gwax's rumblings

I saw Avatar last night in RealD 3D and, I have to say, it is a very pretty, rather fun, awesome to watch movie. The 3D for Avatar was incredibly well done but it gave me such a bad headache and nausea that it almost wasn’t worth it. Luckily, I was able to immediately go home and go to sleep, thus not dealing with the discomfort much. Needless to say, I think that I’m going to stick to 2D movies for the foreseeable future.

Diatribe about 3D aside, Avatar is a pretty great movie. Sure it’s Dances with Wolves in space but Dances with Wolves was a good movie so why not put it in space. Actually, more than that, to me Avatar was Dances with Wolves meets Dinotopia in space. The color palettes of Avatar were vibrant and pretty in much the way that the palettes of Dinotopia were; furthermore, the creatures and world were sufficiently realized to make it seem like a place that one might really want to go. In fact, I think Avatar has provided me with the first artificial setting that I have had a strong desire to visit since Dinotopia.

So, having discussed the pain (literally) of the 3D, the adequacy of the story (adequate being the right word), and the beauty of the world, let’s talk about the special effects. For quite a while, I have been adamantly opposed to the use and overuse of CGI in the film industry. Certainly, some studios do CGI correctly (Pixar, DreamWorks) but when mixed with live action, I tend to think that the Jurassic Park or Aliens approach of relying primarily on live action, puppets and robots is a much safer and more visually appealing approach. The clearest example of where real is good and CGI is bad is to look at the original Star Wars trilogy in comparison to the new Star Wars trilogy. Somehow, thankfully, James Cameron has not fallen in the same way that George Lucas has; Avatar beautifully mixes the real with the CGI and I did not once feel as though things had fallen into the uncanny valley.

Hopefully Avatar will end up profitable in spite of its truly ludicrous budget (officially $237M + $150M marketing) and James Cameron will be allowed to keep making crazy as heck science fiction stuff (it was at >$232M after its opening weekend so odds are pretty good). The outstanding question now is whether he’s going to make a sequel to Avatar or whether he’s going to make Battle Angel Alita like he’s been talking about for a while.

So yeah, overall, I am inclined to recommend the Dances with Wolves meets Dinotopia in space movie, otherwise known as Avatar but I do not recommend it in 3D unless you’ve got some dramamine to take beforehand. Actually, that’s an idea; maybe I’ll pop a couple dramamine and try seeing it again, you know, for science.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Transformers 2) is not what one would refer to as a good movie in the sense that Forrest Gump or Seven Samurai might be considered good. Transformers 2 is, however, an awesome movie in the sense that summer blockbusters are designed to be awesome. It’s pretty typical to see a movie that’s got crazy effects and action but with a story/plot that mostly exists to give pause and glue to hold things together, which is somewhat farcical, in my opinion.

The logical conclusion to the trend of summer blockbusters is that story/plot isn’t actually that important and, if done wrong, can really drag a movie down. So, what happens if you reach that logical conclusion and make a movie that is an open acknowledgment of the frivolity of plot in summer blockbusters? You end up with something that is a gorgeous, shiny, moving piece of art, that pleases your senses but not your intellectualism; you end up with something that every traditional movie-watcher will think is terrible as they hunt for plot and a, so to speak, good movie.

This is the case for Transformers 2. Critics, in looking for plot and traditional quality, have failed to see the gorgeous, shiny, sense-satiating, monster of an experience that Transformers 2 is. The critics made a similar experience with Speed Racer, which was not very compelling but nonetheless excessively beautiful.

In addition to the amazing experience that Transformers 2 is, its quality has also inspired, what is probably the finest review of anything, ever. io9 puts it quite well in their review, Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie, which I completely agree with. Excerpt below:

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that’s because people don’t understand that this isn’t a movie, in the conventional sense. It’s an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

In short, read this review; ignore the other reviews; go see Transformers 2; get overstimulated; and enjoy the culmination of all that is the summer blockbuster.

Thanks to hunch, I recently discovered the anime Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, or just Gurren Lagann, which I have really been enjoying.

Gurren Lagann is, at its heart, a mecha anime and, as anyone who knows my love of Transformers and Battletech will understand, that is a plus in my book. The art is great and the battle scenes are just awesome. On top of that, there are some pretty great characters in the show; I am especially fond of Kamina. Also, Gurren Lagann has already run its full 27 episode course, which means that I can watch it and enjoy a degree of completion, which is a thing that I really enjoy being able to do.

As far as anime series go, Gurren Lagann is the first one that I’ve seen and really enjoyed since Trigun. I wouldn’t say that Gurren Lagann is not Samurai Champloo caliber but it’s certainly worth hunting down and giving a shot.

I finally got around to watching the end of Battlestar Galactica (sure took me long enough) and I have to say that I was somewhat displeased, to say the least. Don’t get me wrong; the series, as a whole, was quite pleasant and I did enjoy watching the end but, still, somewhat displeased.

SPOILERS FOLLOW:

Points of contention:

• Luddism: We had lots of technology and lots of war so let’s throw away all of our technology. Seriously? Going one step further; you think that you can actually just throw away all of your knowledge. It’d be zero to super-polymers age in one day. Oh, le sigh.
• Religion: God this, destiny that, magical know-how the other; ugh, give me a break.
• Starbuck: What’s the deal with her? Just going to write her out with no explanation at all? Talk about sloppy. Talk about cop-out.
• Prehistory: If that’s supposed to be Earth, how do you explain linguistic evolution? Where are the records of ships and technology? What about the super fancy materials? I bet they didn’t degrade in the past 150 thousand years.
• Matrix Architect: Didn’t we get the this has happened a bunch of times before idea out of the way in The Matrix Reloaded? It was a so-so idea then and it’s even more so now.
• etc.: Those were the big ones, at least.

Seriously, you guys couldn’t come up with a better way to write a conclusion to this thing? I guess mediocre closure is still better than no closure. Thanks for the four/five seasons of pretty great, Battlestar Galactica. Oh well, time to catch up on Lie to Me and Dollhouse, I guess.

Let me add Outlander to the list of awesome movies that you’ve never heard of. Outlander came out in US theaters last Friday and having followed it for a while, I went and saw it. Now, let me come clean here, Outlander isn’t a particularly good movie but it sure as Hell is a totally awesome movie. That said, I do recommend going to see it while it’s still on the big screen.

Vikings versus aliens really should be all the synopsis that you need to convince you to go see it but, I guess if you want more, I can give you a brief synopsis. Earth is actually an undeveloped, abandoned seed colony for the spacefaring human race. Kainan, a man from space, crash lands his ship on Earth in viking-age Norway. Kainan soon realizes that a particularly nasty alien, called a Moorwen, had stowed aboard his ship and is now on the loose. There are subsequently a lot of spaceman/viking integration/culture-shock dynamics and eventually it becomes vikings+spaceman vs. alien monster.

Just to be clear, I keep saying that this is vikings vs. aliens because that’s both what it purports to be and what it delivers phenomenally well. Outlander has cult classic written all over it.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not that bad. With the crap that George Lucas has been putting out recently, I’m surprised the new Indiana Jones movie was not worse. The increased use of special effects and CG definitely hurt the movie but not as much as that Gungan idiot hurt Star Wars. Ultimately, the goal and ending of the movie were pretty poor but the early and middle parts of the movie were plenty decent as far as Indiana Jones’ style is concerned.

Funny that aliens and flying saucers are less reasonable than the hand of God but I think that’s just the way my mind says the world of Indiana Jones is supposed to be.

Saturday evening, I went out with some friends and saw The Fall, which was, I must say, a gorgeous movie. The movie is quite artistic, pretty and rather fun. It gets a wee bit on the odd side at a number of points and there are a few WTF?! moments but, overall, the film is quite coherent and a very nice way to spend a couple hours. Unfortunately, The Fall, being thoroughly independent, is suffering very poor distribution and showing up in a rather small number of theaters but, in my opinion, it’s worth seeking out one of those theaters and seeing it.

In today’s edition of George brings you obscure movies that you should have heard of, District B13. This 2004, French film, produced by the great Luc Besson, stars David Belle, founder of Parkour and involves acrobatics and ass-kicking that easily match the better things coming out of Asia recently. Take one part post-apocalyptic action film, add a dash of drug lords, some neutron bombs, two parts crazy martial arts, a liberal sprinkling of really good French traceurs, bake for an hour and a half and you get, well, a pretty phenomenally awesome movie. No wires or special effects necessary.