yes it looks cool. Some of us expectt more in a movie. Sorry about that.
I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious, especially with the clunkiest dialogue I've heard in a decade, and insufficiently compensated for by the technology/visuals. I found the "noble savages" idea and infantile hippy politics and preaching tiresome too.
For some of us lesser mortals good graphics/special effects is just one element of a good Scifi/fantasy movie, and then not the most important aspect.
(from the review) " what it really felt like to me was a fourth movie in the Shrek franchise, pipping the yet-to-be-released Shrek Forever After to extrapolate that series' twin curves of rising technical achievement and plumetting wit to their logical endpoint: a near-immaculate feat of visualisation, accompanied by a staggeringly awful plot in which clunky genre conventions triumph completely over plausibility and originality. Avatar even boasts its very own love story where societal expectations and superficial barriers of size and pastelicity are overcome by generous helpings of pixie dust."
This expresses my feelings perfectly, but I wouldn't be so polite. I think Avatar is a terrible movie with gorgeous visuals and nothing else.
Aliens != Red Indians in fancy dress. The movie insults my intelligence on multiple levels. Yes I know, Caveat Emptor and all that, but I guess it must be because I am one of "these people"?
Netflix also rents our pedantic art house flicks so you never have to be troubled by what the rest of us mortals watch for escapism.
I'm sure you can find some overwrought deconstruction of modern human sexuality retold as 4 movements of the lives of people in positions of authority but no power, politicians of the modern era in a mock nuclear stand-down, a 30 minute continuous scene of a single flower, in water, as people pass by blurred in the bokeh of an extreme depth of field and the audio recorded so poorly you can't actually hear what anybody is saying, and a clinically shot orgy with a clown stepping in at minute 11 to juggle, seemingly unaware of his own environs -- driven by the effort to juggle so many balls.
In the end, the clown drops the balls and close to credits.
The credits of course will flow up and will be in a mix of Italian and French. Each scene of course representing impotence, sexual drive, narcissism as a sexual trait, and lust and the struggle to balance a polygamous relationship with three waitress and a gay hairdresser at the same time (as the director was experiencing while he shot this film). The credits of course flow up in Italian and French as a both symbols of ejaculation and of salad dressing.
"I like movies that have strong plots and not try to insult my intelligence" isn't the same as saying every movie has to be "high art", - or "overwrought deconstruction of modern human sexuality retold as 4 movements of the lives of people" in your words ;-) .
What you've done is use the timeworn rhetorical device of taking someone's point of view and try to (rhetorically vs logically) invalidate it by positing an absurd opposite.
I think Avatar sucks except for the visuals. Bad plot, bad dialogue bad acting. None of this implies preferring "pedantic art flicks" as an alternative (this is your cute rhetoric at work - the unwarranted exaggeration of my stance).
Well, the story is a combination of typical archetypes retold with pretty pictures. That much I cannot argue about. And I think that what you are really saying by "the plot sucked" is "it's too archetype driven". I'm basing this on:
>I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious
Sure the characters ranged from a bit 2-d (the Col.) to well fleshed out (Neytiri (watch it again if you don't believe me)) and the acting ranged from "will probably win an award it was so good" Saldana to "thanks for showing up and picking up your paycheck" Weaver. But that's nothing different than you'll find in almost every movie -- the principles are fleshed out and the supporting cast is flat.
Why can't we have more 'smart' movies like Erin Brockovich/Schindler's List/Fight Club/District 9/Oldboy/etc. (archetypes of David vs. Goliath, Greed and Bullies) or The Incredibly True Story of Two Teenagers In Love/Léon/American Beauty/Mississippi Masala/South Pacific/Moulin Rouge/West Side Story etc. (Forbidden Love) or Lawrence of Arabia/Dune/Hunt for Red October/etc. (Lovable Turncoat)... you ask? And I'd counter that all of those are as archetype driven as any other well known flick (archetype stories provided in parens).
You see where I'm going with this. Even if you don't agree with all my movie choices as being "good" or "smart" you'll at least have to agree that most movies that are at least reasonably well known are pretty much based on a dissection or aggregation of common archetypes. How many times has Romeo and Juliet been retold almost verbatim? And by and large the audience enjoys these things and says "oh the plot was so good" when really, they are just a rehash of old story ideas. We even group movies into archetype driven categories "love story", "ghost story", "suspense", etc.
So yes, I was being "cute" with my notional art-house flick. But if you want to find something not driven by archetypes, where the artists consciously try to avoid those things, you have to go there, or to France or Italy perhaps. Here, http://www.imdb.com/chart/top this is the top 250 movies on IMDB not by dollars but by rating. How many of these are "smart" movies meaning "not a rehash of archetypes"? Very few if any.
It's pretty simple really, if you don't want your intelligence to be insulted (meaning you don't want an archetype driven story), you end up with a movie about a vapid cowgirl/model with giant thumbs or a movie director that can't focus on making movies because he's too busy with all his mistresses (which is actually just a retelling of the "guy with too many girlfriends archetype"). And given that non-archetype driven movies are typically poorly rated and attended by the open public, either you are particularly "smart" or those movies tend to suck.
"You see where I'm going with this. Even if you don't agree with all my movie choices as being "good" or "smart" you'll at least have to agree that most movies that are at least reasonably well known are pretty much based on a dissection or aggregation of common archetypes."
which all has nothing to do with what I said. You are reacting to your own opinions what you think is the sharp division of movies into either a collection of dumb stereotypes on one extreme (where Avatar fits) or "art movies" on the other..
Since this discussion looks increasingly pointless, I will end this thread here. Thank You for your time.
>I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious.
to mean, in the general sense "I personally found the warmed over archetype and cliche driven plot to be tiresome, repetitive and tedious."
But now I see by your infantile "I'm right, you're wrong, end of discussion fingers in ears Nya nya nya nya I can't hear you" childishness (to wit)
>Since this discussion looks increasingly pointless, I will end this thread here. Thank You for your time.
That I should have just linked you to Amazon's Disney Princess store instead of Netflix; and related "Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs" and "Little Mermaid" to you instead of "8 1/2" and "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" as that would have been much more at your level.
Is as vapid a retelling of "guy with too many girlfriends" as any other. It simply creates an easily escapable artificial conflict that's better told in the form of a summer teen comedy.
Can't make a movie? Get less drama in your life. Situation movie solved.
It wasn't improved any when they added another 1/2 to it.
There's an interesting discussion going on at Matthew Yglesias's site - http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/12/the-racia... While his short summary of Avatar is pretty far off the mark, I thought the comparison to Dune was pretty on-point. The comments are also worth reading.
I do. (Sorry for being ...uh .... different).
yes it looks cool. Some of us expectt more in a movie. Sorry about that.
I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious, especially with the clunkiest dialogue I've heard in a decade, and insufficiently compensated for by the technology/visuals. I found the "noble savages" idea and infantile hippy politics and preaching tiresome too.
For some of us lesser mortals good graphics/special effects is just one element of a good Scifi/fantasy movie, and then not the most important aspect.
(from the review) " what it really felt like to me was a fourth movie in the Shrek franchise, pipping the yet-to-be-released Shrek Forever After to extrapolate that series' twin curves of rising technical achievement and plumetting wit to their logical endpoint: a near-immaculate feat of visualisation, accompanied by a staggeringly awful plot in which clunky genre conventions triumph completely over plausibility and originality. Avatar even boasts its very own love story where societal expectations and superficial barriers of size and pastelicity are overcome by generous helpings of pixie dust."
This expresses my feelings perfectly, but I wouldn't be so polite. I think Avatar is a terrible movie with gorgeous visuals and nothing else.
Aliens != Red Indians in fancy dress. The movie insults my intelligence on multiple levels. Yes I know, Caveat Emptor and all that, but I guess it must be because I am one of "these people"?