Archive for the ‘Film’ Category

Avatar – it Might not Suck!

That new Tarzan flick – what’s it called again?

Avatar – now I remember!

Firstly; I know Hollywood really can’t stand James Cameron – at least the working stiffs in Hollywood can’t stand him. “Cameron – he freaking drowns people” they say.

He brings in the bucks though – the bean- counters and the suits like him.

So he did Piranha 2 which had some cute chicks in bikinis, some pretty good cinematography (really!) It didn’t completely suck even as a grade B monster flick, or was it grade C?

He did Terminator which was an awesome low budget Science Fiction flick, Terminator Two which was a pretty good big budget action flick.  He did Aliens which was pretty cool for a grade A Monster flick, then the Abyss, Titanic and a host of others that made da bucks. If he wanted to film Jesus Christ getting whipped until we all feel sick to our stomachs, the suits would let him.

Oops! Someone else already did that (my-bad!)

OK so he wants to do an animated feature that mixes live action with CGI, but seamlessly. He wants monsters as characters but they have to be utterly inhuman and be computer animated, but based on real actors. He wants to, not only scratch design every artifact shown on the screen, he wants to design a whole new camera technology. He wants to do this in 3D, he wants to film actors and have a computer translate them into his monsters in real time. He wants to design a realistic alien biosphere – realistic aliens and all that junk.

And he want a pony!

The suits say “OK, just bring us the bucks!”

So he makes Avatar which is concocted from every Science Fiction book or movie he’s ever heard of. It’s going to be fresh and original….. Hu- what?

The movie is also the most expensive in history – and it’s a Tarzan flick!

Basic Tarzan movie is – white guy gets left with savages, they freak him out for a while, he starts grooving with them. Since he’s a white guy and we “know” he’s better than they are he ultimately out-savages the savages. This is a trope and it’s been done by everyone from ERB (Tarzan – John Carter and all those Pellucidar books.) it’s been done as a Western (Dances With Wolves.) It’s been done in several Japanese novels and   movies (Shogun and “The Bushido Blade”come to mind.)  It’;s been done in countless comic books etc. Basically it’s been done to death.

It was even done n a little movie called “My tasty Frenchman” – but the protagonist gets eaten in the end.

So let’s see if I understand this, Cameron just made a movie that’s the biggest worn out plot evah! The only one that even comes close is “boy meets girl.” And guess what sports fans! Plot for Avatar is;
White guy becomes doe-eyed ten foot tall blue monster on distant planet that humans want to rape. White guy finds that he likes being blue-furry critter, a lot! (big surprise his life sucked anyway.)  He meets naked blue furry, doe-eyed SHE monster and they do the nasty under a rainbow waterfall or something. He finds out that humans are going to strip-mine the whole place and build the biggest WalMArt ever, white guy decides blue furry monsters are people too, even if they don’t have WalMarts and big honking guns. White guy fights back for what it right and just. Only he uses bows and arrows while the humans use their big honking guns.

White guy gets his blue furry ass blown off and wakes up in his human body again. Gets docked for the time he went native.

OK; perhaps Cameron can pull this thing off, the film LOOKS fabulous, what I’ve seen of it (which is darn little.)

I mean, why is it 3D? I have never seen a 3D movie that was really enhanced by the process. Basically, I can’t tell if stuff is 3D unless it’s right in front of me anyway. My eyes are too close together and so are yours. Why do you think marksmen close one of their eyes?

Also, there are a buttload of out of work Science fiction writers out there who would kill to get involved in a flick with a tenth of the budget of Avatar. Can we get some real writers for a change? I’ve seen Hamlet done with no set and almost no props, it was still Hamlet. You can spend a billion dollars to dress up a pig – get ghost writers and do a big  book deal, and it’s still Sarah Pailn.

Avatar might be a very enjoyable story, but so far all they publicists have been saying is “ooooh look at the pretty lights!”

It might not suck, but so far it’s hard to tell! I  hope it doesn’t suck. Then again, I’m too poor to see it in the theaters anyway. Sorry James!

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