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Keep Smiling page 4
So I ran right out and saw James Cameron's Avatar this weekend.
Pretty disappointing, sorry to say. I'd seen the 20 minute preview a few months ago and left that feeling fairly unimpressed, but I'd been heartened by the overwhelmingly great reviews it got upon release. i really don't know that the reviewers were thinking. Sure, it's real pretty to look at, but I really had the feeling that I'd seen it all before. The plot is lifted wholesale from Dances With Wolves. You can see every plot point coming from a mile away. There's a cool chase where the hero flees from nasty CGI creatures, each one, bigger and more fearsome than the one before. But then I already saw that in Star Trek. There's a cool battle sequence with robot armor. But I already saw that in District 9. As a bonus, there's an incredibly heavy-handed Iraq-war analogy that is so groaningly obvious it loses any impact it might have had. The sci-fi metaphor thing was handled with far more subtlety in, again, District 9. The 3D was cool, but I didn't really get a sense of it being a great leap forward from Beowulf. I will say that the Navi animation was really well done, and their faces were incredibly expressive, but it doesn't really do much for me when the characters themselves are all cardboard cutouts in service of a dusty second-hand plot. Steven Lang has a nice turn as the villainous Military commander though. And Sigourney Weaver seems to have somehow stopped aging. Anyways, it was kind of a bummer. A technological achievement, I'm sure, but somewhere along the way Cameron forgot to come up with a compelling story to go along with all his cool CGI creatures. Oh well.
Read another two-dollar street-seller special this week, The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins.
I'd read recommendations of the movie based on the novel from both George Pelecanos and Ed Brubaker, a couple of writers whom I adore, so when I saw the book on the street I snatched it right up. It's a cool, fast read. Great dialogue and a nasty little plot about gun dealers and bank robbers. Not an ounce of fat on it, just lean mean and right to the point. Worth picking up if you come across a copy. Now I'll have to track down the film.
Here's a merry xmasshole for ya:
That's it for me. Hope everybody has a good ol' holiday and a happy new year!
1 comment:
Oh yes - track down the film. I don't know if it has anything on the book but the film has long been a favourite of mine - right up your street for sure.
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