Posts Tagged ‘Avatar’

Things that make me happy

Monday, March 8th, 2010

#136

Avatar DIDN’T win the Oscar for Best Picture.

Because of a self-imposed boycott of the 82nd Annual Academy Awards,  I didn’t watch tonight’s ceremony, but I was online when the news broke that The Hurt Locker swept Best Director and Best Picture, leaving the polarizing Avatar in the dust.

My faith in the film industry has now been restored… a little bit, anyway.

The people who have seen Avatar fall into one of two opposing teams. Team Avatar insists the film was the best thing to ever happen to cinema and will defend their masterpiece and Director James Cameron to the death, while Team Dances With Smurfs acknowledges that the visual effects are stunning but the story is nothing more than cliched, poorly written tripe, undeserving of a $500 million budget and a $2.5 billion worldwide gross.

I haven’t seen The Hurt Locker yet so I can’t say whether or not I think the film deserved to win.  Of the 10 nominees, I’ve seen four: Avatar, District 9, Up, and Up in the Air, and of those films, Up in the Air would have been my pick for Best Picture.  The first fifteen minutes of Up were brilliant, but the last hour fell short of Pixar’s earlier Oscar-winning films Wall-E and The Incredibles.

I am curious to see if the Avatar controversy and the Academy’s gimmicky nomination of ten films for Best Picture were enough to entice millions of new viewers to the 3+ hours of awkward, unfunny presenters and pompous ceremony.  From the hundreds of angry rants on the Avatar and Hurt Locker IMDB message boards, one would think that an entire nation had tuned in for the battle between the blue smurfs and the bomb squad.  Well, everyone but me.

Of course the night’s real winner is director Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman in 82 years of Academy history to walk away with the Oscar for Best Director.  In the years to come, may the award always go to the most deserving auteur, regardless of gender.

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Golden Globes of Crapola

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Does that title seem bitter to you? Maybe just a tad?

Sunday night I made the regrettable decision to watch the Golden Globes for the first time since… I dunno, 2003? Ever? It’s hard to remember the Globes (aka: the Academy’s poor, country mouse cousin). It’s an awards show that tries to be classier than The MTV Movie Awards (not hard), but it still falls short of the prestige of the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) awards.

I turned on the TV just as John Lithgow was walking to the stage to accept the best supporting actor award for Dexter, and I was like heck yeah, he totally deserved it! The fourth season’s Trinity Killer (as portrayed by Lithgow) chilled me to the core, as few TV villains ever have. Mere minutes later it was Michael C. Hall himself climbing the stairs to accept the best actor award for Dexter, and I was hooked.  The Hollywood Foreign Press had smartened up and was finally giving a great show its due, and I couldn’t wait to see what deserving films would be recognized and celebrated.

Which is when the awards show went to hell.

For one thing, the announcements before every commercial break hyped up Avatar so much that by the end of the night I wasn’t sure if I wanted to puke or kill James Cameron… or puke while killing James Cameron.

“Everyone’s eagerly waiting to find out…will Avatar win big tonight?”

Not if there’s justice in the world.

“Find out after these messages!”

I’ll die first!

What was even more offensive than excessive brown nosing to Avatar fans during the breaks was the fact that the damn movie actually won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama.  Because apparently mediocre storytelling is deserving of the night’s highest honor as long as $300 million+ is spent on kick-ass visual effects.

But Avatar wasn’t the only blockbuster winner for the night… also awarded was The Hangover for Best Motion Picture – Comedy, Sandra Bullock as best actress for The Blind Side, Robert Downey, Jr. as best actor for Sherlock Holmes, and the list goes on.  No film that made less than $100 million at the box office was a big winner for the night, which means the smaller, indie films were all but shut out (with the exception of Mo’Nique’s best supporting actress win for Precious and Jeff Daniel’s best actor win for Crazy Heart).

It’s true that most of the night’s winners were big crowd-pleasers (otherwise their box office tallies wouldn’t be so high), but since when has mass appeal dictated which films are worth celebrating for their contributions to cinema?  If you’re going to award films based on mass appeal, you might as well do away with all the high-brow, hoity-toity showmanship and make the Golden Globes an Internet poll.

The Globes have soured me for the Oscars in March.  The Academy is already desperate to appeal to a larger viewership which is why the Best Picture category now includes ten films instead of the usual five to make room not only for Avatar’s nomination but other blockbuster favorites like District 9 (very good, actually) and Star Trek.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the Academy follows in the Globes’ footsteps this year, awarding Avatar top honors, and thereby ensuring the masses will tune in this year and beyond to see what fan favorite will win next.

The Golden Globe Winners:
Worldwide Box Office Tallies (as of 1/19/10)

Best Motion Picture – Drama
Avatar, $1,620,293,100

Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy
The Hangover, $459,422,869

Best Animated Film
Up, $683,004,164

Best Director – Motion Picture
James Cameron for Avatar, $1,620,293,100

Best Performance by an Actor – Drama
Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart, $2,285,965

Best Performance by an Actress – Drama
Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side, $228,181,615

Best Performance by an Actor – Musical or Comedy
Robert Downey Jr. for Sherlock Holmes, $313,526,907

Best Performance by an Actress – Musical or Comedy
Meryl Streep for Julie & Julia, $118,552,598

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds, $312,635,374

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Mo’Nique for Precious: Based on the Novel Push, $44,833,760

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Avatar, Over-hyped and Under-written

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

So, I started writing this entry more than a week ago after seeing Avatar in 3-D, and then I got lazy. And then I got angry.

I don’t get all of the hype over this movie. Sure, James Cameron’s latest mega-blockbuster gets an A+ for the graphics, but it gets a C- for the script (and that’s being generous). Since when has a mediocre script made a film worthy of being hailed as the “best movie ever made – EVER”. Really, guys? REALLY?

avatar1

In Avatar, paraplegic ex-marine Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) is given the opportunity to join a scientific research team on Pandora, an extremely dangerous planet inhabited by a lithe and primitive humanoid race called the Na’vi. The team’s mission is to infiltrate the Na’vi through the use of avatars (bodies genetically created to resemble the aliens) which the scientists can link with and control while on Pandora. The team hopes to initiate diplomatic negotiations with the Na’vi to obtain a rare and extremely valuable mineral, but the greedy corporate figurehead and bloodthirsty American colonel running the operation have other plans in mind…

Despite the fact that 3-D is still jarring on the eyes (especially in a fast-moving, 162 minute film), Avatar is very nice to watch. The visual effects and CGI are stunning, and it’s easy to get lost in the breathtaking world of Pandora, forgetting entirely that the Na’vi and their planet are computer generated creations that can be broken down into 1s and 0s, not flesh and blood. It’s just a shame that even with “the most expensive movie ever made” (and the [currently] second highest-grossing film of all time), Cameron still couldn’t afford a decent screenwriter.

Visuals aside, Avatar is no more than a half-baked, live-action retooling of Dances with Wolves and Disney’s Pocahontas (as demonstrated beautifully here). Its environmentalist-themed storyline strongly echoes animated classics such as Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, only with undercooked idealistic philosophies and an outrageously predictable and simplistic narrative. Even adding a third dimension couldn’t make Avatar’s 2-D characters any less transparently archetypal.

avatar2

Considering that Cameron has been working on this film for twelve years, it’s really amazing how under-developed the story is.  The techno-science and Gaia/anime-inspired philosophies injected to beef up the plot are never detailed enough for Avatar to break free of Intro to Science Fiction 101.  The film seems to have an ultimate moral (of some sort), but I left the theatre completely unsure of what the point was.  I’m still torn between “it’s not easy being blue”, “the grass is always greener on the poisonous planet we haven’t destroyed yet”, and “the gun is mightier than the arrow” (which can also be translated as “if you give the natives guns, they will shoot at you”).

But maybe I’m thinking too much.  Maybe the beauty of Avatar is that the film was never supposed to be anything more than an uncomplicated, (solidly)good-versus-(super)evil, mega-budgeted blockbuster spectacle, all wrapped up with a 3-D bow (and arrow set).

sam-worthington

Still thinking: Is it just me, or is Sam Worthington, the star of Avatar, nothing more than a cookie-cutter, GI Joe-type stand-in for a leading man?  I’ve only seen him in Avatar and the mediocre Terminator: Salvation, and while he does an adequate job in both films, there is a degree of superficiality in his performance.  He seems to be lacking a natural charisma of more established A-list leading men like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and (dare I say it) Mel Gibson. Worthington’s star is only on the rise with Clash of the Titans upcoming in the spring, but I wonder how bright he’ll burn before the next hot young thing takes his place.

And now I present you with some fun, related reads that I highly recommend!

Proof that Avatar is Really Pocahontas in 3-D (also linked above)

Is Blue the New Black?  Why Some People Think Avatar is Racist

An Open Letter to James Cameron from Papyrus

The Response from Fans when Any Critic Dares to Dislike Avatar

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