AVATAR
Right out of the gate let me say this: I fucking despise this movie. People have asked me if my hatred stems from my expectations which were, admittedly, sky high. There might be something in that but also, it's just awful. Let's look at the expectations and why I was hoping for a magical cinematic experience beyond anything I'd ever had before.
Avatar is a James Cameron movie so straight away, I was very interested. His back catalogue is hugely impressive. But it was also James Cameron doing Sci Fi again. James Cameron and Sci Fi is like fish n' chips. Just a fucking superb combo. Then the man himself started talking about Avatar. To say he bigged it up is an understatement. He was talking about changing cinema forever (you can argue that he has but it isn't for the better). He was talking about immersing you into a luscious alien world and letting this amazing story unfold around you. Whether or not you think he succeeded depends on how you feel about 3D. I didn't feel like I was immersed into anything but I was still on board as I was promised a powerful, emotional story...
Turns out the shitty 3D is the least of Avatar's problems. Here's the craic: Earth has exhausted all resources so a paraplegic jarhead is sent to the Na'vi (pictured above) planet of Pandora (no really) in his very own "avatar" (he takes the form of a Na'vi but maintains his own mind) to infiltrate and report back to his bosses the easiest way to rob Pandora of its main mineral, Unobtanium (no really). Predictably enough he becomes attached to the Na'vi and falls in love with one of them. He turns his back on his earth life and risks everything to defend the simple nature loving, god tree worshipping Na'vi from the big bad military.
I don't mind simple stories. I don't even mind blatantly ripping off other stories. It happens all the time. The main problem with Avatar is just how fucking annoying everyone in the movie is. The marines are utterly devoid of anything resembling a human characteristic and the Na'vi are so "wise and deep" that I actually ended up rooting for the bad guys. None of this is helped by the casting. Sam Worthington is a useless cunt. More charisma in a bin bag and he cannot act. Zoe Saldana is gorgeous but as a Na'vi I'm afraid her beauty is all but hidden and try as she might with the material, she cannot rescue this shit. The words "I see you" will induce rage. She fares a lot better as a green alien in some other movie you may have seen also featuring a sentient plant... Meanwhile Sigourney Weaver is shamelessly wasted, Michelle Rodriguez does her "I'd be a badass dude" thing and they are directed by a guy who seems much happier playing with his new toys than actually trying to relate to people.
Credit where it's due, the J-Cam can put together an action sequence. They are always perfectly edited and slick as a whistle. You can tell he has worked his ass off here! He pulls out all the stops, builds some new ones and pulls them out too. There is no question that the man put everything he has into this movie. The problem is the story is nowhere near strong enough to survive the technical onslaught and the technical side of the movie just isn't all that much fun. Remember this:
In particular, the way the gun gets caught between the bars. What a superb touch that is. It is smart and subtle. Avatar is neither of those things. In fact it is the exact opposite. For all the outstanding work done by the fx team, the movie is fucking dumb and insists on beating its pro nature message into your skull over and over and over again... We get it. Tree good, war bad.
Another annoyance is the constant jumping. There's so much of it and it's in there purely to show off. It's never sympathetic to the story. Not even the scene where our hero tames a dragon (or something) to prove his worth to the tribe. It's shoehorned in there and because there'd been so much jumping beforehand, it loses all of its potency.
Avatar has long been criticized as looking like a Pixar movie. Initially I felt this was harsh but looking at it again, it's a fair claim (See clip on the right). This isn't a slight against Pixar whose output is mostly excellent but it is another point of interest when deciding if this movie is all Cameron cracked it up to be. For all the technical prowess, there are times where you feel like you're watching a cartoon. Was this the intention? I doubt it.
Let's talk about the score. James Horner was a legend. When people talk about his amazing work Avatar seldom, if ever, comes up. The reason it doesn't is because it's a by the numbers, workmanlike approach and I really feel like the reason he didn't reach the emotional depths of something like Braveheart is because he couldn't relate to the story or any of the cardboard characters...
In closing, I'm a huge fan of James Cameron and he really does work very hard to entertain the audience. And all he has to do is point to the critical acclaim and the box office to shut the likes of me up. He made his movie and at that point it is up to us to decide if it lives or dies. We decided it should live. Boy does it live! 2.7 billion dollars later and Cameron has earned his "told you so" demeanour. Numbers like that exist because people go to see a movie multiple times. This is where I get confused. I get people going to see it once. But putting oneself through that multiple times? Baffling! Utterly baffling. Clearly I'm out of touch with the average movie goer...
So can a movie about a human who becomes an alien and turns on humans to help said aliens possibly be any good? Yeah, yeah it can.
Forrest Gump
Hate is a strong word, too strong for Gump. So I'll go with strongly dislike. Gump is a very well made movie on a technical level. As you'd expect from a Robert Zemeckis movie, there are some remarkable moments of special fx prowess, mostly involving Forrest being present at some important moment in history. This is where my positivity ends...
So what's the what: Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks) suffers from a slight mental disability (if you're offended by my description please ask my bollocks). Sitting at a bus stop he picks up a feather and decides to tell complete strangers the story of his life... poor bastards. Anyway, bullied as a kid, because people are assholes, Forrest finds strength in his relationship with his mother (Sally Field) and his friendship with Jenny Curran (Robin Right) the love of his life. His ability to run (wow) gets him into college on a football scholarship. After college, Gump joins the army and ends up in Viet Nam where he meets Bubba who has the idea that when the war is over they should buy a fishing boat and hunt shrimp. Riveting stuff!
While in Nam, Bubba is killed during a nasty attack. Gump shows real courage here risking his life to save as many as he can... Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise) loses his legs in the attack but, thanks to Gump's flight of foot antics, survives the incident. Gump himself is injured and gets shot in the arse. While in recovery he discovers another extraordinary ability, he is superb at ping pong (wow). He flirts with celebrity, gets a medal of honour, plays ping pong and when asked to address an anti war rally in Washington he runs into his long lost friend Jenny (now a hippie) who is clearly happy to see, but just isn't that into, him.
Gump goes home and buys a boat as much for Bubba's memory as himself. He and lieutenant Dan head out to find shrimp. After a hurricane hits, they find that their boat is the only one still in tact. They make a killing, Dan invests the money into Apple and Gump is now rich. However, his mother is dying so he goes home to stay with her while she passes.
Jenny turns up to visit and Forrest proposes! Predictably enough she turns him down. However, she does give him a pity fuck... and then leaves him. Jenny, you see, is a cunt! So Gump gets up and decides to run across the country for a few years and this gains him further celebrity though I have no idea why.
Fast forward and Gump explains why he is sitting at the bus stop. Jenny has asked him to meet her there. She has seen him on television and now that he has garnered enough celebrity he is good enough to.... are you ready.... meet his son! This loathsome cunt has kept his son from him all this time. GEEBAG!!!! Gump in his innocence does the right thing and marries her. But Jenny has AIDS (they're too chickshit to say that in this fucking pox of a movie but it's AIDS) and dies shortly after they get married. Luckily the kid still has Forrest who you'd have to think will be a far better role model for him than Jenny ever was and the movie ends on a predictably cloying note featuring the feather we'd seen at the start of the movie which I guess represents Jenny's spirit or something, I dunno.
Now, you may have noticed an absence of that line... I didn't want to give it any air in this blog but it's impossible to write about this movie without bringing it up. "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get". It's very easy to hate this line (don't worry, I really do hate it) but I kind of admire its power. It has etched its way into popular culture where it will stay forever. Credit to the writers for coming up with it. I liken it to an awful pop song that can never be killed... Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up or James Blunt's You're Beautiful... you get the idea. Awful but not going anywhere... ever... which pretty much sums up how I feel about this debacle.
