This week: Sigma is back with all the maths on the update weapons!
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In the final episode of the year, Andrew and Morgan discuss the latest film from the director of Juno, Up in the Air. They then examine a small independent film that nobody's excited about at all (/sarcasm)... that's right, it's Avatar time! Has James Cameron created another classic sci-fi epic, or is this eye-orgy underwhelming? Plus, Andrew has a super-advanced review of the new romantic comedy When In Rome! Also includes QuickChatter Reviews and DVD Recommendations.
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2009 was a year of anticipation, of expectation. PROGRESS. CHANGE. HOPE. We were supposed to be entering a new age whose opportunities would improve our health and well-being, the very quality of our life. Promises were made, dammit.
I'm talking, of course, about Disney's return to cel animation. Quentin Tarantino's Nazi execution wet dream. Three consecutive George Clooney pictures (Quentin has his dreams, I have mine). Two different movies titled “nine” and one titled Ninja Assassin. And James Cameron ending his 11 year cinematical hiatusery to bestow upon us poor peons the Promethean pyre which daily ignites by even his whispered utterance of “Action.”
Forget True Lies. Begone from my memory, Aliens. Hasta la bye-bye, Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Stay drowned, Titanic. You're all done, finished, because with over a decade spent in secrecy and hiding, Cameron has finally unveiled project Avatar.
And the crowd goes...home to drown its sorrows in Jägerbombs.
Like Peter Jackson's King Kong, M. Night Shyamalan's The Village, the Wachowski's Matrix: Reloaded, and Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, JC (God, no wonder he's pretentious) has made his Because I Can movie. A movie whose existence is the direct result of several million doughy eyed lemmings investing their love and trust in a single director. The director in turn proceeds to open boxes of doodles and margin notes from grade school, and then films whatever the Hell they feel like.
Said Jimmyboy to Entertainment Weekly back in '07: “Well, my inspiration is every single science fiction book I read as a kid.”
Cameron and his marbles had parted ways long ago, I knew this. Anyone who makes a movie about Robo-Skeletor fighting Metal Aqualad while Sarah “Che Guevara” Connor takes sniper potshots at African-American suburbanites is not only off their rocker, they can no longer get back on their rocker because they've mailed their rocker to the Sun. But with Avatar, Cameron has also decided to part ways with you, the audience, concocting some half baked souffle of childhood fantasies and letting the whole traitorous dessert fall right on top of you.
Avatar is about Marine paraplegic Jake Sully (Terminator: Salvation School of Franchise Ruining graduate Sam Worthington) who goes to Pandora, the moon of a planet that is literally a blue version of Jupiter. Jake is there to take his dead bro's place as the brain pilot of a human/Na'vi (Pandora's residents) clone used to prove to the Na'vi how much we respect their culture, in essence the space age version of blackface. Meanwhile, back in Cameron's mind, he can't decide whether to use an obligatorially evil U.S. military or big corporation and decides to have both! MiliCorp's evil plot is basically an intergalactic game of “Hey, look over there!” where Jake plays friendly Na'vi ambassador while delicious natural resources are Iraq'd right out from under the Na'vi's methane-breathing noses.
Seemingly the center of all the drama in this Golden Globe-nominated Best Drama of 2009 is the Na'vi, Pandora's beleaguered indigenous population of ten foot tall blueberry tiger people. Any sympathy for their tribulations quickly feels misplaced when you realize their entire culture is a hodgepodge of stereotypes of African and Aboriginal peoples including: their most advanced technological achievement is a spear, they pray for the souls of the animals they hunt, they wear next to no clothing and there are a lot of scenes of them crying after their favorite trees-to-hug get bulldozified. It's okay Jimbo Cameron, 11 years just isn't enough time to come up with something better than ingrained cultural racism. Why don't you go right back into hiding until you catch up with a time period that doesn't refer to Europe's Southern neighbors as the Dark Continent?
Avatar isn't simply satisfied with being unoriginal on its terms, no sir. It decides to take a page from George Lucas' Because I Can how-to book and not offer actors any sort of direction. “Wow, what a great monotone voice, Sam Worthington. Why don't you try every line in that tone? Hey, get the other actors out here, I want them to see what I taught Sam to do!”
Then the script burning party began. And though the nearly three hour script was quickly recovered by the only actors giving craps, eccentric government weasel Giovanni Ribisi and still-sexy-after-all-these-years scientist Sigourney Weaver, something was amiss with the script. There were these gaping “holes” in the “plot.” So, mysteries like why the helicopter pilot chick (Michelle Rodriguez) was all for suddenly betraying her superiors even though she was in maybe four scenes the whole movie, or why the scientist dude (Joel David Moore) hates the very core of Jake Sully for half an hour before suddenly being his best bud, well, we'll never know. Surely, these plot holes were caused by the cast & crew bonfire I just described and not because a script in development since 1994 wasn't actually up to any standards of quality, right? Perish the thought!
Now, the reason most people care about this movie is the Action and the Visual Prettyness. The action, while helped by the massive helpings of prettytude the visuals serve up, is monotonous for one key reason: it's established from the get-go that if Jake's Avatar dies while he's operating it, he won't die IRL. Since every action scene involves Jake driving his giant smurf kitten Na'vi around for the purposes of causing havoc, this presents a problem. Because, well, you know he's going to be totally kosher since he's heroically operating his Avatar from hundreds of miles away. Sure, you could counter that Jake and his Na'vi hunnybunny will have a harder time getting it on without his jolly blue giant doppelganger, but if their love really knows no bounds, then those two should still be able to get it up for getting it on.
Now, people have been talking about the visuals in this movie like Cameron somehow drilled underneath the color spectrum and discovered a wholly new rainbow of visual opportunity, with colors named Fierce, Wicked Sick and Ballergasmtastic. While I won't go that far (though I dream of a world where I'd actually want to say nice things like that), Avatar is the greatest technical achievement in computer animation in human history up to this point.
Ahh, finally, a quote fit for a movie poster...I really, really want to write “penis” somewhere in there. Does that make me a bad person?
It is beautiful on IMAX. If you see this movie at some place other than IMAX, I can personally guarantee your immediate hatred of this movie. But if you ever wanted your eyes to experience sex, this is it. The story and the acting may be nonexistent, but if there was ever an award to be handed out for style over substance, Avatar deserves at least that much. This movie has no soul, but wrapped around that soul is the equivalent of Carmen Elektra, and who are you to argue with Carmen Elektra?
1.5/5
In this episode, Andrew and Morgan mull over sports films and biopics in their discussion of the new film written by Peter Morgan, The Damned United. They then take a nostalgic look back at their childhoods with Disney's return to 2D hand-drawn animation, The Princess and the Frog. Also includes QuickChatter reviews and DVD Recommendations.
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This week: Flonk and Jestr join Mint and Highstepper to speculate about the WAR! update.
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The end of the CrunchPad, Beating WoW, and Comcast is taking over the world.
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The end of the CrunchPad, Beating WoW, and Comcast is taking over the world.
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It's WAR!
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It's time to get sociological! Andrew and Morgan give their thoughts on one of this year's most buzzed-about films, Precious, and then get on a lengthy tangent as they attempt to answer a single question: Is it racist? They turn off the analytical side of their brains long enough to discuss Armored. You know, that one about the thieves and armored cars and stuff. Also includes QuickChatter reviews and DVD Recommendations.
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LOST Season 5 is released today on both standard DVD and Blu-Ray! Better yet, you can also get the "Dharma Initiation Kit" in either version too! Before we get to the promo videos and pictures, let's look at the kit...
