Stop Frame

The first teaser trailer for James Cameron’s forthcoming Avatar is up. I am unmoved. It’s an incredibly dull “tease.” In full-on 3D it might come to life, though. It certainly attempts to have sweeping vistas, an entire epic feel, but I’m just left feeling “meh.” Matters are made worse by what the trailer shows. You have a soldier in a wheelchair who is given the opportunity to remote operate an alien body, his “avatar.” They can grow an entire alien, complete with the necessary central nervous system, yet they can’t fix his original body? Can’t wait to hear the techno-babble explanation for that. Humans can fly across vast expanses of space, yet can’t “nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure”? We’re reduced to fighting hand-to-hand, looking for all the world like Hollywood’s lasting image of Vietnam (door gunner hanging out of his helicopter, machinegun a-blaze…)? I thought the reason for the avatars was because humans can’t work on planet Pandora (and ...

Oh, what might have been. This is not a good film, but wow, it might have been. I remember seeing early talk and clips for this over at io9 ; none of the commentary was positive. But somehow I was intrigued. So here it is on DVD and…well, it’s not that good a film. And yet. The story goes that at the end of the ice age, a great machine fell onto earth and starting cranking out mutants. The ancient tribes of man united and buried the machine, sealing the mutants in. Fast forward to the dark future. The world is split between four corporations, fighting for the scraps of the planet. A battle between two of the corporations unseals the mutant machine, and the mayhem begins. The fate of the world rests with a small band of warriors who, on a suicide mission, must descend into the ground and destroy the mutant machine. I don’t know about you, but that plot description sounds like all sorts of awesome to me. Alas, it’s in the execution where great ideas live or, like here, die. The wri...

Further proof of the coming Apocalypse: Steven Spielberg has committed to his next film, and it will be an adaptation of the Mary Chase Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Harvey,” which will be done as a co-production between 20th Century Fox and DreamWorks. What’s next, a remake of Casablanca ? Citizen Kane ? Jaws ?!? H/T: AICN .

So I’m in Best Buy the other day, buying discounted copies of Wanted and Taken , sweet deal, and I start watching one of their Blu-Ray Disk (BD) and high-definition TV setups. It was playing U-571 , a film that resides in my DVD collection. Awesome , thought I. Only it wasn’t. It was awful. Everything had this gloss and sheen to it. It was so sharp that it stopped being film. It looked exactly like “quality” video. Yes, it was high-quality video, but it looked like video nonetheless. And it was, as said, awful. I don’t think anything was out of adjustment because it looked so damn sharp. It’s just that the end product came out looking terrible. Another demo setup was showing Spider-Man 2 and it looked just as bad. I know this isn’t an across the board result of BD + hi-def. My son has a BD setup (though the TV is only 720P) and we watched the BD version of The Dark Knight on it. Nonetheless, it seems like a distinct possibility if the film isn’t treated right when it gets re...