Am I the only person who didn’t love this movie?<\/p>\n
I’ll admit sci-fi is not my thing.\u00c2\u00a0 But the script will never be nominated for an Academy Award.\u00c2\u00a0 And although the special effects were cool, state of the art, "Up" had better 3-D.<\/p>\n
I don’t go to the movies much.\u00c2\u00a0 Ever since they stopped being an art form and devolved into commercial ventures guaranteed to play worldwide, i.e. dumb enough that even if you don’t know the language you can enjoy it, but can’t movies be about the language, aren’t some of the best just that, as opposed to A+ cinematography and special effects?\u00c2\u00a0 What’s "The Philadelphia Story" without the banter?\u00c2\u00a0 Even Hitchcock movies, genre pieces, had riveting scripts.\u00c2\u00a0 But "Avatar"’s dialogue seems to be written by a middling junior high school student.\u00c2\u00a0 As for the metaphors everyone sees in the flick…it doesn’t require deep insight to see them, rather you’re beaten over the head with the bad guy Americans taking what they think is rightfully theirs.\u00c2\u00a0 I get it.\u00c2\u00a0 Anybody would get it.<\/p>\n
Not that all movies are bad.\u00c2\u00a0 Saturday I saw "The Hurt Locker".\u00c2\u00a0 At the world’s shittiest theatre, the Laemmle in Encino, where the screen is at an angle, the sound system is equivalent to a boom box and if you don’t have a walker, you almost qualify for the children’s rate.<\/p>\n
What a movie!<\/p>\n
I knew I wanted to see it.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what the reviews engendered, a desire.\u00c2\u00a0 I know, I know, no one reads the reviews anymore.\u00c2\u00a0 Except maybe me.\u00c2\u00a0 If everybody says something is great, I’ll go, especially if it’s got a visceral quality, whether human relations or danger, I dig that shit.<\/p>\n
Two-thirds of the way through the movie didn’t know what it wanted to be, when James left the compound, the movie lost a bit of its believability, but before that…\u00c2\u00a0 You sign up for the military, you do the time, it’s your job.\u00c2\u00a0 Deploy long enough in Iraq and you’ll no longer trust anybody, not the Iraqis, not your team member, maybe not even yourself.\u00c2\u00a0 The main goal is to get out.\u00c2\u00a0 Safely.\u00c2\u00a0 But is that even possible?<\/p>\n
To think that men too old to fight sent young soldiers into this morass where victory can probably never be sealed and the fighters may never emerge, and if they do, without their nervous systems intact…\u00c2\u00a0 How about that know-it-all shrink, trying to bond with the Iraqis?<\/p>\n
"The Hurt Locker" is built on tension.\u00c2\u00a0 Based in reality.\u00c2\u00a0 And when you leave the theatre you have a desire to go to the movies each and every day. If only there was a movie worth seeing.<\/p>\n
And I’ve had a vague desire to see "Avatar", to find out what all the hubbub is about.\u00c2\u00a0 And it being a rainy day, I suddenly felt the time was now, and drove down to the Bridge to see it in IMAX 3-D.\u00c2\u00a0 Real IMAX, with the sloped floor and giant screen, where they show the nature documentaries, not phony IMAX, built into a regular theatre.<\/p>\n
I didn’t bother to buy my ticket online.\u00c2\u00a0 At 3 PM I should be able to walk right in and get a decent seat, right?<\/p>\n
No.\u00c2\u00a0 Thank god my buddy couldn’t go.\u00c2\u00a0 I was offered one of two dead center seats, two rows apart, if I’d gone in a pair, I’d have been sitting on the fringe, which ain’t too good at the IMAX.<\/p>\n
But when I ambled to my seat, holding my giant glasses that were akin to the ones Will Ferrell wore on SNL when he played that old guy with white hair, two aged men on either side of my destination gave me the evil eye.\u00c2\u00a0 They’d piled my seat up with jackets.\u00c2\u00a0 It was their safe zone.<\/p>\n
The obese man, to my right, said I was lucky, that that was supposed to be his buddy’s seat, but at the last minute he couldn’t come, so I was able to buy it right before the show.<\/p>\n
The guy on my left had halitosis even worse than the guy on my right, and took off his shoes to relax while he ate his tiny ice cream bites.\u00c2\u00a0 And the two of them were talking like they were old buddies.\u00c2\u00a0 The one on the left telling us that Inglewood should really be four hundred miles south, and that for ten bucks you could buy a topographical map that would give evidence of ice age movements.\u00c2\u00a0 And the guy on the right starts telling how he used to cut trailers, before he retired.\u00c2\u00a0 And I’m singing the Stealers Wheel song, "clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you."<\/p>\n
Now I know why I no longer want to go out.\u00c2\u00a0 The screen might not be quite as big at home, but the viewing experience is light years better.<\/p>\n
And at first the 3-D wasn’t perfectly clear.\u00c2\u00a0 I kept taking the glasses off to see if it was better in 2-D.\u00c2\u00a0 And it was decent without the glasses, but there were double images, so I put them back on and wondered is American really desirous of 3-D in the home?\u00c2\u00a0 Do we really want to sit on the couch wearing these specs?<\/p>\n
And then the movie unfurled.\u00c2\u00a0 In the "important" way.\u00c2\u00a0 Sans credits at the beginning.<\/p>\n
Sigourney Weaver hasn’t had plastic surgery, she looks her age and that’s great, makes her more believable.\u00c2\u00a0 And when they first ventured outside, and Sully encountered the special effect creatures, that was cool.\u00c2\u00a0 But it was downhill from there.<\/p>\n
Where did they get that Marine colonel?\u00c2\u00a0 He reminded me of Sgt. Hulka in "Stripes".\u00c2\u00a0 I wish Bill Murray was in this movie so he could whisper "Do you think this guy’s overdoing it a bit?"<\/p>\n
And it dragged so in the middle.\u00c2\u00a0 It was depressing when you realized this was it, the whole damn movie, until you got to the climactic battle scene, which brought my personal grade up from C territory into the lower B’s.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe if the flick had been ninety minutes instead of three hours, it would have played better.<\/p>\n
I know, I know, it’s the largest grossing flick of all time.<\/p>\n
But I’d rather see "Annie Hall" any day of the week.\u00c2\u00a0 Even "When Harry Met Sally", which is imitation "Annie Hall".\u00c2\u00a0 Special effects?\u00c2\u00a0 How about some reality!<\/p>\n
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Am I the only person who didn’t love this movie? I’ll admit sci-fi is not my thing.\u00c2\u00a0 But the script will never be nominated for an Academy Award.\u00c2\u00a0 And although the special effects were cool, state of the art, "Up" had better 3-D. I don’t go to the movies much.\u00c2\u00a0 Ever since they stopped being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s96vPs-avatar","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2633"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2634,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2633\/revisions\/2634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}