Author: broderic

For a moment there Up In The Air tried to be about redemption. A man lives his life on the road afraid of commitments, relationships, baggage, but with the help of three women in his life he finds that life is more than traveling. Then a twist that you knew had to be coming comes and the movie gets our leading man back on the road where he belongs.

The trailers lead you to believe that George Clooney finally gets off the road to now where. He doesn’t. He is defined by the mileage and the rental cars and the gold club and the flying. Girls try to change him. But it really isn’t him. And so he stays the same. All the better for it.

I didn’t like that he didn’t change. I thought he would and we would have a feel good movie. When he didn’t, I felt lost. I wanted to fly away from the theatre.

Are there moments in my life where traveling would be fun? Yes. Do I like to fly? No. Especially if there are pantsu bombers out there.

3 of 5 stars

I’m gonna service the queue and the first movie up is Avatar which I saw opening night before the big snow storm in surreal “IMAX” 3D.

I was always very skeptical on the look of the film. James Cameron spent upwards of $300 million on this movie and in the commercials it looks like a Halo cut scene. With my 3D goggles on that first night, it looked like $300 million on the screen, and it did not look like a cut scene. It looked pretty awesome and pretty, too. All that $300 million to render and make the physics look good was worth it. But that $300 million did not pay for a story.

The movie’s plot has been compared to Dances With Wolves and other films of white guys going to the natives. And it sure was very similar. The Terminator guy loves his blue skinned honey. He loves his blue skinned avatar as well as it gives him the mobility that this shriveled legs lack. He gets his legs back and his soul back to save a planet. And of course to condemn another planet to death.

Avatar had weird politics. It asked the audience to cheer for the Indians as they slaughter the pioneers. It asked the audience to choose to root for the insurgents as they blew up IEDs on the unsuspecting soldiers. It asked the audience to be bigoted against the other. For a group of people that valued a universal emotional/physical bond, the Nav’i sure hate those that are not the same. They expel the humans from Nav’i world with extreme prejudice. I don’t understand why they let some humans stay.

Avatar also had weird concept of evolution. Does it work the same way on planet Nav’i as it does on earth? Then what’s up with the ethernet jacks. I wonder how these things evolved, and what is the evolutionary need of such a thing on all the things there.

The visuals were a feast for the eyes, but I was too busy trying to understand the evolution of these species to fully get into the movie.

The battles were pretty good, James Cameron is a cheese master though, the movie had a Phantom Menace vibe as it could not live up to the hype, and I couldn’t help but notice that it was a mash up of many different movies: Princess Mononoke, The Matrix trilogy, Dance With Wolves, etc. Cameron is frustrating on the story end.

3 of 5 stars.