In a rare misstep Gary Larson once published a cartoon showing an empty hall with a couple of sad-sacks standing in it and a caption underneath that read: "Didn't Like Dances With Wolves Society". Only a fool, Larson seemed to suggest, could not have fallen for the splendour of Kevin Costner's masterpiece of the American West. I guess I was one of those fools. I thought the film was ridiculous: hokey, clunky, silly, emotionally retarded, obvious, dull-witted, predictable. I saw it in the old ABC cinema Belfast just before the IRA blew it up (not moments before) and I have to say that getting near the end I was praying for one of those bomb scares that would have allowed me to evacuate the movie theatre and get my money back....
On Friday I had a wee bit of a similar experience. I was one of the fortunate few who got to see an extended preview of James Cameron's Avatar, a film ten years in the making, the most expensive film of all time (Cameron's previous film Titanic used to hold that record) a movie which Fox claimed at Comi-Con would "revolutionise cinema going". Maybe it will, I don't know; visually it's a striking film and the 3D effects are absolutely spectacular, but oh man that story: an Earthling soldier undergoes a body transplant to infiltrate an alien arboreal society (with whom humanity is at war) and of course falls for one of the elfin alien girls and goes native: Dances With Wolves in space.
...
Don't include me in the James Cameron haters club. I liked T2 and T1 and I loved Aliens. Titanic made me long for the cold embrace of a watery death, but on the whole I think Cameron is a pretty good director. I hope I'm wrong about Avatar and of course it's completely unfair to judge a film just from a trailer. And anyway it doesn't matter what I or anyone else says. AICN has been hyping it for months and the fanboy audience is a lock. (That, er, includes me). The film is utterly critic proof, but if you're expecting originality in story telling to go along with originality in cinematography I have a feeling you are going to be disappointed.
...
You can see the two minute teaser trailer on Apple here. Oh and BTW if Gary Larson reads this somehow...listen mate, I'll take it all back, declare DWW the greatest film of all time and buy the DVD if only you'll start cartooning again.
67 comments:
You raise a good point. Cameron's storylines have never been his strong suit. T2, as awesome as it is, is basically an amped-up rehash of the first film. Titanic, while technically a very impressive film, had a plot we'd all seen a million times before.
Somehow, though, he manages to make stories with decent or just so-so plots into great movies.
BTW - I avoided seeing the trailer. Want to go in cold to this one.
Brian
In that case I wont say anything more about the story.
The visuals are probably worth the price of admission. There's a flight scene which is stunning and although the aliens look a bit Jim Hensonish (despite it being CGI) I still was able to buy into it.
Will I be going to see it? Probably yes. This is not a film to watch on DVD.
I liked the plot of Titanic. Big unsinkable ship hits iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic and the iceberg sinks the ship? Who could think of such stuff?
I wanted more of the iceberg's POV though. What did it feel about everything? Regret? Sadness? Or is the mindset of glacial sea ice just too strange for us to understand?
My take on that cartoon, though, is that Larson was a DWW hater too. I'm sure he was in all the uncool clubs growing up.
What's with this last generation of cartoonists, anyway? Cartoon enough to sell merchandise forever and then just pack it all in? Watterson is another. You wonder what they do with their time. I guess they don't make them like Charles Schultz anymore--the draw until you drop kind.
If Arthur C. Clarke had written the screenplay for Titanic, the iceberg would have been completely indifferent to the ship, as it no doubt would have been there to serve some other purpose entirely unrelated to man.
Sorry, I've been reading a lot of sci-fi recently.
Avatar has a solid cast too. Worthington was great in T4, and Stephen Lang practically stole Public Enemies from Depp and Bale even though he only had fifteen minutes screen time tops.
Seana
No I think he liked DWW. Maybe not so much now. Or maybe he does.
I totally agree you've got to admire Schulz: a bleak, unrelenting dark worldview right to the bitter end of the strip and then a week or two after the last one appears, he dies. Thats the spirit.
I have no idea what Larson or the Calvin and Hobbes guy do with their time. It was like Johnnie Carson after he retired. He ate out a lot, played poker, watched TV. Sounds ghastly.
Brian
Still havent seen T4 but I will. Yeah the main kid was pretty good in the preview. There's this smile thing he does which is in the Apple preview too - its very affecting. I thought the long blue alien chick with the pointy ears was kinda hot too but maybe that's just me.
Cinema is a visual medium but an original story once in a while might be nice too.
Did I ever tell you about the Arthur C Clarke bit I read in Theroux's latest train book? Theroux visits ACC who's rambling a bit and very tired and suddenly he looks over at Theroux and starts telling him about some boy he knew in the War who was killed and then he says to Theroux "he was the only one I ever loved." It was a nice little scene, I hope Theroux didnt make it up.
You were really in a cinema when they blew it up? Its like Inglorious Basterds only real.
Ian
No I wasnt in the cinema when they blew it up. They blew it up about three weeks later when I was nowhere near it.
I was in a different cinema in Belfast once when a major riot broke outside. I was my wife and little brother and we were leaving Mission Impossible (2 I think) and the whole city was on fire and covered with paramilitary roadblocks (guys in ski masks with guns and baseball hats). We had quare old time of it driving home that night.
Bomb scares and cinemas. God, I'd forgotten about that -- how it used to be a genuine fear that you'd miss the end of Mrs Doubtfire or something.
gb
Adrian,
I don't remember reading that. Very interesting. There were some wild rumors about ACC liking the little boys too, right? I don't know much about the guy but what I do know is intriguing.
There's a good, hour-and-a-half Western in DANCES WITH WOLVES, but it's not contiguous within the existing movie. Maybe somoene could make an anti-director's cut some day. That might be worth watching.
One of my favorite Far Side's shows an alligator in a court wutness box, saying, "Of course I did it in cold blood. I'm a reptile."
That's the iceberg's perspective in TITANIC. Watches the ship go down with great loss of life and never flinches. He's cold, man.
Speaking of arboreal societies, I had the tree in front of my house trimmed yesterday. Have I commited an act of war?
I thought the film was ridiculous: hokey, clunky, silly, emotionally retarded, obvious, dull-witted, predictable.
I have often made just that observation on any number of subjects.
=================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
War is hell:
"God, I'd forgotten about that -- how it used to be a genuine fear that you'd miss the end of Mrs Doubtfire or something.
gb"
=================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Brian
I actually know a little bit more about this story than I'm letting on. I have a friend of a friend who grew up in Columbo and used to play snooker with ACC. However its not cool to say things bad things about the recently decesaed and bascially ACC was a good guy.
Dana
I think I would have liked DWW better if they'd stayed with the Civil War. I dont think I've ever seen a good CW movie.
My favourite Larson has to be the woman wheeling the Hoover through the forest and the caption is something like "Marjorie was afraid because she knew that nature abhored a vacuum."
Peter
On someone's blog, possibly Seana's, I was talking about Thomas Hardy and the terrible consequences of fate. There's a bit in the Woodlanders where a neighbour has a rotted tree trimmed for an old man so it doesnt fall on his house and the shock of the naked branches gives the old man a heart attack and he dies.
Ger
Yeah I remember once at Christmas queueing up to see Santa and just when we got close to him there was a bomb scare. Santa ran out of there like he was Usain Bolt. I was not impressed.
Not the kind of film I'd want to see in a cinema, but the visuals are great.
The plot isn't good, but it can become a widely successful film, since the plot isn't always the most important aspect when it comes to buying a ticket for a film. I liked DWW. Not one of my favourites, but still I liked it.
Adrian,
Yeah, I didn't mean anything by the comment, just that I'd heard rumors. Don't know one way or the other if they were true. From what little I do know of ACC, he seemed like a cool guy. Rendezvous with Rama is still the best sci-fi I've ever read.
I found it interesting when I read somewhere that he was initially not happy with the film version of 2001, and later grew to like it.
Liliana
Glad to hear it. I value all opinions here.
I'll tell you one thing about DWW that makes it transcend its artistic qualities was its impact on the Lakota who apparently adopted Costner as an honorary Sioux.
Did you know that Clint Eastwood never shot an Indian in any of his westerns? Apparently he made that a deliberate policy. Interesting guy that Eastwood.
Brian
Yeah lets just leave it there. I'll tell you what I was told when we meet in person.
I love the fact that Clarke who met everyone says that Stanley Kubrick was the smartest person he ever met. I read somewhere that Kubrick used to play chess on set often playing without a queen or a a bishop to give his opponents a chance.
Eastwood is one of the most interesting guys, both as actor and as director. Untouchable.
Dances With Wolves could not have sucked harder if it tried. Dances With Wolves in Space does not sound any better. Since I wasted my time I'll forewarn you to not waste yours with T4, unless you really liked T3.
I, by no means, meant that to sound so negative. I guess I'm just not much on science fiction or Kevin Costner or other things that suck.
Russell Means (Chingachgook from LOTM) had some very unkind words for Dances with Wolves in his autobiography.
I'll watch Avatar, of course, but mostly for Stephen Lang. Love that guy. I remember a few years back Cameron did a foreword for his main FX guy, who had written a book called 'Worlds: A Voyage of Discovery', a 'photojournal' of an astronaut's exploration of different worlds. Beautiful book - the Avatar trailer reminded me of it quite a bit.
Good civil war movie? Ride With The Devil has grown on me over the years, but isn't Josey Wales a civil war film? If it qualifies, definitely that. Also fond of The Beguiled, directed by Don Siegel, where Eastwood plays against type. God knows I'd rather take a cannonball in the kisser than watch Glory again.
Carson also sent jokes to Letterman right up to the last year of his life, apparently.
First Adrian, I agree with everything you just wrote (with one caveat below), and the first thing I thought when viewing the Avatar trailer tonight for the first time was exactly the title of your blog.
Even though Greg and I currently have a Netflix compatibility rating of 82%, I'll have to disagree with both him and Adrian and agree with Liliana. I like DWW. Can anyone point out some other Hollywood films that have given us much more humanizing and accurate views of Native Americans in Civil War times? Yeah so it's sentimental and most of the whites are caricatures and Costner is over the top with his suicide ride at the beginning and his transformation. I still thought it was a moving film. There. Said it.
OK Greg T4 was better than T3, but that isn't saying much, is it.
I loved T & T2 and Aliens AND The Abyss. Titanic looked kind of cool on the way down.
I think Gary Larson plays jazz guitar in his unlimited free time. Heard it on NPR a while back. I too wish he'd return.
Well, I don't know if Eastwood is so untouchable if we're going to talk about rumors. But as I've said somewhere before, he became mayor of Carmel not long after my mom moved down there, and as she was involved in local politics at the time, she saw him in a non celeb kind of situation a few times, and thought him very admirable.
I dunno. Not my type.
I never saw Dances with Wolves, so I really have no business being involved with this discussion. Nor did I see Little Big Man, but I did read the book when I was quite young, and was quite taken with it. So, quite unfairly, I am going to vote for it being the better movie.
However its not cool to say things bad things about the recently decesaed
unless they are Michael Jackson?
Liliana,
He's certainly had one of the most impressive final acts of any actor or director in Hollywood.
Greg
I wasnt impressed with T3. In fact I choose to believe that it doesnt exist like Alien 3 and 4.
I am a little intrigued by the prospect of the Alien prequel to be directly by Ridley Scott, An old pal of mine Brian Evenson, wrote a prequel called Aliens No Exit that I liked and although the movie is coming from another source I think there's a lot of potential out there.
Matt
What was Russell's problem? Was it the scenario or was it Costner or was it both?
Thats the thing about Avatar, we're all going to see it. I just hope Harry Knowles etc. dont tell us its genius when it isnt. Though it might be.
matt
oh yeah I remember that. every time Letterman would do one of Carson's jokes he would make a little golf swing...
HB
I forgot about the Abyss. Speaking of Costner, what's her name with the curly hair was hot in that. (the Abyss I mean).
I think my main problem with DWW was tedium. And maybe the evil Indians who wore black feathers in their hair.
Larson plays Jazz eh? I'm surprised but not shocked. I wonder if he ever doodles at all or has just jacked that whole thing in completely. I know that after Rimbaud gave up poetry he spent the next ten years deliberately not writing.
Seana
Little Big Man is a good film. Hoffman's good and the whole Battle of the Little Big Horn scene is fantastic. And the ending is perfect.
I also liked Faye Dunnaway's cameo. I think you'd like it.
Eastwood seems more of a Libertarian than someone who would feel comfortable with the current GOP.
Marco
Well if its funny anything goes. I just cant think of anything funny about ACC and his, er, activities around the snooker table.
Did you ever read Childhood's End? He wrote it, if I recall correctly on the ship from London to Columbo, which is why we should all travel by ships and planes not trains and be drunk like Nick and Nora.
Adrian,
I just finished Childhood's End last week and enjoyed it. Good book.
Eastwood is the man. I got a kick out of the way he responded to Spike Lee's idiotic comments about Flags of Our Fathers.
Marco
No I meant that we should travel by ships and trains, not bloody planes. I still love train travel to this day, especially sleepers.
Brian
It was good wasn't it? I liked the strangeness of it.
I'll be honest I didnt follow that whole Spike Lee - Eastwood contrafab, but I do think its interesting that more US soldiers and marines died on that one tiny little island (Iwo Jima) than Gulf War 1, The Iraq War and Afghanistan combined. It just must have been utter hell.
Carson writing jokes for Letterman sounds like a good way to go out. And Larson playing jazz guitar, well, there's nothing wrong with that. It's funny that it's easier for me to understand why writers stop writing than why cartoonists stop cartooning.
I love trains. Even taking the commuter train from San Jose to San Francisco is a pleasure. Amtrak could be so much better than it is, servicewise. But that ride going east over first the Sierras and then the Rockies is just fantastic.
I would cheerfully take the train rather than the plane to Europe if I could. Flying is like going to the dentist, though the dentist will usually get you in and out of the chair reasonably close to on time.
There is so much to do and see on planes. You can squirm past your seatmates' knees. You can contemplate the condensation between the windows. You can choose from a wide range of entertainment options. You can enjoy the easy-going conversational genuineness of the crew. You can relax in spacious lounges while you wait to use the commodious lavatories.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
I am suspicious of these blue Jar Jar Binks-looking characters, however attractive they may seem.
Peter
I'm pretty much of the school of thought that the worst train journey is still better than the equivalent flight. I once took the Amtrak from Chicago to New Orleans, it was 22 hours, there was no sleeper, but I'd do it again especially if I had to fly out of Midway.
Seana
Yes I took that train once. OK it starts in Oakland which isnt so wonderful, but the journey to Denver is very pleasant indeed.
Did you ever have Amtrak's French Toast? They do very good French toast.
HB
Me also worry, me thinky mistakey have all CGI cast, me thinky it seem good idea in 1999 but maybe not nowee. We see.
I'm pretty much of the school of thought that the worst train journey is still better than the equivalent flight. I once took the Amtrak from Chicago to New Orleans, it was 22 hours, there was no sleeper, but I'd do it again especially if I had to fly out of Midway.
We are graduates of the same school. A train journey begins with a thrilling lurch into motion. A plane journey begins with the slightly nauseating whiff of filtered, pressurized air.
==============
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Plane travel is also much more dislocating.
I never had Amtrak French toast, which is a shame. In fact, once when I was coming cross country back from the East coast, the morning began with a conductor coming through and asking. "Is there a doctor on the train?" Apparently there had been a kitchen fire overnight and someone had suffered minor burns. No breakfast that day, needless to say.
Adrian, you might just want to contact George Lucas and offer your services as a dialogue consultant. I have a feeling he would think you had a gift for it...
Peter
And you can walk the whole length of a train and get a good walk. You cant do that on a plane. On the Denver to Oakland train they also have an observation car with windows all around that you can open which is worth it going through the Rockies.
Seana
I suppose if you're a doctor you can never really take a vacation, unless you're prepared to lie.
I've never studied medicine but I've seen so many babies delivered on TV and two in real life I think I could assist with that.
When I was in high school, I got certified as a senior lifesaver for some reason that I do not totally understand now. Not long after, I was hanging out with my friends at a nearby lake and saw a couple of kids having trouble just a few yards out. There was no official lifeguard around so I realized that somehow this was now all on me. All I actually had to do was walk out to where they were and ask, "Do you need help?" and have them say yes and pull one of them back in, but it made me realize that relaxing by the pool was never going to be the same again.
Those observation cars are cool. But even going across the Great Plains in one of those regular cars is pretty thrilling. It's been a long time since I took that trip, but at least as I remember it, there were long stretches that were completely uninhabited and really put you in touch with the timeless aspect of the place.
An old pal of mine Brian Evenson, wrote a prequel called Aliens No Exit
I've heard nothing but good about him - expecially Last Days and The Wavering Knife. He's on my "to watch out for" list. Btw, have you read Inherent Vice yet?
Did you ever read Childhood's End?
Yes. But to tell you the truth, I think it's far from the best novel in the "human uplift" genre.
Thats the thing about Avatar, we're all going to see it.
I won't.
I also generally prefer trains , but I've made some long trips in sweltering heat and packed as a sardine which were a close approximation of hell.
In other news, some guy in a village 15 km from my own has just won the biggest jackpot in European History .
Marco's note is a refreshing antidote to sentimentality about trains. I once was stranded in Chicago by a snowstorm. Amtrak paid to put me up in a hotel room. That was fun. The next day's delayed departure, with two nights' worth of ticketholders on one train (and, as a result, no sleeper berth for me) was not.
And the train trip I wrote about here was no picnic either, though a good deal shorter.
=================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Seana
Yeah, exactly the stress who needs it. Although it would be cool to be a surgeon, if ER is to be believed.
Marco
Yeah Brian's a good guy and a talented guy. Anyone who was excommunicated by the Mormons is bound to have interesting things to say.
He was telling me last week that next year he'll be teaching Hermione from the Harry Potter films which might make at least a short story or two.
Peter
I dont know, I've had some bad train journeys too - I was once on a train abandoned by the crew between Greece and Turkey for 30 hours - but at least they dont make you stay seabelted in and at least there's not the fear of death.
I suppose I would have saved that little kid anyway. But I wouldn't have spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about how I was now obligated to save everyone else who had wandered out beyond their skill level.
If you ever feel called upon to save anyone from drowning, by the way, don't just go out and grab them, because in their panic they will end up drowning you with them. When you are about six or eight feet away, dive under the surface and sneak up on them from underneath, grab their legs and crawl up their body, putting your arms around them so that their arms are pinioned to their body. Then you can do a kind of one handed sidestroke to pull them into shore.
Even when it's fake, it's kind of scary. And actually I had to practice on someone who didn't know the safe code, so as a result, she almost drowned me. Okay, probably she would have given up on trying to drown me before it actually happened, but I did get some slight sense of what it would be like if you screwed up.
I like his work ...... for example in titanic... awesome..
I detested "Dances with Kevin" only slightly less than "Kevin's World" (Water World).
And considering all the intriguing real-life Titanic stories that Cameron could have drawn from, I’ll never, EVER understand why he used a made-up, sophomoric, and farfetched romance as the central theme of the movie. The only thing that nauseated me more was Cameron’s acceptance speech at the Oscars, where he asked for a moment of silence for the people on the Titanic who died almost a hundred years ago (a far better tribute would have been a story-line that wasn’t contrived and lame).
Seana
I think I could save a kid, but I agree I think a grown up might drown me. I suppose I'd feel obligated to attempt it though anyway.
Hampshire
Thats whats great about the world, everyone has a different opinion.
Holden
Did you ever see A Night To Remember?
I really enjoyed that film when it used to be on the BBC during the 1970's. And I think it was largely a true depiction of the actual events surrounding the Titanic's demise.
One thing that annoyed me about JC's version was the bit where Thomas Andrews speaks to Kate Winslet in a Dublin accent - the guy was born and bred in Belfast, why oh why would he be talking with a Dublin (actually more of a generic Hollywood Irish) accent?
"A Night to Remember" is way more to my liking.
I didn't pick up on the made-up Irish accent but I got annoyed when Leonardo DiCaprio shows Kate Winslett how to "hawk a loogey." Granted, I wasn't around in 1912, but I don't believe "loogey-hawking" was part of the English lexicon during that era.
I doubt very much whether he would have thought to show her how to hawk a loogie either, enchanting though she must have found it.
But wasn't the whole point of the movie just to show off their painstaking re-creation of the ship? That's the only reason any guy I ever knew allowed himself to be drawn to it.
I actually wrote 'drowned' to it first, which is kind of funny, in a tragicomic sort of way...
Seana -- Definitely the best part of the movie is the re-creation of the ship and the video of the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean. I just wish the human story had been created with as much care.
Joan Rivers said that if Kate Winslett weighed just 5 pounds lighter, Leonardo DiCaprio would still be with us today…
That Joan. I have to say, though, that the whole women and children first thing has never made a whole lot of sense to me. Children, yes, but even Noah had that directive about the male and the female of each kind getting on the ark. It only makes sense. Of course, it would be hard to sort all this stuff out as the ship was sinking. You wouldn't want to try to reach a consensus, for example.
I learned an interesting thing about an old theater teacher of mine tonight. She had come to discuss Shakespeare Santa Cruz at our weekly discussion group and one of the members, a man in his eighties, told me that when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit here in 1989, he happened to be attending a class of hers. He said that she looked at the glass windows shaking and told the class to go out to the picnic tables, where she immediately started up the class again. Having been in that earthquake, I found this quite impressive, as apparently the earth of our charming pastoral campus was rolling like the sea. When I asked her about this, she said that she noticed some of the students, who had never been in an earthquake before, were ashen-faced, so she thought it might be best to just continue the class a bit, till they, and the earth, calmed down. She then said, I was in London during the Blitz, and there were dogfights over my head. I must say, earthquakes don't impress me.
I take her point, but having been downtown during it where buildings fell down, and people died, etc., I have to admit to being just a little bit impressed.
Holden
I found A Night To Remember A Lot More believable, but come on, Kate Winslet's pretty hot.
Did you see Beautiful Creatures?
Seana
See comment on next post...
I also agree you can't judge a film by the trailer. Belfast Cinema.
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