_Avatar_, directed by James Cameron

It would be so, so awesome if everything we've seen/heard about "Avatar" was actually restricted to the first 30 minutes of the movie, and the rest was all, like, talk. Sort of like the opposite of "Aliens."

I say with tongue obviously in cheek, because a) this would never happen and b) Cameron is actually a pretty weak writer, classic line-or two and bits of "The Abyss" aside. "Avatar" just seems like such an obviously, well, obvious allegory - and lo and beyond, the primitive other has lessons to teach us all! - that it would take a really clever, perceptive screenwriter to transform it from spectacle to anything substantive. Giant blue Thunder-Ewoks don't help matters.

That author of that b.s. "New Yorker" profile, by the way, clearly had seen little to no more of the film than any of us plebes have. Either that or he was legally obligated to keep it confidential.

"Should I talk about the bit where they -- "

"Shut up, you."

"Sorry."

Oh, by the way - what fucking bureaucrat would call the planet Pandora? That's just asking for trouble! What were the runner-ups? Pompeii? Krakatoa? Hades?

Titanic, Hindenburg and Lusitania were also under consideration.

Also, Last.fm.

(ba dum bump)

"we're headin' to the planet warsaw ghetto..."

New trailer

― Ned Raggett, Friday, October 30, 2009 1:51 PM

ha yeah thats the one i saw

lol giovanni ribisi

That’s a great trailer. Anyone who H8s on this is dead inside and should move on to another career.
Comment by Movie Fan — October 29, 2009 @ 12:03 pm Reply to this post

Okay, is it me or does this sound like a James Cameron sock-puppet?
Comment by G. Lira — October 29, 2009 @ 2:13 pm Reply to this post

i'm the king of the world woo

The design of this whole thing, right down to the title font is just atrocious. It's like his aesthetics just woke up from cryosleep.

district 9 meets ferngully

I read that thing in the New Yorker last week. His hyper-detailed approach to everything (getting special cameras made, special underwater techniques on The Abyss, etc. etc.) EXCEPT the actual writing is quite astonishing. "We can hire an entire division of an aeronautics company to make us a special camera plane but we can't hire ONE. SINGLE. FUCKING. ACTUAL. WRITER. Nor do we think writers actually do their jobs very well or we would have hired one."

Cunt.

uhh, that's because he writes.

Would you prefer he hire dozens of script doctors like they did for the first Charlie's Angels movie?

ANd what's with that Woody Allen not passing along work to some screenwriters anyway?

James Cameron's Interiors

That author of that b.s. "New Yorker" profile, by the way, clearly had seen little to no more of the film than any of us plebes have. Either that or he was legally obligated to keep it confidential.

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, October 30, 2009 2:27 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

what's your point?

it's a great fuckin' profile!!

this looks sorta awesome u_u

I think a lot of folks are failing to view this trailer/film thru the eyes of a naive 11-year-old sci-fi geek. Seems like that's who it's aimed squarely at, and on that level, carping about the font seems ridiculous. "The Little Mermaid was charming, but that font!"

but this doesn't look charming at all

Aye, this just looks gash.

is this a sudan allegory btw

nah brazil

the movie or

or?

so this has nothing to do with airbending right

http://i40.tinypic.com/rubuah.gif

I wasn't carping about the font inasmuch as it seems to punctuate the awful look of this movie's design and overall aesthetics--as far as looking at it from the POV of an 11 year old... I was 11 when Terminator came out--that shit looked scary and cool.

could see this being a movie where a surprisingly wide range of non nerds are all that was cool

all that was cool in an effed up world.

... in 3D!!!

x-post It's totally a great profile. My point was that all the audacity on display in the piece perhaps needed a bit more counterbalance than the single graf related to the negative reaction to the teaser.

I mean, Cameron=jerk is not news.

he lets him hang himself with his own rope dude... what did you want, an anti-james-cameron expert to give the opposing view?

won't be as good as 2012 fuiud

someone needs to take cameron's $$$ away and force him to work with a small budget again, like with Aliens and the Terminator.

also bring back michael biehn and lance henrikson.

I really think lower budgets force people like Cameron or George Lucas to be more inventive.

hard to say, cuz the only time they had them was so long ago...

I'm not sure Aliens counts as low budget. $20 mil in 1986? That's about twice as much as "RoboCop" the next year.

x-post If Avatar is a huge hit and every bit as technologically successful as he's promised, then we're all the dupes. He's arrogant, that's for sure, but it's only hang-yourself hubris if he's wrong. It would have been nice had the author been privy to a bit more and been able to come to some conclusions, but my guess is at the time of the piece's filing the movie wasn't anywhere close to done, at least not enough to really show off.

Personally, I would have rather read a balanced Michael Bay profile in the New Yorker a la the Michael Savage piece. At least we know what Bay's been up to. Cameron, on the other hand, has been more or less off the grid for a decade, so the piece doesn't advance his particular story very well; there's simply too much of his reputation riding on "Avatar" for them to have given the author the access he needed to transform the profile into more than a on-the-go with James Cameron behind the scenes piece. Brody's Wes Anderson profile (and the Haneke piece - lots of directors in the New Yorker these days!) parallels the Cameron one, but took a firmer critical stance and made room for more analysis.

Invention isn't the goal. Making the most money you can is the goal. Telling a story is merely the means to that end.

Except that Cameron himself has called "Avatar" a game-changer, so unless he means he expects it to make more money than "Titanic," surely he has a different goal in mind.

"If we make money, I guarantee there will be more," Cameron said. "If we don't, we'll pretend it never happened."

x-post If Avatar is a huge hit and every bit as technologically successful as he's promised, then we're all the dupes. He's arrogant, that's for sure, but it's only hang-yourself hubris if he's wrong. It would have been nice had the author been privy to a bit more and been able to come to some conclusions, but my guess is at the time of the piece's filing the movie wasn't anywhere close to done, at least not enough to really show off.

Personally, I would have rather read a balanced Michael Bay profile in the New Yorker a la the Michael Savage piece. At least we know what Bay's been up to. Cameron, on the other hand, has been more or less off the grid for a decade, so the piece doesn't advance his particular story very well; there's simply too much of his reputation riding on "Avatar" for them to have given the author the access he needed to transform the profile into more than a on-the-go with James Cameron behind the scenes piece. Brody's Wes Anderson profile (and the Haneke piece - lots of directors in the New Yorker these days!) parallels the Cameron one, but took a firmer critical stance and made room for more analysis.

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, October 31, 2009 2:28 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

having the author weigh in on the movie itself would have made it a very different KIND of story... this was a process piece and i found it pretty fascinating. it will of course be easy to draw conclusions once we all see the movie.

i mean if the movie sucks it would be a LOL james cameron piece and if it's great it would be james cameron is a genius piece... not sure who really needs that.

i actually think it's a lot like the michael savage story... an interested and slightly detached look at a huge and contradictory personality.

Invention isn't the goal. Making the most money you can is the goal. Telling a story is merely the means to that end.

― Aimless, Saturday, October 31, 2009 2:32 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

do you really think, after reading that piece, that james cameron thinks of himself purely as a businessman?

i mean congratulations on realizing that HOLLYWOOD LIKES MONEY but there's more to it than that which is why we're still talking about this dude

Cameron is playing with other people's money. He is not in sole charge of the project. However he may think of himself, he is a businessman among businessmen. He will always sell his project on the basis of anticipated profits, and his backers will view his inventiveness or lack of it, and not coincidentally set the size of his budget, in terms of anticipated profits.

That is why Cameron's personal goals are only tangentially related to the goal of the movie. An inventive artist who makes money is a Hollywood success story. One who loses money is a loser, pure and simple.

yes and?