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Malevolent
2018 ***1/2 It's 1986 for some reason, and a team of paranormal investigators are making a big name for themselves all over Scotland. ...
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I’m sure none of you except for JPX knows that I’m a bit of a germ-a-phobic. It’s annoying, but manageable. Though, since I met JPX and list...
9 comments:
Agreed...ouch. Looks like Fern Gully: the Last Rainforest.
Can anyone explain to me why Sam Worthington is such hot shit all of a sudden? I just don't see it.
Yeah, it's that Hollywood "the only rule is box office" phenomenon gone awry, as happens very often. It's like Shia LeBoeuff, who was suddenly the biggest deal in the world "because" of Indiana Jones and Transformers, even though he had absolutely nothing to do with those movies' successes. Hollywood furiously pretended not to notice the actual logic and decided he, himself, was a big star. The same thing with Worthington, except it backfired; his agent probably got him into Avatar on the strength of Terminator Salvation, which everyone assumed would be a big hit (again, "because" of Worthington) but the plan backfired when TS tanked. Lots of actors get temporary career boosts by appearing in movies that are hits "because" of them.
I look at a poster like that and think only one word, crap.
Identity crisis -
I think the poster is simulataneously trying to woo the fans that might see Avatar because they loved Aliens & Terminator, along with the fans that might see Avatar because of Titanic.
Thus, we get this weird, romantic, yet super sci-fi image.
As for Worthington - he did a modern-day interpretation of Macbeth in Australia a few years back that was pretty cool. Not that Anybod ever saw it.
I think I was born just a tad too late to really experience it, but do some of you older fogeys out there on the blog remember what the hype scenario was like when Dune was coming out in theaters?
I know that movie (plus the books) have a rabid, vocal fanbase, but I can't help but feel that the impact of both movies will be eerily similar: big sci-fi production, endlessly hyped and anticipated, and ultimately falling flat on its blue-skinned face. See Also: Willow.
I don't know, the poster (and all else I see or read about Avatar) just conjures up Dune-like feelings for me - big sci-fi stpry that I know in my sci-fi heart I SHOULD be way into, but I just can't warm to it.
(Apologies to all the Frank Herbert fans I've just offended. I feel like there has to be at least ONE on Horrorthon. Lord knows I've picked up Dune at least a dozen times, and I cannot for the life of me make it more than 30 pages in each time. If there's a Super-Dune fan out there, (why do I get a tremor in the Force of Jordan cracking his knuckles in front of his keyboard?), please educate me...)
I'm not the biggest Dune fan in the world. I've only read the first one, only once, about twenty years ago. It's a very good novel. (Not just a good sci-fi novel; a good novel.)
But it's also an enormous commitment, in the Lord of the Rings tradition. It's extremely complex and detailed, filled with theology and technology and philosophy. It's all very interesting, but it raises the question of just what kind of dedication you're willing to pour into it; how far away from reality you're willing to get and still have the responsibility of contemplating economics, politics, soap-opera-style story mechanics, centuries of fake history etc.
I'm beginning to realize that this entire phenomenon is sci-fi/fantasy's achilles heel. It's the reason "the straights" (or, the non-geeks) don't want to play. For years I was confused, because it seemed like the "straight" audience was confused; they complained that sci-fi/fantasy was "juvenile," but they seemed to like it that way, preferring Tim Burton's "Dr. Seuess" approach to Batman, etc. Then I realized it's all about this issue of "commitment": non-geeks aren't going to learn Klingon, basically. They don't want to get pulled into anything that complicated that's that far away from reality, because non-geeks tend to be extremely involved in reality (more than geeks) and reality is complicated enough. It's like my attitude about The West Wing; why should I memorize a fake White House? The real White House is right there.
Anyway, that's the weakness of Dune; a weakness it shares with Lord of the Rings. (It's too much, you dig?) It might have been possible to make a great movie of Dune, exactly the way Peter Jackson did with Rings, expecially these days. But giving it to David Lynch was not the right idea. I actually kind of dig the movie, purely as a Lynch film, just because it's so weird..;.but it's totally a Lynch film; it's got very little to do with the book. So, fail.
Trevor's got it Avatar right, in my opinion. I humbly (Humbly? No! Brazenly! Proudly!) refer you to my own post on the topic...
Good points all, from both Trevor and Dr. J (somehow, I managed to completely miss that early-September Avatar post...)
With regard to the "removal from reality" bit: that's a huge reason I favor Arthur C. Clarke's work as opposed to Asimov: Clarke's sci-fi is of a very accessible and plausible nature: his stuff can be set either dozens or sometimes hundreds of years in the future, sometimes on other worlds, but there's always a solid grounding in the overall story that this sort of thing is POSSIBLE, hence the easy connection with both sci-fi and heretic readers alike.
Asimov, especially with Empire, went thousands of years into the future, and millions of light years away from Earth, with only the most gossamer of references to what Earth is/was and how we (as a species) got to where he's taking us. Less so with the Robot material, but I am much less well-versed in Asimov as I am in Clarke.
So anyway, I've been warming up for another crack at Dune for the last several years. Fingers crossed.
And my one-word review for Avatar:
Titantrix.
I can't stand Asimov because I think he's an awful, awful writer (notwithstanding his ideas). I'll go a certain distance into pure drivel (for example, I can stomach Clarke, barely, despite his self-important, florid, square style) but Asimov is just unreadable.
Probably your least likely candidate for a Frank Herbert fan but I have to raise my hand Stan. I read the first Dune back when I was in high school. I only got 2 sequels in (Dune Messiah & Children of Dune) out of the 5 he wrote and stopped there. I reread the original about 4 years ago and though it is rather slow paced I settled into it like a comfy old arm chair.
I'm not offended in the least by your opinion of it and as always appreciate the honesty of opinions on this blog.
Dune is a tough sell and through the years I've really only run into a few people who really dug it as much as I did, but I am admittedly weird. I like slow moving complex sci-fi stories. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land is one of my favorites and that one gets very political midway through making it a rather tedious read.
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