James Cameron returns twelve years after drowning Leo and encouraging teenage girl to go to the movies over and over and over again with his latest project, returning to the sci-fi realm that he ruled with such talent before he sunk his ship.
Avatar stars Sam Worthington as Jake Sully, a paraplegic ex-Marine who replaces his dead twin brother in a project on the far away planet of Pandora. The planet holds a mineral called unobtainium (snicker if you like) and an indigenous species called the Na'vi, a blue skinned, humanoid like creature that lives in harmony with the planet. Jake's mission is to control an avatar that was created for his brother. An avatar is a biologically bred Na'vi that is controlled by the mind of it's driver, which in this case is Jake. His mission, being led by Dr. Augustine (Sygourney Weaver), is to examine life on the planet and come up with a compromise between the Na'vi and their human visitors. Jake inadvertently stumbles into Na'vi life and customs, greatly pleasing his military and science superiors. The problem is that Jake, who feels what it's like to walk, fly, and love for the first time in a long time, begins to understand the Na'vi attachment to their planets nature.
Of course, when you look right at Avatar you can see the metaphors. Environmental destruction. The elimination and relocation of natives. Military maneuvers to achieve natural resources. Cameron juggles these without being too preachy. I'm not saying it doesn't come off preachy, but it's not as much of a sermon as you may thing. The sad part is that some of the messages in the film tend to bog it down a bit, causing a "we have to get this in" attitude even at the cost of the story. From a screen writing point of view this is not Cameron's best work. The film tends to drag itself down a bit as it plays out. It starts out great, gets a middle that slows to a crawl, and then picks up during the last thirty minutes. It's the middle that gets you.
The acting is great, considering most of the characters are digitally rendered. This leads into the effects. The special effects of Avatar are state of the art and reveal some breathtaking shots of Pandora and the Na'vi. This is probably the first film I've seen where I forget a being is just a bunch of 0's and 1's. Cameron has created a triumph of digital effects and 3D that will benefit the next decade of film making to a degree. The action sequences are first rate, as they always are in a James Cameron film.
So what is the verdict on Avatar? Is it a revolutionary film that will dictate how movies are made or is it Cameron's folly? No, I don't think it will be as successful as Titanic due to its running time and dull middle, but it is a film that steps ahead of the curve a little bit and gives us a glimpse of things to come. There's been a lot of comparisons between Avatar and Star Wars and how each film defined how movies were seen and made during their respective eras. Both films held great technical achievements with Star Wars being the standard bearer for decades after its release, but there is a defining difference between the two films. Star Wars had a very approachable story that pulled from various sources through centuries of myth and story telling to create a story that was easily approachable for kids and adults alike. You were glued to the screen as the events played out like never before. With Avatar, the story is hard to get to, especially if your mentality tends to lean one way or another. The story grabs you in the beginning, but fails to hold you in its grasp for the entire picture. The effects are center stage, and they should be praised for that, but the story tends to push you away a bit. You could also compare Avatar to Toy Story in that each film represented what was to come before it, but the story is what made a good effects film great.
Now don't get me wrong, Avatar is a good movie that deserves some praise, because when it picks up it is a very entertaining action piece and will mesmerize during the first quarter of the film and subsequent points throughout. It just tends to allow itself to slow down too much for a film of this genre. Avatar isn't James Cameron's finest work, but it's still good to have him back.
Now you have to face facts at some point: Martin Scorsese is at his best when he's doing a gangster picture. We can go back to Mean Streets, through to minimal gangland influences in Raging Bull, jump forward a decade to the great Good Fellas, past Casino, and finally arrive at The Departed. It's funny looking at that list because it almost seems like not having DeNiro in his movie was why he won an Oscar.
The Departed takes place in Boston, a town that has been on the edge for two hundred years and probably will be for two hundred more. It opens with a flashback of crime boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) working a grocery store and meeting a young Colin Sullivan (played later by Matt Damon). This is where Frank becomes the young Sullivan's mentor, molding him into the perfect tool for a notorious crime boss- a mole inside the police department task force investigating Costello.
Meanwhile, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) has just graduated the police academy, attempting to shed the demons of his families past. Due to this past he's asked if he will become and informant working undercover in Costello's crew. Yes, each side has a rat planted in their pantry. Instead of a plot about committing crimes and stopping them, The Departed is actually a film about being a rat, while trying to find a rat and hoping no one busts your ass doing it.
Based on the Japanese film Infernal Affairs, Scorsese delivers another rich gangster film that doesn't follow the parameters that he himself helped set in his own crime drama film making through the years. Damon and DiCaprio don Boston accents and grow out of the babyface personas they were pigeonholed into. This is a great performance for each of them. Nicholson is Nicholson, crazy as hell and finally jumping from the romantic comedy market into his specialty- crazy son of a bitch market. Of course you have Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, and Mark Wahlberg filling out a great cast, but the one guy that gets left out when discussing this film is Ray Winstone as Mr. French. This right hand man of Costello is played with such brutality and intensity by Winston that he should have been nominated for a supporting Oscar over Wahlberg.
Now this is a Martin Scorsese picture, so it's going to be good and won the Oscar for best picture. But is it better than Taxi Driver? Is it better than Raging Bull? Is it better than Goodfellas? Each of those films were screwed at the Oscars and The Departed seems to be payback for picking the popular schlock of the era of these masterpieces (take a look at what they lost to). The Departed is a great film, but will it be a member of that holy trinity of Marty films? It might, but it will be the younger cousin to those great masterpieces.
Now don't get me wrong, it's a great movie. Just don't go into it thinking it's his best, because it's not. But Scorsese at his worst is 10x better than most director's best.
Refugees on boats are replaced with refugees in a mothership that ends up hovering above Johannesburg, which we all know is the beacon of equality. District 9 is the area that the refugee aliens known as "prawns", are ushered into after a split second of humanity ends up being a police state. Of course, that old George Carlin bit about NIMBY (not in my back yard) takes hold with the demand for their removal pressures a private corporation into evicting the aliens from their shacks in District 9 to their new tents in District 10. These aliens are social outcasts because they don't know earthbound norms and look like a 6 foot cross between a crawfish and a grass hopper. Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) heads the eviction process, which spirals out of control when he is infected by an alien liquid, putting him on the other side of the fence.
This is a rare item today. A movie with amazing visuals, effects, AND a good story. The film is basically a documentary that book ends 72+ hours of Wikus' life. Obviously, there are parallels between District 9 and apartheid, posing as a history lesson into what was policy in South Africa twenty years ago. It's hard to get an alien to show emotion and even harder to get a digital alien to show emotion. District 9 achieves this with it's main alien being a single parent trying to get his child out of the hell that is District 9. As the movie progresses, his reasoning changes for wanting to leave this planet and return to wherever home may be. It's a nicely written film that is full of action and doesn't disappoint the viewer. Sure it has a message, but it's able to make that pill go down smoother and not be as preachy as other films.
Seeing how the film plays out and some major plot points that come up, there will be a sequel to District 9. It's inevitable and will also be an interesting picture as the prawn population grows and the human races begins to make payments on the sins they have committed.
Every once in awhile someone gets what they think is a great idea which usually isn't the beacon of greatness they think it should be. With Julie and Julia someone came up with the idea of taking two books, Julie and Julia and Julia Child's autobiography, and make a sort of hybrid film out of the two. What you get is a film where half of it is very good and the other half is blah, dragging the whole movie down the drain.
Since this review almost reads like the typical good news and bad news cliche, I'll start with the bad news. Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is sick of her life and apparently needs a task, so she decides to cook her way through the Julia Child cookbook and blogging about it. So what we get is to watch someone who actually made money and a career from writing a quirky blog, whereas the other billion schmucks out there ripping on chick flicks and pre-teen pop culture (ahem) are broke. That's that side of the film. Dull, sad, and tedious.
Now for the good news. The scenes that flashback to Julia Child's introduction to cooking are great. Meryl Streep pulls off the hyperactive Child while Stanley Tucci is much more interesting than Julie Powell's narcoleptic husband. These sequences of the film are great and were very enjoyable to watch, which leads to the problem with this film. By the midway point you really don't give a rat's ass about Julie Powell's blog or any of that crap. Whenever we cut to her cooking and pissing and moaning, you're wanting more Streep as Julia. That fact is the huge crack in this film.
The sad part is I have no idea why they did it this way. Obviously Julie Powell got some kind of big movie check for her blog this is the result. What could have been a great bio-pic about Julia Child dorwns in the whole blog story. It would have been preferable to bookend Julia's story with Powell's, instead of interweaving them together because the only link between the two is on the surface. If there was some link (or the pair of title characters actually meeting each other at some point) the film would have worked better. Instead of a very good film starring Streep and Tucci we get a to and fro mess.
Heartbeeps is the story of two robots (Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters) that meet in a factory, fall in love, and build a baby. Oh, and they're being chased by a poor man's Robocop. Now you can guess how great a movie it is by this point. Many of you have probably never heard of this one, even if it does have the legendary Dick Miller in a cameo as a security guard or an early appearance by serial hotel stiffer Randy Quaid.
Now for the skivvy. This movie sucks. And I don't mean boring, horrible acting, dialogue, and all that stuff. I mean that it sucks like getting in a nail gun accident or being Tiger Woods. The only good thing about this movie is its running time (79 minutes) meaning that you only cringe for a little over an hour. The wonderful dialogue about circuits and power packs will bore you to tears and a plot where they take a walk through the woods then walk back is as eventful as waiting in line for the portapotty at a music festival, which also has one other thing in common in that they are both full of shit. This movie should be avoided at all costs. If you see it in a video store it must be destroyed. Fire works best, although I have seen garbage disposals work just as well.
Quentin Tarantino's second volume to his epic Kill Bill saga follows a more cerebral story than the first film. The action is scaled back to make room for a movie that Sergio Leone would love. It's a film filled with close ups, deranged dialogue, and a great sense of itself. It's hard to believe that at one time both these films were going to be one long movie. Volume 2 is so much different than it's predecessor that you have to wonder if both films as a whole would have been as great as they were separate.
After killing half of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, The Bride (Uma Thurman) prepares to murder and maim through the rest of her former co-workers and finally face the man that put a cap in her crown, Bill (David Carradine). That's the basic storyline- it's still a revenge tale that sweeps us across the country on a mission from hell. Whereas Volume One owes its soul to kung fu movies, Volume Two was born at the breast of the spaghetti western, where there were no consequences, just vast verandas to be filled with the carnage of the day. Tarantino knows the art of Leone and paints the first half of the film with images that Sergio and John Ford would be proud off. The desert is a dark and sinister place at night. Add to it the recklessness of Bill's brother Budd (Michael Madsen) and The Bride's arch nemesis Elle (Daryl Hannah) and you get what amounts to a Mexican stand off in the desert. No one trusts each other and they shouldn't- they're killers.
Once again Tarantino proves that he is a great artist who uses dialogue as his medium, particularly during the confrontation where Bill compares the Bride to Superman. No matter how much she tries to disguise herself as the pregnant wife of a record store owner she will always be a killer- she'll always be Bill's killer. It's dialogue like this that makes a scene that is typical Hollywood fluff and makes it cool. That's the thing about Tarantino- he makes well worn cliches cool.
Of course, the $64,000 question is which volume is better. It's really all a matter of preference. If you grew up with kung fu movies and their ilk you will enjoy the first volume. If spaghetti westerns are your game then you will prefer volume 2. I prefer the second volume, mainly because it slows itself down almost to a crawl, but you don't notice it. It's more cerebral than the constant hack and slash of the first movie and delivers an ending that may seem "wimperish", but is more grandiose than most. Kill Bill, Volume 2 is a great and enjoyable ride.
