Turns out there's really no way to do the Topics/Questions/Exercises of the week without bringing out the, shall we say, sharp-edged humor, so I let loose in a special 3-D edition (not really, but, you know) over at The Auteurs' today.
Snark import…
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You had a lot pent up, didn’t you?
Boy Howdy, that’s loverly. I wish you had also taken aim at Johnny Boy’s “Top 15 of the Millennium”, too.
By far the best snark I read was this statement on the trailer:
“It looks like an 80’s cartoon designed to sell toys that are rebranded left overs from Thunder Cats”
Magnificent Troll, Mr. Cameron. Magnificent Troll.
“Dizzying hat trick of error…” Lovely. And brings to light a factor of Armond’s ineptness that you left out of your takedown last week: his reviews are often rife with factual error. My personal favorite AW reviews are those in which he completely bases his oh-so-contrarian reading of the film on said errors (his recent Coraline review comes to mind).
I seem to have strayed into an alternate universe where James Cameron’s Avatar is being derided and JJ Abrams Star Trek is being heralded as some kind of masterpiece. Can somebody please let me out?
Bingo, markj. Bingo.
Markj, isn’t it possible that Abrams’ Star Trek and the Avatar trailer *both* suck? That would be my own perspective at the moment, though I’m keeping an open mind for Cameron’s movie.
This Avatar trailer is nothing to get your knickers in a twist over. It’s just a trailer to a film nobody has seen. A person who watches this trailer is perfectly entitled to decide whether they want to see the finished film or not based on what the trailer shows them, for this, as I understand it, is the sole function of a trailer.
I despise the faintly intimidating air of ‘you have no right to think Avatar looks rubbish because it is the work of James Cameron’ that looms behind me every time I go online. It reminds of that sociopathic army of Dark Knight true believers who sent death threats to film reviewers for giving the film ‘only’ four stars out of five. Those people make my shit itch.
Anyway. I love James Cameron but this trailer is a disaster – possibly one of the worst ever created for such a major movie. I’ll reserve my judgement for the film itself until I’ve actually seen it, but the trailer does indeed make me think it looks rubbish.
Offered without comment, John Nolte’s review of Inglorious Basterds:
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jjmnolte/2009/08/21/inglourious-basterds-review-2/
@Owain:
You have no right to think Avatar looks rubbish because it is the work of James Cameron.
I jest… 😉
It’s pretty clear to me analysing the shots that Cameron knows what he is doing. If the film turns out to be a huge letdown i’ll be very surprised… the general concensus from people who saw the footage shown in theaters yesterday is that it was pretty spectacular.
We’ll all find out in December I guess…
Regarding factual errors, White isn’t alone (though his percentage may be way beyond the curve)…Ebert does it with surprising regularity…usually no more than one error per review, but very distracting (and disappointing) when it’s a big one that throws a large part of his understanding of what the particular movie’s about out of whack.