No doubt that’s what Cameron meant when he talked about his movie.  Hopefully he was not talking about the story.  So, will every movie in the blockbuster/space-opera genre be in 3-D with flawless CGI? Will budgets continue to push upwards of $400 million dollars?  Seems likely.  On the other hand, will Avatar go down in our collective memory the way Star Wars did?  I find that very doubtful.  Technical advances may have had a great influence at the time Star Wars came out, but that’s not why we remember it now.  After all, as soon as it was out, everybody else set out surpassing it.  Matrix made a similar leap in visual technique, but little else about the movie has lasted.

Star Wars had something else that was special, something that even George Lucas could never find again.  Though nobody could call the acting great, the relationships between the characters were inspired.  Obi-Wan is still an archetype, and Darth Vader is synonymous with ultimate bad guy.  Princess Leia was the perfect damsel in distress, who could also kick some ass.  But the key was really the hero.  Instead of just focusing on the “chosen one”, Star Wars kept balancing Luke with Han Solo.  Han Solo was fun in a way that Luke could never be.  Neo was never fun, the hero of Avatar could never catch that magic.  Nobody in the sequels had it.  Maybe it was just Harrison Ford, but I also think the character of the co-hero lifted some of the seriousness that oppresses adventure movies when the film-maker starts thinking about making art.  Lucas could be as serious as he wanted about the Force, destiny, and the themes of good and evil and fatherhood, without drowning the old-fashioned serial-movie fun, because Han Solo was always there.

It seems odd that one movie could have given the modern standard examplar of three cultural archetypes, but Star Wars did it.  Darth Vader, Obi-Wan, and Han Solo are always with us.  You can pull out any of those names and describe someone, and you’ve covered that topic.  I can’t imagine any character from Avatar will be that memorable even a year from now.

It does steal from some good movies.  The opening scene is an obvious reworking of the Outlaw Jose Wales.  Several scenes evoke 2001, and Solaris is also hanging over the whole thing.  The downside is, as several internet commentors pointed out, the Star Trek holodeck.  Almost every holodeck episodes was bad.  The pure invention of the holodeck was an acknowledgement that the writers were running out of ideas.  But, if virtual reality was introduced a different way, somehow making sense in the story, it worked even in Star Trek.  One of the best episodes had Kirk, Spock, McCoy and a couple others trapped in a replay of the OK corral.  Except they were on the losing side, and they knew it.

The thing about Virtuality is that it doesn’t work as a movie.  Most of the time is spent introducing characters, then introducing a couple plot elements, and staggering around one decision, which we always knew.  But it didn’t end, not really.  The official story is that it was written as a pilot, but Fox nixed the deal and aired it as a stand-alone.  But it’s not a stand-alone, even a Fox exec knows that.  Fox may be evil, but they specialize in satisfying television audiences.  This did not.

My theory is that Fox knows people will want more.  They want to buy the show, but to make it a success, they want to be pressured into it.  Create a fan-base, a buzz, a demanding group of outsiders.  They’re willing to be the bad guys, so that we can force them to do something in a way that makes them another pile of money.  And if it doesn’t work, they aren’t out much, just a Friday night movie that did okay.

I went to see Star Trek, for the second time, at the AMC Hoffman in Alexandria.  We went there because we wanted to see the movie on an Imax screen.  Sadly, the AMC Hoffman offers Fake Imax.  Now, it wasn’t a complete rip-off.  Fake Imax still looks better than the digital projection screen we’d seen it on the first time.  But it was a long ways from being a real Imax experience.

The movie itself holds up magnificently.  There is one long section, beginning from Kirk’s exit from the Enterprise, and going at least until he meets Scotty, that is just painfully bad.  A mish-mash of un-motivated action, stunning coincidence, and exceptionally bad physics/astronomy, I just had to bite my tongue and wait it out.  When the movie gets it’s feet back underneath it, the awesomeness returns.

The message of Hamlet 2 is that even if your vision is fucked up, lots of people will jump in at the last moment and help you transform it into art.  Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is what happens if someone takes that message too seriously.  Now, I hate romantic comedies mostly because the central message is destructive.  They teach us to be victims or stalkers in the name of love.  And, unlike action/horror movies, people take those messages seriously.  Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is not as bad as believing that some girl will really love you if just keep following her around.  But it is bad.  All through the movie, you can almost hear the voices of the creator/director and his friends saying things like: “wouldn’t it be funny if Jesus had to fight a bunch of guys getting out of a car?”  “wouldn’t it be funny if Jesus had to go shopping in modern times?”  “wouldn’t it be funny if Jesus rode a skateboard?”  No, no, and not really.

If something seemed really funny when your stoned, you should probably try running the idea around in your head sober before making it into a movie.  On the other hand, everybody making this thing was having a good time.  They decided to thrown in a Mexican wrestler and lots of lesbians, just in case the profane Jesus couldn’t carry the movie.  There are a few characters who are desperately trying to be over the top, and one or two of them make it.

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is probably about as good as you might expect.  Bad acting is topped by senseless direction and inane action scenes.  There is no actual nudity.  Jesus is ridiculous, but doesn’t engage in any kind of political or social satire.  The vampires are inconsistent, and some of the other characters get a lot of screen time which they don’t have the talent to make anything of.  It looks like a college student movie that somehow got enough budget to go full-length, and hire one stunt man.  But it doesn’t make the kind of magic out of these elements that Hamlet 2 seems to promise.

Anyway, my friend had the same reaction I did when reading the reviews about Appaloosa.  “What the F(*&ck” is Renee Zellweger doing in this movie?”  She not only just seems wrong, she’s also almost as iconic of romantic comedy as Hugh Grant.  He decided not to see the movie.  I swallowed my fears and, partly due to peer pressure, went anyway.

I won.  Ed Harris, who co-wrote, directs, and turns in a starring role, must really understand the western.  He gets down into the roots of the genre, capturing the violence, the shifting sense of right and wrong, the slow pace at which everything happens in the wide open desert.  Having read over 50 Louis L’ Amour novels and a scattering of other westerns, as well as growing up in a small desert town where you can shoot guns in your back yard, I consider myself knowledgable enough.  This is another great entry in a genre that is marked with some masterpieces, and which somehow always captures more about America than other genres.

He gets that the West was a microcosm of civilization, going from lawless to quasi-civilized in just a few short years, and that the people who became the pillars of the community came from both sides of the law.  And honor.

Harris also understands just where love fits in all this.  Renee Zellweger showed up and my hackles rose.  But her character was exactly right for the time and for the story.  As the town whore explained, women have it hard out here.  Love is mostly for men.

I hope my friend gets over his little RZ wall and sees this movie.  He’ll love it.

Surprisingly, this was really good. Among the things that worked:

• No tortured origin story. Everybody knows it was gamma rays. (yes, it makes no sense, but what the heck)
• Stretchy pants. Bruce Banner is always buying pants that can stretch way out. One scene, where he checks the size of a potential purchase against a nearby ass, is priceless.
• The love story. Once again, no long intro, it’s just given. But Liv Tyler and Ed Norton produce more chemistry than you’d think. I generally don’t like love stories.
• The action. Hulk is about unstoppable forces smashing into normally immovable objects. They move. It works. There’s a good escalation of conflict culminating in an all-out battle that delivers.
• But the thing that works most, that starts off the move on the right foot, is the re-working of the most classic Hulk line: “Don’t make me angry, you won’t like me when I’m angry!” Except, there are translation problems. The result is hilarious.

• An opening that consisted of a musical number
• A hysterical female “romantic interest” who had no possible interest for any man, let alone a man as cool as Indiana Jones
• An insipid twelve-year-old sidekick

She argues that Temple of Doom at least didn’t have stupid aliens who looked a bit like the ones in Close Encounters.  Which is true, but bad elements that start at the beginning of a movie outweigh bad elements that only pop to ruin the ending of a movie that actually had already ground to a halt.  So she’s wrong.

It may not be fair to look at Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as a movie.  It really isn’t.  It’s more like a Spielberg/Lucas tribute show, where they recreate scenes movies past.  We get a lot of Close Encounters, a hint of 1941, a touch of ET, and monkeys that act like Ewoks.  There’s even a shot that looks a lot like the T-Rex plowing through the jungle in Jurassic Park.  Some scenes appear more because Spielberg wanted to shoot them than because they had anything to do with the story, including a completely gratuitous take on The Day After.

Indiana Jones has always  teetered on the line between adventure and slapstick.  And when that balance holds, you get great scenes, such as the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the mansion scene in The Last Crusade with Indy and his father tied in chairs, and his father dropping the lighter on the rug.  But if the balance slips, and anything goes, then nothing is funny and nothing is believable any more.  That balance fell apart from the first moment of Temple of Doom.  In Crystal Skull, the balance lasts up until Indy climbs into a refrigerator.