Avatar

"I'm probably just talking to a tree right now..."

Really, that sums it up. Avatar is Ferngully with really nifty computer animation. Everyone is cardboard. The hero is heroic, the anthropologist is a tree hugger, and the big company and big army evil doers are well, evil.

Yeah, the plot, is all about your stereotypical big bad company finding an untouched, misunderstood wilderness and looking for ways to exploit it. If that means running out and massacring all of the locals by making them out to be savages, well even better. My favorite part was when the bad guy runs out into the unbreathable atmosphere without his oxygen mask to shoot the tree huggers and HOLDS HIS BREATH. Oh, and the slow motion action scenes. Let's not forget when the whole end of the movie was telegraphed, um, from the minute she talked about the legend of the Braveheart guy who brought all of the clans together.

Don't get me wrong. The CGI is amazing, if you can get past the fact that it glows like a velvet Elvis painting under a blacklight. But really, even bells and whistles do not a Oscar winner make. Thank god. Because let's face it, The Hurt Locker- that had action, character development, visuals that made your blood chill, and enough tension that I couldn't keep my hands unclenched. Oh yeah, AND it had a point to make too, Mr. Cameron, without beating me over the head with it.

Rating: Bah. It's no wonder there's a RiffTrax. It's the only way I will watch this again.
- Posted using BlogPress from Bruce

Location:On my couch in the she-cave

The Chinatown Deathcloud Peril by Paul Malmont

A good friend handed this book over to me because he thought with my love of old 40's noir, old time radio programs, and James Ellroy that I would love a book that stars the authors of two of the most popular pulp stories - The Shadow and Doc Savage. He was right.

In The Chinatown Deathcloud Peril, William Gibson writes The Shadow. He's buddies with H.P. Lovecraft, whose strange death spurs the writer to meet the real-life Shadow and it scares him. Gibson and Lester Dent (author of Doc Savage) are in a race to uncover the answer to one of the greatest mysteries and best pulp stories ever told. All sorts of writers appear in the tale, including L. Ron Hubbard and Louis L'Amour. The two authors are rivals and partners as they dig deep into the secrets surrounding Lovecraft's death and the secrets hidden in Chinatown, all culminating in the biggest pulp of all.

It's fun, it's pulpy, it's a fast read with plenty of all that a good pulp fun with quips, crazy characters, and impossible adventures. It was funny without being too campy, when it could have gone over the edge.

Rating: 5 Purrs for something I probably never would have found myself but loved every page of it.

Clash of the Titans (remake)

What can I say about Clash of the Titans? Hmm...What to say...What to say...

1. They took out pretty much every shred of mythology from the original. All that stuff about Kalabos, Thetis, Poseidon, Zeus ruling the gods and goddesses with an iron fist, the gifts from the goddesses, the origins of Perseus, all of that - out. You see Zeus and Hades, but that's it. All of the others there on Mt. Olympus are pretty much window dressing to Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes munching on the screen.
2. Perseus wants to be a *man* not a *god.* He whines like Luke Skywalker throughout the entire movie about how he wants to do the whole journey to Medusa as a *man* despite the many good men dying around him because he is stubborn.
3. Io - WTF? I guess Andromeda wasn't warrior-chick enough to be in this movie but for more than a second.
   
4. Man, I miss Ray Harryhausen's special effects. CGI just doesn't give the right feel to what this movie could have been.
5. Oh no, you did not just throw Bubo back into the trunk. He's a gift from Athena dude. You don't just cast off a gift from Athena.
   

I wasn't looking for a retread. I knew that Harryhausen wouldn't be there and that there would be mostly big-bada-booms, but I was very disappointed that they stripped so much of the mythology out. That's what the freaking Clash of the Titans is about, dang it. I admit, I clapped when Neeson said "Release the Kraken!" and when Bubo did show up for all of two seconds.

What this movie needed: more Bubo! More clashing and less "no we are men, not Gods! I will fight as one" and "but I was going into Tatchi for power converters" blah blah. Of course if you remove those feelings from the equation and just see it for what it is, a big CGI action fest, well, it's not so bad.

Rating: 3 1/2 Purrs because there was a Kraken, after all

Terry Gilliam! Windmills! Don Quixote!

I just read that Terry Gilliam is going to restart his production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Whee!

I watched the documentary Lost in La Mancha a few years ago and was so overwhelmed with Gilliam's vision and so sad to see the just *awful* luck involved with the film. Flash floods, back problems, destroyed sets. Just like someone broke 100 mirrors and channeled all of that bad luck into one film. But the pieces of the film that you did get to see, the storyboards and costumes and drawings, gave me just enough of a taste to really wish he would have been able to push on. Wow. I just love his movies, mostly because I have always felt that Gilliam has such vision, such a signature style that creates a fairytale on screen. Sometimes it's dark , like 12 Monkeys, sometimes it's an adventure full of life and bittersweet relationships, like The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen. But what you always get is a dream. A beautiful, eerie, haunting dream.