Goodbye, 2009

2009 had its ups and downs with me. There were some good stuff, lots of bad stuff and lots and lots in the middle.

Happy new year, dear readers.

District X: Episode 0 (a.k.a. District 9)

The movie that came out of nowhere… Produced and sponsored by Peter Jackson. Made for cheap and heavily advertised, it went to make a huge profit. Not bad for a guy whose first movies were short films on Youtube.

 

While I did enjoy the movie, I didn’t understand what all the hype was about. Yes, it does have a story, and is story-driven, AND it’s not Transformers 2… But, the story has more plot holes than actual plot lines. And I didn’t care for the main character, at all.

 

The following review contains SPOILERS. I repeat, SPOILER ALERT. You have been WARNED!

 

The story about a space ship that appeared out of nowhere and stopped over Johannesburg seems very promising. The first few minutes with their documentary-style really attracted my attention. But I guess the movie was like a pretty girl who was pretty until she started speaking.

 

If the movie didn’t try to be big on the story, I wouldn’t have minded, but to try to be story-centric and then deliver a mediocre one is baaaaad in my book. The movie fails to answer a lot of the questions that it asks, giving you the impression that the story is incomplete. The biggest mistake they made was the 20-year time gap between the arrivals of the aliens and the events of the movie. 20 YEARS!!! That’s a lot of time… If the aliens were sick when they arrived and the humans helped them and reallocated them. Did we learn anything about them (except that they love cat food)? Nope. Nothing. Did the movie tell us how come they were prefectly adapted to the Earth’s atmosphere and gravity? Nope. Are we given any explanation on how come humans and aliens are able to understand each other without speaking the same language and without even being able to replicate the same sounds? Nope. I don’t even think that it is humanly possible to replicate these clicks. Do we know anything about their government system, their society, religion(s), anatomy and physiology? Nope. Did anyone try to board the ship and dismantle it, know its energy source, flight logs, operating mode, loaded weapons? Why wasn’t the ship destroyed after the evacuation of the aliens? So many questions.

 

But the most important question that was left unanswered is why they came to earth? Refugees? Then why pack such kick-ass weapons? Which brings me to the point of how come were these weapons brought to earth from the ship if the evacuations were done by humans? And if you had such awesome weapons that can only be used by your kind, why beg for food when you can take it? Why stand so much humiliation for 20 YEARS without doing something about it? Wasn’t any of these aliens interrogated to find their purpose? Why wasn’t the city evacuated for fear of something so massive as the mothership to fall down? And speaking about falling down, why did the little shuttle fall down? And why was it needed for the operation of the ship? And how come no one found it, again for 20 YEARS?!!! Why, why and a million other whys?

 

And here is another why: why do I care? Because the movie could have been GREAT. It could have been a whole new sci-fi universe that could rival Star Wars, Trek and Battlestar Galactica. But no. It was just a wasted opportunity. I don’t care that the movie was made for cheap. Look at The Fountain. It was made for real cheap! And it delivered a great, minimalistic story that respected its budget while answering most of its questions.

 

This brings us to the point of looks. The movie is a looker and I think after watching this movie two persons committed suicide right away: whoever was responsible for the Halo movie in both Microsoft and Universal. A Halo movie with these filming techniques and visuals would have been massive… It could have been the biggest blockbuster for many years, looking at home much the game is popular. The special effects in District 9 are life-like, gritty and believable. Too bad that the story wasn’t given the same attention to details. Great job by the WETA guys. After all, the made Lord of the Rings visuals!

 

For a movie that was shot by a South African and filmed in South Africa, I think the movie is racist! There is not a single good black character, except for Wikus’s assistant who is a total noob! The bad, non-alien guys are black, and they are (surprise, surprise) Nigerian. Nigerian? Why Nigerian? Why not South African? And why not white, or a mixture of both? And it’s really ironic that Wikus can understand the clicks of the aliens, but he can’t understand the Swahili or whatever these Nigerians are speaking… Ironic, isn’t it?

 

So, after everything is said, this is a good movie that could have been great. It was a commercial and critical hit, which means that District 10 is only a matter of time! Which makes District 9 nothing more than a pilot movie, a proof of concept and a test drive to the abilities of Neil Blomkamp… And as Christopher the Prawn told Wikus that he will be back in 3 years, I am waiting for the sequel in 3 years.

 

I didn’t hate the movie, but I was pissed off because I was expecting something great. The hype was incredible and I did put myself in my radio silence mode and avoided any distractions from trailers and reviews. But I wanted more… The Amorphous Snake is disappointed… 3.5/5.

 

P.S. I guess after reading this you must be shaking your head at disbelief and saying, “All this criticism and he gives it 3.5/5”. And my answer is that I could have gladly given it 5/5 if it had filled the clothes it made for itself. It’s a nice first effort, and it has great action and visuals for a $30 million movie, but when you start something, you finish it. Look how Battlestar Galactica’s pilot was. It didn’t fill in all the details about the Cylons, but the movie was about the human survival and the Cylons were a mystery to us and the movie didn’t try to give you conclusions, but asked you to focus your attention elsewhere and allowed you to fill in the gaps with your imagination, but the gaps were small gaps, not lunar craters!

Greatest movies 2000-2009

While I personally believe that the first decade of the 21st century ends in 2010, NOT 2009, people still believe that 2 days from now will be the end of the decade. So, here is a list of the best movies I have seen produced between 2000 till 2009, in no particular order. You may notice that they are ordered alphabetically. This wasn't intended, but there was so many movies, that I had to use my list to remember. My list was listed alphabetically.

Note: If you would like to contribute to this list, be my guest in the comments section, but no bashing of any kind will be permitted.

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Gladiator

Requiem for a Dream

Traffic

Memento

Snatch

The Patriot

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Cast Away

Amores Perros

Training Day

Black Hawk Down

The Man Who Wasn't There

Kingdom of Heaven

21 Grams

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Big Fish

Letters from Iwo Jima

Avatar

Sin City

City of God

Downfall

The Lives of Others

(500) Days of Summer

Kill Bill

The Fountain

The Fall

The Prestige

The Incredibles

Wall-E

Batman Begins

The Dark Knight

Spider-Man 2

X-Men 2

Mulholland Dr.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Children of Men

No Country for Old Men

Oldboy

Infernal Affairs

Pan's Labyrinth

Mystic River

Gran Torino

Hero

Hotel Rwanda

Ocean's Eleven

Battle Royale

King Kong

The Last Samurai

Little Children

Little Miss Sunshine

Million Dollar Baby

Minority Report

The Mist

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War

This list is by no way complete for two reason a) my memory is not perfect and b) there is a lot of critically-acclaimed movies that I have and haven't seen so far.

There are two non-movie entries that I would like to add: Band of Brothers and Battlestar Galactica. They are simply amazing...

Avatar: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy the CGI

Several months ago, I read an interview with James Cameron about this movie. He said that directing such a movie is risky nowadays, because it’s not a franchise. Avatar is a totally new thing, and he didn’t know how the audience would react to it. He also said that he wanted this movie to be the next Matrix. He was right in everything.

Enter the world of Avatar, dear friend and don’t look back, because you won’t want to do so. James Cameron deserves the place he has crafted for himself among moviemakers. I don’t care if he makes a movie every 10 years or every 100, at least it’s better than what some great directors have been doing, like Spielberg whose movies have been going downhill ever since Saving Private Ryan.

Avatar is a revolution in film making. It’s the most visually impressive movie I have ever seen. Period. The CGI (or Computer Generated Images, for the not so tech-savvy readers) used in this movie wasn’t an extra or a gimmick: it’s the whole movie. It became more than just “special effects” and became an item by itself that even rivaled, and dwarfed, the plot. More on that later.

Before watching this movie, I put myself in the radio silence mode… No trailers, no reviews, no previews, no viewer comments, not even an IMDb score, and it worked! Before watching it, all I knew was that the movie was in 3D, looked spectacular, was about a planet called Pandora, and had James Cameron’s name on it. Good enough for me.

This was the first time I have ever seen a movie in 3D. The verdict (about the 3D, not the movie): it was good. I will certainly watch more and more movies in 3D when they become available, but it wasn’t quite what I expected. Also, I got a little headache, but I really can’t blame the 3D effects for that only. It’s the 3D way! I am not used to wearing glasses, and I think that was the reason. I expected a little more depth in the image. But I can’t complain. For the first time in my life, I am finally able to see a clean picture in a cinema, without the usual film artifacts from the film reels.

Pandora is a living and breathing world. Everything is detailed, from the flora to the fauna. And it’s not just the details, it’s the beauty of the details. The beauty of seeing a whole new world that is so different from ours, and knowing that it’s fake but you still believe it’s true because it’s so gorgeous to look at. Cameron forced you, through his CGI magicians, to go into suspension of disbelief mode, see the tale, and like it.

The Na’vi people are the real stars of the show. They are pure and simple, strong and proud, ancient and spiritual, and they were all done in motion-capture technology. Damn, I can’t write two words without mentioning some technical stuff that the movie did… Only 40% of the movie was live action with real actors. The rest was all motion capture and CGI. Which brings us to speak about acting… There isn’t much of it here, and there can’t be. Like I said before, Hollywood blockbusters generally don’t have good acting. They have memorable characters, sure. But not good acting. You simply remember the characters, not the actors who did them, because the characters are over the top, and the actors are just doing their best to fill the shoes of these characters. The Avatar character of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is much more alive, memorable and likeable than Jake Sully the Marine. Sam Worthington is also staring in Clash of the Titans, a remake of a movie that is one of my favourite childhood, and adulthood (Hell, yeah!) movies. I haven’t seen much acting from him, but the success of Avatar will catapult him into the world of stardom, that even made the producers of Titans decide to make the movie in 3D, increase its budget and allowed the director to re-shoot some stuff. Let’s wait and see. It’s coming next year.

Back to the Na’vi… I really liked Neytiri. Her character was so likeable, her role pivotal to the movie. The only problem is that I have seen it all before. Yup, and this is the only black eye in the beautiful face of Avatar: the story have been told before, over and over and over. You can say about Avatar anything of the following, and you won’t be wrong! Avatar: Pocahontas III, Dances with the Na’vis: Avatar, The New World: Avatar, Avatar: Tarzan the Ape Man in Space, and so on. And there is more! After walking out of the cinema, I kept trying to remember a cartoon movie that I have seen before, a lot actually, when I was a child. I didn’t quite remember the name. It was *Something*: The Last Rain Forest. So, when I went back home, I did a search on IMDb. The movie was called FernGully: The Last Rain Forest. Lots of other users saw the resemblance too and there is an active forum post there discussing that. Youtube has a lot of videos about it!   is not just similar to this movie, it’s more or less a shot for shot remake!!! Even the huge bulldozers were in the cartoon. I remember really liking FernGully. But it’s not a reason to hate Avatar. It’s just retelling the tale, in glorious style) to a newer generation.

So, is that all there is about Avatar? Special effects, 3D and a native people. Nope, there is more… There is a (drum roll, please) message behind the movie… Save the environment. Save the planet. Stop wars. RIP to every indigenous culture that was butchered at the hands of colonialism. Not bad for a Hollywood blockbuster.

Jurassic Park was perhaps the biggest movie of my childhood. Alas, I haven’t seen it at the cinema. But still, it held it’s place as one of the most spectacular thing I have seen in my mind. Note: there are other, a lot other, spectacular stuff I have seen, but I am not going to compare Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur or Lord of the Rings to Jurassic Park, it’s unfair. Peter Jackson’s version of King Kong is also in this list. And now, there is Avatar to add. These three movies represent the best of their kind in my eyes. Total immersion in an ancient and lost world. You will notice that I didn’t mention Lord of the Rings, even though it had great visuals too. But like I said, it’s unfair, because even if you remove the visual elements from LOTR, you still have a huge and beautiful story, which is not available in the other three movies. They do have stories, but it’s not the main attraction.

There are two minor things that bothered me in Avatar, and they are related to it’s presentation. The first is some, very minor animation problems. They only happen like in 0.00005% of the whole amazing ride! But they are there. CGI has come a long way, but still the human eye can differentiate between natural and synthetic animation. The other is that most of the creature sounds in the movie were taken straight from Jurassic Park.

James Cameron is a master of film making, he is the one who made Terminator 1 and 2, Aliens, The Abyss and Titanic. While Avatar won’t make as much as money as Titanic (I hope I am wrong), it will make a lot of money. Which brings us to the point of sequels… While I do want to see more of Pandora, I don’t want a cheap sequel. Cameron said that he may work on Battle Angel (his ambitious, manga-based project) or an Avatar sequel. I would like to see the first. Avatar will have a long life and it will not age badly. The attention to detail in the movie will assure years and years of compete supremacy in its category and it will be remembered in the same manner that the original 1933 King Kong or the 1993 Jurassic Park are. And when you consider that Cameron made two among the three best sequels ever! (The Godfather: Part II, Aliens and Terminator 2). I guess he can make a great Avatar sequel…

So, if you want to see something amazing, meet a new civilization, hear a new language, see some cool aircrafts and mechs, ride a pterodactyl-like bird, watch epic battles, see an effective although repeated story, see Ripley, err, I mean Sigourney Weaver, all in 3D… Then what the hell are you waiting for?!!! Go and watch this movie, NOW!

The Amorphous Snake is pleased… 5/5. A masterpiece…


[Edit 1]: I forgot to mention that I am actually glad that something will just make people forget Transformers 2's visuals. With Avatar, there is simply no comparison, at all... This is the Academy Award 2010 winner for Best Visual Effects (among a bucket load of other Academy Awards). A friend of mine sent me a comic about George Lucas commiting suicide after seeing Avatar. Well, I have to say, it's not just Lucas, but almost every director that made or dreamed about making a sci-fi movie. In the case of Michael Bay, director of Transformers 2, he should go to the real Optimus Prime and beg him to step on him and end his and our misery...

Tarantino and his Inglourious Basterds

This is a different movie. Yes, different is the word for it. The movie wasn't quite what I expected. I expected a wild WWII movie, something along the lines of The Dirty Dozen and Kelly's Heroes. But this wasn't the case. I don't know why I got these expectations in my mind, although I avoided watching any trailer for this movie (not just for this movie, but for all movies). Perhaps, it’s stuff that got into my head since Michael Madsen was attached to this movie. He would have made one fantastic Basterd… Even better than Brad Pitt.

The movie is great if you want the short version (great and different). This little review may contain spoilers, or what I consider to be spoilers. My spoiler-alert meter is quite different than most of the people I know.

The good stuff:

It’s a Tarantino movie! So, everything from the cool factor, to the music, acting, length, stylish and memorable conversations that would make you feel that the characters are really alive and you have known them for ages, the selection of actors and their performances. Brad Pitt has been better before, but his role as Aldo the Apache is marvelous, but I don’t think it will win him any awards. He was a little stiff. But Chrisopher Waltz as Colonel Landa was amazing. A great villain was added to my all time favourite villains list! Yes, I do have such a list!

The opening of the movie is something to behold. If you are like me and love great opening scenes, and in particular, if you like westerns, and especially, especially, if you liked Once Upon a Time in the West. This is an opening that would have made Sergio Leone proud! And if you watch Chapter Two, you should start thinking about The Wild Bunch.

The Basterds were cool. The intro scene for Hugo Stiglitz should have been for every member of the Basterds. But it wasn’t. I’ll talk more about that in “the bad stuff” part of the review, below.

The bad stuff:

The ending of the movie is unique, it will be a love it or hate it kind of liking. Tarantino tried to do something that wasn’t done before in WWII movies. But the sudden change from reality to fantasy was abrupt. I wasn’t expecting that ending, at all. Really, it came from nowhere. The gritty tone in the rest of the movie made me think of a different ending.

Now, to make the last paragraph more understandable. All movies are works of fiction, even if they were inspired by true events, which this movie claims to be!!! But ending this movie the way it ended, is like ending Braveheart with a bunch of angry Scots that came to storm the castle to save William Wallace. You get what I mean? Braveheart prepared you that Wallace will be executed. And you accepted and expected it.

I wanted to see more and more of the Basterds and their inglourious conquests! After all, the movie is named after them. But this wasn’t the case. Tarantino gave you a taste of sugar in the first two chapters of the movie and promised you for more, but he didn’t give you sugar, at least not in the promised quantity. This doesn’t mean that the later parts of the movie are bad, but it wasn’t what the beginning of it made me think.

Like I said, all the lengthy conversations in this movie were awesome, but I felt that introducing the British Lt. Archie Hicox was a distraction. But the almost 20 minute basement cellar sequence was great and Archie’s performance as a British officer was stunning and was a tribute to all those classic WWII movies. Tarantino could have skipped him and showed us more about the Basterds adventures among the Nazis. You must have seen the baseball bat in posters of the movie. It was only shown and used once… A big missed opportunity...

Speaking about old movies, I would like to see Nation’s Pride! I hope it gets the same treatment as Machete and be turned into a separate movie that is a parody of all the 1940-1950 WWII movies that were made to boost morale.

A great movie, but Tarantino has done better movies. This is not Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill. But it's NOT Death Proof! But he will get some awards for this movie. After all, you know the saying that says, “If you want to get an Oscar, make a film about the Holocaust.”.

Great movie, but I expected too much of it: 4/5.

[Edit 1]: Added some hyperlinks, a score, the baseball bat and fixed some stuff. I visited Youtube and watched 2 trailers for this movie after I wrote the review. Man, I am glad that I haven't seen them before watching the movie itself.

(500) Days of Summer

I am not going to give you a review. All I am going to say is this: This is among the best movies I have seen in all my life. But... Not everyone can understand its beauty. You will, or you will not.