James Cameron's AVATAR 2 - now playing in cinema theaters

[DeadWalrus]

Same term was used in POS movie The Core

yes. exactly.

[Dr Yail Bloor]

the material that the one dimensional evil corporation wants to murder the peaceful natives for is called "unobtainium". this is the level of thought that went into the script.

wasnt that just a joke on the empire website??

Unobtanium started as a joke term in the movie's world but gained wide acceptance. This is an existing term in our world invented by engineers. It's not unreasonable that it'd be used IMO. Same term was used in POS movie The Core to describe metal that becomes stronger as you heat it.

From the scriptment i.e. the first post of this thread:

Pandora is
blessed with a naturally occurring substance a million
times more precious than gold. Its joke name of
"unobtanium" has stuck, over the years. Unobtanium is a
rare-earth mineral, formed volcanically, which is a roomtemperature
superconductor.
The room temperature superconductor has been the "snark"
of modern materials science... a substance which transmits
electricity with zero resistance, but at normal
temperatures, rather than the liquid-helium cooled
superconductors of human science.

and IRL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium

ah well as long as science backs it up i'm cool with it

[queedlemorth]

The Columbus Dispatch had a sizeable article in the paper today about the film.
I watered my pants.


http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/li ... FUQED.html




HOLLYWOOD -- The toughest task for actors in James Cameron's new sci-fi movie Avatar might have been speaking words invented by a professor at the University of Southern California.

Linguist Paul R. Frommer was hired by Avatar writer-director James Cameron to create a functioning language for the tribe of 10-foot-tall blue beings who inhabit Pandora, the otherworldly setting for the film's conflict.
Frommer tackled the project with glee -- "How often do you get an opportunity like this?" -- but the actors who had to bend their tongues around the invented vocabulary and syntax were slightly less charmed by the experience.
"Oh, it was so hard, and I was really concerned about it," said Zoe Saldana, who plays Neytiri in the science-fiction adventure that will open Friday.
"I didn't think I could get through it. I'm not good with languages. All the actors, we worked together. It was the only way."
Frommer has spent four years laboring on the language of the Na'vi tribe, and his work won't end soon.
"I'm still working, and I hope that the language will have a life of its own," he said.
"For one thing, I'm hoping there will be prequels and sequels to the film, which means more language will be needed."
Frommer explained that his language was limited by the earthling larynxes of cast members.
"The constraint, of course, is that the language I created had to be spoken by humans," he said.
"I could have let my imagination run wild and come up with all sorts of weird sounds, but I was limited by what a human actor could actually do."
Including the scripts for the film and a video game, Frommer has made up more than 1,000 Na'vi words, as well as all the language's rules.
"I'm adding to that all the time," said Frommer, who says he would like to see the new tongue catch on in the way Star Trek's Klingon has.
"Cameron wanted something melodious and musical, something that would sound strange and alien but smooth and appealing."
The finished product sounds, to some ears, vaguely Polynesian. Others hear the rhythms of African languages.
Avatar producer Jon Landau approached the Linguistics Department at the university about creating an extraterrestrial tongue.
"The e-mail that came my way said they were looking for someone who could create an alien language for a major motion picture directed by James Cameron," Frommer said.
"As soon as I saw that e-mail, I pounced on it."
Frommer finds himself walking the campus and talking to himself in Na'vi.
He has attempted poetry, too. It wouldn't be surprising if some of his couplets were forlorn -- it's lonely being the only person speaking a language.
"I just wish," he said, "that I had someone to talk to."

[Necrometer]

Are you trying to be like a fake girlfriend for me troll, q-morth? Because that's not nice. I'd go so far as to suggest it's unwarranted.

[the awesome Assassin]

Just got back from the movie at the Niagara Falls, IMax after winning tickets... 4/10 at the best...

[Necrometer]

Just got back from the movie at the Niagara Falls, IMax after winning tickets... 4/10 at the best...

What did the kids/ladies think?

[the awesome Assassin]

Just got back from the movie at the Niagara Falls, IMax after winning tickets... 4/10 at the best...

What did the kids/ladies think?

The wife was bored...

[queedlemorth]

Are you trying to be like a fake girlfriend for me troll, q-morth? Because that's not nice. I'd go so far as to suggest it's unwarranted.

Ill be your real girlfriend
If you feel it's warranted

[Necrometer]

Damn, Mitch. Tough news for my near future!

Are you trying to be like a fake girlfriend for me troll, q-morth? Because that's not nice. I'd go so far as to suggest it's unwarranted.

Ill be your real girlfriend
If you feel it's warranted

Sounds like a plan!

This part was great:

"I just wish," he said, "that I had someone to talk to."

Story of my life.

[queedlemorth]

Damn, Mitch. Tough news for my near future!

Are you trying to be like a fake girlfriend for me troll, q-morth? Because that's not nice. I'd go so far as to suggest it's unwarranted.

Ill be your real girlfriend
If you feel it's warranted

Sounds like a plan!

This part was great:

"I just wish," he said, "that I had someone to talk to."

Story of my life.

Don't worry, I have perky titty genes.

[Necrometer]

goddamnit

[DeadWalrus]

"The e-mail that came my way said they were looking for someone who could create an alien language for a major motion picture directed by James Cameron," Frommer said.
"As soon as I saw that e-mail, I pounced on it."

Unfortunately, the e-mail looking for someone who could create a tight, original script and characters with depth and dimension went to the spam filter. Cameron was forced to finish the script the weekend before principle photography in a haze of jack & coffee, Huffington Post columns from 2003 and Captain Planet reruns.

[Necrometer]

Are you just bitter because they used your likeness and didn't pay you for it?

SPOILERSPOILER_SHOW

[Necrometer]

Hahaha, no wonder they're having a hell of a time marketing it:

And it's an aspect that Fox would NEVER want to be let out early because it WILL cause fanboys to over-react (because fanboys are, by definition, people who over-react). However since the film is bathing itself in the glow of positive reviews and strong critical support, I think it's safe to let the cat out of bag...and it is this: this is not "Aliens". This is not "Terminator" or "The Abyss". This is not "Titanic" either. This is not James Cameron's war film or horror movie or thriller action/adventure.

James Cameron's Great Experiment...is also James Cameron's FAMILY FILM.

This is not James Cameron trying to top his science-fiction masterpieces of the past...this is Cameron muscling in on Disney's territory and trying to make the kind of films that got Disney Oscars decades ago.

"AVATAR" is a family-film, through and through. And by "family film" I don't mean like modern Disney Animation or even the candy-colored Pixar movies. I mean family film like "Labyrinth" or "The Princess Bride" or "Flight of the Navigator" or "The Never-Ending Story". I mean the kind of family film that WAS an emotional ordeal for kids to watch and nightmares were to be had, but those kids still kept watching them and grew up and emotionally developed because of how complex and dark they were.

I can't find the Disneyfied Avatar trailer... will post it if I can track it down... it's so awesome.


Oh shit - now Armond White's review is up

SPOILERSPOILER_SHOW

James Cameron’s love of technology is enough to sell Avatar to fans awaiting his first techno-feat since 1997’s Titanic. But will they understand the awful thing he’s done with it? Avatar’s highly-touted special effects depict an army from Earth traveling to Pandora, a moon in the Alpha Centuri-A star system, to mine rare ore from under its inhabitants, tall, blue-skinned creatures with tails called the Na’vi. These F/X show Cameron’s ex-Marine hero, Jake Sully (the great everyman Sam Worthington), taking part in a quasi-military program where he enters the alien society via a hybrid body (an avatar) made from human and Na’vi DNA. Cameron’s “fully immersive” 3-D technology is irritating to watch for nearly three hours. And then there’s his underlying purpose: Avatar is the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt.

Only children—including adult-children—will see Avatar as simply an adventure film; their own love of technology has co-opted their ability to comprehend narrative detail. Cameron offers sci-fi dazzle, yet bungles the good part: the meaning. His undeniably pretty Pandora—a phosphorescent Maxfield Parrish paradise with bird-like lizards, moving plant life and floating mountains—distracts from the inherent contradiction of a reported $300-$500 million Hollywood enterprise that casually berates America’s industrial complex.

Cameron’s superficial B-movie tropes pretend philosophical significance. His story’s rampant imperialism and manifest destiny (Giovanni Ribisi plays the heartless industrialist) recalls Vietnam-era revisionist westerns like Soldier Blue, but it’s essentially a sentimental cartoon with a pacifist, naturalist message. Avatar condemns mankind’s plundering and ruin of a metaphorical planet’s ecology and the aboriginals’ way of life. Cameron fashionably denounces the same economic and military system that make his technological extravaganza possible. It’s like condemning NASA—yet joyriding on the Mars Exploration Rover.

While technically impressive, Avatar’s basically a daft version of the Transformer movies’ sci-fi, techno fantasy. Michael Bay’s extraordinary gift for flashy spectacle found perfect expression in the gargantuan slapstick comedy of technology run amok; his teenage characters’ rapport with cars and machines showed an ambivalent relationship with the things that expedite human activities yet threaten our peace and our history. Avatar, however, invents an alternate world to make the airy-fairy pronouncement: “There’s a network of energy that flows through all living things.” Alien-girl Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) teaches Sully how to bond with a tie-dyed, eagle-like creature by docking his wriggly tail into it. “Feel her!” Neytiri urges, and Cameron emulates the boy-plus-car symbiosis of Transformers—but with pulsing loins, veins and orifices. Better than Titanic’s kitschy romanticism, it is Cameron’s most sensual incident since the husband-wife airlift of True Lies yet, strangely, this sexualized conquest suggests latent fascism in his style.
Related content
Proving Movie Stars Still Matter: Fast & Furious
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Mailbox: 04.08.09-04.14.09
Ready to Roll
No Greater Glory
Brothers
Related to:
nypress
armond
white
james
cameron
avatar
review
dumb
escapism
sam
worthington
smurf
navi
3-d
michael
bay
transformers


Bay’s exultant technological thrills climaxed with Transformers 2’s war metaphor, where mankind’s historical continuity was at stake. But Cameron gets sappy and hypocritical. Set in the near future, Avatar is a throwback to the hippie naiveté of Kevin Costner’s production Rapa Nui (directed by Kevin Reynolds). While prattling about man’s threat to environmental harmony, Cameron’s really into the powie-zowie factor: destructive combat and the deployment of technological force. At first, Sully, a “warrior and dreamwalker” like The Matrix’s Neo, is shown as a fierce, sculpted meathead with a wounded look in his wide eyes. Cameron lights Worthington superbly in tremendous, empathetic close-ups, yet when Sully’s involvement with the avatar project increases—as hair and beard grow in—his humanity becomes nondescript and he identifies with the Na’vi. (It’s disappointing that the great Worthington only appears in a quarter of the film; most of the time Sully is a Smurf.) Going native allows Cameron to move on to the violent technology he really loves—though never scrutinizing Sully’s new bond with an angry red dragon or how Sully’s temperament becomes dangerously enflamed.

Here’s the hypocrisy: As Sully helps the beleaguered, virtuous aliens fight back and conquer the human invaders, Avatar puts forth a simple-minded anti-industrial critique. Despite Avatar’s 12-year gestation, Cameron’s obviously commenting on the Iraq War—though not like his hawkish Aliens. Appealing to Iraq War disenchantment, he evokes 9/11 when the military topples the Na’vi’s sacred, towering Tree of Souls. The imagery implies that the World Trade Center was also an altar (of U.S. capitalism), yet this berserk analogy exposes Cameron’s contradictory thinking. It triggers the offensive battle scenes where American soldiers get vengefully decimated—scored to the rousing clichés of Carmina Burana.

The fantasy of Sully giving up the impediment of his (American) humanity is a guilt-ridden 9/11 death wish. References to “fight terror with terror” and “shock-and-awe campaign” don’t belong in this 3-D Rapa Nui with its blather about the Na’vi’s “direct line to their ancestors.” Once again, villainous Americans exhibit no direct communication with ancestors. That’s Cameron’s fanboy zeal turned into fatuous politics. He misrepresents the facts of militarism, capitalism, imperialism—and their comforts.

Cameron’s seditious hero cheapens Neveldine/Taylor’s timely concept in Gamer, where modern characters took responsibility even for their avatars’ misdeeds. Invested in his own techie legend, Cameron never risks Neveldine/Taylor’s honest critique of our technological dependency—which would be to examine national values. Cameron’s deep failing as a pop artist lies in the fact that, unlike the avant-garde Neveldine/Taylor team, he’s a techno-geek who conflates mindless sentimentality with meaning.

Avatar’s going-native F/X fantasy infantilizes Cameron’s technology-infatuated audience; they’ve never read Joseph Conrad on colonialism or feel any compunction about balancing politics and fantasy. There’s even a Busby Berkeley-style tribal dance to divert them. Also, Avatar’s techno-exoticism involves blue cartoon creatures, not brown, black, red, yellow real-world people. It’s the easiest, dumbest escapism imaginable.

[MANTIS]

I stopped reading when he started praising Transformers.

[Necrometer]

I have to give him credit - he didn't bash the mishandling of racial themes (all the blue people are played by black people) or the juvenile "noble savages"... he was creative in his obligatory bashing. He's probably one of the world's best trolls.

[caldwell.the.great]

I stopped reading when he started praising Transformers.

I stopped when I realized the guy was trying to impress himself with his own convoluted bullshit. Where's Roger Ebert when you need him?

[MANTIS]

Fuck Ebert.

[Necrometer]

If you read Ebert's review it's hard to believe it's the same movie they saw:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbc ... /912119998

I do this Ebert is nothing special. His reviews are so half-assed now, they're barely above blog-quality.

And if you need to get up to speed on Mr. White:

SPOILERSPOILER_SHOW

[Dr Yail Bloor]

If you read Ebert's review it's hard to believe it's the same movie they saw:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbc ... /912119998

I do this Ebert is nothing special. His reviews are so half-assed now, they're barely above blog-quality.

And if you need to get up to speed on Mr. White:

SPOILERSPOILER_SHOW

That guy should not be allowed near a cinema, ever.

[cm34p4in]

[DeadWalrus]

I read that review all "hmm yes, he hates the Avatar good good" and then I got to this:

Cameron’s seditious hero cheapens Neveldine/Taylor’s timely concept in Gamer, where modern characters took responsibility even for their avatars’ misdeeds. Invested in his own techie legend, Cameron never risks Neveldine/Taylor’s honest critique of our technological dependency—which would be to examine national values. Cameron’s deep failing as a pop artist lies in the fact that, unlike the avant-garde Neveldine/Taylor team, he’s a techno-geek who conflates mindless sentimentality with meaning.

and i lolled and lolled

[caldwell.the.great]

Fuck Ebert? I don't always agree with the guy, but I tend to think he's a decent writer most of the time. At least he isn't pumping his reviews full of bullshit references that ultimately have more to do with his ego than with the film itself.

Who are your trusted critics? I don't tend to read them too much unless I'm looking for background information about movies.....

[Necrometer]

How She Move was actually really well reviewed; I think they put it on his "likes" list to point out that he's a pushover for black culture stuff.

I love reading Anthony Lane reviews because they are typically legit literature, and I most-of-the-time agree with the hipsters at AV Club e.g. Scott Tobias. I think Peter Travers at Rolling Stone has decent taste. Again, this is why metacritic and RT are cool sites - you can get a sense of why which people liked a flick or not, and go from there.

[MANTIS]

He is a good writer. I'll give you that. I like some of his reviews. Lots of them... not so much though.

I think he pans a lot of good films and give lots of shit a free pass.

Remember in the eighties when he was screaming about how Friday the 13th films were evidence of the downfall of Western civilization?

Give me a fucking break Ebert.

Who are your trusted critics?

NONE.