One podcast I listen to made an interesting comparison between Avatar and Star Wars.  Each movie raised the bar for blockbusters, as well as working in a genre that can be described as Space Opera.  A little too easy and facile for Science Fiction, but set in a future universe.  In fact, both movies rely heavily on the mythology of the American West as background, though Star Wars uses a lot more Eastern martial arts iconography as well.  But the real comparison was about the effect the movies had on the industry.  It’s undeniable that movies before Star Wars, or many that are actually contemporary, but were in production before Star Wars broke all box office records, look cheap now.  No matter what your memory is of the special effects, if you go back and see it now, it will look fake.

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.

Somehow, perhaps because my Netflix-enabled xBox360 is now practically a video store in my living room, I ended up watching an episode of Lost.  My previous attitude towards Lost was a mixture of contempt and outrage that people where so devoted to it.  Some people compared it to BSG.  I kept comparing it to Gilligan’s Island.

But then, because I was in max ADD mode and needed something on in the background while I got some work done, I watched the first episode of Season one.  Then I watched the second episode, and the third.  Before the day was out, I was four episodes in.  As of now, I’ve finished Season 3, and fully intend to finish Season 4 before the last and final season starts live.  I love the show the same way I love peanut M & Ms.  They aren’t really nutritious, and it’s not exactly high-quality chocolate, but the combination can be perfect in the moment.

Broadly, though, my opinion hasn’t changed that much.  I still think:

• The sci-fi in Lost sucks.  There’s no consistent underlying set of rules, just a sort of random interplay between odd tech and pure fantasy
• The constant themes of fate and religion have been done better elsewhere.  The excess string of coincidence is constantly interpreted as having “meaning”.  But the meaning is always obscure.  “We were meant to be here.”  Sure, you were meant to be standing over there, and you, yes you, were meant to be naked.  (Kate, for instance, is constantly struggling with her clothes)
• It’s no BSG.  But then, it really isn’t trying to be BSG.  One is a tightly woven story with gritty, real science fiction elements, the other is a bag of M & Ms.  Peanut.  It doesn’t make the M & Ms less tasty

What drives Lost is character.  The island is obviously the screen-writer’s vision of purgatory, whatever else they call it.  And purgatory is, by definition, filled with tortured souls who are on the edge between redemption and damnation.  Throw a bunch of these characters together, add some solid chemistry, and you get great drama.  Almost every character who gets introduced eventually becomes fascinating.  I love Bernie and Rose as much as I do Sawyer.  Of course Jack is just insufferable, but you always almost like him.

Last night I had a dream.  It was so scary, so soaked in anxiety, that it woke me up at around 4:30 a.m.  So maybe I should say I had a dream this morning.  It started off innocently enough.  I was standing in some kind of steep hall, with friends, watering the carpet with a garden hose.  Some kind of thing, it was either a polar bear or a malevolent ice cream truck, was playing around at the bottom.  Naturally, we hosed it.

The thing started coming up the carpeted hall, but fortunately I realized that if I kept spraying water it would lose its footing.  But I needed to have enough water.  (By this time the carpet had disappeared).  There was another, side hall, and the polar bear/ice cream truck would switch over and try coming up that side, but I quickly doused that as well.  It seemed clear that I couldn’t keep this up for long, though.  The only thing for it was to run.  But I’d left some of my clothes in an obscure locker somewhere and couldn’t quite get there in…

Everything changed.  The polar bear/ice cream truck that I had been keeping at bay was now a mobster.  He had invited me, and I was waiting around for the party to get going.  I didn’t much like this mobster, and he knew it.  He had some nefarious end planned for me, yet I couldn’t seem to leave.  Partly because my keys and suit jacket were now wherever those other missing clothes were before.  The party kept filling up with other sort-of-bad people.  I decided I would not go along with whatever they wanted, and failed to applaud when the bad hair guy won some kind of contest that involved matching air canisters with bottles of some kind of liquor.  He cheated by substituting a broken drill, but because he was a known mobster friend/important person, everyone clapped anyway.  Except me.  I knew, then, that I would have kill him, or he would kill me.

My friends didn’t understand the direness of the situation.  Mostly because, apparently, they hadn’t lost their car keys and suit jacket and could just leave.  I was not only trapped, but I had trapped myself.  I did not have the spirit it took to simply walk away from something that was going really badly, and could only get worse.  It was this overwhelming feeling of being trapped and yet being a contributor to my own state that woke me up.

Sometimes dreams don’t mean anything.  But a lot of stressful dreams go back to real-life situations.  There were clues here:

Whatever badness was happening, I had accepted it

I was surrounded by certain friends

Much of the dream was spent keeping something at Bay

The only thing that matched this was an unfortunate decision to see Transformer 2: Return Of The Friggin’ Losers (ROTFL).  Sitting through this movie violated even my normal willingness to watch trash.  After all, Michael Bay KNOWS IT SUCKS.  But he’s counting his money and laughing at us as we sit through it anyway.

There is one argument that this is actually a great movie.  It’s a great read, but it doesn’t require anyone to see the actual movie.  There’s another argument that this movie will doom future civilizations.  (Also a great read, but it does contain an inaccuracy about why someone went to the wrong theater).  But I think there’s a worse fate in store for us now.  We have willingly given up our money for something we knew would be bad, for something that turned out to be far worse than we imagined.  Now we will wait in our little cubbyholes while vast sums are dedicated to the making of Transformers 3.

How come expectations are such an integral part of how we enjoy movies? Not just good or bad, but also type, genre, tone. We know who’s in the movie, we think we know the genre, maybe we know the story. Maybe we’ve scene trailers and think we’ve got it pretty much down. Eagle Eye looked like it would be dumb. The plot looked stupid, and the characters seemed questionable. Mostly, it was pretty dumb. But because we weren’t expecting anything good, we enjoyed it. It stayed very close to expectations, often by stealing from other, better movies.

Meanwhile movies that really are good got trashed by some critics because they weren’t what critics expected. Hancock fell to this critical inflexibility earlier this summer, while Burn After Reading took a lot of flack for it more recently. You could blame to publicity people who put together the trailers. In both cases, the trailer weavers went for pure, light-hearted slapstick. Neither movie falls into that role. Both hit a turning point where the movie is no longer the thing you were promised. Something better, perhaps, but your expectations are already fixed.

Some people have little tolerance for the unexpected. Personally, I usually like it. If it’s good. But movies that don’t deliver what they seemed to promise, but then don’t give you anything else, are at the bottom of my FAIL list. (Epic Movie fits into this slot).

It always annoys when my friends say something like: “I could have told you that,” after I report that some movie really sucked.  No, no you couldn’t have told me that.  Sure, the Mummy III: Tomb of Jet Li Phoning It In looked bad.  There were many warning signs.  But these friends would have said the same thing about Hitman, or Tank Girl, or Blade III: Trinity.  Say what you will, I enjoyed those movies.  I loved all three Resident Evil movies.  I savored the badness (and the cage scene) that was BloodRayne.  Would you deny me those pleasures?  So I take a lot of chances.  Sometimes, as with Babylon A.D., I get about what expect, a flawed movie with derivative elements and some good action.  Even the bad ending didn’t ruin it for me.

But sometimes I get the third Mummy movie.  It’s not so much bad as it is tired.  The almost ritualistic character portrayals using every old trope and stale piece of dialog dragged down the small moments in which the action actually worked.  I love Jet Li, and I like Brendan Frazier.  But neither of them showed up for this movie.  Surrounded by CGI badness, they read through the exhausting dialog with no hope of adding anything fresh to it.  Retired hero misses action.  Father has problems expressing approval of son.  Evil emperor wants to take over world.  (what to good emperors do?)

Fortunately I had already downloaded the unrated version of Hitman on my PS3.  I got home, feeling like I needed to bath in something to get that “Mummy-to-far” feeling out of my system, I started watching this hyper-cool, intense action flick, in which the characters actually seem to care about what they are doing.  Though the reviewers generally have gone negative Hitman, it’s really a lot of fun.

I was ready for this one to fail. The premise is kind of dated, the raging Id as superhero has been done in many forms, plus there’s the stretchy pants problem. Also, I never made it through Ang Lee’s version, even on cable, for free. But it was Saturday afternoon and I needed a little something. I like action movies, and I can enjoy a bad movie for its badness. After all, “Hulk Smash” always works.

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.