Sunday 17 January 2010

AVATAR

I've long since given up on the idea of writing film reviews on here, at least of the portentous broadsheet (is that an anachronism yet?) variety. All the same, I feel moved to report on my viewing of Avatar, what with it being such a cultural event (the film itself, rather than my attendance of it), not to mention a ground-breaking feat of technical something-or-other.

Somehow, the effort of writing a coherent piece of prose seems unwarranted, so I'm going to go all Susan Sontag on your ass and do a "Notes on Camp"-style series of fragmented observations.

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1. When Giovanni Ribisi grows up he will look exactly like Paul Giamatti.

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2. Who played Michelle Rodriguez in movies before Michelle Rodriguez was in movies? She's not so much an actor as a stock character, like an eccentric uncle with a drinking problem ("Oh, God! Don't tell me that Michelle Rodriguez is coming to dinner again!"). James Cameron tacitly acknowledges this fact by declining to give her character any background or interesting dialogue; we already know what a Michelle Rodriguez does, why waste time on explanations?

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3. It seems perverse to spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing the CGI necessary for creating an imaginary alien world, only to populate it with amateur concept art stolen from Internet message boards.

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4. It seems all the more perverse to make a film condemning imperialist resource grabbing and the genocide of indigenous cultures only to forget about it forty minutes from the end and pin all the blame on one inexplicably stubborn military officer. It does, however, allow for a climactic battle between a blue-faced cat-monkey and a man in a robot suit.

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5. THREE-DEE is shit.

2 comments:

Lord of the Files said...

#2 is dead on! When I was watching the film I kept imagining scenes like one in which an executive producer and his assistant are frowning in front a whiteboard, trying to allocated their ratings-allocated number of uses of the word "bitch" for maximum profit-making power. 'Let's give one to Rodriguez.. she's obviously got to call someone or something a bitch.."

Anyway, my own review of the movie would probably include the following points:
1) The fact that the movie starts without a title (and I saw it in 2D) and an incredibly ham-handed expository voiceover made me think I was watching another preview for about 10 minutes. Only when I began to question the length of this "preview" did the horrible truth emerge.

2) I think for maximum enjoyment one should, if possible where you live, go and see it in a language you understand at most very poorly, unsubtitled.

fouls said...

The answer to #2 is Jenette Goldstein.