_Avatar_, directed by James Cameron

ya i agree that the thing about SW is that the rebels had a cogent plan (fly here, shoot into this thing—they used their smarts to find a flaw in the empire's military machine) and i find that more compelling than the "hey let's all get together and put on a show!" thing avatar did

This movie was great!! Trippy visuals! Flying mushroom jellyfish-looking things!! George W. Bush as the main bad guy!! Flying psychedelic dragon-pterodactyls!!

You know, I got the impression the ground "forces" (as such) were mostly just a distraction so that the air forces (with the true element of surprise, since they didn't show on the radar) could take out all the flying machines (which they did, pretty quickly). Once the air assault began, the ground forces, er, turned tail and ran away.

i would have liked to see some guerrilla tactics on the ground. throw shit from the trees, dig a hole, something.

hey how is the music in this thing--i guess there are some unreleased Grateful Dead songs on the soundtrack?

clearly soundtrack should be by YES

the soundtrack was on some generic tribal shit + meaningful celtic titanic music

it was like enya but with more pan-pipes and offended me slightly iirc

but when this comes out on dvd imma synch up the battle scene w/ gates of delirium and it is gonna rock so hard

so it sounds like the Grateful Dead were going in a new direction. . . thanks, everyone. . . i'll have to check it out

Their strategy sounded like Tora Bora -- get the folks with guns into an area where they know the terrain and the opponents don't. Still, they did charge head-on.

Oh, also re the second half being the inverse of Aliens, I thought the first half was the inverse of Aliens, as far as that one being "you all are heading to the most hostile place in the universe" and it was, versus "you all are heading to the most hostile place in the universe" and it's not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLrTPrp-fW8

the whole thing is an inversion of aliens i even said so in my review yall!!!!!!

my problem is I don't see why they don't nuke the mother tree from orbit, just to be sure

The inverse of "Aliens" would have been a handful of blue people and a bazillion soldiers.

Man, I hated the score. And as I told someone else, that Leona Lewis song seems designed specifically to send you out of the theater unable to bask in the afterglow so that you're forced to see the movie again to re-experience those feelings.

i would have liked to see some guerrilla tactics on the ground. throw shit from the trees, dig a hole, something.

You're talking Ewok style. The blue people just don't roll that way.

wow this is sort of a compelling concept re uses for motion capture

Cameron: The other thing that people aren't talking about, you can take an actor of a given age, and you can transform their age. Additive makeup can age somebody, but it's hard to make someone younger. Let's say you have a novelistic storyline where you cast an actor in their 40s, but the first time you see them they're 15 years old and the last time you see them they're 80. This is the Benjamin Button idea. Clint Eastwood could do another Dirty Harry movie and look the way he looked in the '70s. He would still be making all the performance choices. It would be his voice. We'd just make him 30 years younger.

http://www.slate.com/id/2239171/pagenum/all

they should have made IEDs out of some kind of weird exploding Pandora jungle nuts.

xpost the score is not good Horner, no. I downloaded it yesterday and it's just a puree of various longtime Horner tropes, not deployed appealingly or memorably.

I'm not a Horner hater though, he's done some A+ work in his time.

i heartily support the suggestion that this soundtrack should have been full of Yes epics.

Man, I hate Horner. I can't think of any score I've really liked of his besides "Aliens." As far hacks go I think I prefer Zimmer, but then again, I can't recall much of his moody bombast, either (aside from the "Thin Red Line" score, which I love, and "The Lion King").

Yes would have been awesome (if not quite awe-inspiring). Vincent Gallo was right!!!!

http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1102840089/

Young Horner did some awesome shit:

Wrath Of Khan
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Brainstorm
Sneakers
Land Before Time

His stuff got really glutinous and lazy after his Titanic bonanza though.

Yeah, dude got a huge hunk of that Dion dough, didn't he?

And since then, every score he's involved with has to have an end titles song sung by fillintheblank.

when sully got on the tarduk or whatever i wanted to shout 'i have ridden the mighty dune worm!' but figured it would be kind of disrespectful

re: na'vi tactics

i was thinking they were gonna hide out on the floating mountains and like dump giant boulders onto the flying machines. but not. deej is right that there were a lot of missed opportunities for actual/interesting battle tactics in that final fight (which was surprisingly rushed for the battle-action climax of a contemporary adventure film).

and i dunno where s1ocki's review ran, but it's true abt the inversion of aliens thing. seemed very obviously intentional on cameron's part.

there were these kids sitting in front of me that were too young (in the 4-6 range) and they kept turning to their dad asking 'is that guy gonna be okay?'. i wish i had brought my flask and made a drinking game of it.

re: final battle & disappointment

for one thing they said they rode out on the 4 winds or whatever, i thought that meant we would get at least 4 different types of mounts. also there should've been some even bigger badasser thing they could've ridden into battle, i paid 12.50 for this shit, where's my fucking wormsign?

http://www.slate.com/id/2239171/pagenum/all

this remark from Cameron to Peter "LOTR" Jackson made me tense:

Cameron: But they've also lost the courage to make, frankly, a movie like Avatar, which is a blockbuster-scaled movie not based on prior arc. All the blockbusters of the last four years, like Transformers, Harry Potter, Spider-Man—they're all films based on other films or part of a franchise

such a red herring, that argument. who gives a shit about original material as long as the end result is good.

god forbit we cultivate enduring, multifaceted myths within the culture

forbit? what the fuck is that

forbid

god forbit we cultivate enduring, multifaceted myths within the culture

― larry craig memorial gloryhole (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, December 22, 2009 4:08 PM (13 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you're holding up NORBIT as an example of that?

btw i caught a typo - u wrote forbit instead of norbit

i loved this movie but PLEASE don't let there be a sequel

hoping for a prequel, are you?

Norbit 3-D

"We're going to take the same 3D technology James Cameron used in AVATAR and stick it up Eddie Murphy's butt."

They should do, like, little serialized 20 minute sequels to stick in front of future 3-D features. It'd be cheaper and shorter. Blue people gather nuts and berries. Blue people plan a surprise party. Blue kids' first day at school. Like Berenstain Bears or something. They lived in a tree, too, right?

there weren't any blue people in norbit!

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/08/movies/09norbit600.jpg

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/4/2009/12/500x_avatar_papyrus.jpg

Are those Rush lyrics?

when sully got on the tarduk or whatever i wanted to shout 'i have ridden the mighty dune worm!' but figured it would be kind of disrespectful
― did you mean: fart blasters? (nickalicious)

yeah, something like that

re: final battle & disappointment

for one thing they said they rode out on the 4 winds or whatever, i thought that meant we would get at least 4 different types of mounts. also there should've been some even bigger badasser thing they could've ridden into battle, i paid 12.50 for this shit, where's my fucking wormsign?

― did you mean: fart blasters? (nickalicious)

http://z.hubpages.com/u/284678_f520.jpg

the estimable Godfrey Ch^shire sez

AVATAR = THE LION KING meets THE HURT LOCKER

kinda

slocki have you passed by the revamped bar on the corner of bernard & st-laurent? i think it's based on avatar's 90s hippie-rave colour scheme but with more decorative cocaine

haha no

any hot na'vi in there

anyone do the feliz na'vidad joke yet or

animated gif greeting card waiting to happen