ON WHY AVATAR IS MASSIVELY OVERRATED

At this point, you probably have spent a few bucks on James Cameron latest opus. I have. Thirty dollars. And I hated it.

The first time I saw Avatar was in 2D in Brockville, ON, opening day. Stripped of 3D quality and digital projection, Avatar is a bore. The patronizing plot about the good savage winning the heart of the kind-hearted invader has been done and better numerous times (Dances with Wolves, The New World.) With the notable exception of Sigourney Weaver' Dr. Augustine, the characters are unoriginal and painfully underdeveloped. The motion-capture animation is impressive, same as the vast array of extraterrestrial life forms, but without something to do, it's just a bit better than a pretty screen saver. Do you want to see properly used CGI characters? Go and watch LOTR: The Two Towers. Gollum has shades the Na'vi can only dream of.

The tree of life? The Fountain used the same idea more successfully a couple of years ago (true, nobody saw that show, but is there, people.)

Cameron, who is responsible for the Avatar script, is a mediocre writer. When Titanic took home eleven Oscars in 1997, the screenplay wasn't even nominated. He had help for Aliens and Terminator and it shows. In fact, Cameron steals from himself and recycles the character roster from Aliens (the hardcore Latina soldier, the duplicitous corporate drone, Ellen Ripley) and wedges it into his Pocahontas redux.

On New Year's Eve, I decided to give Avatar another chance, this time in 3D, in a state-of-the-art screen in Vancouver, BC. It was actually unbearable, the second time around. I fidgeted in my sit during the entire projection. Sure, the colours are pretty and the first half hour the 3D aspect makes the show tolerable, but the novelty wears off very quickly. There are very specific sits in the theatre where Avatar can be fully appreciated (the four sits right in the middle of the room), if you are not in one of those, you are missing out.

There was an emotional weight in Titanic that's entirely missing in Avatar. Did anybody care when (SPOILER ALERT) three of the main characters bit the dust within minutes from each other? It felt like a montage!

Here is hoping I'm not the only one who notices the emperor has no clothes.

No More Midnights

After this weekend, Rainbow Cinemas at the Golden Mile will no longer have midnight screenings of movies.

A midnight showing at the Rainbow was one of the few unique theatre experiences in Regina. Personally, it's hard to imagine seeing pure schlock any other way.

Already, the decor of the Rainbow is a wonder - it's bright neon and carpet floors were dated when the place opened. The "Coming Soon" and "Feature Presentation" clips are a mish-mash from different years and theatres.

But the midnight showing was a special treat. The crowds were worth coming out for on their own. Trying to figure out their motivations for coming to Meet Dave or The Gameplan at this time was always as interesting as the film itself.

Of course, they could have been asking the same thing about me. The fact is, going to a midnight showing made the movie more of an event, in large part due to the mystique around it. A lot of times, you would enter when the Broken Rack next door was full up and leave when it was empty or emptying out. A midnight movie could be the cap to an evening or the main event. It had a gravitas that could make even the hilariously bad infinitely enjoyable.

Here, I saw some of my favorite movies and some favorite movies to mock. And I couldn't have asked for a better venue to discover them in. Here's hoping the midnight showing returns to Regina one day.

I'm not sure how this weekend will turn out personally, as I've got a birthday party one night and a wedding the next. I'm hoping to make it to at least one last midnight screening. Most likely, I'll go to All About Steve, because there are few films more suiting. It holds a special place as the worst Sandra Bullock movie and probably one of the worst movies ever, experience.

Bladder Management

They sell 64-ounce drinks in movie theatres? (MSN)

Up! A Review

Before, I launch into my review of Pixar's latest blockbuster release, Up!, I have to admit, I haven't actually seen the movie. But I have read the colouring book. So my comments are based entirely upon that.

Truth be told, going into this colouring book, my hopes were pretty high. While I've never read any of the colouring book adaptations of their films in the past, I have enjoyed every single Pixar release I've seen. From Toy Story to the Incredibles to Wall-E, their work is witty, rich, complex and visually stunning. I'm not generally a fan of computer animation, but in the hands of Pixar, the cold precision of pixel art becomes warm and endearing. I'd pretty much decided I'd follow Pixar wherever they decided to go.

And yet, back before it was released, upon hearing what the hook for Up! was -- grumpy old man ties baloons to his house so he can escape his neighbourhood -- my immediate thought was, "Wow, this doesn't sound like my kind of movie at all." But, seeing as it was Pixar, I trusted they'd be able to win me over.

Well, after reading the colouring book, I think I should've trusted my initial reaction. If the plot of the movie bears any relation to what I've read, frankly, this film is a disaster.

(Warning: numerous spoilers ahead... of the colouring book... and maybe the movie, I'm not sure.)

The story opens with grumpy old man, Carl, floating away in his balloon-carried home. Sadly, the colouring book never really makes his motivation for tying balloons to his house clear, and I have to admit I found this jarring. But the idea was sufficiently amusing that I was willing to follow along and see where this floating two storey took me.

But before getting anywhere, I had to endure a couple of those obligatory "puzzle pages" that still plague the colouring book genre.

First up, there's a tedious "circle the two Russells that look exactly alike" puzzle. After that there's a truly baffling one where you're supposed to circle plates to keep them from cracking. The scene depicts the house shaking about in a storm so, presumably, your waxy circles of crayon are somehow supposed to save the china from crashing on the floor -- unnecessary busy work, if you ask me, as the plates are going to hover in the air forever because this is after all a picture in a colouring book and not a scene in a motion picture.

What turns this "puzzle" into a real annoyance, though, is that after all this circling you're supposed to identify how many unbroken plates there are. Do they mean how many in the picture are drawn unbroken? Or how many will remain unbroken if my crayon circles are drawn with precision about them? What if one of my circles isn't completely closed or if what passes for a "circle" from my three year old is really more of a scribble in the vicinity of a plate? Do we count those plates as broken? You see my confusion?

The colouring book never clarifies any of this but fortunately it provides a solution if you turn the page upside down. Phew! (Spoiler: the answer's four.)

Finally, Carl and his house wind up somewhere called "Paradise Falls" and it's here that things really go off the rails.

I won't blow the rest of the story -- such as it is -- for you. Suffice it to say it involves an exotic species of bird, mastiffs with talking dog collars and a mad scientist.

Up until this point I've been willing to happily suspend my disbelief. Floating house? No problem, I can accept that. But talking dogs and mad scientists? Come on.

No, seriously. A floating house with balloons coming out its chimney is a great idea. But a huge part of the magic of it derives from the fact that this house is special. Unique. If it exists alongside a completely unrelated island inhabited by talking dogs and mad scientists, the magic gets diluted. It's just one more crazy thing in a world where all sorts of crazy business goes on. Ho hum.

From then on out, the colouring book plot unravels pretty much as you'd expect, peppered along the way with a few too-easily-solved mazes and more of those "circle the two things that are the same" puzzles. (Nobody likes those puzzles. Why do colouring book writers continue to rely upon them? Is it laziness or malice?)

So far, Up! is coming up lacking, but at least with Pixar you can pretty much be guaranteed a colourful, visually-impressive spectacle if nothing else.

Not so with the colouring book, I'm afraid.

The art is standard black-outline fare, nothing innovative going on here. And as for the colours.... Well, the colouring book I picked up actually came with four crayons -- a nice touch, I have to admit. But the colours they chose were a pale lime green, pink, yellow and an innocuous purply-blue. Hardly inspired choices, and I have to wonder at what the editors were thinking. The lack of a fleshtone makes colouring the human characters difficult. And as anyone who's done any serious colouring knows, yellow crayons are almost always invisible on paper. Frustrating!

At least my daughter was happy to have a pink.

Ultimately, I can't say I came away with particularly fond feelings for Up! and I'm not inclined to see the movie at this point.

In short, I'll have to give Up! The Colouring Book a big thumbs down.

Daily Moon: One Last One

Streaming into my iTunes today came the Quiet Village's Moon Episode, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo XI mission. I'm listening to it right now. The Quiet Village, by the way, is my favourite tiki/lounge/exotica podcast. And, yes, I listen to enough of those to have a favourite.

Anyway, listening to all this space age music reminded me that I still have a pile of moon-themed advertisements scanned from that July 1969 Globe and Mail that I haven't posted yet. So here they are.


And while I was scanning all these, I happened to look over the movie listings and discovered that sandwiched in between decent fare like True Grit and Midnight Cowboy there were a few really dirty movies. Have a look...



The Miracle of Love. Inga. The Gay Deceivers. Yowza. And mom always said movies were so much more wholesome back in the day.

Rosie's first ever top six in the A.M.

1. The Quebec jail system isn't that good a place for a convict with the nickname of The Flower (Globe and Mail).

2. Mosaic Stadium. At Christmas. For a hockey game or a possible double-header. (Mitchell Blair) What could possibly go wrong?

3. Solidarity forever ... or why Fox News is trying to bury the story of the U.S. Navy SEALS rescuing Capt. Richard Phillips. (Crooks and Liars)

4. Kevin Smith's newest movie project sounds as if he's doing a documentary on the next Lethbridge Chamber of Commerce meeting. (IMDB)

5. Okay, Murray, Brad Wall is likeable. Calvert was likeable too. And compared to Stephen Harper, Montgomery Burns is the King of Kensington. Being likeable didn't make Calvert a good premier, so why does the L-P's chief (read: only) political columnist think this trait makes Wall a Man of The People? (Regina Leader-Post)

6. I didn't know my blog posts (prairie dog) had such an effect on Don Morgan, arguably the most incompetent minister in Wall's cabinet (CBC Saskatchewan).