This starts to wear on his team, and you start to see tensions flare.

What struck me most about this movie is that Bigelow, being a woman, perfectly captures a very masculine tone that is just under the surface of every man on earth. She captures the moments of guys teasing each other, somewhat harshly but all in good fun, that without any forewarning turns into a very tense, but quiet battle of two people that have very different ideas of what teamwork is. Every guy has been there. They are teasing each other and suddenly one person takes it a little too far and what was just boys being rough turns into an all out fight.

The other point that Bigelow makes that I appreciated was that in her film not every citizen in Iraq was a terrorist in waiting. In Peter Berg's 2007 movie "The Kingdom" every person was secretly a terrorist waiting to strike. In Bigelow's film you had the soldiers looking at everyone suspiciously, especially the ones standing around watching as the soldiers disarmed bombs, but she didn't have scenes of random people going home and opening up a trunk to reveal a cache of rocket launchers and C4. The people that were terrorists were labeled as such from the first second of their screen time and everyone else, for the audience at least, was just a citizen that had the bad luck of being born in that country at this time.

All told, this movie is intense. There are gun fights and explosions, and yes several people die, but what the movie is really about is what does it take to be the type of soldier that disarms bombs every day. How does that person deal with waking up every day and preparing themselves to die? And ultimately, once you have lived that life, can you go back to a life where the highlight may be going to Kroger to pick up milk for the family?

Those are some tough questions.

A Year of Movies #2: The FINAL Final Destination...dear God please let it be the last...

The Final Destination...

Okay, so you know the plot. Some person gets a glimpse of a terrible accident before it happens, and he and some others avoid death only for it to find intricate ways to kill them. It is essentially a gore filled R-rated version of the Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons we saw as kids. Only when Wile E. Coyote gets shot off on an Acme rocket and slams into a wall, in this movie the person explodes in a bloody mess.... Just going to let that sink in for a minute.

That said, this is the 4th movie in the franchise and it is by far the worst. The elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions that kill everyone are so horribly designed that they might as well have Zeus ride down from the skies and zap everyone dead. The acting is also, understandably, terrible.

The sad thing is that the first film in this series was really creepy. Mostly because the "bad guy" that was after the survivors of an airplane crash wasn't a monster like Freddy Kreuger or Jason, it was death itself. The very act of the "killer" being a personification of death made it quite creepy. You can't bargain from death. You can't run from death. You can cheat death (as these movies show), but only for a while. And usually when death finds you, the manner in which you die this time is far worse than it would have been had you not cheated it the first time. The point is, death can't be stopped. That alone gave the first movie this eerie feeling. Not IF these people would die, but WHEN and HOW. By the third film, and definitely with the last, they essentially turned it into a, usually less than 90 minute, movie that sets people up to be killed off one by one in interesting ways.

Sadly, the last film didn't even get that right. There are some movies that I watch just to see how awful they can be, this ranks up there with some of the best of the worst. Even with that I can't say watch it. The reason you watch bad movies is to make fun of them ala Mystery Science Theater 3000, but when a movie is this bad you can't even make fun of it.

A Year of Movies #1: Up in the Air...

Ryan Bingham is a corporate downsizing expert whose cherished life on the road is threatened just as he is on the cusp of reaching ten million frequent flyer miles and just after he's met the frequent-traveler woman of his dreams.

That is the synopsis according to imdb.com. It's a pretty accurate one too. I will tell you up front that Up in the Air is not nearly as fresh as the marketing leads you to believe. It is, however, one of the best performances of George Clooney's career. He plays the lead part with a quiet tone that you usually don't see from him. He still has the swagger of someone who is happy with their life, but none of the arrogance that Danny Ocean or Jack Foley display.

I say that this movie isn't anything fresh because it is a plot that you have seen before. A person (man or woman) who makes no time for love puts all they have into work. Work becomes their lover. Then somewhere along the way they meet someone who challenges that belief system and slowly but surely they begin to take a detour from their "old" way of life and bravely journey into a new era. Then near the end one of two things happens: they live happily ever after or they get their heart stomped flatter than a pancake. The latter of the two options is usually resolved by the person taking what they have learned from the other (now very disliked) person applies it to their lives. I won't tell you which side Up in the Air falls on, but it really doesn't matter.

The thing to watch in this movie are the performances. The three main characters (Clooney, Vera Farmiga as the pretty woman who is just as dedicated to work as Clooney, and newcomer Anna Kendrick as the protege to Clooney who challenges his way of life) all give great performances. They come at the roles in a very natural way that feels real as opposed to how some actors try to just emote the right way. Clooney though is very good at that kind of subtle introspection that makes you think he is really working over something in his mind. Just watch Ocean's Eleven and you'll know what I mean.

The other notable aspect of this movie is the photography. It was done in a very natural, if slightly unsaturated way that makes the movie look more like real life. Especially the way the director Jason Reitman takes the camera from fluid moves when Clooney's life is focused to the Soderbergh style of handheld shooting near the end. It is all designed to inform you that there are changes on all levels going on with Clooney, and we should take note.

All said, this movie was fun to watch. It wasn't the best of last year, and in my mind certainly doesn't deserve the Oscar nod for best picture or best director, but what do I know.

A Year of Movies...

I should say first and foremost that I am going to be catching up for a few weeks while I post my backlog of movies I have seen this year. I hope to keep this up to date as I watch movies throughout the year. We'll see if that happens. A few guidelines that I am going with for this section of the blog:

1. I will not post about movies I catch on tv unless they are ones I have never seen before. If I run across Ghostbusters halfway through I won't post that. I would hope that all of you out there have seen it before. However, if I see something that I haven't seen before, then that will be posted.

2. Netflix is your friend. A lot of the movies I see now are through Netflix since the movie theatre is getting so expensive and there are very few movies worth going to see in the cinema.

3. I will post everything that I see that is new to me. That may be a movie that is 50 years old, but if I have never seen it before, it's on the list. I like to consider myself to be somewhat of a film snob in that I will not go see any movie with Sandra Bullock, or Sarah Jessica Parker in theatre. I am not, typically, a Romantic Comedy or Horror fan. That said, I do watch a lot of movies and many of them are trash. And just because I am not a fan of Rom-Coms or Horror doesn't mean I don't watch them from time to time just for the heck of it. The point of this blog is to encourage transparency and promote a dialogue of film and encourage the love of film. That said, you always have the option, and are encouraged, to disagree with me. Who knows, you might change my mind.

COMING SOON.......................

The first Movie Marathon will be posted. This will be the marathon for March. It will be a simple marathon to ease us all into the idea of watching a movie a week.

I welcome any suggestions on what upcoming marathons should be.

My Favorite Movie Ever.......one of them at least.

If you know me at all (I pity you first and foremost) you will know that I am the kind of person that doesn’t have one favorite movie… I have 6 or 7 of them.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ranks up there with the top ones. There may be 2 movies I like more than this one. I am telling you this because I want part of this blog to be about you that don’t know me to get to know me, and those that do know me to get to know me better. So I will try to post a new movie every week that will be one that I strongly recommend you watch because I will come back to these movies again and again. You don’t have to like them, but you should experience them.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (or Eternal Sunshine as I will call it from now on for the sake of typing the whole thing out over an over) is my favorite romantic comedy. I love it because it is a realistic romantic comedy that shows that love does not resolve itself at the end of one hour and thirty minutes to have Kate Hudson and Matthew Mcblahblahblah realize that even though they have lied to each other the whole movie that their contempt for one another is actually some deep seeded love.

What Eternal Sunshine tries to do is show you that love is really about accepting the other’s faults as much as it is the good parts of someone.

The plot is pretty simple…but really out there. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet have a pretty unstable relationship. He is very mopey and insecure, and she is equally insecure but masks that insecurity by acting out and coloring her hair odd colors like neon blue. Soon Joel (Jim Carrey) finds that Clementine (Kate Winslet) has undergone a procedure to “erase” Joel from her mind. Joel does the same out of anger, but as he has his memories of her erased he soon realizes that he loves her and that the good far outweighs the bad.

Don’t think for a second that I have spoiled the movie for you. I haven’t. You figure all of this out in the first 15 minutes or so. What comes after is one of the most beautifully shot movies I have ever seen.

I hope you enjoy it, and let me know what you thought of it once you are done.

A Quick Guide To the Various Content of This Blog…

So I have a few different areas that I would like to blog about. They are as follows in order of importance:

1. The movie that is scheduled for that weeks marathon. Each week I will post a movie review of the movie that we were scheduled to see during the previous week. You will know by the last week of the month what the marathon will be for the next month. There are some marathons that I will take longer to go through so some may for two months (or six weeks).

I STRONGLY SUGGEST THAT YOU GET NETFLIX OR A BLOCKBUSTER CARD! This will help you get the movies that will be talking about. I use Netflix so I can almost promise you that there won’t be a movie that we discuss that can’t be found on Netflix. Netflix is great because the rental plans start at $8/month (I think) and you never get charged a late fee. If you are like me and keep a movie 1 or 2 days over then you have just payed for a month of Netflix already. The other great thing about Netflix is that you get unlimited rentals for one monthly fee.

2. Movies that I see during the week (either rented or at the theatre). I can’t promise that all of these movies will be readily available to everyone. I am blessed to be living in Nashville where we have one of the best independent movie theatres in the country. The Belcourt Theatre is a great place to see movies that are either too independent for a major chain to pick up or some sort of Midnight Movie cult classic like The Evil Dead 2 or Robocop.

3. Any movie that I see the trailer for and it interests me (at the moment one is G.I Joe for no reason other than it triggering a childhood memory slideshow in my head). These have not been released yet but I will always provide links to the trailers so others can see what I am talking about too.

4. Movies that I am reminded of. Every now and then I will think of a movie that I haven’t seen lately and I will post a review of it. These are different than movies I have seen recently as I will not post much about the movie. I am more-so posting about it because I want to get the name of it out there into the ether.

5. Lastly, movie news that I find interesting. I DO NOT spread movie gossip about celebrities or filmmakers that are acting crazy or cheating on whomever. This is not US Weekly. I will only post movie news from reputable sources that I think is interesting. For example: what the next Coen Brothers movie will be, or when Wes Anderson’s next movie is being released. I don’t want gossip. We have enough of that crap in our world already.

One last note, I encourage you to post reviews of your own as well. Just remember Rule #5 and keep it holy.

That is all. I hope you post often and enjoy. Thanks.

A Little Bit About THIS Movie Blog…

So I want to set up a few ground rules so that we can all enjoy this blog.

1. I don’t want anyone to be disrespectful to another person. I know that there are some people out there that actually liked the Legally Blonde movies but we don’t have to call them names. They already know they are dumb.

2. Nobody is wrong! We all have opinions about movies and sometimes we can get pretty heated up about them. Just remember that we are all different and that we all see movies through the prism of our own life experiences. For example: My uncle, one of my closest friends, doesn’t like any Quentin Tarantino movie. I love them all (except Death Proof with was borderline coma inducing). We have decided to not discuss Tarantino movies because we don’t agree and never will. Neither of us if wrong, we just see things differently.

3. NO F********* PROFANITY…unless necessary. I am not going to get all puritanical on you guys, but I am of the opinion that profanity is not needed in a movie critique. It is the equivalent of someone saying “I didn’t get it.” or “That movie sucked! Why? Because it did” when they watch a movie they don’t care for. Profanity can be used in quotes or when needed to get a point across, but not because you disagree with someone else.

4. Enjoy the blog and participate. The only way that you will get anything out of this blog is if you put something into it. I know that not all of you will watch every movie every week. There may be some weeks where I miss one. The point is that we try to participate.

5. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES POST A MOVIE SPOILER! The only way I can see this rule being broken and me not falling into a white hot cauldron of my own rage is if you are posting about a spoiler that is widely known (i.e. that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father, and that Leia and Luke are sister/brother). That is forgivable because if you are reading this site, then you probably have already seen Star Wars more times than you are old. Otherwise, no spoilers please.

Aside from those rules, this will be an open, uncensored forum for people to come together to share their love of movies and make friends that feel the same way.

I hope you enjoy.