What They Found

http://www.theawl.com/2009/12/flicked-off-with-mary-hk-choi-avatar

“Avatar” is staggering. It’s seismic. Evolutionarily speaking it is cladogenesis in a thunderclap. Punctuating the balls outta equilibrium. Think about it: You can’t bit torrent this shit. And even if some very industrious pillager cops the glasses and figures out how to do it in the way it was intended to be seen, that person is a hope rapist that should be shot in the face for dream treason because James Cameron and a gang of wizards made this beautiful, beautiful thing for us—in 2009 of all years. We should ALL hold hands about it.

That interview, courtesy of TheAwl.com, takes home the gold for sheer unbridled vulgar enthusiasm.  Best review I’ve read so far.  I ended up seeing Avatar twice (in 3d, there is no other way), and from the reviews I’ve read, I guess it’s redundant to throw in my two cents.   It was an incredibly amazing piece of work and truly staggering in what it achieved visually.  The characters came as close to the uncanny valley as I’ve ever seen without falling in (though technically they weren’t recreating truly human faces, per se…that’s just nitpicking), and the attention to the expressiveness of the eyes and mouths of the cgi characters allowed you to forget that you were basically watching cartoons for 3 hours and become immersed in the world that Cameron so painstakingly created.   Yes, the story was simplistic (dances with wolves/pocahontas with smurfs),  and yes, “hamfisted” seems to be tossed around in a lot of the reviews of the dialogue, but that’s not the point.  It’s the immensity and detail and reality of the cgi world, along with the well-integrated 3d effects that will set the bar for cgi/3d movies to come.

Of course, it also affirms the prophecy set by the recently departed author David Foster Wallace [1] in his 1998 essay, F/X porn“, which skewers big F/X blockbusters (namely Terminator 2) for their similarity to hard-core porn, and all but lays out the formula that some claim Avatar followed.  

It’s a good read, even if you’re not familiar with DFW, merely for a segue into this next little gem, the first 10 minutes of a 70 minute (yes, 70, more than an hour) evisceration of George Lucas and the steaming pile of true F/X porn that was the Phantom Menace.  

**NSFW**

I’m sad to admit that I watched all 70 minutes (yay unemployment).  It gets pretty weird after the first one, but looking past the whole “serial killer kidnapping hookers in his basement” stuff, the man wields the truth like Thor’s hammer until there’s really not much left for Lucas’s bastardization of the Star Wars franchise to stand on.  Just watch the first one and see if you don’t get hooked.

Footnotes

[1]Obligatory footnote.