Avatar has surprisingly little Google presence. Aggressive copyright protection, maybe? The first few pages of Google Image's results are all this other Avatar. What's her special power, toothpaste generation?
I thought I was going to hate Avatar because the only thing I had heard about it was that it was so high tech and that the effects were so groundbreaking. Having soured on F/X since the early '90s, this was not a good set-up for me. But when I went to go see it (mainly because I was depressed and wanted to distract myself from how weary, stale, flat, and profitable seemed to me all the uses of this world), I was startled by how much I enjoyed it. The best part about the incredible technology is that I didn't think about the incredible technology, and even though as far as I can recall there was not a single original idea in the entire story, the way it was all recombined and retold was perfectly entertaining. Bravo, Mr. Cameron.
[SIDE NOTE: In classic New Yorker film review fashion, Denby writes, "[Neytiri] protects [Jake] from the other Na'vi, who discover that he's a spy." This is basically just plain wrong, as plot summary goes, by which I mean factually inaccurate. The Na'vi know from the beginning that he's a spy insofar as he is one of the "dream walkers," or whatever they call them—i.e., they have a pretty good understanding of who and what this guy is—and when they discover he's a spy in that they find out exactly what he was up to, Na'vi rejects and renounces him. Will fact checkers never decide to bother with film reviews? (See also.)]
Solves Rubik's Cubes, drinks blood.
Let the Right One In was criminally undermarketed. One blurb goes, "Best. Vampire. Movie. Ever." Maybe so. It was, at the very least, well worth watching. The beauty/tragedy of the ending [SPOILER ALERT, SPOILER ALERT] is that unless she turns him into a vampire, in 40 years or so he's going to be Bizarro Renfield like the guy who was living with her in the beginning, n'est-ce pas?
Robert Downey Jr. is thoroughly enjoyable as always in Sherlock Holmes, and indeed the movie was good fun overall.* This was particularly pleasing to me as I was expecting the thing to be pretty bad ("The one thing missing from the Sherlock Holmes story was always shirtlessness and punching"). My only complaint, in fact, is that it could have been even better. Specifically, the movie sets Holmes up as a fascinating character with a lot of potential for depth—the beginning of the movie is particularly excellent—but then it never really does anything with that set-up: the idea that his almost superhuman perception and reasoning skills are a curse as much as a blessing and could easily drive him nuts if he doesn't focus them—intensely—on a suitable challenge...well, it's not as if the movie does nothing with that, but really his personality ends up just being not too much more than biographical data about the protagonist in an otherwise fairly standard story. Not that there's anything wrong with that—and it's not even entirely true. Still, it's just that a movie with a character like that could be better than good: it could be truly great. And it isn't.†
"The Like of It Now Happens"? Huh?
Finally finished The Man Without Qualities—or Vol. 1 (Pts. 1 & 2), anyway, which the friend who recommended it said was all I ought to bother with. Man, it's good. My friend put it very well: "If a smart collected essays collection with a narrative throughline is your thing, then buckle up and dig in." In fact it's a little bit like Alt85 if Alt85 were much, much smarter and better. Another thing I'll say about it is that either America in our time is rather a lot like Austria in Musil's‡ (which is a little scary) or I'm just retarded. [Or both. –ed.]
* On the way out of the theater, I had an experience I've had several times but not lately. I overheard a couple of older folks talking, and this one guy said, "Well, it was very well done and very entertaining but so hard to follow!" Huh? Hard to follow? What part?
† One of the most interesting things in the movie was the idea that crazy Blackwell or Blackwood, or whatever his name was, actually had some intellectual power over Holmes, not because he was on the same intellectual plane or because Holmes believed in the mumbo-jumbo, but because he (Blackwell/wood) was able to present just the right/wrong kind of puzzle, whose psychotic ins and outs appealed intensely to the guy on levels both intellectual and self-destructive, is the beauty of it. But that doesn't really go anywhere.
‡ In terms of the intellectual/philosophical state of the people, our sense of our place in the world, that sort of thing. Really I'm just talking about some of the concerns and problems Ulrich lays out, which of course effectively no one else in the book's Austria even particularly perceives. Whatever.
2 comments:
My main problem with Avatar was that District 9 was already a "show white guilt through aliens" movie, and a second one with more derivative characters was...meh. Also another problem was that everyone in my theater laughed whenever Neytiri cried in anguish, which, while maybe disrespectful or even insensitive, I could understand, and it just shows how badly that sort of moment was handled. Like when my theater went "Ew" while Neytiri was caressing the near death human body of Sully at the end.
Oh, yes, I agree with the white-guilt aspect for sure, although, when discussing the issue earlier, it occurred to me that this may be less about the movie's being about that than about its just being so damned derivative—which is also sort of my response to the hackneyed elements: probably the reason your audience laughed (mine didn't) was that these moments were getting hit like somebody connecting the dots in a child's game book. That said, I really enjoyed the story: sometimes unoriginal stories are insufferable, but this one I thought worked rather nicely for what it was.
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