“Today I started making a list of all the movies I saw in the theater in 2009 that I never wrote about. The list is way longer than it should be. The problem is that when I started writing longer, more comprehensive reviews to publish, I stopped writing little blurby short-take reviews. I’m going to go through the list tomorrow and attempt to write a few sentences on each movie.
In the meanwhile, I have a New Year’s Resolution, besides the one in which I promised not to stop saying FUCK, and that is that I am going to write up something short and quick every time I go to the movies, and then I’ll worry about writing the long in depth review later when I have time to get to it. Of course, if there is a movie I’ve seen that you would like me to say more about, prompts are always welcome. And I’ll do my usual periodic in depth review, but I can’t do those for every movie I see in the theater since I usually see about 100 movies a year.
On that note, here’s my first 2010 Short Take installment. I’m going to create new tag for these called Movie Short Takes.
I got out of the house to see Avatar in 3D tonight because I really thought that I needed the spectacle. Never in my life did I imagine that a 235 million dollar 3D extravaganza could be so freaking boring. I mean, this movie is all about the special effects, and other than that it is an empty vessel. Sure, its main point is that Western imperialism, particularly of the United States variety, sucks. It kills, it steals, it rapes, it plunders. But the movie makes that point and stretches it out forever with filler that alternates between uber high tech military machinery and ever so Disneyland-under-a-black-light nature exotic nature footage. Yes, we get it. Military = Bad. Nature = Good. Thanks for making that point.
It’s amazing how hyper everything in the movie is. It’s full of frenetic movement, flashing gizmos, grunts,booms and animals with sharp teeth. Nature may be peaceful, but it’s also full of all kinds of hazards that make for a lot of dramatic running around, falling, tripping, fighting, and general mayhem of the loud action-movie sort. Falling from trees, hanging on the edge of a cliff, fighting and escaping wild beasts that come from the trees or the sky. This stuff looks good in 3D. That’s why they put it in the movie. Big scary military equipment also looks good in 3D. That’s why they put a lot of that in the movie.
The best line in the movie is: ‘When shit you want is on other people’s land, make them your enemy.’ But do we need three hours and 235 million dollars to get to that point? At first, the cost of making the film was preventing me from seeing it. I mean seriously, how can you create an anti-imperialist movie that costs $235 million? Isn’t there something inherently contradictory in that formula? But then I realized that all those dollars went to pay a hell of a lot of working people. Making a movie like Avatar takes a lot of human labor of all sorts of varieties. I was reminded that by supporting movies, you support jobs. But still, what a bunch of hoopla.
The thing about movies like Avatar and is that they just seem so empty. They have all the veneer of entertainment, but inside they somehow just seem hollow even if they attempt to make some kind of valid lefitist political point. Still, it didn’t seem empty to the people in the packed theater where I saw it. They all applauded enthusiastically, and maybe they got some kind of message about America’s imperialist life-destroying, planet-murdering tendencies. I don’t know though. In the part of the movie when the Bad Guy said, ‘We have to fight terror with terror’ (which was supposed to be a dig at US military operations in the Middle East), the guy in front of me shouted, ‘Fuck yeah!’ and raised his fist in the air. So uh, perhaps the movie’s point was lost on him.
My favorite part of the movie was watching the Na’vi (the native tribe, how clever to call them Na’vi) move and appreciating their physicality. The way they live and move their bodies is so physical and bodily that it felt good to watch them. I thought, ‘I want to live like that! In a giant tree house, riding cool horse things and flying around on dragon birds. Neato!’
I did have some emotional moments, particularly when Neytiri, the Na’vi girl, bonds with a big vicious scary razor-toothed panther-like creature to kick some American Imperialist asses. Just when you think he’s going to eat her alive, he bows down, let’s her climb onto his back, and they go bite some soldiers’ heads off! But then I was outraged when the Very Bad Colonel Fuckface kills the panther in a long drawn out scene where he stabs it over and over and over again and we have to hear the animal’s cries of pain. Dang. That’s brutal. I also nearly shed a tear when Neytiri’s father dies. I mean that poor blue girl’s screams of grief were so horridly real. (In that particular moment, she was almost like Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist!)
Anyway, I was kind of disappointed by the 3D which I thought was going to look a lot better. Frankly, I enjoyed the 3 minute trailer for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland in 3D more than I enjoyed the entire 3 hours of Avatar. But it was kind of fun, and I’m glad I saw it because otherwise I would beat myself up for missing out on This Important Cultural Moment (for whatever the fuck it’s worth).
I actually have a few more points to make like why does the female scientist have to be a smoker? But I better end my Short Take here and go to bed. Ask me questions about the movie, and I’ll be happy to expand my thoughts.
Over and out.
KDD”
art in and around South Florida
