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AVATAR ON DVD

Today is Earth Day, so naturally it was the perfect day to release Avatar on DVD. Wait, what? I'm not sure about the symmetry there, but I'm not really trying to flex my brain muscles on that one tonight.

So I bought Avatar today. Avatar was has a special place in my heart. No, it's not the best story ever. Yes, it was somewhat predictable in spots. Yes, it was visually the best movie I've ever seen. No it wasn't as good in 2-D as it was in 3-D but hey, no shit. Yes I loved it both at the theater and on my couch. It was good to see Jake Sully again. His voice mesmerizes me. The tone of the movie captured my senses like not many films do. It didn't make my cry or even feel like I wanted to cry. But it did make me cheer. It did make me root for the hero and boo at the villain. I really enjoyed all three hours of it. I've seen it four times now. The sights, and the music and the editing of this movie, along with the epic landscapes and incredible effects all combined to make my senses tingle with a feeling of complete satisfaction in a movie-going experience.

I've read many who thought that Avatar was over done, over the top, too many effects, not enough character development, not enough original idea. I have to disagree with all of that. My opinion is that Avatar is very close to movie watching nirvana, a sort of bliss. Why wouldn't we want to see the most incredible thing ever put on celluloid? Why wouldn't I want to watch that? I find it incredible to think that most of what we saw in Avatar doesn't exist in the real world, yet it totally looks like it does. I mean, it's flawless. It's not cartoonish. It's not like seeing a science fiction movie where you can tell where the effects are on the screen. It's not like watching Toy Story. It's an amazing accomplishment in story telling and it's an amazingly interesting movie experience.

My all time favorite movie, ever, is Raising Arizona. That movie is as basic and low-tech as it gets. Funny writing, quirky acting, great characters. Me and a friend I used to work with watched it dozens of times after closing the bar late. I used to have a good solid working number of how many times I'd seen that movie. I think the number was somewhere in the 60's. I lost track over the years how many times I've seen it, but let's say I've seen it 70 times, and that's a real number, not a bullshit number...no exaggeration at all. And now that I own Avatar, I can see watching it dozens of times. Yes, it's twice the length of Raising Arizona and no it won't overtake Raising Arizona as my all time favorite movie. But it will be in my top ten movies of all time. And here's the thing...for me, for my movie taste, there is no question that it's a beautiful, poignant piece, which has transformed movie making forever. This is the picture that has turned the corner of movie making,or perhaps it's turned movie making on it's collective ear. Everyone has opinions about the finished piece of art. Opinions are fair. I like opinions and i believe everyone has their right to their opinions. But what I don't like is when I read that someone is calling Avatar "crap" or something negative. First of all it was one man's dream, his vision to make this movie the way it was made. And the second thing is, to help him make his dream a reality, he enlisted fellow dreamers and fellow artists and fellow technicians to make it happen. And when they figured out they couldn't make something happen on film, they invented a way to do it.   THEY INVENTED IT.  It's a collective dream piece mastered by this industries finest and brightest talents. It was a ten year trek that led them all through dreams and nightmares and visions. I'm sure at times their faith in their work was tested and they questioned themselves many times. But what makes it great is that the hundreds and hundreds of people who gave themselves to the creation of this fine film were rewarded with the biggest box office in history, and with the single most ground breaking (technically speaking here)movies ever. Maybe of all time.

In the end, I want Avatar to get the respect that it deserves. It does deserve that. If you were in an art museum and you saw something you didn't care for, you'd still respect the painter and the style and the effort that was a made.

OPEN WINDOW

What is it that fascinates kids about an open car window? I remember being fascinated by them. Yesterday I watched Sarah (4 yr old) as she waved her hand around outside her window as I drove her to school. I watched her for 3 miles as she just watched her own hand and arm flailing about in the wind. Her head practically laid on her own shoulder while she just watched her arm out there, crooked smile on her face. knucklehead smile. I remember doing it too. Dogs do it, kids do it. It's actually very pleasing if it's not too hot outside and if you're not driving too fast. Once I'm going a certain speed, it's windows-up, I get annoyed. I'm driving with the windows down tomorrow.

VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR? NOPE.

On August first of 1981, I was a ten year old boy about 6 weeks from turning eleven. I have no idea what I was doing on that day but I do know something of significance happened then...MTV was launched at 12:01am and the first video they played was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles. It's a catchy tune and today it's a legendary video because it marked the first video on the music channel.

MTV was huge part of my life as a pre-teen and all the way through high school and for years beyond that. I remember reading that MTV only employed people under the age of 30 because they wanted the channel to remain the voice of the young and didn't want it represented by "older" people. When I read that, i was younger than 30. I thought that was a very cool idea. But an interesting thing happened over the years. MTV became a mockery of it's once "all music all the time" theory.

You, dear reader, maybe still watch MTV. I don't. In fact, I don't even know what channel it is on Direct TV, and with like a thousand channels, I don't have the time or the inclination to find it. It's not a very interesting channel anyway, they lost touch with their own musical efforts years ago. They became a reality TV show network. I loved The Real World, especially the first year in New York, and I enjoyed many of the subsequent years in New Orleans and San Francisco. But mostly, the music channel of my youth ceased to be a music channel. I guess it's sad, but maybe not so sad. I kind of wish that MTV wouldv'e aged with me. Instead they decided to pander to the reality show (even though reality had very little to do with most of their shows).

MTV lost it's way. It'll never be the same. I know that they play blocks of music here and there, but it's not the same. Music is the minority on MTV now. MTV was on the verge of taking over the music world with some cool programming like the game show REMOTE CONTROL and the aforementioned REAL WORLD as well as shows like Headbanger's Ball and THE WEEK IN ROCK and YO MTV RAPS and the countdown shows. They had lot's of cool "rockumentary's" and had some great awards shows. But now, it's really an irrelevant channel.

In their song "Video Killed the Radio Star" the Buggles said this, "Video killed the radio star, pictures came and broke your heart". These words were true for a time, but maybe they just seemed true. What actually happened is video changed the radio star. Form over substance became big with such bands as Creed and others. And in the end, the video star killed MTV. The irony is that the very medium by which MTV defined itself was the very thing that devoured and cannibalized it's own existence. So video hurt the radio star, but the radio star survived and moved on to places like I-tunes and Amazon. So in the end, it was the music that prevailed, the true art that was the basis for the channel won out. The music found a way to live. And live it does.

They used to have that slogan "I WANT MY MTV"...well I still want my MTV. I just don't want this MTV. I want what MTV was supposed to be and what it was for two decades...music videos and music news. I want to rush home from school again to see the Michael Jackson Thriller world premier. I want to see Kurt Loder read the music news to me on the tens and fourty-fives. I miss Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain. Mostly, I just miss my MTV.

IT'S CALLED COMMITING TO THE SCENE, ASSHOLE

A few weeks ago, I was flipping through the channels and somewhere on HBO or Showtime, I found the movie Swordfish starring John Travolta and Halle Berry. The movie had already started but i tuned in anyway. Not because it's a good movie, because it's really not a very good movie, but because i knew that the scene where Halle Berry displays her nakedness for the world to see was coming up soon. Hey, sue me, I'm a boy...boys like boobs, and Halle Berry is one of the prettiest, sexiest women in the world, with nice boobs (they were naked). So, I enjoyed the boobs scene and watched the rest of the movie. When I was done thinking about Halle Berry and her "friends" I started thinking about John Travolta's career. What a bad streak of movies he's been in for a long time. And it's not the movies themselves, it's what his presence in them does to them. He makes movies worse. That's right. He's become a bad actor, making bad choices. He gets paid ridiculous amounts of money to be in movies that most actors would pass on. He has lost it. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I was going to say that he's done 2 good movies since Pulp Fiction: Get Shorty and Broken Arrow. But, I can't really stick to that, because while Broken Arrow was sort of entertaining at times, it was in no means a good movie. So, since Pulp Fiction, he's been in one good movie...Get Shorty. That makes Get Shorty the exception that proves the rule. He gave a good performance in that movie, as did all the other actors on that flick. I really like that movie. But Pulp Fiction came out in 1994. That was 16 years ago. Yes, some of his movies were hits and some weren't. And yes, I feel horrible that he lost his son last year, that's a horrible tragedy and my heart goes out to him. And I'm not mad at him, I just think he's lost his way. And there's not much chance of me plunking down any of my money at a movie theater to see any of his crappy movies. Again though, I'm getting ahead of myself.

If you go back further than Pulp Fiction in 1994, and look at ALL of his movies, you start to realize that John Travolta has made mostly all bad movies. And guess what? He made them all worse. And more over, we realize that John Travolta isn't much of an actor. In fact, I'll contend that he's been good or decent in about 4 movies and hes' been in around 60 of them. Here's his IMDB page, scroll down and look through the list. I'm right aren't I?

Travolta was good in Grease, that was a good movie. And he was good in Welcome Back Kotter, playing the quintessential doofus good looking idiot we know as Vinny Barbarino. He was good in the TV movie Boy in a Plastic Bubble. He was good in Pulp Fiction. But the funny thing is that even in Pulp Fiction he wasn't really that good. He was kind of playing himself...a guy who's looks had passed him by, who's career was on the back nine, who was almost out of luck. The role was written for him by Quentin Tarrantino and it would've been a very bad choice for almost any other actor to play Mr. Vincent Vega. But almost every role he's had since has been pretty bad. Yes, he had those talking baby movies, and yes, he was in Saturday Night Fever, but he was also the sequel Staying Alive which sucked ass. But here's the most important thing about his career, and you really have to pay attention to this...he's made a kajillion dollars playing some sort of riff of himself, and that's been bad. He's had a short or long dance in almost every movie, which is weird. He's had bad hair in almost all of his movies, which is odd. He's smoked in many movies and he's not a smoker. And this goes to the acting part of acting, even if you don't smoke in real life, you have to inhale onscreen. If you're playing a smoker and you don't inhale, you look like a puppet with a cigarette dangling out of your little wooden hand. It's called COMMITTING TO A SCENE. Travolta can't commit to a scene. He uses bad voices, bad hair, bad cadence and cliched movements to make it seem as if he's acting. He's terrible. Most of all of his movies, I can't concentrate on them because I'm always thinking "gee, that Travolta got paid $20 million to do this?" It's always Travolta, not the character. Grease was good. Pulp fiction was "ok" but what else? And don't tell me Urban Cowboy, I thought his accent was terrible and never got over the fact that it was Travolta dressed up as a cowboy. Why? Who likes that movie?

In the end, Travolta's the winner here. He's made a king's ransom to go through the motions as a movie star. But being an actor for him, has never really seemed to be that important to him. He missed his calling as a singer, because he really can sing. But as an actor? I ain't buying it. If you're a smoker, you inhale. It's called committing to the scene, asshole.