In the thirteen years since James Cameron’s last new feature, Avatar, I have increasingly come to treasure his particular mode of popcorn filmmaking, which I feel didn’t used to be rare, but basically has been dead as dead can be for all of those thirteen years. It is a mode of complete, unyielding sincerity, mixed […]
I’m not certain how ashamed I’m meant to be that I didn’t find Sanctum to be at all bad. Mind you, I didn’t find it particularly good, but it feels like the sort of movie one should hate with a full-throated hate. Thing is, the film only really sets out to do one thing, and […]
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 […]
When I last saw James Cameron’s massively successful, Oscar-dominating epic Titanic, it had been in theaters for just a few days, the hype was deafening, and I was a newly-minted 16-year-old boy, and thus I was duty-bound to hate it. Oh, and hate it I did – a hate that slowly drifted into sheer unadulterated […]
In the early 1990s, action superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger found a project that he absolutely had to be a part of: a proposed remake of the 1991 French adventure-comedy La totale! in which a globe-trotting James Bondian super-spy fights terrorists while convincing his wife that he’s nothing but an everyday businessman. It was not like Schwarzenegger […]
The third sequel directed by James Cameron – but only the first sequel to a film he’d overseen originally – Terminator 2: Judgment Day holds a very special place in my heart; like a great many American males of my age, this was the first R-rated movie I ever saw, or at least the first […]
Having completed his meteoric rise to become one of Hollywood’s biggest popcorn-movie filmmakers in just a handful of years, so that only three films into his career his fourth film could be breezily advertised as “from the director of The Terminator and Aliens“, James Cameron set his sights on his most ambitious project yet, an […]
James Cameron’s rise to the top was swift: it was only his third film, and the second that anyone ever gave a damn about, that saw him win the coveted credit, “A James Cameron Film”. Of course, being the director of something as outstanding as The Terminator would do that for a fella’s reputation. Mind […]
Piranha II: The Spawning may have been a wretched, cheap monster picture, but it had one benefit for the young first-time director James Cameron: it put his name out there, and got him in a position that any young filmmaker would have committed some of the most wicked sins to achieve, namely, he found himself […]
In 1975, there was a movie made about a giant killer shark, and it was called Jaws. Being a success – being in fact, the most successful movie ever made at that time – it influenced a truly massive number of rip-offs, more perhaps than any other single movie. To even begin to scratch the […]
