Avatar 2009

[cinemabon]

Notes: rather than a pre-publicity column, this thread is for film criticism and review, please don't take offense, Johann.


“Avatar” presented in Real 3-D, directed by James Cameron

Rarely in our lives are we present at a monumental moment in the history of film… I can recall a few: the first time I saw “Citizen Kane;” seeing 70mm “2001: A space odyssey” at the Cinestage in Chicago; watching “Animal Crackers” seated next to Groucho Marx; sitting with holocaust survivors during a screening of “Schindler’s List”… these come to my mind.

As I sat in that theater with my son (reluctantly pulled away from his video games), those moments came back to me… for this film is more than just a great technical movie, this is an outstanding film event, a once in a lifetime event, an event that will change forever the course of all film to follow. When you see “Avatar” in the next few days, and you must, you will be a witness to history. One day you will look back and fondly recall the days around this time just as clearly as you recall events around a disaster or wondrous moment in your life. The term “visually stunning” stands as a cliché next to this superb effort by its author, James Cameron. Nothing compares to it. “Avatar” stands alone as one of the greatest science fiction/fantasy films of all time, an achievement I would not have thought possible after “Lord of the Rings.”

The plot is very simple and nearly a distraction. A soldier goes native and saves indigenous people. However, the presentation of that story is everything. This is one instance where criticism of the film based on storyline alone cannot be a valid criticism, as the eye-feast is so unique, so impressive, and a story unto itself, that critical review based on “rehashed plot” or anything along those lines is just plain ignorance. I defy such criticism as baseless and lacking in sensitivity. That is intellectual masturbation at its most self absorbed.

Cameron has created a new world, never seen, never imagined, with such detail and with such depth, it is the true story to this film event. The 3-D effect only enhances the true quality of that detail. This extra film process assists the director in this particular case, by bringing to the foreground the minutia present in the natural world. The scale, the scope, and fertile image surpass anything on record in terms of staying power. In the past, we had seen CGI flyovers meant to impress us with a brief overview of some alien world. In this instance, Cameron moves his camera through the density of this world with such clumsiness that we are most certainly there… we must be there… it is real, this world, this place, it must be real. It feels so real… we feel it, deep, like the roots of a tree that thrusts its life into the ground.

By the end, we believe in the characters, we believe in the setting, and we cheer for their triumph… not the triumph of plot, but the triumph of spirit, that life is precious and needs protecting, a thought not lost on current endeavors. “Avatar” is currently playing in two versions. I highly recommend the 3-D version. This is Best Picture stuff, folks.

(Author’s note: I purposely did not see any previews, interviews, clips, nor did I read critical reviews or the in-depth Filmwurld opinions on this film prior to this review based on my viewing just now…)

FYI: Rottentomatoes.com "cream of the crop" had a rating of 97; while Metacritic (with its graded reviews) had 82, however, Metacritic gave additional negative weight to the one critical review: Salon.com (remember that intellectual masturbation I mention? Just so...) I read most of the reviews. Across the board, every valid critic in America gave Cameron his due... The New York Times review hit it full bullseye.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/movies/18avatar.html?hpw

[Chris Knipp]

Well, if every valid critic liked it, it must be great.

You've drunk the Kool-Aid, bigt-time, I see. Needless to say, I think you've gone overboard, but as you point out, you are not alone. Neither am I, however.

Your claim that the story is really a distraction makes one then ask: why is there a story, if so? What you say proves the quote I gave earlier from TimeOut London is still germane to our discussionn:
Ultimately, Cameron's signature achievement may have been to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the oldest of all Hollywood maxims: all the money in the world is no subsitute for fresh ideas and a solid script. However, you think the images disprove that. I find them ultimately kitsch. But I repeat, this is an enjoyable movie, till it goes on too long, and there are lots of parts I like. I'm willing to consider it one of the best or runners-up for the best of the year's American movies, but it's turning into one of the yesr's most overrated ones.

[Chris Knipp]

So okay, I'll post this here too, since it is true, I wrote a review.

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, 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.


http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/7272/avatarbigo.jpg
JAKE SULLY (SAM WORTHINGTON) AND HIS AVATAR (THE IMAGES ARE GORGEOUS, AT FIRST)

[cinemabon]

thank you, Chris. Now we can continue our bickering here.

[Chris Knipp]

Oh please don't let's call it "bickering." We're discussing the merits of the film.

[cinemabon]

In addition to the reply I posted on the other four page blog, I'd like to add the following:

From Variety...

Exit polls indicate "Avatar" one of the most positive films of the year

3-D theaters polled higher than 2-D theaters

"Avatar's" one day Friday only (est.) take of 30+ million is highest ever for a December opening

Hollywood reporter:

"Avatar" one day take est. for Friday at 26.7 million which excludes the 3.5 million from the "midnight" take.

L.A.Times film critic Kenneth Turan:

"Think of "Avatar" as "The Jazz Singer" of 3-D filmmaking. Think of it as the most expensive and accomplished Saturday matinee movie ever made. Think of it as the ultimate James Cameron production.

Whatever way you choose to look at it, "Avatar's" shock and awe demand to be seen. You've never experienced anything like it, and neither has anyone else.

Say what you like about writer-director Cameron -- and take it from me, people have -- he has always been a visionary in terms of film technology, as his pioneering computer-generated effects in "The Abyss" and "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" testify. He is not a director you want to underestimate, and with "Avatar's" story of futurist adventures on a moon called Pandora, he restores a sense of wonder to the moviegoing experience that has been missing for far too long.

An extraordinary act of visual imagination, "Avatar" is not the first of the new generation of 3-D films, just as "Jazz Singer" was not the first time people had spoken on screen. But like the Al Jolson vehicle, it's the one that's going to energize audiences about the full potential of this medium.

That's because to see "Avatar" is to feel like you understand filmmaking in three dimensions for the first time. In Cameron's hands, 3-D is not the forced gimmick it's often been, but a way to create an alternate reality and insert us so completely and seamlessly into it that we feel like we've actually been there, not watched it on a screen. If taking pleasure in spectacle and adventure is one of the reasons you go to the movies, this is something you won't want to miss."

[Chris Knipp]

Maybe so, maybe not. It's definitely innovative -- but Pandora still looks unreal, and the Na'vi still look like what they are, virtual people rather than real ones. I can't resist quoting again from one of the two Guardian reivews, that "obscure" major London newspaper, by Peter Bradshow:
After a run-up lasting 12 years, James Cameron has taken an almighty flying leap into the third dimension. His first new film for over a decade is in super-sleek new-tech 3D, and it is breathlessly reported to have taken the medium of cinema to the next level. And who knows? When Michelangelo completed his sculpture of David in 1504, he probably thought it made flat paintings look ever so slightly Betamax. Maybe he put a consoling arm round the shoulder of Sandro Botticelli as the two men looked ruefully at Primavera, and murmured caustically: "Little bit eight-track, isn't it darling? A touch Sinclair C5, a smidgen video top-loader – compared to, you know, sculpture?" That extra dimension makes the difference, and a recent village fete in Ilfracombe offered an absolute game-changer of a hoopla-stall in hi-def first-person interactive 3D – or 4D, come to think of it, if you count the time dimension. In other words, today's amazing innovation is tomorrow's ho-hum passe' technology. All this is about 3D, which still feels to me like a quaint Fifties idea, with the cardboard glasses people used to make fun of decades ago. They're still basically the same glasses!

You like concluding with a Latin tag; I'll conclude with a French one:

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

[Chris Knipp]

P.s. I prefer John Hillcoat's THE ROAD, a film that I find much more moving and significant. And it's pretty innovative too; any good movie is, except when an artist works in a strict style, like Jerry Lewis or Eric Rohmer (come to think of it James Cameron repeats a lot of stuff too, and remember Johan's quote from Fellini, about how he always makes the same picture?). "Innovation" isn't everything. I've been working on my review of THE ROAD, which is here. (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2713)

I would also say that COLLAPSE (http://www.filmwurld.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2710) is a film that is far more significant and intellectually stimulating. But then, it's not the greatest thing since sliced bread, like AVATAR -- if you drank the Kool-Aid.

[Chris Knipp]

P.p.s By the way, despite my dislike of the association with DANCES WITH WOLVES, a go-native movie that I like a lot is THE EMERALD FOREST. That is a long-time favorite of mine. So I have no objection to this kind of theme. But I forget: you're not interested in what AVATAR is ABOUT. You're only interested in the cool visuals.

[cinemabon]

You tend to assume, and rightly so, that the visuals overwhelmed me. You are right. They did. The three-dimensional view helped significantly. However, as I watched, I realized that no filmmaker had ever tried to create a completely different alien world from scratch with such splendor. There is a point during which most filmmakers move to the studio, mostly due to cost. Cameron threw off those impulses and took us into the heart of this jungle. He made us feel it was worth saving. Therefore, when they attack the big tree, this moment alone becomes a heartrending moment in the film. You might say this was expected, because you and I are jaded by past films whose similar themes have played out on a less grand scale. But for my son, this moment was as painful as me watching Kane slowly reject his beautiful wife in that brief yet poignant montage Welles made to reflect his changing attitude. We are moved by those images. I let go of my learned mind and let Cameron take me away during a "child-like" moment, where I had not seen a thousand movies, studied film, film theory, and film criticism... where I was just a boy, seeing something new and wonderful. That scene tore my heart out, for I discovered I still had one, one not stiffled by cynicism.

[Chris Knipp]

Good comment. However, if you think this movie will ever be spoken of in the same breath in future with CITIZEN KANE, you may be disappointed.

[oscar jubis]

Originally posted by cinemabon
From Variety...
Exit polls indicate "Avatar" one of the most positive films of the year

3-D theaters polled higher than 2-D theaters

"Avatar's" one day Friday only (est.) take of 30+ million is highest ever for a December opening
Indeed. AVATAR is doing extremely well at the box office. What I find most impressive is that exit polls show that the film was equally liked by teenagers and senior citizens. And that the weekend take would have been much higher if the Northeast had "normal" weather this weekend.

[Chris Knipp]

When you started this thread, cinemabon, you said "this thread is for film criticism and review". But now it's drifted into statistics and hype, like the one you labeled as a "pre-publicity column."

Well, we need an editor. But this is the Web, where those are hard to come by. And that's the fun of it, I suppose.

[tabuno]

AVATAR is a fusion of DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990), ALIENS (1986), ROBOCOP (1987), STAR TROOPERS (1997), JURASSIC PARK III (2001), and the novel DRAGON RIDERS OF PERN by Anne McCaffery (1988). In my mind, in order for a movie to be a classic it requres that ALL the elements work together and be of exemplary quality and as such AVATAR, however, does not meet that threshold.

What AVATAR has demonstrated is that live actors may not be necessary in less than a decade as the distinction between animation, special effects, and real human actors appears to be close to being negated. Such a transformation of the medium will have both serious positive and negative consequences of which is an entirely separate discussion.

The problems with the visual imagination and cultural immersion of Cameron's AVATAR is that for whatever reason, perhaps public acceptance and marketing. The hard core sci fi elements have been popularized for the general audience consumption and the true grounding of this movie is overtly human in origin, not extra-terrestial in nature. All the visuals and all the aliens have in their essence not extraterrestial characteristics but obviously earthly derivations. the aliens are humans with added size and different looking features, but are strongly humanoid with strikingly similar native-American cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The alien animals and plants are also just merely variations of earthly insects and animals on earth of which most of us can relate to the rhinos, dragons, jelly fishes, and such.

More serious flaws occur when the lead character supposedly becomes native, but the narrative continues mostly in English, whereas, with DANCE WITH WOLVES, there is a strong commitment to using the native language to promote authenticity and coonsistency with the native culture and nuance. Another technical incongruity is that continued existence or use of machine gun and bullets in the year 2154, which is somwhat incredible to believe that in more than a century, advance military weaponry hadn't advance further along with the more than convenient failure of the the enemy/millitary troopers bullet-proof windshields when the same transports convenient are resistance to such damage when the "good" characters steal one.

The storyline is, in my opinion, important and needs to be considered for any classic, for an overly simplified, overstereotypical characters as found in AVATAR are also imbalance to the rich and fabulous setting in which we find such characters. If this movie was to be a classic, the story must hold up its end of layered sophistication of plot and character as much as the detailed landscape and beauty of this alien world or else this partial "classic" will be easily surpassed by a production that encompasses in its entirety the whole theatrical experience in its surperb totality.

[tabuno]

Even though I'm in the minority when it comes to enjoying and embracing Harrison Ford's voice over in BLADERUNNER, the use of the voice over in AVATAR for the most part is so talking down to its audience as if we were children needing spoon fed explanations that personally I felt it distracting and in many instances unnecessary, a lazy device that could have been eliminated and incorporated more authentically in the directing and acting and actual dialogue of the movie instead of having a lot of the background being offered in part as a recording and in part as a director's device to supposedly help the audience in knowing what's going on. But I would hope that the most of the audience members would be more sophisticated than this.

[Chris Knipp]

I'm glad to see you didn't drink the Kool-Aid. You make a lot of good points: AVATAR'S lack of impressiveness or originality in some of its key elements, notably the storyline or narrative, the content vs. the look and setting. Make no mistake the visuals and the setting are beautiful and make AVATAR one of the fun mainstream blockbuster watches (and far from the usual run of the genre) for the year, but also far from fully achieved enough to become a classic, as you state.

AVATAR has many predecessors; including those you mention, A MAN CALLED HORSE is another going-native film with powerful content. Many have noted how derivative AVATAR is in content, which is funny since its fans are insisting that there has never been anything remotely like it, that it's a whole new threshold of film-making!

You're also right about how AVATAR is unoriginal and timid in presenting us with such human-like aliens, and its surprisingly limited use of Na'vi by Jake even after he "goes native." This is a paradox given that (as I noted before) Cameron engaged a linguistics professor at USC to create a whole new language (1,000 words) for the film, that he then chose to resort to the rather ridiculous excuse that the Na'vi people have all been taught English by Grace, so Jake can go on speaking English to them most of the time. In THE EMERALD FOREST also Tommy, who becomes Tomee, naturally speaks only the Invisible People's language after he's joined and been raised by them.

The whole thing is that joining a people in surrogate/avatar form is only joining them provisionally, not fully.

Indeed storyline is always of essential importance in any film that has one. If a film has no storyline, okay, we can appreciate it purely for its look or setting.

[Chris Knipp]

Do most people prefer BLADE RUNNER'S Director's Cut absence of voiceover? I don't; I like the voiceover, the way it adds to the hardboiled noir feeling. This is a good point, that Jake's "journal" is in terms of the information it explicitly conveys to us, unnecessary. However it's used to show that he is being spied upon, so that Quartrich finds out he's gone native and sets out to stop him. It also makes the audience feel more intimate with Jake, so there's more focus on his personal experience and we're not too swept away by the rich scenic aspects of the movie. In that sense the voiceover has two values to the filmmakers. Nonetheless you are right that what he says is often too obvious for words.

I think that Cameron has made clear in so many words that he has to dumb down his ideas for his intended mass audience.

But I think a worse fault of AVATAR is that it turns into a video-game battle that even one of its greatest admirers in print, David Denby, admits goes on "forever"; that what early in the movie is a situation with rich enough psychological aspects -- I especially sympathize with how Jake jumps into the avatar life to enjoy being (vicariously) a whole, vigorous man again -- degenerates into a Good Guys vs. Bad Guys balls-out shootout.

Didn't that happen in STAR WARS? While A.O. Scott in his Charlie Rose interview about AVATAR talks about how as a youth STAR WARS defined movies for him and took him into a whole new cinematic world, I can remember watching it with my father (as an adult) while he kept dozing off and I couldn't, but sympathized as the battles and tiresome explosions kept going on and on and on. Spectacular visuals again, turned into boredom.

[tabuno]

According to Paul M. Sammon writing in "Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner" (1996) in Chapter XIII about what has become one of the most controversial aspects of the movie stated that most people preferred the absence of a voice-over (pp. 291-99) though he was surprised that there was a substantial minority who thought otherwise.

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks; I didn't know that. I don't understand it, because the original studio version had the voiceover.

[tabuno]

According to Sammon, there were three total recording sessions for Harrison Ford's voice-over which he himself detested. Two prior to the Denver/Dallas sneak previews which released a workprint version of the movie that contained a few lines of voice- over. In part, as a result of a mixed public response, a third voice-over session was undertaken that increased the voice-over narration significantly for the original theatrical release. This voice-over of the original release, that was taken out for the director's cut that was released years later, has been criticized according to Sammon by various people involved with the production and that supposedly "the majority of viewers find BR's narration grating and intrusive."

[Chris Knipp]

Hmm. I see.

[cinemabon]

First of all, I do not like Kool-aid. I do not drink it. When I enter a theater, I do so with a blank slate, or as close to one as I can get. Every film has strengths and weaknesses. When I criticised "The Ten Commandments" as being extremely weak in acting to the point of being pretentious, I was barbecued for my blasphemy. In the case of "Star Wars" Lucas took the plot from a western. It is far from original in any shape or fashion. Nor is the acting even close to Academy level. However, it was nominated for Best Picture of the year. Why?

I'll tell you why.... the damn visuals, that's why!

John Barry's sets, John Dykstra's special effects, and Richard Elund's models were unique and impressive in 70mm and anamorphic Superpanavision. However, thirty years later, Lucas had to go back in and change them digitially to reflect how much things have changed (such as visible lines that followed traveling mattes). When "Lord of Rings" first came out, we were blown away by the hordes of men that flooded onto the battlefield, again a new special effect and impressive visuals. Bingo! Nominated for Best Picture of the Year!

It's not that I drink some mind altering drink or join with some cult, I believe some people have their intellectual blinders on!

[cinemabon]

73 million at the BO. Third best BO ever in the history of film for this time of year... and like Oscar said... had the snow storm not been so severe... "Avatar" picked up another 16 million in sales yesterday on Monday, not reflected in the totals below.

And where the hell is Johann? You've been trumpeting this horn for weeks. Have you seen this movie or not?

The numbers by "The Numbers News":

"Fox have announced their estimate for the opening weekend of Avatar: $73 million. The daily breakdown is estimated as Friday $27 million, Saturday $25.65 million, Sunday $20.35 million. Despite falling short of the most optimistic predictions, in part thanks to poor weather on the East Coast, the movie ranks high among the best opening weekend for non-franchise movies. It stands to open in third place on that list, behind The Passion of the Christ and December record holder I am Legend, and takes the record for the biggest opening for a wholly original production. IMAX sales are reportedly through the roof, with every single seat sold throughout the weekend. International sales are also extremely strong, with Fox reporting $159.18 million so far for a worldwide total of $232 million."

available also at this link:

http://www.the-numbers.com/interactive/newsStory.php?newsID=4690

[Johann]

I haven't seen the movie yet.
But I'm enjoyng all the posts about it...

[Chris Knipp]

I don't see what the box office has to do with the merit of the movie or how that plays into this thread that was supposed to be not promotional.

Johann, why not yet?

[Johann]

I've got crowd-a-phobia right now.
Maybe Christmas day?

[Johann]

I know without even seeing AVATAR that it is an awesome film.
The trailers give you that much.
Chris might have a point about it being silly and that the Na'vi are plastic. You can see from miles away that they are CGI.

I think the main thing to remember with this movie is that Cameron said he put everything in it that he's ever wanted to see in a movie.
So we're experiencing James Cameron's vision, end of story.
Either you give it up or you don't.
He's Canadian and he's got real cinematic balls and I give it up for his work. He's not my favorite filmmaker, but he was inspired to become a director by Stanley Kubrick & George Lucas.
I just watched The Terminator this week to "bone up" on Cameron and he's been a visionary for a long time.
His filmography is damn impressive, and his latest film from all I've read is the most impressive of all.

Running time might be an issue. I've made a mental note about it.
I'm in London Ontario for the holidays, and I think I'll have to wait to see it back in T.O. (in 3-D). Not too many awesome theatres in London...

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks for commenting anyway. And this is stimulating. It is interesting to compare Cameron to Kubrick and Lucas. He genes from both, but he came out different.

[Johann]

I'm just glad that this kind of movie is being made. By anyone.
Huge scale vision, like Lord of the Rings, which inspired Cameron too- he saw the rendering of Gollum and figured it was time to make his ultimate major epic sci-fi film.
The cost is staggering, but I trust that it all went up on the screen.

[Johann]

Happy Holidays to everyone, before I forget.
It's been another interesting year.
Hope the next decade destroys the last one.
I'm still stunned by what happened from 2000-present.
What an insane ten years...

Keep going to those movies and keep posting!

With eggnog in hand, I salute all members. Cheers.

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks, and the same from me to everybody!

Goodbye and good riddance, in ten days, to "the Noughties." I am often thankful that my dear mother passed away after the first of them, missing 9/11 and all the horrors that have followed.

[oscar jubis]

Well said. Indeed, Happy Holidays to my Filmleaf friends. Peace and Love to y'all!

As much as I want to watch AVATAR, I cannot afford to let people texting and walking in and out of the theater to buy junk food and sticky, buttery floors ruin the movie for me. So I will go to a matinee show on a weekday sometime next week or the following week and I'll make sure it is on digital 3D.

[Johann]

Stanley Kubrick missed it all too- just like your mother Chris.
His lack of faith in the human race was fully justified..

I'm studying Robert Anton Wilson's book Prometheus Rising right now (one of several books I'm immersed in) and it's amazing. He's taught me a lot about myself with that book, how the left and right parts of the brain work. I'm even trying to teach myself to write with my left hand, like Aleister Crowley taught his students to do. It's weird how these kinds of "alternative" books land in my lap...Wilson is pro-weed/LSD (consciousness expansion), pro-cinema, pro-Jung & Burroughs & Beethoven...he's a brilliant man, and I only just found out about him 2 months ago.


Oscar, I have the exact same gripes about seeing Avatar.
Just sitting in a theatre waiting for a movie to start is enough to make me flee. All these kids jabbering away about nothing.
As Nobody said in Dead Man: "Talk much. Say nothing."
Texting is just lame.
Twittering is even lamer.
Egomaniacs use that junk, not real people. (just my opinion)
But I guess I could be accused of the same- I text on a website!
Do I have a halo? Nope.

[Chris Knipp]

Saint Johann.

Saint Jason.

[tabuno]

I began this year wondering about the impact that 3-D would have on the movie industry this year and had initially believed that it would have a great impact and then I was persuaded that 2-D still have a powerful place in movies that could rival 3-D. I saw AVATAR in Wendover, Utah (some may have to look the place up on a map) in 2-D and was inspired and dazzled by the movie minus the content. Whether or not 3-D would put the movie into a rarified place in movie history, I haven't a clue.

[Johann]

Originally posted by Chris Knipp
Saint Johann.

Saint Jason.


Oh yeah. That's me alright.

*rolls big blunt, uncorks another bottle of Greg Norman's Cabnernet Merlot, scratches bum, yawns, yells at cat*

[Chris Knipp]

None of that will keep you from going to heaven.

[cinemabon]

Merry Christmas to all and to all... well, they are showing four new films Christmas day... anyone going? Last day to qualify...

I'll reserve any comments on the past decade for next week.

Tuesday's numbers? Another 16 million! For Monday and Tuesday alone, that's over 32 million, better than "The Princess and the frog" did on its opening weekend. $109 mill for total domestic gross. Merry Christmas, indeed... butter and all, a good night.

[cinemabon]

Post Script: Nationwide - IMAX theaters are sold out through Christmas break... sold out, Chris.

[tabuno]

Super popularity is a rather fascinating phenomenon. Take 9/11 for example - it was immensely popular in an insidious manner in that it grabbed the world's attention, yet a vast majority wouldn't consider the event the most aesthetic nor positively valuable experience. JAWS (1975), CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), ABYSS (1989) have similar special effects at the time of their release and exciting scenes, yet in some ways JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS might be considered even more creatively connected and consistently superior productions in their entirety.

Cameron's TITANIC (the same director of AVATAR, probably not by coincidence) remains the most popular and yet there are those detractors that might suggest that it was an overly romantic, simplistic movie that depended more on the psychological emotive buttons and special effects than the script and the superior quality of the movie itself that allowed this super popular movie to make history.

Thus AVATAR is an delightful piece of eye candy like a LSD hallucinagenic drug that invites its audience on a Disneyland ride of super visual entertainment.

[Chris Knipp]

Post Script: Nationwide - IMAX theaters are sold out through Christmas break... sold out, Chris. I love being mentioned, though I don't know why exactly I deserve this honor. I have never said anything about the cost, popularity or box office of AVATAR. But going by savvy discussions of the production cost (http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2009/12/how-much-did-avatar-really-cost.html) of the movie, it may be about $280 million for production plus marketing costs, and if the current take worldwide is $381 million as is currently estimated on Box Office Mojo, (http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=avatar.htm) , then the movie is already turning a profit.

But as tabuno diplomatically puts it,
Super popularity is a rather fascinating phenomenon. So is super profitability. Both are phenomena separate from artistic merit or narrative interest..

[oscar jubis]

I think it is remarkable in this era of rapid technological innovation, when there are so many choices of media available, that millions of people of all ages agree that this movie is worth leaving their homes to go to a public space to experience it. This is the rare movie that immediately becomes part of the culture of a nation. It is a phenomenon.

[cinemabon]

The fourth biggest movie in box office history... I'd say he made his money back... and, knows something about what the film-going audience wants - entertainment, pure and simple. What's your dream?

[tabuno]

The fourth biggest movie in box office history... I'd say he made his money back... and, knows something about what the film-going audience wants - entertainment, pure and simple. What's your dream?

I completely agree with your statement and Cameron like Spielberg's JAWS (1975) has demonstrated that he is attuned to what the film-going audience wants - entertainment, pure and simple. Nevertheless, this is a populist movie that fails to really adhere to the hard core nature of sci fi aliens - AVATAR is more like the soap opera STAR WARS (1977) updated with special effects that provided more dazzle and flash over the substance and inherent essence of sci fi much like Richard Gere's character of Billy Flynn in CHICAGO (2002).

[cinemabon]

Avatar is now the second biggest box office film of all time (surpassed only by Cameron's other film, "Titanic") with 1.2 billion in dollars in world wide sales, and for a very good reason. It is a very beautiful to see in its current presentation.

I said in the first post that I felt, despite the criticism, this would be a phenomenon. If you haven't seen it in 3-D (my 86 year old mother saw it Saturday in 3-D IMAX), then I highly recommend it. The DVD will most certainly not be the same and this may be your only opportunity to be part of this experience for a very long time, as no other studios or directors will be eager to spend three years and 300 million dollars on a similar project.

[tabuno]

When Titanic came out in in 1997 people oohed and ahhed at the dazzling special effects and the nearly perpendicular death falls of passengers, this was a huge epic love story pasted on the background of a huge dizzying set and for a while the audience was transported much like an extended Disneyland ride into a world outside of themselves and away from their current lives. Today in 2010, America and now the world are again enthralled in another visual entertainment ride transported far away for a couple of hours away from the terrible worries and anxieties of reality by the dazzling special effects and another love story and American-based fairytale in outerspace. Nevertheless, both Titanic and Avatar are just that - amazing visual entertainment rides that allow us to turn off our minds and absorb the visual images and forget our real world for a few moments, hope for a better future with images of perhaps experiencing some moral uplift in ourselves. Whether or not the audience afterwards has really been intellectually stimulated with a truly layered and qualitatively substantive script with any depth is another matter. Yes, both Titanic and Avatar were phemonena but so were the Wall Street Crash and executive bonuses, UFO Balloon ride, and the Palin Vice Presidential campaign, and the death of Princess Diana or the television coverage of OJ Simpson's trial.

[Johann]

I'll be seeing this within the next two weeks in 3-D in Toronto. (Hopefully in IMAX too).
I'll be good and ready for it by then.
I know I'll like.

[cinemabon]

I just finished the article on "Avatar" in the January issue of ASC magazine "American Cinematographer." Cameron used the experience from his two previous films, "Ghosts of the abyss" and "Aliens of the deep" to perfect his use of 3-D camera work. One might even assert he made those films as practice for "Avatar." By the time he hired cinematographer Mauro Fiore, Cameron knew more about photographing with the process than his photographer (Fiore: "This entire production was extraordinary, the most extraordinary experience of my career so far...If you’re going to delve into new technology and a new world, Jim Cameron is the guy to do it with.") The article on the production goes into the technical problems Cameron faced on the set, which were monumental. Also revealed is the question of a sequel. Evidently Cameron wrote another script simultaneously with "Avatar" called "Battle Angel" which he plans now as a possible sequel to "Avatar" although its plot has nothin in common with the other film (Although he said in an article recently he plans two sequels to "Avatar" where the characters explore the nearby moon).

Cameron is nominated this year for a DGA Award (presented Saturday January 30)

While "Book of Eli" took Friday night (11 million to Avatar's 10), Avatar's domestic gross just passed 460 million which will make Cameron's films the two highest grossing box films of all time.

Here is further reading on "Avatar"..............

ACS article: http://www.theasc.com/magazine_dynamic/January2010/Avatar/page1.php

Avatar on Wikepedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film)

Directors Guild of America: http://www.dga.org/index2.php3?chg=

[tabuno]

We started last year with Chris and I debating the direction of 3-D films, with Chris getting me to pull back on my belief that 3-D films were becoming a permanent and important phenomenon. Whether or not 3-D films will become an essential part of the film landscape, particularly when it comes to non-action movies, remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the technology seems to always to be improving and money seems to help a lot with some exceptions (WATERWORLD). Yet, behind all the feverish work on technology and the glorification of fantastic scenery, it seems that American's lust for something new and supposedly exciting remains ever present. Video games, virtual reality (movies such as THE CELL and BRAINSTORM) will always point to more and other movies that will succeed in surpassing these marvels of visual delight leaving in its wake and fading memory of has been movies. AVATAR is likely not to be exempt from this category, particularly as this movie is so heavily dependent on them as opposed to the more endaring TITANIC storyline and ending scene and musical score. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY for all the time that has passed retains is power and authenticity regardless of all the fancy new special effects technology. Here there was a commitment to authentic realism in a sci fi back drop that was layered in scientific realism without 3-D or other visual delights except the ending - where the musical score really supported the LSD experience.

[Chris Knipp]

I am not impressed by 3D; I don't think it adds as much as its supporters think. But whatever my personal opinion may be, anyway AVATAR clearly provides 3D/iMax viewers with a tunning experience, and that may be the main thing the film has to offer, given it's conventional plot. But a friend pointed out to me that what's exciting about AVATAR visually is more due to other technologies, often explained in promotional videos for the film -- all kinds of new special cameras and processing methods that permitted the blending of CGI, motion-captuire figures, and directly filmed people to be integrated into a single scene seamlessly and convincingly. And also the beauty of some of the images, like the glowing blue in the one i used with my review, and the invented flora and fauna of the land of the Na'vi.

[Johann]

Is everybody watching the Golden Globes tonight?

James Cameron said in an interview that Avatar is meant to be seen as a 3-D experience.
I must see it the way it is meant to be seen. Can't wait to get back to Toronto to check it out.
Will definitely post about it after I see it. (finally)

[Johann]

Notes: rather than a pre-publicity column, this thread is for film criticism and review, please don't take offense, Johann.http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/movies/18avatar.html?hpw


No offense taken.
But incidentally, why is pre-publicity a bad thing?
I find it curious that you initially were anti-Avatar and then you swung 180 degrees on it.
You were sniping before you saw a scene! Then you became it's biggest champion here...
That's funny.

I'm looking very forward to seeing it/experiencing it.

[Chris Knipp]

It's obvious to anybody, even someone as little interested in the AVATAR phenom as I, that the movie was planned as 3D from the start, and that's one of the reasons its completion was delayed, till improvements in the techniques of making 3D movies came through. However, as I just mentioned, AVATAR is really interesting for other techniques used in its making, used to integrate motion-capture, CGI, and directo film of humans seamlessly into a film, and enabling actors to see the artificial creatures they were interacting with in the scene as they shot it.

But after all, great silent films were made, and the advent of color did not mean better movies, just different ones. Maybe I'd like 3D if it didn't look like my grandmother's stereopticon pictures that you held up to your eyes and if you didn't have to wear those silly Fifties cardboard specs that darken the images and pinch your nose when you watch.

[cinemabon]

James Cameron deservedly took Best Director at the Golden Globes (and humbly). I did do a 180 on this film because it really impressed me as something quite unique when I saw the 3D presentation.

I called my mother today, as I do every Sunday. Last week, she went to an IMAX theater in Florida and saw Avatar. She was seven when they installed the first sound projectors in our home town. The year was 1929. I wondered what she would say about a 3D film at her age. This is what she said to me...

"I don't understand why everyone doesn't go to see this... because in all of my life, I don't believe I have ever seen anything as beautiful as that."

Thanks, mom.

[cinemabon]

Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press, for the honor... Best Picture of the year




ps please see previous post

[tabuno]

TITANIC and now AVATAR. If I recall correctly, both won major film awards without the actors or actresses involved. With virtual reality on the horizon, like robots and automation, the day of the non-acting movie has become a reality where the best director is a technician whose primary responsiblity is to get all the special effects and computer animated scenes composed with digital lighting and sound. Good-by Jeff Bridges, good-by Meryl Streep, good-by Sandra Bullock, and Robert Downey Jr., you need not apply for future films. The era of inhumanity of movie-making has arrived and I'm not talking aliens.

[cinemabon]

You can't be serious. You sound like a commentator on Fox.

[tabuno]

With the Best Picture Golden Globes AVATAR, my question is "Why do we need real actors?" With animation getting closer and closer to realism, the difference between real actors and animated characters seems to be getting nearer and nearer to zero. If AVATAR can win the hearts and minds of millions and international awards without serious acting and an excellent script than what's next?

[Chris Knipp]

With the Best Picture Golden Globes AVATAR, my question is "Why do we need real actors?" With animation getting closer and closer to realism, the difference between real actors and animated characters seems to be getting nearer and nearer to zero. If AVATAR can win the hearts and minds of millions and international awards without serious acting and an excellent script than what's next? What's next? Robotic audiences? Oh, forgot...we already have those.

[tabuno]

What's next? Robotic audiences? Oh, forgot...we already have those.

There's a scene in the original LEGALLY BLONDE (2001) where there is a class is without any real students and only voice recorders sit on individual student desks and a voice recorder of the teacher's voice sitting on the lecturn while Reese Witherspoon sits by herself looking around.

[cinemabon]

Issue #120 of Cinefex magazine arrived with over half of the issue dedicated to the production of "Avatar" (2009) with production stills and art for submission to the Motion Picture Academy. (A collector's item if I ever saw one) The full page shots which include close-ups are about as real as you can get with all the art, emphasis on art, thrown in. Right up your alley, Chris. Someone has got to be coming out with a book called "The Art of Avatar" or my name isn't Buffalo Bill Cody... and it's not!

[tabuno]

Nobody, no real actor was even nominated a Screen Actor's Guild Award, a possible sign of things to come. Do we still need even good actors in "great" movies anymore? Maybe we can just as with models, nowadays, just do a little paint brush on magazine covers, we can perhaps just do the same for less stellar actors and use computer assistance to create a whole new movie acting experience that will gain the acceptance of best actor or actress award nominations. What's the difference? Is it human or not?

[Chris Knipp]

Many actors were honored at the SAG Awards, though some big ones were passed up, including the UP IN THE AIR and HURT LOCKER casts.

[cinemabon]

"Avatar" is poised to become the biggest BO champ of all time. Its domestic gross is just eight million shy of Titantic. (Since the film took 36 million this weekend alone, I think they can make that much during the week). I believe we can officially say that the gamble James Cameron made on this film has paid off. Kudos to you, Mr. Cameron. You wanted it your way. They should have listened. Now you have the final word... speak, sir. We are listening.

[tabuno]

AVATAR still has a way to go to really become the most popular (as opposed to most financially successful in 2010 dollars) as there are number of movies that have attracted more people. Anyway, again what does the most financially successful (in 2010 dollars) really have to do with the quality of the film anyway? Just yesterday USA Today came out with an article "Psychologists: Propaganda works better than you think." People can be made to believe and buy stuff that they really didn't even know they wanted in the first place.

[Chris Knipp]

See Alexander Cockburn's "From Genesis to Gaia" in The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100125/cockburn). This is most of the last paragraph:
In 1975 Stewart Brand printed in the summer issue of his CoEvolution Quarterly Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock's "The Gaia Hypothesis," which advanced the notion that "living matter, the air, the oceans, the land surface" are "parts of a giant system" that exhibits "the behavior of a single organism, even a living creature." Thirty-five years later, James Cameron gives us Avatar and the planet Pandora, which is Gaia brought to life in the most savage denunciation of imperial exploitation--clearly American--ever brought to screen. Now a huge hit, Avatar is the most expensive antiwar film ever made (at $200 million, about half the cost of a single F-22). "It is nature which today no longer exists anywhere," a peppery German wrote in 1845. But Rousseau is having his revenge on Marx. The night I went to Avatar the audience cheered when Pandora, as a single Gaian organism, puts Earth's predatory onslaught to flight and man's war machines are crushed by natural forces. Against Genesis and the Judeo-Christian tradition, pagan mysticism is carrying the day, at least at the level of fantasy.

[Chris Knipp]

And also in The Nation, same January 7, 2010 issue, see Stewart Klawans' "Imaginariums," (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100125/klawans) with a discussion of Avatar as well as Imaginarium, Sherlock Holmes, Nine, A Town Called Panic, and Police, Adjective. This is too long to provide a good sound bite and this is only part of a very thought-provoking piece:
As suffused with intimations of the divine as a Hudson River School landscape, and very much a product of that pictorial tradition, Avatar offers you nothing less than transcendence, in both the Lisztian meaning of the word, as virtuosic execution, and in the commonly accepted religious sense. Whether the film makes good on these twin promises (I'll plunge in and say it does) is perhaps less interesting than its having explicitly united them. Avatar proposes that the Great Chain of Being really exists and is accessible simultaneously to the characters on the screen and the audience in the seats by means of a neuromotor plug-in.

By now, even if you have not seen Avatar, you will know that the excuse for this connection--the plot--is familiar cowboys-and-Indians fare, remarkable only for having combined titanic marketing power with a worldview congenial to readers of The Nation. Well, worse things could come along than an anti-imperialist, pro-Gaea sci-fi blockbuster, which pits the nature-loving wisdom of an indigenous people against a mining company's clanking, murderous machinery. That Cameron has sided with the tree huggers (literally) but used sophisticated technology to do so is a readily spotted irony and may be readily dismissed as a criticism, if you consider that his own factory does nothing worse than keep hundreds of people peacefully employed making pictures. Besides, Avatar insists that spiritual truths are not only compatible with science but are demonstrably rooted in biophysics--a position that becomes all but irrefutable when asserted by a ten-foot-tall, blue, tiger-striped Sigourney Weaver.

[Johann]

I'll be seeing this in about 4 days. In 3-D. Can't F'n wait..

[cinemabon]

First, 'bout time, Johann.

As Stewart Klawans says in his article, "Geeks prepared for the revelation [of Avatar] by draping themselves in garlands of e-mails," in speaking of its anticipation. I tend to agree, but only partially. I agree that Fox had plenty of advertisement for the film, including numerous interviews and guest spots. However, that can only help a film so far. After that, the movie must stand on its own. No amount of publicity can save a bad film, as many studios have discovered through the years. Big budgets can also mean big disasters. However, on a rare occasion, a single person has a vision for a film and gathers a group around him or her to help bring that vision to the screen. I can think of many examples, from Hitchcock (Psycho) to Welles (Citizen Kane) to Wyler (Ben-Hur) to Speilberg (Schindler's List) to Lucas (Star Wars) to Coppola (The Godfather). While film is a collaborative effort, the vision of the individual, usually the director, guides the work from start to finish and delivers a product that stands up to multiple viewings. Klawans, in a round about and overly intellectual way, arrives at a similar conclusion, although his analysis of plot is slightly over the top. He took great pains to find the root appeal to its mass attraction by careful examination of the rudimentary elements that comprise the film and its creator. All fine and good. However, such "intellectual masturbation" as I have come to call it over the years, does not produce what Cameron found so easy to do... find the art, let the story tell itself.

From the start of this thread, I said the plot was very simple. Klawans calls it "cowboys and indians." It is, but with a modern twist, just as Star Wars is also a western with outer space elements. Yet, if we even go back to the western and look at those elements, we find why they had such great appeal at one time. These include the basic elements of plot and story. True the protagonist is a cripple whose deliverance can be considered Christ-like or prophet. Only these are but stories, too. The kind of writing that is sucessful usually uses these same plot devices that have been used in storytelling since the beginning of human speech to elicite emotional chords that are universally felt. Find the right combination, and you can make a million. Deliver the right combination with a personal touch that also gives the audience a new artistic twist, and you can laugh at the critics all the way to the bank.

[tabuno]

Thanks to digital television offering more channels, I managed quite by accident to catch the last four-fifths of SEPARATE TABLES (1983) , made of television movie starring Julie Christie, Alan Bates, and Claire Bloom last night. The movie was shot in a play setting format, yet what struck me was the relatively simply plot outline and yet its presentation was so captivating, so rich in nuance, and so bitingly and emotional gripping that when I compare this television movie to AVATAR, I can't but be struck by how deeply SEPARATE TABLES was able to strike strong cords of both emotional and intellectual resonance on the topic of difficult human and intimate relationships as well as controversial public sentiment and humiliation and tolerance. In comparison toe AVATAR, SEPARATE TABLES was production singularly focused on the acting and ferment of the human condition while AVATAR took advantage of spectacular visual effects, almost hypnotizing its audience into a mindless joyride that offered some tidbits of the resolution of ethical dilemmas and heroic battles. Yet I would take SEPARATE TABLES over AVATAR because it was it didn't require fancy gloss-over effects to get its strong and sensitive message across. As I mentioned elsewhere, for alien-ness, even a movie like THE FIRST SPACE SHIP TO VENUS (1960) with its low-budget could easily rival AVATAR for its depiction of an otherly world.

[cinemabon]

If we're speaking just of acting, then why not take a film like, "12 Angry Men" instead of "Avatar"? This Sidney Lumet film is shot in one room with absolutely no action and no other sets used - twelve men acting, pure theater and as far removed from cinema as one can get. Why do I say that? Because cinema is not a stationary thing. While the acting in "12 Angry Men" is practically superior to anything you can name, it is still theater and not cinema.

The art of cinema is to tell stories using this medium of film (and now digital, but the same difference - you still have to cut between shots whether physical or in a computer). What we are talking about when we sing the praises of "Avatar" has nothing to do with a detraction of the actors or acting. It has more to do with a fluid and visual expression of art.

So when you come down on "Avatar" because it uses "virtual actors" and not real ones, you are missing the point. No one is advocating that actors be replaced and no one should. I started in the theater at the ripe old age of three and performed in plays for the next forty years of my life. The theater is in my blood. Yet, I also studied cinema and turned out some very interesting product. However, I look at James Cameron's work with envy. For he has blended that world into a wonderful homogenous effect. I understand your fear that the popularity of this medium might under cut the work of actors. But rest assured, we will be around for a very long time, with or without special effects around us. That is the human condition, to look at another human and listen to them tell a story, by gesture or facial... and no computer will ever take its place, not even a fancy one. Disney's realistic animation in 1938, called "Snow White" did not replace actors (actually quoted in the New York Times!) nor will this fantasy.

"Have no fear, Underdog is here!"

[tabuno]

If we're speaking just of acting, then why not take a film like, "12 Angry Men" instead of "Avatar"? This Sidney Lumet film is shot in one room with absolutely no action and no other sets used - twelve men acting, pure theater and as far removed from cinema as one can get. Why do I say that? Because cinema is not a stationary thing. While the acting in "12 Angry Men" is practically superior to anything you can name, it is still theater and not cinema.

The art of cinema is to tell stories using this medium of film (and now digital, but the same difference - you still have to cut between shots whether physical or in a computer). What we are talking about when we sing the praises of "Avatar" has nothing to do with a detraction of the actors or acting. It has more to do with a fluid and visual expression of art.

So when you come down on "Avatar" because it uses "virtual actors" and not real ones, you are missing the point. No one is advocating that actors be replaced and no one should. I started in the theater at the ripe old age of three and performed in plays for the next forty years of my life. The theater is in my blood. Yet, I also studied cinema and turned out some very interesting product. However, I look at James Cameron's work with envy. For he has blended that world into a wonderful homogenous effect. I understand your fear that the popularity of this medium might under cut the work of actors. But rest assured, we will be around for a very long time, with or without special effects around us. That is the human condition, to look at another human and listen to them tell a story, by gesture or facial... and no computer will ever take its place, not even a fancy one. Disney's realistic animation in 1938, called "Snow White" did not replace actors (actually quoted in the New York Times!) nor will this fantasy.

"Have no fear, Underdog is here!"

Your words are comforting to hear. I shall look forward with interest with the reign of the 3-D film during this decade.

[tabuno]

As AVATAR is about to surpass TITANIC as the number one box office champion based on unadjusted dollar box receipts is well to remember other films that may have a just as strong a claim as box office champions and as to whether such a claim relates to the quality and "best" movie claim as well, I'll leave to readers to look over the list and decide for themselves.

Rank Title ( Year) (Est. tickets) (Adjusted Gross)

1 Gone With The Wind (1939) 202,044,600/1,455,000,000
2 Star Wars (1977) 178,119,600/1,282,000,000
3 The Sound of Music (1965) 142,415,400/1,025,000,000
4 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) 141,854,300/1,021,000,000
5 The Ten Commandments (1956) 131,000,000/943,000,000
6 Titanic (1997) 128,210,000/924,000,000
7 Jaws (1975) 128,078,800/922,000,000
8 Doctor Zhivago (1965) 124,135,500/894,000,000
9 The Exorcist (1973) 110,568,700/796,000,000
10 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) 109,000,000/784,000,000
11 One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) 99,917,300/719,000,000
12 Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) 98,180,600/707,000,000
13 Ben-Hur (1959) 98,000,000/706,000,000
14 Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983) 94,059,400/677,000,000
15 The Sting (1973) 89,142,900/641,000,000
16 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) 88,141,900/632,000,000
17 Jurassic Park (1993) 86,361,800/620,000,000
18 The Graduate (1967) 85,571,400/616,000,000
19 Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) 84,738,800/611,000,000
20 Fantasia (1941) 83,043,500/598,000,000
21 The Dark Knight (2008) 80,765,300/533,000,000
22 The Godfather (1972) 78,922,600/568,000,000
23 Avatar (2009) 78,133,700

[cinemabon]

I'm not certain of your source, however, by that standard "Birth of a Nation" actually sold more tickets than any film in the history of film (domestic gross), more than "Gone with the Wind." However, when you apply the rule (adjusted BO according to inflation) the figures can change because the rules are arbitary at best:

"ACCURACY OF FIGURES
Adjusting for ticket price inflation is not an exact science and should be used to give you a general idea of what a movie might have made if released in a different year, assuming it sold the same number of tickets.

Since these figures are based on average ticket prices they cannot take into effect other factors that may affect a movie's overall popularity and success. Such factors include but are not limited to: increases or decreases in the population, the total number of movies in the marketplace at a given time, economic conditions that may help or hurt the entertainment industry as a whole (e.g., war), the relative price of a movie ticket to other commodities in a given year, competition with other related medium such as the invention and advancements of Television, VHS, DVD, the Internet, etc…

Still, this method best compares "apples to apples" when examining the history of box office earnings."

source: http://boxofficemojo.com/about/adjuster.htm

A film ticket costs seven cents when "Birth of a nation" premiered. The average cost of a ticket for "Gone with the Wind" was less than a quarter. Since the price of admission today is significantly higher, it is difficult to compare previous releases in terms of money made based on number of tickets sold. Currently, no film has ever made as much money as "Avatar"

[Chris Knipp]

It is only a matter of time before another movie in future will make more 'money" in gross dollar terms than Avatar. Figures must be adjusted to the current value of the dollar. Even if such adjustments are approximate, they might still show Avatar is NOT the world's greatest movie hit. Furthermore, due to the greater number of media platforms today, theater attendance is only a piece of the action, whereas, before television, cinema was, for a few decades anyway, the universal source of entertainment for all the world. And so, in that sense, no film, no matter how profitable or widely attended, will be as big a hit as in the pre-TV days.

Surely it is fair to say that all this is rather pointless on a site devoted to film, rather than business? If we love Avatar, can't we express it in terms of its merits rather than its profits? For dissenters, these figures only show this is a commercial, not an artistic success. There seems to be some subconscious feeling that somehow if Avatar makes enough money or sells enough tickets it will be proven to be a masterpiece. But it will only be proven to have been well promoted and popular.

[tabuno]

A circular argument at best when one comes to argue about the validity of box office receipts and then ends up stating that AVATAR has made more money than any other movie as a concluding statement. The fact that AVATAR has made more money than any other movie considering all the variables involved still isn't very meaningful statement as regards the movie itself...

While I have rated AVATAR an 8 on a 10 point scale, as a fascinating and visually delightful movie, nevertheless, Marshall McLuhan's the "Medium is the Message," where the 3-D and the visual effects become the popular, Disneyland entertainment of the current fashion, the world's LSD trip...where a passing technical breakgrhough is sought over substance, the collision of mental thought and emtions for primitive sensory delights...we find ourselves in the sci fi world of Fahrenheit 451 (1966) looking at wall screens that offer only a mirage of substance over an illusion of brilliant intellectual stimlution while books are banned and burned.

[Chris Knipp]

Tabuno, I find you and I are totally on the same page about Avatar and its "success."

[tabuno]

It's perhaps the Hiesenberg Principle of the observer affecting the observed or random probability of chance that two events intersect in the time/space continuum.

[Johann]

I still haven't seen AvAtAr yet. It literally is a phenomenon, this movie.
In Toronto over the weekend I gave up trying to see it. Maybe in another 2 weeks?
When you are first in line when the doors of the Scotiabank theatre open in the A.M. and you're immediately told that the only screening available is 1030PM THAT NIGHT, I get angry.
I'm glad that the movie is doing killer box-office. I think that is just fantastic. But it's pretty retarded that you can't get a ticket 7 weeks after it opens. I hate movie theatres that are filled up to capacity or near-capacity.
Usually I go to the movies alone, and to listen to jerk-offs and jackasses natter away about sheer meaningless crap before the movie drives me up the wall. And an odd thing always happens in these packed theatres: the talking gets louder and louder as the movie gets closer to beginning.
Why is it that whenever people get to a movie theatre they feel the need to ramp up and amp up their already mundane conversation?
I mean that shit hits a fever pitch EVERY TIME.
I want to seal off the place and gas the fuckers.

I want my 13 bucks back for Rob Marshall's NINE. I felt like I was watching a commercial for erectile dysfunction.
Judy Dench was horrible. What was she doing???
Kate Hudson was so out of place it was like watching Paris Hilton audition for Fame.
And Daniel day-Lewis? My God, what posessed him to do this role? It's like the Twilight Zone.
Nicole Kidman was in it. I think.
Penelope Cruz's performance was the most interesting/saucy thing in the movie. And Fergie was good. She's a music performer anyway,
nailed it to the blackboard with ease. Sultry Mama she is.

Terrible movie, NINE is.
A slick, polished turkey.

[cinemabon]

I find it ludicrous to mention McLuhan (whom I studied at OSU and read "Understanding Media" in which he mentions the phrase "the media is the message" should have any bearing on this case. I mean, what is it about the success of this film that bothers you? Clearly, the mere mention of money in the same breath means something else. Take "Psycho" for example. This film had the lowest budget of any Hitchcock movie and yet had the highest return of all his films. Does success diminish its content? Then take a film like "Blair Witch Project" or even "I am curious, Yellow," where the budgets don't add up to the price of a Lamborghini. They were highly successful outtings, but in their case the content was crap. Your criteria for judging or misjudging a film based on its BO, or your argument that "Avatar" should be judged so, baffles me. But to mention any connection to McLuhan is so far removed... you either haven't read "Understanding Media" or you've watched too many Woody Allen movies.

If this discussion is going by the way of McLuhan, then I suggest all of you about to participate brush up on your literature, because if I have to post on Marshall McLuhan, I will be dusting off my college paper notes... and you don't want to go there.

[tabuno]

How something is packaged regardless of its content influences public opinion greater than most rational people realize. How something looks can provoke positive beliefs in how good a product is and in this case a film may be. So the medium can make a message even better than it really is. Supposedly psychological tests have demonstrated this to be so according to Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia.

[cinemabon]

McLuhan’s understanding of the media that delivers the medium or message, was framed by his knowledge that satellite communications had made us more a “global village.” However, that level of understanding would pale in comparison to what he would say today about the internet (which did not exist in its current form since he died in 1981). Even more, since he was more focused on the medium that delivered the message, the iphone would further complicate matters, since the “hot” media he so described (such as film) is combined in its content on such devices, and computers such as laptops contain both hot and cold forms. All film is hot, and if McLuhan had seen an IMAX theater, he would have said, HOT HOT HOT! In this case, anything an IMAX theater projected would have the same significant impact on its audience due to its size and image clarity (especially by adding realism such as 3-D). But that would go for any film in that format or any format. McLuhan would not say that one film is more significant than another because it is the delivery system that is the medium, not the content.

For once, we agree

[oscar jubis]

It seems rather superfluous to me to write a review of AVATAR at this stage. I mean, IMDB has collected 352 reviews from critics and an astonishing 2,170 reviews from "users". So, I reiterate the obvious: AVATAR is a monumentally entertaining immersive and sensorial experience. I can picture Chris thinking: "Argh! Dummy drank the Kool-Aid! Bought into the hype!" I tend to regard myself as a guy with eclectic tastes but I recognize I respond most enthusiastically to low budget, minimally plotted, subtly socially-conscious dramas with psychologically complex characters and ambiguous endings. The best films I watched in 2009 (The American GOODBYE SOLO and the Argentinean New Wave films THE HEADLESS WOMAN and LIVERPOOL) fit that mold. However, once in a while comes a grand fantasia out of Hollywood that sweeps me off my feet. I am a fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the first and last versions of King Kong, for instance. Likewise, I found AVATAR irresistible.

Not just the visuals, mind you, but the romance and the critique of imperialism that form the core of the narrative. I realize that the story mostly follows an archetypal template. Yet that is part of the reason for the film's universal reach and the specificity of the imagined milieu rendered with painstaking craft sustained my attention for the duration. Out of the 6 pages of comments in this thread, it is cinemabon's recounting of his (and his son's) emotional reaction to the scene in which the HomeTree is destroyed that resonates with me. One of the great things that cinema is capable of doing is to arouse emotions within the viewer. This one just could not remain detached and distanced during the destruction of Pandora. The CGI bombing scenes reminded me of the all-too-real bombing of Cambodia seen in the Oscar-winning documentary Hearts and Minds (1975).

The political allegories in AVATAR are clear, and central to my modest reservations about the film. There are two antagonists:Giovanni Ribisi's organization man and Colonel Quaritch. The former barely registers and the latter seems scarcely human; a barely personified Thanatos. Ideologically, it feels uncomfortable to me to "hate" a soldier and not the "suit" giving orders from earth for the enrichment of himself and his class. We don't get to see the real villain(s) in AVATAR. There has to be a Dick Cheney in it but we don't get to see him.

[tabuno]

Personally, it's hard for me to really resonate with a movie that uses stock characterization and predictable storylines that seem to be idealiized beyond reality (even taking into account that it is a sci fi movie). We've seen the story all too often before - we the bad guys against the bad guys in order to promote some socially concientious goodness. Not a lot to really contemplate here. I got more out of Ripley saving her cat in ALIEN (1979) in terms of emotional resonance than anything in this movie besides the fabulous special effects or for another more effective socially redeeming movie take Golden Globe Signourney Weaver's performance, storyline, and script in GORILLAS IN THE MIST (1988).

[Johann]

I still haven't seen the film yet and I probably won't write a review either, like Oscar.
I'm impressed with my ability to resist seeing this behemoth. Gold star for hype avoidance! (Even tho I've hyped it personally!)

In the Toronto Star a few days ago they had a picture of a guy in Na'vi makeup and "costume", in all blue makeup, complaining about his country's displacement of his "people". (They named the country but I forget what it was- somewhere in South America? Maybe?). Apparently a whole horde of people protested in that get-up. The film has serious resonance on our little blue marble.
I sense serious political tones in it and I plan on seeing it in the first week of March. (Still selling out in IMAX here in Toronto- unbelievable)
There's a "man behind the curtain" like Cheney in it? Hmmm.

I think I'll love it.

[cinemabon]

Thank you Oscar for your remarks. The man who touted Avatar's horn is "still resistant" I find incredulous. Tsk, tsk, Johann.

Few movies in film history resonate with their audiences the way this film has. To be cynical and disregard those feelings on an intellectual basis is to deny ones feelings about any event... the skater who fights to be on the podium after a decade of sacrifice only to fall at the last second and have their hopes dashed away is a vicarious moment, not only for the skater but us. We feel the pain, the loss, the emptiness that follows and the terrible sense of failure that no matter what we do, we face this foe of fate that robs us of glory. "It was not meant to be." The reason I came out in favor of this film from the start, and I believe I made this abundantly clear many times, had nothing to do with the plot. We've gone over that time and again. It had to do with something much deeper than that. It concerns emotion... the kind of gut wrenching emotion that some people refuse to recognize in themselves, because to do so, would make them feel vulnerable. Well I happen to cry when I see something that calls for it, such as the skater who falls or the tree that falls, and to deny that "Avatar" is not some gut wrenching emotional event and a once in a lifetime happening, is to deny that child in ourselves that calls a spade a spade when we see it. If we are to seek out the truth in our lives, then we must recognize that part of us that is vulnerable, and let it out when called upon. For only then are we human and part of this larger tribe called humanity.

[Johann]

"THAT"S HOW YOU SCATTER THE ROACHES" -Col. Quaritch


AVATAR


Incredible movie. I waited a retarded amount of time to check Avatar out and it did not disappoint.
Wow.
In 3-D it is nothing short of breathtaking.
I was just bowled over with the gorgeous 3-D renderings.
The art direction (colors, character/vehicle designs, vegetation, MOONS!, etc.) was just incredible.
Everything I want in a movie is here, except there are two things that kind of annoyed me (yet are quite forgivable):
1. It seeems to me that Jake is plucked from nowhere to be the intel hero. Why? Why is he chosen? a crippled marine?
His mental state hasn't been analyzed enough. It seems like they just picked him out of a hat. Maybe I missed why he's the man for the job.
2. The Na'Vi accepted him pretty damn fast into their tribe. I had trouble with how they reason.They are extremely primitive, yet their communications and abilities to express themselves is quite developed. I was expecting maybe a little more "caveman" and a little less spiritual/native indian superimposition. But again, quite forgivable. James Cameron has suceeded in telling an interesting story about human folly transposed onto a fantastic forbidden planet.

That giant tree falling towards the end....holy shit. Just like the Titanic, falling to the depths!
Loved Avatar. I wasn't going to write a review but I had to comment on it. It is an astonishing achievement in motion picture history.
Everything was aces to me, each sequence was beautiful to behold. I often wondered how Cameron's SFX teams produced such amazing, believable images. The CGI was more believable than the great stuff we saw in the new Star Wars trilogy. Special effects are at a level now that surpass anything in the past. During Avatar I had flashbacks to when I first saw Jurassic Park, and The Phantom Menace. But Jake Sully's Avatar destroys the likes of Jar Jar Binks and Boss Nass. More believable and more interesting.
Just a fantastic film.
Avatar deserves all of it's recognition.
James Cameron has shoved the medium forward.