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James Cameron Is Back?

I want to get this excited, I really do:

I don’t care how he votes. I don’t care if he’s frenched Hugo Chavez in the warm glow of a burning American flag. Cameron is the most innovative exciting and original filmmaker we have now and his return to the business of making films is wonderful news. If some other hacks had half Cameron’s talent I’d give them a wider berth. See, it’s just a bad mix to be a hack and hate America. One or the other I can maybe live with. But both? No.

...but James Cameron is so uneven for me. Maybe it's the way he let his ego take over after Titanic's Oscar sweep. Or maybe because where lots of people condemn Steven Spielberg for creating the "curse" of the summer blockbuster (think Jaws, 1975), I blame Cameron for creating the true curse of the horrifically out of control Hollywood film budget.

Titanic was and probably remains the most expensive film ever made. (Yes, yes, I know that Cleopatra ranks right up there, but I don't have my inflation adjustment calculator with me at the moment.) What happned in the case of Titanic, though, was that by some miracle it achieved a profit. By common formula it had to gross something like $750 million at the box office just to break even, and its box office gross went into the billions. Thus all those studios began greenlighting films with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And not too many of those get to be made, even as they absorb all of the money available for film projects.

It's wrong to blame Cameron, I know, but it still irks me. He got the bad guys right in True Lies, and wasn't ashamed of it. Even though I think it's a flop, The Abyss is a glorious failure. And I was happy he wanted nothing to do with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines because he shouldn't have made Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The Terminator is simply one of my all-time favorites and he should have left well enough alone. And even though he completely fouls up the alien biology, and even though he makes Marines look stupid, once they're dead, Aliens turns into a great film.

So, yeah, I suppose I have high hopes for what he'll do with The Avatar. I love his commitment to the craft of filmmaking, so much so that I'll probably be in line opening night, 2009.

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