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[socketlevel]

saw it last night IMAX 3D. i give it a 7.75... yes, there is a solid reason for this distinction from an 8 and a 7.5 score.

agreed with other sentiments, though i'll go so far to say the average action sci fi movie of this kind usually has a solid set up, bad 2nd act and horrible closer.  in this case the first two thirds of the film were pretty on the correct note for tone and restraint (particularly the diaglog). however, even though the ending was heavy handed, it still wasn't to the point of being over the top for this genre. i easily got over some of the cheeseball stuff, cuz i never rolled my three dimensional eyes once! :P

i have to say it looked utterly real by my tastes, maybe it was the 3d goggle mediary that abstracts the effects. it always takes me half a 3D movie to not see the flickering strobe projector and double images. also in general, and maybe it's just my eyes, i find foreground stuff very hard to pull off in all 3D movies, i still go kinda cross eyed in an attempt to make the double image singular.  3d works best when it's mid-foreground to background imo. it's the wide shots that i really loved in avatar.  my fav stuff was when they were on the top of the tree just before flight and the camera craned birds eye above them, i honestly felt that sensation you get at the top of a roller coaster climb.

solid movie, not a let down.

[Myxo]

Saw this today in IMAX 3D.

The first half of Dances with Wolves in 2154 is right in James Cameron's wheelhouse. The attention to detail in this movie is like nothing I've ever seen before. It raises the bar. I couldn't believe how immersed I felt in 3D, particularly with some of the evening shots in the forest of Pandora. The second half of the film was too heavy-handed for my taste. We understand Cameron's story has a peaceful, anti-war message without the subtle political jabs. Cameron succeeded early by making his aliens feel human right through the CG. The references to "terror" and that little "shock and awe" comment soured some of the earlier beauty. In a movie like Dances with Wolves, Costner had the benefit of fusing well understood history with fiction. Cameron jumps head first into our daily nightmare; a polarized world full of Glenn Becks and Michael Moores respectively. What makes this film a B+ for me is Cameron's personal political statement within the framework of a story we're supposed to be lost in. He's great at making his CG shots feel genuine, yet invisible. Now he just needs to do the same thing with his political bias.

[cronopio 2]

*takes deep breath*

i think people are being a bit cynical about the characters in avatar being '1D'. i'm not into this 'fad' about expecting multi-dimensional characters, all the time, in every contemporary story. i had the same impression about giovani ribisi's character being a caricature of corporate greed. i am okay with that. he plays golf in his office, who gives a shit. we know what he and that orange-tanned marine stand for.

but what i want to say is that, aside from the media mammoth it needed to be in order to work, this movie is an event.  yesterday, i went to a nativity play with my sister. we have a cousin who's a priest from the missionaries of the holy spirit. if you don't know who they are , they're this really laid back congregation. i'm not very religious but these guys drink and smoke and talk about god in a way that's not intimidating. so after the nativity play, there was a party and i was talking to an ex priest who's now teaching philosophy and theology, and he was saying that after he saw the movie he couldn't wait to go back and talk about it to his students, because of how dense the story and its universe are. to me, that's fucking cool. i like it when teachers talk about neo to explain shit from the aeneid. or when they bring up darth vader to explain the concept of a tragic hero. i think i prefer that level of enjoyment from movies to technical discussions about lighting or directing or 'a weak third act', and i know that makes me sound ignorant to some of you. i don't think i'll ever be able to talk about a movie in the same level of detail some of you do. but i  think it has to do with a difference of understanding what stories are and mean. stories bring sense to our lives.

i'll stop this for a bit.

i will never forget the day i went to see avatar. i'm not saying this movie is perfection, but man, look around you. a big part of the world has embraced mediocrity. twilight, the books and movies, are huge. think about the useless works of creativity that get produced every day. all the bad music. to me that is a genuinely depressing thought. we're very distracted. it's increasingly hard to find something that inspires you massively that doesn't happpen on your computer screen or your blackberry.  avatar is big and it is inspiring.  say that it's an overblown, opportunistic vehicle to cash in merchandise and wanting to be a pop phenomenon badly, but don't call it mediocre.   cameron is not a hack.
compared to the formalism of peter jackson , or the exhaustion of lucas' and spielberg's creativity, james cameron is the best fucking director working in that scale. he doesn't need to throw that bullshit about making movies 'for the fans' to sound convincing, he knows that his legacy has to do with quality and making a movie that's a generational frame or reference.   whenever i think about john connor wearing the public enemy  t-shirt in terminator 2, i feel that.  i don't care if it's a masterpiece or a let down or if it lived up to the hype or not. i like that this movie will be discussed for years to come, because it does push a lot of ideas forward, is challenging and inspiring.

[I Love a Magician]

what does avatar inspire you to do

[cronopio 2]

being less lazy and getting shit done.

[Pas]

long post

Well that was a good post. I don't know if I mix up your life with some other member's life but I think you're pretty much "a man of the world", something about diplomatic work in your family right? Anyway, it shows. Smart guy.

[Alexandro]

*takes deep breath*

i think people are being a bit cynical about the characters in avatar being '1D'. i'm not into this 'fad' about expecting multi-dimensional characters, all the time, in every contemporary story.

I've been reading comments like this all over the internet. I don't get the "cynical" tag everyone who doesn't go ape shit over this movie has to live with now. It's certainly nothing new or over intellectual in asking or expecting a better screenplay. every critic who has praised this film to the skies has not been able to overlook that aspect of the film. I think is more cynical to say "yeah it's badly written but it looks really good, so anyone who doesn't enjoy it is a pretentious asshole". some idiot in some other site actually said that complaining that the characters are underdeveloped is like seeing a beautiful landscape and complain that "i already saw the picture". Also, expecting good characters in a movie is no "fad", and when some movie shows up with unidimensional characters and works, it works. But when Finding Nemo has more complex characters than your space epic about a cultural clash with political undertones it means you could have done better.

[tpfkabi]

On a tv show I was watching, it said the budget was $300 million and advertising will cost $200 million so I don't know how this will be able to get its money back, but I remember in 1998, there was little hype for Titanic. Before the film was released, E News actually ran a segment about how overblown that budget was and since there were no stars in the film it was going to be a guranteed bomb. If I also remember correctly, the film never scorched any weekend records (or even came close), but it's consistent good sales week in and week out is what propelled it to the juggernaut that it is now.

Like I said, I don't know how Avatar will do good business considering its budget is inflated even by Titanic comparisons, but even if it fails financially and is still a good movie, I will be happy. It could be a Cleopatra level bomb and almost destroy a studio (like that film did for Fox in '63) and if it's good, it's quality is that all that will matter for me. I'm pretty convinced the visuals won't live up to the hype, but the story and filmmaking still could.

The thing with Titanic was that it was a love story (or human to human love story - i don't know the Avatar plot).
I'm thinking this won't be able to do as well because a lot of people will be alienated by the weird sci-fi stuff.
I like Star Wars and this looks too weird to me.

It's going to do well because of what it is and the time it's released, but I don't know that it will beat any of the recent blockbusters.

[Gold Trumpet]

Titanic did have a love story that caught on with the public, but I don't believe any future films will be remiss to beat its box office just because they don't have the same love story that Titanic featured or one distinctly similar. Avatar does challenge audiences to find endearment in weird characters, but so did Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and any Speilberg science fiction story along with numerous other films.

But my ultimate point is that I didn't believe the film would stand much chance to exceed its budget, but a $220 million opening weekend worldwide is a good start to proving me wrong.

[Derek]

Wow.

So Cameron's not the greatest writer. But his movies are pretty well his own vision start to finish, which is pretty rare, especially among movies this large in scale money-wise. Maybe his characters lack certain dimensions people feel they need to enjoy a movie, but I really don't know what dimensions are missing. It's not a character piece, and why are people getting pissy if they're not getting what they shouldn't have expected anyhow? Cameron's not a great writer, as I said before, but this is not news.

[Myxo]

Titanic did have a love story that caught on with the public, but I don't believe any future films will be remiss to beat its box office just because they don't have the same love story that Titanic featured or one distinctly similar. Avatar does challenge audiences to find endearment in weird characters, but so did Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and any Speilberg science fiction story along with numerous other films.

But my ultimate point is that I didn't believe the film would stand much chance to exceed its budget, but a $220 million opening weekend worldwide is a good start to proving me wrong.

I paid $17.50 for my IMAX 3D ticket, including glasses. I wonder how skewed final box office figures will look based on IMAX and 3D sales. These past couple of years have produced quite a few of these "spendy" 3D movies. If anything breaks Titanic's record it will almost certainly be a 3D flick.

[Gold Trumpet]

Titanic did have a love story that caught on with the public, but I don't believe any future films will be remiss to beat its box office just because they don't have the same love story that Titanic featured or one distinctly similar. Avatar does challenge audiences to find endearment in weird characters, but so did Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and any Speilberg science fiction story along with numerous other films.

But my ultimate point is that I didn't believe the film would stand much chance to exceed its budget, but a $220 million opening weekend worldwide is a good start to proving me wrong.

I paid $17.50 for my IMAX 3D ticket, including glasses. I wonder how skewed final box office figures will look based on IMAX and 3D sales. These past couple of years have produced quite a few of these "spendy" 3D movies. If anything breaks Titanic's record it will almost certainly be a 3D flick.

That's a good point because when Titanic broke all records, it only broke them in matters of how much money it made. Other movies still sold more tickets than Titanic did, but ticket price inflation allowed earlier financial records to be broken. The newfound popularity of 3-D is destroying all sense of what it means for a normal escalation in prices. Titanic will not only be dethroned eventually, but its days are definitely numbered now.

[RegularKarate]

Complaints about this film are equally valid and invalid.  If character and story are the most important part of a film to you then why are you watching Avatar in the first place?  Of course it's frustrating that this kind of visual mastery is "wasted" on something with a crummy script.... but that's usually the way it goes so why not enjoy what it does have to offer?

I was pretty blown away by the look of this thing.  I never thought all these faddy things I normally hate in movies could come together and work so well.  Cameron will continue to push everyone to try harder.

The dialogue was awful and almost every character was just a character from a different Cameron movie  (Rodriguez is playing Vasquez etc...).  There were some cringe-worthy moments at the beginning script-wise, but just as my eyes got used to the 3-D as I got sucked into the movie, my brain got used to those awful moments and stopped cringing ("You're not in Kansas anymore") and started either letting it slide or laughing out loud ("ENHANCE!" and "Unobtainium").

The only thing I was really disappointed with was the last twenty minutes or so.  Cameron usually writes amazing action sequences... the action at the end of this was impressive for another director, but wasn't quite as good as I was hoping for.  Lord of The Rings really pushed battle sequences and I would have expected Cameron to want to push his even further... oh well, it can be a personal goal for JC now.

[Myxo]

the action at the end of this was impressive for another director, but wasn't quite as good as I was hoping for.  Lord of The Rings really pushed battle sequences and I would have expected Cameron to want to push his even further... oh well, it can be a personal goal for JC now.

Funny you mention this. As the credits were rolling I turned to my buddy and said, "Man, imagine if Peter Jackson had created his LOTR trilogy in 2011 instead of 2001." I can't even begin to fathom how crazy some of those large scale battle sequences would have been in 3D. Can't wait for the Hobbit. There's a huge 3D opportunity there waiting to be cashed in on.

[MacGuffin]

There's a huge 3D opportunity there waiting to be cashed in on.

'Jackass 3-D' is Happening
by William Goss, Cinematical

Back in 2007, our own Christopher Campbell (who's back on staff, baby!) told us that, back in 2006, a third Jackass film seemed like a sure thing in the wake of Jackass: Number Two. Steve-O told Howard Stern then that they'd begin shooting at the start of 2008...

Cut to 2009, and the Paramount slate for 2010 in our inbox happens to list a Jackass 3-D, with a release date to be determined. Johnny Knoxville and company don't seem too busy of late, and even with the eye-popping added dimension, this sounds like a relatively cheap production to give the go-ahead to. If Wikipedia is to be believed (I know), Bam Margera confirmed in a much more recent interview for a Finnish newspaper that filming would begin this January around the world.

Since there's really not all that much else to report on this yet, let me just assure you that my pals in the Twittersphere are a bit more psyched to have their gag reflexes back in working order than I might be:

"please be true, please be true, please be true" ... "Party boy's testicles bouncing off our foreheads." ... "there is a God in heaven, and he LOVES me!" ... "Ohpleaseohpleasepohpleaseohplease..." ... "This would make up for anything that goes wrong in the next 10 years."

Yep, there's still an audience.