Avatar: The Way of Water is an incredible film

Over the holidays, James Cameron released Avatar: The Way of Water in theaters. I really loved the first Avatar, so I was excited to see it despite the trolls online that seemed to want it to fail (I'll never understand that mindset). I took a bunch of friends with me on opening night, and we had seats at the IMAX theater here in Sandy, Utah (a suburb of Salt Lake City). In just a few short words, the film was a stunning sequel, and I honestly want to see it again though I've yet to find the time to do so. I also want to say a few things about it that I don't think are spoilers.

I knew going into this movie that James Cameron was going to film the thing in 48 frames per second. When filmmakers decide to do this, it creates a kind of hyper-realistic effect on the screen. Many people think of it as a kind of "uncanny valley" where everything is perhaps too clear and for some reason, doesn't look right. This is because we are used to seeing films that do not have this built in resolution even though we float through our lives by looking at things in this kind of clarity. When we see it in a film, it kind of jerks us out of the moment.

So, I was expecting to maybe not like the film in places because it might look "too good." However, James Cameron performed a trick that I'd never seen before. He combined the latest in 3D technology with the 48 frames per second, and the combination of those two things was absolutely magical. I found myself suddenly inside the film. There was a submarine sequence that was underwater, and I'm telling you, I thought I was inside that submarine. In another scene, a character races to the edge of a cliff, and I literally grabbed my armrests because I thought I was going over. I've never done this in a movie before.

This week marks a threshold for the film in which it has become profitable a little less than its one month anniversary. That just blows my mind that something like what Cameron has done could actually make money (it needed to basically make 1.7 billion dollars). This isn't too strange nowadays though, as (I guess) there are now fifty movies that have made over a billion. So if you don't make the billion dollar club, you're kind of a loser where movie box office receipts are. I do wonder if Avatar: The Way of Water will topple the original Avatar and become the highest grossing film of all time. But none of that matters. I enjoy the story and the "experience" of seeing these films in big theaters equipped with the latest technology. It's worth the price of admission and then some. And I'm glad that the whole saga is going to be coming out in the years to come. There is no question though that James Cameron is the most powerful director of films that has ever lived. 

Prometheus Review With Spoilers

This is a picture of Shaw's baby (the tentacled monster) taking out the lone
 space jockey on the planet that the crew awoke from a 2000 year-old hyper sleep.
 When the space jockey woke up, he was pissed and started killing everyone.
There was no explanation. He shares the same genetic code as a human, but
 clearly was very unhappy that humans had landed on the planet and had
 one thing in mind: pilot a ship filled with biological weapons to destroy Earth. Shaw
stopped him and basically opened a door that had the monster tentacled creature
 behind it that grabbed the space jockey that would have killed her. This was the biggest
face-hugger I have ever seen. It was really impressive.

Well I saw Prometheus at the midnight showing last Thursday, and I absolutely loved it. Here are the elements that fired my imagination:

1) The 3D was stunning. It wasn't too dark or too light, and it didn't feel like they were purposely going out of their way to make trick shots for a 3D audience. This is definitely a "big screen" film, and I feel that if you are a fan of these movies, you definitely want to invest the money to see it in IMAX if you can.

2) Michael Fassbender as David was the most interesting android ever. There are parts where he is on the spaceship, engaging in sports by himself to clearly wile away the time and then he also emulates Peter O'Toole's character in Lawrence of Arabia (by the way Fassbender looks a lot like a young Peter O'Toole, and I had previously not noticed this connection). Anyway, why would an android need to use old movies and sports to entertain himself unless he was bored? And this begs another question...can computers be bored? I have no idea. But it's an intriguing concept. Roger Ebert pointed out in his review that Peter Weyland referred to David as the "son I never had". Charlize Theron plays the daughter of Peter Weyland and there was definitely sibling rivalry there as well as a startling physical appearance (both blond, both tall, etc.). But Peter Weyland strips David of humanity by declaring him soulless. Is this statement true though? I don't know.

3) The concept of parents. David the android says in one scene that "all children secretly want their parents to die". I thought this was fascinating that someone would even say this. I for one don't want my parents to die. I kind of feel that having my parents die will be the thing that makes me really aware of my mortality--that I too can and will die. And I kind of wonder if David said this because he's essentially immortal and wants to know what it will feel like to die and doesn't believe he can do so UNLESS the ones who created him perish.

Additionally, in Prometheus, one of the characters named Shaw is obsessed with finding an explanation of "where do humans come from?" She's Christian in the movie, which suggests to me that she already has an answer. So why then is she doing all of this searching? Does she want proof? Is belief not enough for her? Maybe there is something to the statement "All fanatics hide a secret doubt". What do you think?

Basically, I see Shaw's quest as a search for parentage of some kind and when she finds it, the parents are not what she was expecting. In fact, they're pretty terrifying. Physically, the "space jockeys" look like the most muscular humans on earth, only half again as tall. Take the offspring of NFL superstars like Eli Manning and Tom Brady and couple that genetic code with really tall supermodels for about three hundred years and then smack that offspring with an ugly stick, and you'd probably end up with a space jockey. So really...not all that far-fetched.

And the gist of Prometheus is that this "super race" created humans (basically destroying all of her beliefs in one fell blow) and to top it off, they're jerks. They offer no explanation for what they did, and it looks like they changed their mind about humanity. In other words, the stuff on the world that the Prometheus visits is a biological weapon. The alien xenomorph is a creation manufactured in a lab somewhere and meant to deploy against the human race to wipe us out. But why?

4) The unanswered questions. The end of the show has Shaw zooming off in a space jockey ship with David along for the ride and she isn't going back to Earth. She's going for the Engineer's (space jockey) homeworld. But what does she hope to find there? They clearly wanted humans dead. However, it's been 2000 years since the engineers on this world were in touch with their core civilization. Did something happen to them? Did they get wiped out by their own biological weapons? Or maybe they were designing a weapon to take out their own parents (the ones that created them).

All in all, Prometheus is the magnificent film that I was hoping for, so I'm pleased. I just hope it makes enough money to warrant a sequel. I want answers that the film didn't provide. And I would also like to see how the first Alien movie and the events in Prometheus connect. Where did the derelict spacecraft on LV-426 come from as well as the huge cargo of eggs. The end of Prometheus showed the birth of a xenomorph, but that's basically a harmless lifeform as the planet had no indigenous population really (unless the alien could learn to pilot an empty ship).

The Majesty of the Human Condition in The Artist

The Artist is about George Valentin. A silent film star who is at the top of his career. The side effect of this is that he is vain. Vain of how handsome he is, vain of how successful he is, and vain of his position as a superstar. Then comes the invention of sound, and just like yesterday's garbage, he is out with the trash.

The studio replaces him with a young woman who the world wants to hear speak. And her career starts to take off even as George blows most of his money on one last silent film that tanks at the box office. Why does he do this? Vanity/pride. He thinks that all that he has accomplished is because he has something that others don't have. I draw this conclusion from one specific line in the film that George says as he anoints Peppy Miller (the young starlet) with a single beauty mark that seems to make all the difference.

But maybe that's just it. Maybe that's all the difference there is between a nobody and someone that is a star. A single beauty mark drawn in with a makeup pencil to distinguish her from other girls. Would Suzanne Collins be the star that she is if Scholastic hadn't made her one? I sometimes wonder.

George ends up going broke and drinks himself almost to death. The film ends when he almost commits suicide and Peppy saves him.  "Why won't you let me help you, George?" she asks him. And then it just clicks. She understands that she needs to work around his pride, his vanity, which is suffocating him. So they invent a dancing vaudeville act and become a smashing success together. "Out with the old in with the new" becomes "the new reinvents and gives purpose to the old", which is probably a much better saying, and one that we can take to heart.

I left the theater after having seen this movie and thought to myself how closely this movie is a reflection of our society. I know that in the gay community in particular, many older gay men become invisible to younger men simply because they are the old black and white silent pictures, and now everyone wants "sound". The same can be said for the straight community.

I also see this in ebooks. Printed books are under siege from the onslaught of e-readers, iPads, Nooks, Kindles, and tablets galore (the new). But just like in The Artist, there is still value in the old. You just need to know how to find it with an appreciative eye.

The Artist is an expose of the overall human condition that I see everywhere in America right now. The old get put into nursing homes seemingly at younger and younger ages because families don't want to care for them. I've seen many parents reach an age where there children dismiss them as a bother and probably secretly wish that they'd just die off because they've gotten so busy with their lives that they just can't spare the time. Fade to black. Invisible. When at one time you ruled the world or at least your family. Now...no one cares.

What a remarkable film. To capture all of that about our society in a short silent black and white movie.

The Artist is you. The Artist is me. The Artist is a film that is for anyone that is an artist or who fancies themselves to be creative. As writers, we DO fit into this category. How many of you out there are so proud that you will only accept being traditionally published by the Big Six? How many of you desire the fame and adulation of Stephanie Meyer and keep it hidden just under the surface so that no one can tell how much you feel you deserve to be a star? How many of you are vain? That secretly think that your writing is so much better than another authors when you haven't even read what they've written? You just visit their website, look at their book, and think, "Someday I'll be famous and there's no way this person would have ever gotten signed to an agent anyway...it's good they self-published." How many of you feel contempt for another person as you walk or drive by them on the street just because they are fat, a different race, or smelly?

The Artist is a film that warns against vanity. At the end of the film, George finally loses his vanity and is saved. He achieves happiness and love. I think that's the key. If you depend on the adulation of others to give your life meaning, then you are going to crash and burn.

I haven't seen all the best picture nominees. But The Artist blows Hugo away. Martin Scorsese, in my opinion, doesn't stand a chance.

The Art Of Good Storytelling

Alert: There are some spoilers ahead for the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

This weekend I saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes and I loved it. When there have been so many of these movies done in the last fifty years including a terrible reboot starring Marky Mark...why did I love this movie so much?  What set it apart?  Well the storytelling is awesome.

Hard science-fiction can be challenging to pull off well.  This is where all the science is accounted for, where everything is possible, only you just take it a step further which is what breaks the boundaries of fact and throws in the fiction.  I knew this going into the movie because sci-fi reviewers had given this movie great props for pulling off the hard science-fiction aspects of the story. That and they set up the sequels perfectly.

This is what the writers of Rise of the Planet of the Apes did. They gave us an exposition of ground-breaking work in the world of Alzheimer's disease and took it one step further.  They showed us how the human drive to find a solution to a terrible malady could in fact produce evolution, result in a new life form, and that we...not them...would be the ones responsible for our own destruction.  And it all came about with the best of intentions.  The end result was never supposed to happen.

Andy Serkis

There were several parts of this film that I just absolutely loved. From being mesmerized that Andy Serkis could stand in for the motion capture of Caesar (who does some astounding things) to the lessons about humanity that I learn in just watching this splendid film take shape.  Tom Felton a.k.a. Draco Malfoy seems stereotyped as an asshole on screen.  I hope he can break out of this role and soon because he shows great promise as an actor that can play other types of roles.  James Franco as the scientist who created the drug stood in very well as the tragic genius who turned to all that he knew in order to make life better for his father (played by John Lithgow) who was robbed of his life with each passing day to the onset of Alzheimer's disease.  The film is filled with powerful foreshadowing.

Go see this movie.  As a writer, even if you only write YA or some other genre, you can benefit to see how sci-fi done well can have a lasting impression on you for hours after you have exited the movie.  By the way, if you are worried that you will see apes killing humans, that doesn't happen except by absolute accident or to defend themselves. In the end, it is the humans that destroy each other because our lack of humility with regard to the power of genetic engineering is the source of our own cataclysm.

Thoughts On Deathly Hallows, Part 2 O.o

Okay...first off, I did get my money's worth at the matinee. I know everyone that reads these words is thinking it is the best movie of your entire life, how will you ever live without another movie, the fact that you cried etc. for hours on end and yadda yadda yadda. I respect that and am not gonna even look at that. I just wanted to say that I didn't like it as much as everyone else but I have very solid reasons as to why.

SPOILER ALERT:

Okay...Just to be clear...I haven't read anything past Azkaban. I decided that it was dumb to do so when the movies were being made and I'd just watch the movies and read other books. So this is only movies I'm talking about here:

1) Bellatrix Lestrange. I've been following this character some eight or nine years. Great villain. "I killed Sirius Black!" etc. prancing around like a mad-woman, played by a great actress Helena Bonham Carter. I came to the movie thinking...this will be great. I get to see how this villain gets the kabosh. Okay the fight with her lasted maybe five seconds and the person that killed her was momma Weasley who had less lines than Darth Maul had in Phantom Menace. REALLY? So dumb. She even stole a line from "Aliens"... /facepalm. This is not how Bellatrix should have died.

2) J.K. Rowling's World. I have never seen a world so full of magic. Let me repeat that. I HAVE NEVER SEEN A WORLD SO FULL OF MAGIC ANYWHERE. Literally, anything is possible. We got resurrection, teleportation, giants, dragons...you name it. You could bust out anything and it would be believable. So why in the hell was the battle of Hogwarts so boring? I saw the sparkle effect on the wands and I guess that all you have to do when a wizard throws the lightning red death beam from the end of the wand is to raise your own wand to create this shiny plasma sphere for five minutes where no one gets hurt and everybody can sigh and think...how pretty. Additionally, the walking golems that Professor Minerva McGonagall summoned got completely owned by the giants. Did they kill anyone? When the death eater wizards attacked Hogwarts there should have been massive traps and all sorts of creative zappos, blips, and massive death everywhere. I saw nothing but the wand lightning things and a person frozen in the air and then tossed back out the window. How stupid.

3) Voldemort. He's supposed to be this all-powerful bad ass wizard. Yet, he can't figure out his own wand? Really? He thinks he figures it out but gets it all wrong. I honestly thought perhaps he was the wizard with downs. Then he lets Neville completely monologue. Why would you do that? If I was an evil badass wizard, as soon as Neville started giving his speech and rallying the kids out front of the ruined castle, I would have zapped him dead as a doornail. But nope. That didn't happen. Let's let the young man monologue and get everyone all rallied up with gusto!

4) The Goblin Banker. He wanted the magic sword of Gryffindor even knowing that it teleports around to give itself to a person that is in need of its power. Yet, he's supposed to be a curator of treasures. This is a bad bad investment and doesn't make sense. Also, he's too short to wield the sword. It would be like me wanting a trebuchet for my one-bedroom apartment. 

Anyway...don't egg me please. I got my matinee's money's worth and I know the movie is like 97% on Rotten Tomatoes so essentially it's considered a masterpiece. I just don't get it.

I don't. And that's my two cents.