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Avatar (2009)
You will be disappointed...
...if you go into this movie expecting the greatest movie of the past twenty years. However, this movie is certainly compelling, solidly executed, and (perhaps the most important and rare quality in Hollywood at the moment) original in concept.
I went into this movie as a bit of a James Cameron neophyte: I have never seen Titanic, and I do not imagine I have seen any of his other works. So I did not encounter this movie with the grandiose view of James Cameron that everyone else seems to have (in fact, I distinctly avoided Titanic because I thought it looked like a bad movie). So with only a slightly negative disposition towards Mr. Cameron, I took in this movie.
Expect to see a lot of money being shown on screen: giant blue cat aliens are not exactly cheap to render, nor is the world, Pandora, on which they live. Expect a strange meshing of science fiction and fantasy concepts, as the Na'vi (see giant blue cat aliens) and Pandora are so in tune with one another that it appears magical in a strangely familiar yet unique way.
Expect a romance. In fact, this is probably my only gripe with the movie. The romance is the only part of the movie which feels completely cliché to me, simply because it feels as though it was shoehorned in as a plot device. I felt that the movie would have been far more compelling if Jake Sully had somehow managed the feats of plot without the help of a powerful female getting the hots for him. But hey, that's Hollywood, I can't blame Mr. Cameron for that.
Some people claim that the characters are cartoony in the manner in which they are characterized, to which I have to humbly disagree. Every single character in this story had a redeeming quality, even the villain, and every single character in this story had a devastating quality, even the hero. Where some people find it hard to sympathize with any of the characters, the manner in which they were written (even the very cliché speeches of Jake Sully) came off as completely natural. Jake Sully is a traitor, but you forgive him because the humans are out of line, but you forgive them because they're just following orders, but you feel for the Na'vi because their way of life is being disrupted, but the big corporate head guy clearly has lost control of the situation to a crazy marine commander, but you forgive him because he's just trying to do what he was hired to do by the big corporate head guy... I could go on forever like this, but my point is that though the movie encourages you to root for one character over another, nobody is a complete wash of black or white. No one in this story is a saint, and no one in this story is Satan. Everyone came off as complex, with their own unique back-stories which may have been somewhat cliché in their own rights, but combined in such a fascinating way that you have to wonder at the flexibility that this environment holds. The villain of this movie, transplanted into a similar environment with slightly less sympathetic aliens and told from his perspective, would be just as sympathetic as Jake Sully is in this movie. As a writer, I will say this to all of you out there: this is no easy task.
Let's not even mention the fact that the plot itself is a variation on a cliché theme in sci-fi. Original story goes: super-advanced aliens invade Earth. Avatar is a direct subversion of this concept, and it delivers amazingly well. Only criticism I could offer here is that I could easily see people interpreting the story as environmentalist propaganda; it happened with WALL-E and this one is just as overt. But if you acknowledge that possibility of message going in and let it be, there is nothing problematic about it inherently: it works with the story.
So in conclusion, if you are looking for a mega-blockbuster that is so "totally not cliché that it in itself becomes cliché," (that is, the cliché of a movie that sacrifices coherence for originality) Avatar will not deliver: it has far too much depth of character and plot to allow itself to deliver such frivolous desires. However if you are looking for a movie that will lend itself to some dissection, into craft of writing as well as directing, acting, and special effects, this is a good movie to look into.
WALL·E (2008)
One of the most important movies of our time.
I know what you all are thinking. "Wait, what? Are you serious? This little kids movie?" Stop right there, and I will tell you right now, this is no kids' movie. Rated "G" in our society has somehow been skewed to automatically imply that the movie is for the kiddies, when all criteria for said rating is simply that the movie will not use any content that one might find "questionable." A kid can watch this movie and be entertained without being exposed to questionable material, which is nice, but obviously no measure of the greatness of this movie.
I will admit, I went into this movie with practically no expectations. I went because other people wanted to see it, and was not expecting much from a movie with zero-dialog advertisements. "How could this movie possibly say anything other than 'aww how cute look at the robots.'?" I wondered. Pixar then proceeded to prove to me just how wrong I was for even thinking that way.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about this movie is precisely that there is such minimal dialog, yet you are able to connect with each character on a level such that communication is possible through non-verbal communication almost exclusively. This movie forces you to think about how much of communication is fluff, and what meanings can be attached to nothing more than a name, simply through the use of voice inflection and facial expressions.
"Intriguing, but perhaps just a novelty, worth maybe a few extra points for creativity but not the 10 you're giving it," you might be thinking. It doesn't end there.
This movie takes a fairly typical plot in literature that never seems to surface in recent movies - Utopia. In the first minutes, you are presented with a post-apocalyptic world wherein WALL-E is the sole inhabitant, and are quickly shown what happened to cause such a catastrophe. From that point on, you are launched into a story of humanity attempting to survive in space, with the hopes of someday returning home being nothing more than a faint memory, with the humans on board simply going about their days in gluttonous and slothful livelihood. Needless to say, this story is aimed directly at our society.
Watch this movie with an active mind, and you will be rewarded with one of the deepest, thoughtful movies of the decade, and this is including live action as well as any animation.
Kung Fu Panda (2008)
Great, Innocent Fun, with a bit of depth
I don't know what to say, exactly, about this movie, except that it was about as close to pure distilled comedic awesome as I have come into contact with in recent years. That said, this is not humor for every person, as it is not always perfectly clear where the punchline is. The fact of the matter is that the entire movie should be treated as one giant jab at old, super-cheesy Kung-Fu movies. However, rather than flatly lampooning it, what we wind up with is a deconstructionist approach to the genre. Rather than making fun of specific elements, Kung Fu Panda seems to set out to, instead, write every Kung Fu movie ever made, and does so to hilarious effect. It is a simple plot, but well-executed, and the animation is superb. Every frame is a work of art.
The only thing that keeps me from giving this movie a perfect score is that it is so simple, and the depth of the movie suffers somewhat from it. However, the movie does have a point, let no one convince you otherwise. It is nothing earth-shattering, and is somewhat in the vein of "feel-good" types of thematic statements, but it is, all in all, an excellent movie, and one I would recommend all should see. Unless you have a personal vendetta against Dreamworks, CGI movies, animation, Eastern culture, martial arts, or Jack Black, I could just about guarantee you would enjoy this movie.
Blank Check (1994)
Enjoyable "just because" movie
My definition of a "just because" movie is one that doesn't have any profound message about life going into it, and is meant to be thoughtless for the audience.
This movie successfully fills that niche, and while I believe a movie needs to say something for it to be considered more than mediocre, this is probably one of the better meaningless stories out there today. For some, that is saying very little, but those who are seeking something that is a child's fantasy, and not particularly taxing on the mind, will always have this movie to consider.
There are numerous details of the story that I could go into to further argue the point that it is innocent, and simple fun, but to do so would be to ruin any enjoyment that this movie has to offer, because this movie is without a doubt not something you would want to watch repeatedly. I have seen this movie exactly twice, and that was enough for me. Would I watch it if it were playing? More than likely, but this is a movie that just gets old fast due to its meaninglessness.
The Master of Disguise (2002)
Swing and a miss
Actually, that might be a bit overstated, I'm not entirely sure the people behind this movie were really trying to make a good movie. This movie seems to me to be a textbook example of Rat Race Syndrome, wherein you get a whole bunch of A-List actors in an effort to make up for a plot which is at its essence crap. However, there's only one thing that keeps this from being such a movie: Good actors. Sure, Dana Carvey did a brilliant job with what was handed to him and probably deserves praise for his performance in this god-awful movie. Everyone else, though, came across simply terrible in their efforts, which, I would suspect, were minimal to begin with. As a result, there is the sad likelihood that this movie has ruined Dana Carvey's career. I haven't seen him resurface since this movie, though perhaps I am not looking hard enough. However, I would completely understand him not wanting to show his face anywhere after this extraordinarily terrible movie.