Tag Archives: Movies

Movie Review Avatar

This morning a friend and I went to see James Cameron’s first feature film in 15 years, Avatar.

A Science-Fictione adventure set in the year 2153, Avatar is about a paraplegic marine Jake Scully (Sam Worthington) who has step up and take over his brothers position as an Avatar driver for a science and anthropological mission on the planet Pandora. An Avatar driver is  a person who has the conscious mind transferred into an artificially  created Na’vi body. Allowing them to live free and interact with the native population.

Pandora is a jungle planet with a veracious biome that extremely dangerous. The Atmosphere is poisonous and it is populated by the tribal people the Na’vi. (Cameron observes the Sf cliche of over use of apostrophes in alien languages.) Unluckily for the Na’vi, Pandora is also home to ‘Unobtainium’ a mineral so valuable that it sells for 20 million a kilogram. In addition to the scientific expedition there is a large scale strip mining operation with plenty of ex-military security.

Naturally Jake finds his loyalty tested as he lives more and more in his fully abled body and learns more of the ways of the Na’vi.

The film is nearly three hours long and represents a new level of excellence in the relatively young art of performance capture. Actors have their performance captured digitally and this drives the animation of their digital doppelgangers. Robert Zemeciks has been experiment with this as a tool in motion picture, but on films that retained an animated look to them. With Avatar James Cameron has given us photorealistic performance capture. Truly the trailers do not capture the perfect images that have been created for this film. I watched the movie and was totally amazed by the look and realism of the scenes. I could not even begin to guess what elements were real and which elements were digital outside of the alien life on Pandora. The 3-d effect was the best I have ever watched and really did help place you right into the reality of the story. If you have any interest at all in seeing this film you need to see it in the theater where the achievement can truly be appreciated.

As for the story — well sadly there the film was simplistic and predictable. The baby-boomers simply cannot let go of Vietnam and this — in part — is Vietnam all over again. The characters are flat and without and real depth or complexities. From what I have told you — all of which is available in the trailers – you should be able to guess nearly every major plot-point, development, and ultimate resolution on the story.

The film suffers from the need to lecture and allows this soapbox mentality to mar a perfectly fine production. Now mind you, the three hours passed quickly and the visuals are gripping. The story did not fail so badly as to bore me, but it didn;t fully engage me either.

The film also suffered from people behaving stupidly for plot devices reasons, as well an inconsistency in realism. (for example in once scene we see that cockpit glass is tough enough to stop sub-machine guns rounds, but in another it is unable to stop an arrow.)

Still, I am glad I saw it in the theater. Home video, even blu-ray, would not have done this film justice. However I am also glad I paid a bargain price. Keep all that in mind when you make up your mind as to weather you want to see Avatar or not.

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Lonely weekend

My sweetie-wife has traveled back home to help her mother and I have to fend for myself for the weekend.

It will be videos, video games, friends, and tomorrow morning an early showing of Avatar. I don’t expect much from the story but I want to see the new technology.

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Vindication

Not that I had gotten much push back on it, but I am now vindicated on my choice for a blu-ray player.

When I was looking into blu-ray players one of my prime concerns was compatibility. There was already Blu-ray 1.0 and 1.1, and 2.0, the basic discs would work in any machine, but some special features would only work if you have the latest version of the blu-ray playing software. Because of that I selected the Playstation 3 as my blu-ray player. Its internet connectivity allowed it to update its firmware as the needs arose and keep up to date on playing blu-rays. I have been quite happy with its performance and not regretted buying it for a moment.

Today the specs were released for something I knew was coming, Blu-ray 3D; 3-D movies with full 1080p quality from you home TV.  Sony a prime backer of blu-ray is going to have a firmware update for the Playstation 3 to show the 3-d Blu-rays.

No hardware upgrade for me.

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Irritation and Temptations

So this blog post was going to be about why I was angry with Turner Classic Movies and their proposed 1st annual Classic Film Festival.

Saturday Morning I awoke with plans of grabbing a couple of checks that needed depositing and walking to my bank to perform said deposit. That plan fell through when I saw that there was a downpour of rain going on and walking anywhere would result in a through soaking that could only be matched by Washington D.C.

So with my sweetie-wife off doing overtime at her job, I sat down and flipped through the channels on the television. I stopped at TCM — Turner Classic Movies —  there was one of those short subjects playing about Claude Raines so I watched that and then the commercials for up coming movies. ( I really like that TCM uses the original trailers to promote the movies they show.) Then the devil stepped up and had an offering.

TCM is hosting the first annual Classic Hollywood Movie Festival. They  started running down the lists of movies to be shown and I got more and more interested. My interest needle pegged when they said that they would be premiering the lost print of Metropolis. Oh my, I really wanted to see that! (I admit an interest in seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen again.)

Then the host – I am certain — revealed that the festival was going to take place in Hollywood, Florida. Damn it man! That’s not Hollywood, not movie Hollywood by any means at all. I was bummed. (I said as much to my ex later that day when I called to wish her a happy Birthday.)

So tonight i sat down to blog about and of course that meant digging up the link to the festival. Surprise, it’s in Hollywood California like it is supposed to be. It’s four days of panels, events, and classic movies projected onto big screens. Man, for a film nut like me this is just great.

Except a cheap 4 day pass current runs $399.00, and that’s going up by a $100 soon. Le Sigh

I have the money. It would be like a really expensive SF con, nut I can’t justify it. There are individual screenings and I may attend one of those.

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Sunday Night Movie: Sleepy Hollow

sleepy_hollow_xl_02--film-A My blogging has been very sparse of late and I do apologize for that. Between Christmas, familial illnesses, and my own illness — creeping crud caught at LosCon — it has been a  rough couple of weeks. I’m going to try to do better for everyone here and I appreciate your patience.

So last night I watched Sleep Hollow (1999), Director Tim Burton’s take of the classic story by Washington Irving. Starring Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane, Cristina Ricci as Katrina Van Tassel and a superb  cast of English actors supporting out the film. Christopher Walken appears briefly, and mutely, as the Headless Horseman with most of the Headless bit performed by Ray Park.

While the core concept is taken from Washington Irving’s short story, The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, what Burton has placed on the screen is an updated Hammer Horror film. The cast is English and speak in their native English accents — or affect one in the case of the American actors — and the culture surrounding the characters is clearly British. The nature of the courts, manner of the gentry and so on all make this film feel much more at home in some isolated area of the Britain than in up-state New York at the turn of the 18th Century.

That aside this is a wonderful film, if you like the classic look and feel of Hammer Horror. there is a delightful mix of supernatural and the mundane. Ichabod is a police inspector anxious to prove that modern scientific methods are the only way to detect and prove the guilty. he doesn’t believe in ghost and spirits. Naturally the Headless Horseman is a bit of a shook to his theory that the murders in the Sleep Hollow are the results of a culprit of flesh and blood.

The resolution of these two opposing ideas is one of harmonious balance. Ichabod can both be right and be wrong and in such we see that truth and appearance are rarely the same thing. A theme that is built upon and one that unfolds nicely in the movie.

If you have not seen this film, it is worth a look.

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An Early Christmas

So I spent today setting up my christmas present from my sweetie-wife.
My wife and id usually do not engage in trying to figure out the perfect gift for each other and instead buy gifts from each other’s wish lists.
A few months ago I had commented in the $99 walmart special audio system I owned couldn’t keep up with the high end data and audio coming off the PS# when it played blu-rays. My sweetie-wife offered to buy em a new sound system for Christmas. I did the research, found an affordable system that met my needs, and gave her the information.
This week Fry’s had it on sale for a very good price so my sweetie bought it and I set it up today.
It is a Sony STR Dh 700. I am very happy with the sound I am getting out of this system. (I also had two speakers that some former owner of the condo left behind when he moved out.)

The most frustrating aspect of the set-up was the speaker connections for the front speakers. I had never seen anything like these and my sweetie-wife and I puzzled over it for a few moments before figuring out how to connect the wires in.

Then I allowed the systems to self balance itself. (It has a very nice auto-diagnostic routine to figure out where the speakers are and how to balance them.) After that I went through each component of our entertainment system and made sure all the outputs were the highest quality.

Man this sounds great. I put in blu-rays and got blown away by the quality, but even older DVD with mono soundtracks – like Destination Moon — sounded great.

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He Dies At The End

I mentioned seeing short horror films as this year Loscon. Here is the youtube of one of those films. Frankly I think the film makers did a bang-up job.

Remember, it is a horror film.

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Sunday Night Movie: Gojira

gojira_cover For those who are horribly Americanized, the film I watched Sunday Night was the original 1954 Godzilla movie. In Japan the films was titled Gojira, but a new name was selected when the film was re-edited and brought to the United States.

When the film came to America it was decided by the distribution company that the best chance for a wider audience and more money was to add an American character to the film. Scenes were trimmed or outright deleted in order to make room for the story of US Reporter Steve Martin and his coverage of the fantastic monster rising from the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

If you have not seen the original film you really should. It is a much more complex and thoughtful piece than the American edit and far more than the daikaiju that followed in Gojira’s massive wake.

I picked up a copy of the original film on blu-ray and the quality is generally good. The film has some scratches and imperfections, the kind you typically see in an older film without the benefits of extensive restoration. It is also true that many of the shots in the film were never pristine. The quality of the film stock and the equipment in Japan at the time severely limited their capability in special effects. What they did achieve in this film, with a limited budget and very limited time is astounding.

In this version of the film there is a much more direct metaphor made between Gojira and nuclear weapons and war in general. The devastation brought by the atomic bombs is directly mentioned, something omitted from the American release.

Also in this version there is stronger character story and few things are resolved without pain and confusion on the the part of the characters.

If you have never seen this film — and seeing the 1956 American release does NOT count — you should.

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Loscon report the second

So it is Sunday morning and day two of Loscon 36 is not but a memory. It is a happy memory.
Many of the panels I attended were aimed towards writers and I found them at least entertaining and mildly informative. (The truth of the matter is that much of was geared toward the novice writer and I have advanced beyond much of that advice.)
I did attend a presentation on a book called “Keep Watching The Skies! American SF films of the 50’s.” Man, I want that book.
It big and heavy, so heavy it hurt my poor arthritic fingers, but for a classic SF film nut like your humble host it is the perfect reference material.
Sadly it runs $99 and that is just beyond what I can afford to pay for a book.

Plenty of parties in the evening and there were fun. (Though I did miss my sweetie-wife. She stayed in the room still under the weather from a flu she has been fighting.) I did make a connected with an editor of an SF podcast, so I might be getting a story online that way soon.

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LosCon Report The First

So this weekend is LosCon 36, the annual L.A. area science-fiction and fantasy convention. Time is short for me this morning so this will be a brief report on the first day of the convention. (Which was Friday, yesterday.)
We left San Diego about 9 am and got to the hotel about 11 am. It was a pleasant drive we passed the time with conversation and a few thorny problems in firearms and armor in an SF environment.

The first panel was SF Horror films, but it really turned into a conversation on SF films in general. Still it was entertaining.

After lunch I was at SF Economics with the Kolin brothers on the panel. They wrote ‘The Unincorporated Man’ something I need to read after I write Cawdor.

We ended the day with Bridget Landry of JPL and her Cassini probe presentation. Always worth seeing.

Sweetie-wife and I walked several blocks for dinner at a little Greek place. It was decent. Then we came back and hit a couple of parties.

About 9pm I stopped by something called MEN INTO SPACE 50 years later. Turns out it was about a TV program that tried very hard to do stories about a US space program. It was really not bad at all.

I ended the night with a Zombie movie premier, Bled White. Not bad, it was about student film school level in quality but I watched the whole thing, and then was off to bed.

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