Avatar Review

Length: 162 min

Rated: PG-13

Distributor: 20th Century Fox

Release Date: 2009-12-18

Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Sigourney Weaver, Joel Moore, Giovanni Ribisi, Michelle Rodriguez, Wes Studi, Peter Mensah, Laz Alonso, C.C.H. Pounder

Directed by James Cameron

Produced by James Cameron, Jon Landau

Written by James Cameron

Avatar isn't the future of movies; it's the past. Telling a story as old as Westerns and swashbucklers and epics and, hell, Greek mythology, it's a classical adventure story that happens to look very, very different from anything we've seen before. That revolutionary look is the reason people are rightly calling the movie a game-changer, but don't be fooled-- Avatar is as old-fashioned and romantic as Titanic, and thrillingly, just as wonderful to watch.

A rousing, play-it-to-the-rafters adventure story wrapped around a deep romance, Avatar is the exactly the James Cameron movie you would expect after 11 years in the making, a masterful combination of technology and the kind of storytelling that's made movies work since the beginning. Yes it's hokey and at times unoriginal, but with so much going on in the background of both the Pandoran forest and the advanced human technology, you'll want the simplest story possible in order for Cameron to play some more in this world. From the floating Hallelujah Mountains to the iridescent Tree of Souls, Pandora is so thoroughly realized that it feels quite literally like a transporting experience. Never before have 3D glasses felt less intrusive between the viewer and the screen; never before has CGI felt so natural, so necessary, or so alive.

In the future, earth has been destroyed, and an anonymous corporation has set upon Pandora to mine something called unobtanium (Cameron has a thing for obvious names, but that's a real scientific term). In one ignored corner of the corporation headquarters, scientist Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) has invented avatars fused with DNA from both humans and the native culture, the Na'vi. While the company execs, led by Giovanni Ribisi's weasel-faced Parker Selfridge (what'd I tell you about the obvious names?) want to obliterate the native cultures, Grace's unit is aiming for humanitarian outreach and cross-cultural understanding.

Enter Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), brought to Grace's lab to replace his dead twin brother, and bringing a bullheaded ex-Marine's attitude that clashes immediately, and wonderfully, with Grace's own no-nonsense ways. Having lost use of his legs in combat years earlier, Jake takes to life within his avatar as a chance to experience the world again, and the minute he's out in the Pandoran forest, finds himself stranded after a chase with a particularly nasty local creature.

Coming to his rescue is Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), princess of the local Na'vi clan with pretty much no patience for Jake and his arrogance, having saved him only thanks to a symbol from their god figure, Eywah. Neytiri takes him home and the tribe is convinced to teach Jake their ways; as soon as he goes to sleep, though, he wakes up in his own body back in lab, sharing details about the Na'vi tribe with Grace as Selfridge, who along with tough military type Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is anxious to use all this insider knowledge to tear down the Na'vi from the inside.

You know how it goes from here-- Jake is dazzled by the Na'vi way of life, especially since that's where he gets to use his legs, but the human threat is approaching, and before too long you know they'll figure out he's been leaking information to the bad guys. But the story is there to make you feel familiar enough for the visuals to utterly blow you away. The bioluminescent Pandoran forest, from the giant palm fronds to the packs of dog-weasel beasts to the massive Home Tree that the Na'vi make their home, is so well-crafted, so gorgeous, that the line between CGI and reality simply disappears. It's impossible to overstate how real the Na'vi and avatar characters look, how every flick of their eyes or wrinkle in their faces seems organic. These alien creatures, their skills and their physicality and wild natures, are the best argument ever seen for motion-capture performances. There's never been anything like them.

For all the gaps in character motivation and underdeveloped side characters, Cameron introduces us to Pandora perfectly, so that when it comes time for the final battle, every peak and monstrous creature is a familiar friend. The CGI in those scenes is stunning, of course, but what's better is Cameron's handle on the cutting and camerawork required for battle scenes. In a decade where fight choreography is frequently masked by frantic editing, and you're lucky to know which side is where in an epic battle, Cameron shows himself, once again, as the old-school master.

Many of the big parts of the story are disappointments-- the Na'vi, with their feathered headdresses and braids, resemble far too closely the racist "noble savages" of past Westerns, and the lesson of environmental tolerance attached to them feels rote at best, insulting at the worst. The corporate and military characters are so transparently evil that they often feel like the real cartoons, while Jake Sully, despite getting in a good zinger once in a while, is essentially a blank slate on which to project our own notions of how heroic we could be, too. But it's all the details that will make you go "wow"; the way the Na'vi literally connect with the earth and animals around them, Neytiri's cries of anguish, or even the technology in Grace's lab. After all, it's not Odysseus's journey and his character we remember; it's all the cool stuff he got to see along the way.

Had Cameron not stuck so closely to a simple story, or replaced some of his notoriously awful dialogue with something slightly less tin-eared, he might have truly had a masterpiece. But then, Avatar might not have felt like such a return to classic epics, and probably wouldn't have been nearly as fun. Over the past decade we've preferred our adventures with a twinge of darkness or irony, be it Johnny Depp's Pirates swagger or the many existential crises of Batman. Cameron has returned to tell us that all we need is a slight and earnest story, a few good characters to carry it along, and thrilling visuals to sweep us all away. Avatar has it all. It's great to have him back.

The Princess And The Frog Review

Rated: G

Distributor: Walt Disney Animation Studios

Release Date: 2009-11-25

Starring: Voices: Anika Noni Rose, Keith David, Jenifer Lewis, John Goodman

Directed by John Musker, Ron Clements

Produced by Peter Del Vecho

Written by Ron Clements, Rob Edwards

It’s actually only been five years since Disney’s last traditionally animated feature but not since the mid-90s has one of them felt this right. The Princess and the Frog is an entry in the mold of Disney’s most enduring, classic, fairytale movies and while its been done before, it never seems to get old. Their obsession with princes and princesses continues and now it’s set to inspire a whole new generation of little girls to run around wearing tiaras. But unlike some of their past efforts, this particular iteration comes with a little more substance than the usual, empty dreaming of true love.

Tiana is a New Orleans waitress with dreams, not of finding a prince, but of owning her own business. Since she was a little girl Tiana has wanted to own a restaurant, and to make that dream come true, she works and works hard. She knows that success takes more than simply wishing on a star and so Tiana ignores frivolity to work double shifts and saves the money she’ll need to make fantasy reality. And though later in the film she’ll learn there’s more to life than hard work, the movie never lets her abandon those core values which have her rolling up her sleeves and getting the job done. She never turns the lovesick waif who abandons herself to follow around a man, you won’t find her sitting around in a castle waiting for him to come and save her. Tiana finds love on her own terms and makes her dreams come true not with wizards or magic, but with determination and effort.

But there’s plenty of magic around her, usually getting in the way. Tiana’s plans for success go awry when she bumps into a talking frog who happens to be a prince named Naveen. Naveen recently ran afoul of a dastardly voodoo practitioner called The Shadow Man, a character in the mold of Disney’s evil, magical, villains. Desperate to become human again, Naveen mistakes her for a princess, convinces her to kiss him, and everything backfires dooming Tiana to the same froggy fate as Naveen. Together they race through the swamp looking for a way to become human again. Along the way they meet a cast of Cajun accented animal critters including Louis, a jazz playing gator, and Ray, a folksy lightning bug with a family full of bright-butted relatives.

Ray in particular was a genius decision on the part of Princess and the Frog’s writers. He could have been a lizard, or a fish, or literally any of the thousands of creatures inhabiting the swamp. But making Ray a lightning bug opens up an amazing range of visual possibilities, as directors Ron Clements and John Musker use Ray and his lightning bug friends to, quite literally, light up the dark in their swampy world. Thousands of tiny firefly lights flit through every scene, lighting up flowers and trees and writing in the sky as the movie’s toe-tapping musical numbers drive the plot and lovingly hand-drawn characters whirl across the screen.

The songs and animation are beautiful, the characters are fully realized, and there’s a great lesson here should you be looking for a way to deprogram your Twilight-mesmerized daughter. If there’s any problem with Princess and the Frog it’s only that it doesn’t feel as epic as some of Disney’s true masterpieces. In a sense it plays out like a small-scale version of movies they’ve already done. As a villain, for instance, The Shadow Man, though colorful and engaging is really just a less powerful version of Little Mermaid’s Ursula or Aladdin’s Jafar. Remember that sweeping, frightening, awesome in scale scene from The Little Mermaid where Ursula grabs Ariel with her magic, twisting and shaping her body into human form while the seas and mountains of the ocean boil around her? Princess and the Frog has that scene too and, while it’s artfully done, it’s on a much smaller scale. Everything about the movie ends up working the same way. It’s a more modestly told affair, a simpler tale in a simpler setting with engaging characters that just don’t quite have the epic pizzazz of some of the others created by Disney.

But that’s not enough to ruin it, only enough to leave Princess and the Frog out of the upper pantheon of Disney’s greatest films. It falls somewhere in the middle, between the unforgettable classics like Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King and the forgettable late-nineties entries like Tarzan or Hercules, the movies which signaled the beginning of the end in Disney’s dominance. Now though, the wait is over. Disney animation is back. The Princess and the Frog is a warm and infinitely enjoyable movie, one which takes advantage of the artistic beauty of hand-drawn animation to tell the kind of fairytale fantasy that only hand-drawn animation can get right.

2012 Reviews

Length: 158 min

Rated: PG-13

Distributor: Columbia Pictures- Sony Pictures

Release Date: 2009-11-13

Starring: John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Amanda Peet, Danny Glover, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Oliver Platt, Thandie Newton, George Segal, Tom McCarthy

Directed by Roland Emmerich

Produced by Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser

Written by Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser

People who view screenwriting as an art and don't particularly care about audience reaction to their films bristle at the thought of screenplay classes, in which Plot Element A and Plot Element B can be put together in such a way that-- voila!-- a hit is born. But Roland Emmerich has taken that very kind of formula writing and made a veritable empire out of it, returning every few years to destroy some corner of the earth and invent a handful of earnest heroes, wisecracking sidekicks and solemn old men to survive his newest take on the apocalypse.

With 2012, as you probably could have guessed from the poster art of tidal waves crashing over the Himalayas, Emmerich is letting go of whatever restraint he might have had before. Clocking in at nearly three hours, boasting about a dozen major characters and at least half a dozen emotional death scenes, 2012 operates on the assumption that, if we liked seeing New York destroyed in The Day After Tomorrow and Washington D.C. zapped in Independence Day, we'll really love witnessing the wholesale destruction of the globe.

I hate to say it, but Emmerich is pretty much right. Far from conveying the horrors that might befall us should anything remotely so destructive happen, 2012 feels more like a soothing bath of Hollywood tropes and cliches, allowing us to witness Los Angeles slide into the ocean like Atlantis, but then warming us with a Woody Harrelson wisecrack and a rousing speech from Chiwetel Ejiofor. It's numbing, sure, especially when the first half is nothing but CGI explosion after another, but on some level it's exactly what we expect out of Hollywood-- shallow spectacle and a bevy of stars, an adventure and a few moral lessons, a giant budget spent guaranteeing we won't feel a bit different than we did when walking into the theater.

If there's any surprise at all in 2012, it's that Chiwetel Ejiofor, not John Cusack, is in fact the star of the film. We meet him in what amount to the film's prologue, a White House-employed geologist trying to prove to a cynical chief of staff (Oliver Platt, wonderfully hammy and villainous) that, in fact, the end is nigh. The cause is less important than the results-- giant fissures open up in the earth's surface, mountains turns to volcanos and skyscrapers turn to ash, and eventually tidal waves cover the entire earth's surface.

Billions of people die in the ensuing melee, but there are only a few we're instructed to care about. Chief among them is Cusack and his family, who start driving out of Los Angeles seconds before the destruction begins thanks to a tip from Woody Harrelson, who plays a Yellowstone-residing conspiracy theorist who saw the whole thing coming and made a YouTube video about it (Emmerich's nods toward modern concerns, like casting Danny Glover as the President and having characters constantly complain about cell service, head toward parody when Harrelson demands that Cusack "download my blog.") Plot mechanics too silly to describe require Cusack, his ex-wife (Amanda Peet), her new boyfriend (Tom McCarthy) and their cutesy kids (Liam James and Morgan Lily) to fly a series of planes on their way to China, where they intend to save their own skins in a manner that's best left discovered in the theater.

Somewhere along the way George Segal perishes on a cruise ship, Danny Glover does the heroic Presidential thing, a Russian oligarch and his bratty kids team up with Cusack and company, and the main players in Washington-- plus the President's comely daughter (Thandie Newton)-- all make their way to a souped-up version of Dick Cheney's undisclosed location. The final quarter of the film, while utterly unnecessary to the disaster elements, is also the best section, finally abandoning generic and plasticine CGI for situations that feel real and dangerous. There's no villain here, unless you count the merely loathsome Platt character, so it takes a lot of effort to keep putting the characters in danger, and by the end of the movie, Emmerich has most certainly run out ideas. But there's something about the scale of it all, or maybe the way seemingly random characters tie into the main plot, that keeps the train chugging along. When Ejiofor gets to make his hero speech, and certain bad characters make good at the eleventh hour, it's not quite a "This is our Independence Day!" moment, but it does come closer than any of Emmerich's films since then. Somehow he's got a real heart beating inside his movie, and no amount of groaner one-liners or thunderous explosions can take that away.

Emmerich claims that 2012 is his final disaster movie, unless Independence Day 2 ever gets off the ground, and the movie is nothing if not an indulgent curtain call for the man who figured out how much we like watching cinematic portrayals of our own demise. It's all the reasons we've ever loved or hated his movies, but also a reminder of why it's high time to move on. When he ends the movie, no lie, on a bathroom, joke, it's not exactly going out on top, but those of us who love Emmerich despite him wouldn't have wanted it any other way.