Anything worth doing is worth doing right, so I’m going to need a bit more time on the Avatar review, especially since I have some birthday-ish things tonight. But it will be ready before I go to sleep, this I promise. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak:
“The thing about Avatar is that it’s not really a movie. It is, of course, but applying normal movie rules to it seems terribly inappropriate: yeah, the characters are thin stereotypes and the dialogue is wooden when it isn’t worse, and the plot is every “soldier learns to respect and love the people he was sent to destroy” story ever made. But, but, that’s not what Avatar “is” – that’s all just sort of the dressing that they used to make it a narrative feature, on account of studios don’t spend $350 million on experimental landscape pictures. But if you asked me, the line of descent that ends in James Cameron’s eighth film as director – his first in a dumbfounding twelve years, following a pair of undersea IMAX documentaries, a failed TV show, and some other odds and ends in the time since Titanic made him briefly the most powerful filmmaker in the world – is not from such other feel-goody “learn to embrace the noble savage” pictures as Dances with Wolves, but image- and editing-driven tone poems like Baraka and Koyaanisqatsi…
At a certain point, it stops being a story at all and is instead just a sheer, unmitigated visual and auditory experience, two hours and forty minutes of being exposed to a brand new world rendered in the most convincing photo-realistic detail of any science-fiction fantasy of the computer age.”