Blue People Are Cool...
I had seen the previews and read the comments on the web regarding "Dances With Smurfs". After talking to a few people who saw the movie and were generally pleased, I decided that I would not wait until the DVD came out to see Avatar. On New Year's Day, Mom and I thought it would be a good idea to head over to our favorite local movie theater in South Philly to see the movie.
With the house being full of people, catching one of the early shows was out of the question. So, we settled on the 8:00pm showing. This is the first time I'd ever gone to see a movie on New Year's Day, so we were expecting the theater to be crowded. And, as we approached, all of the parking lots surrounding the theater were completely full -- there were even cars on the sidewalks and even though the strip malls in the area were closed, all of the parking lots were filled to capacity. As we drove past the theater, we could see that the line wasn't very long, but, without parking we weren't going anywhere.
Feeling sad and dejected, we decided the drown our sorrows at Pat's Steaks. Well, wouldn't you know, all of the side streets were closed-- South Philly was completely inaccessible. In our haste to get out to see the movie, Mom and I forgot about a local tradition where people dress up in costumes and march through the city -- the Mummers Parade. Apparently this is a really big event and it seems that everyone descends on the city on New Year's Day to see the parade. Since Mom and I never bothered to do anything on New Year's Day before, we never realized how the Mummers Parade could interfere with our plans. Having been defeated twice, we decided to have a bite at Appleby's.
The next day we decided to try again. This time we would try for the 4:10pm showing. We arrived a half hour early and got our munchies and picked out our favorite seats -- the few isolated seats near the spaces reserved for wheelchairs. With our bottoms firmly planted and with munchies in hand, we settled in for the show.
With the house being full of people, catching one of the early shows was out of the question. So, we settled on the 8:00pm showing. This is the first time I'd ever gone to see a movie on New Year's Day, so we were expecting the theater to be crowded. And, as we approached, all of the parking lots surrounding the theater were completely full -- there were even cars on the sidewalks and even though the strip malls in the area were closed, all of the parking lots were filled to capacity. As we drove past the theater, we could see that the line wasn't very long, but, without parking we weren't going anywhere.
Feeling sad and dejected, we decided the drown our sorrows at Pat's Steaks. Well, wouldn't you know, all of the side streets were closed-- South Philly was completely inaccessible. In our haste to get out to see the movie, Mom and I forgot about a local tradition where people dress up in costumes and march through the city -- the Mummers Parade. Apparently this is a really big event and it seems that everyone descends on the city on New Year's Day to see the parade. Since Mom and I never bothered to do anything on New Year's Day before, we never realized how the Mummers Parade could interfere with our plans. Having been defeated twice, we decided to have a bite at Appleby's.
The next day we decided to try again. This time we would try for the 4:10pm showing. We arrived a half hour early and got our munchies and picked out our favorite seats -- the few isolated seats near the spaces reserved for wheelchairs. With our bottoms firmly planted and with munchies in hand, we settled in for the show.
First, the visuals are quite stunning. I didn't see the movie in 3-D -- it doesn't usually work for me. Nonetheless, I was very impressed. Unlike a lot of CG-rich movies that I've seen in the past, Avatar doesn't feel as artificial. The story is very reminiscent of "Dances With Wolves", where a soldier heads out to the frontier and meets the natives -- hence the term "Dances With Smurfs". But, Mom and I came to be entertained and James Cameron's Avatar didn't disappoint. There's a lot of action -- a bit too much for the youngest viewers -- and at two and a half hours, its a bit long, but, Mom and I were very pleased with the movie and would likely see it again.A paraplegic ex-marine finds a new life on the distant planet of Pandora, only to find himself battling humankind alongside the planet's indigenous Na'vi race in this ambitious digital 3D sci-fi epic from Academy Award-winning Titanic director James Cameron. The film, which marks Cameron's first dramatic feature since 1997's Titanic, follows Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a war veteran who gets called to the depths of space to pick up the job of his slain twin brother for the scientific arm of a megacorporation looking to mine the planet of Pandora for a valued ore. Unfortunately the biggest deposit of the prized substance lies underneath the home of the Na'vi, a ten-foot-tall, blue-skinned native tribe who have been at war with the security arm of the company, lead by Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang). Because of the planet's hostile atmosphere, humans have genetically grown half-alien/half-human bodies which they can jack their consciousnesses into and explore the world in. Since Jake's brother already had an incredibly expensive Avatar grown for him, he's able to connect with it using the same DNA code and experience first-hand the joys of Pandora while giving the scientific team, led by Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and Norm Spellman (Joel David Moore), some well-needed protection against the planet's more hostile forces
On a chance meeting after getting separated from his team, Jake's Avatar is rescued by Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), a Na'vi princess, who brings him into her tribe in order to give the humans a second chance at relating to this new environment. When word gets out of his increasing time with the alien species, Quaritch enlists Jake to do some reconnaissance for the company, as they'd like to persuade the tribe to move their home before taking more drastic measures to harness the treasure hidden below. Yet as Jake becomes one with the tribe and begins to understand the secrets of Pandora, his conscience is torn between his new adopted world and the wheelchair-bound one awaiting him when the psychic connection to his Avatar is broken. Soon battle lines are drawn and Jake needs to decide which side he will fight on when the time comes. The film was shot on the proprietary FUSION digital 3D cameras developed by Cameron in collaboration with Vince Pace, and offers a groundbreaking mix of live-action dramatic performances and computer-generated effects. The revolutionary motion-capture system created for the film allows the facial expressions of actors to be captured as a virtual camera system enables them to see what their computer-generated counterparts will be seeing in the film, and Peter Jackson's Oscar-winning Weta Digital visual-effects house supervises Avatar's complex special effects.
