Avatar: 2.5 Stars

I’d rate this as the worst movie I would ever recommend you go see. It’s visually astounding. I went in thinking “how much better could the CGI be than the Star Wars prequels?” The answer, it turns out, is a lot. Enough that you have to see it in the theater.

Also, I saw it in 3D, and it was the first movie I’ve ever seen that used 3D well. Normally 3D movies just try to startle you with stuff jumping out. Avatar resisted the urge to do this, and instead just made for an immersive viewing experience with nice little touches here and there.

Is it better than the 2D version? I have no idea, because there’s no way I could sit through that movie a second time. I really hope Avatar doesn’t win Best Picture because while viewed as a collection of special effects it is unparalleled, as a movie it’s pretty terrible.

The plot was about as predictable as could be. In fact, I won’t even tell you “spoiler alert”, because unless you’re in a persistent vegetative state, the first 15 minutes of the movie spoiler it all for you.

The minute you see the low budget Colonel Kurtz character, you know he is going to wind up being the bad guy. As soon as Sigourney Weaver starts insulting the protagonist, you know they’re going to end up best friends in about 20 minutes. You see the blue chick, and you could write the love story yourself. The instant you hear about the blue dude who captured the bad-ass pterodactyl thingy, you know the protagonist is going to do it too.

And don’t even get me started on “unobtanium”. The movie was just one bad (and badly-acted) cliché on top of another. But it looked awesome.

The Hurt Locker: 5 Stars

If there is a God, then The Hurt Locker was why He gave man enough intelligence to invent the camera. I don’t really have much to say about it other than that it’s pretty much perfect. It’s simultaneously meaningful and engaging. It’s well-directed, well-shot, and well-acted. When the movie’s over, it feels like you’ve been watching it for about 20 minutes.  According to Wikipedia:

Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun Times rated the film as the best film of the year and as one of the best of the decade, writing, "The Hurt Locker is a great film, an intelligent film, a film shot clearly so that we know exactly who everybody is and where they are and what they’re doing and why."

Hard to either argue with any of that, or really add anything to it. If it doesn’t win, somebody got robbed.

The Blind Side: 3 Stars

A decent film. A little too predictable and a little too feel-goody, but still a pretty good motion picture. And, though I never imagined I’d be typing these words, Sandra Bullock did a Best Actress-worthy job.

Up In The Air: 2.5 Stars

Not really a bad movie, but not really a good one either. Well-acted but boring. Overall it was just kinda ho-hum. I give them credit for avoiding the sappy ending you felt it was probably leading up to, but they still went with one you guessed would be the backup plan.

Overall it just felt pointless. It wasn’t insightful, and unless you are a frequent traveler, in which case you’ll enjoy the first 15 minutes, it wasn’t very entertaining either.

Precious: 3.5 Stars

Pretty good movie all-around. If you would have told me there could be a movie about a morbidly obese girl from the ghetto who got raped by her father, which gave her two children, one of which was mentally retarded, and she was beaten and neglected by her mother, yet it wasn’t thoroughly depressing, I might not have believed you. And yet they did it. I don’t know that I’d say it ended up being uplifting, but it was in parts.

Mo’Nique was pretty much the whole show, despite being a supporting actress, though I haven’t seen two of the movies she’s up against so I don’t have any clue if she’ll win.

A Serious Man: 3.5 Stars

Not the Coen Brothers’ finest work, but still a Coen Brothers’ film. As per usual, the cinematography and acting were superb. The story was kind of a modern-day Job parable that just felt insufficiently engaging at times. The movie didn’t feel meaningful, dragged at times, and had a very abrupt ending that possibly justified the entire film’s existence.

I thought it was hilarious (not an emotion usually evoked on NPR, especially during their “comedy” shows) for a minute, and didn’t really catch what came on next because all I could think was “I don’t care, I don’t care, I really don’t care/did you see the drummer’s hair? Oooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooooo.” And then I promptly put it out of my mind and tried to get home before I had to listen to any of “Fresh Air”. One of my pet peeves is when radio shows play movie clips, and that show does it enough that I shouldn’t listen to it while driving.

So the next day I was driving home again, and listening to Marketplace (sponsored by Thrivent Financial for Lutherans) again, and up popped auditory Easter egg. This time the segment was the normal “numbers” and it’d been a bad day on Wall Street. Again an instrumental portion of a song, “Feel the Pain” by Dinosaur Jr., another in-joke aimed squarely at some subset of my generation.

I debated whether or not to write about how someone with my taste in music, sense of humor, and admiration for Kai Ryssdal (guy’s got the best voice on radio) seems to be in charge of the switchboard over there at American Public Media. But twice is still a coincidence, and over the next week or two I missed or only half heard a few episodes, and it slipped out of my mind.

But they got me again on the way home today. The lead-in was a segment about the drop in consumer spending, and ended with a bit about how people were moving away from places like Saks and Banana Republic (which they’ll pry out of my cold dead hands) and toward places like Kohl’s (where you’ll find me right after the prying) and the song at the end was “Undone – the Sweater Song” by Weezer.

Granted, that one wasn’t as impressive as the first two since it was a pretty big hit and a lot more people were probably in on the joke, but it does make me wish I had a phone capable of Shazam. And three times is a trend. So here’s to you mister plays-instrumental-portions-of-appropriately-titled- ’90′s-rock-on-public-radio-financial-shows guy. If this were a radio program right now I’d be torn between playing the breakdown of “You Oughta Know” and the intro to “Interstate Love Song”.

1. Most of the content (barring some HBO and Showtime stuff) is free anyway, and cable is incredibly convenient.

2. You don’t download a TV show once and then consume it over and over, like a CD. You have to get a new one every week (or in some cases, every day) and you watch it once and then delete it. The ratio of effort to reward is considerably higher. There are ways to do this reduce the effort a bit (such as RSS downloading) but they still suck because…

3. Getting the content digitized and put online is a much bigger hassle. With music, you pop a CD in and wait 3 minutes. eDonkey or whatever the kids use these days automatically starts sharing. With TV, you have to buy a tuner for your pc, hook that up to cable, record the program using some software (all of which sucks, and I’ve tried them all) edit out commercials, create a torrent file, etc.

4. The end result of pirating a video is generally a DivX file. The percentage of the population that knows what to do with one of those, let alone how to get it onto a television, is small and not growing quickly.

Anyone who downloads TV shows via RSS (as I do) knows that it’s highly unreliable. In fact, the pain of piracy often drives me to Hulu.

It’s also a mistake to assume that Hulu doesn’t want to end up on TVs because they don’t want to be featured in Boxee. Boxee still runs only on computers, and any computer with Boxee can run Hulu. Boxee right now isn’t a better way to get on televisions than the browser.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see TVs start shipping with built in Hulu support. Or given that Hulu is part-owned by NBC, a long time partner of Microsoft, it could easily end up on the Xbox 360. The Hulu guys aren’t stupid. They know that their future lies beyond just the PC. And they know that they exist only because of the legal advantage that allows them to be more convenient. They just want to ensure that when they get there, they do so on their terms, not a third party’s as happened to the music industry. They don’t want to escape the same piracy concerns dragging the record labels under just to end up a slaves to Apple, or more likely someone like Boxee.

Still, piracy is a non-factor to Hulu. Consider iTunes, which charges for music and has made inroads against widespread music piracy by offering convenience. The convenience Hulu offers, relative to pirating video, is ten times the amount iTunes does relative to pirating music, and Hulu doesn’t charge a cent. It’s pretty hard to make a case that any of their recent policies are going to change the overall direction online video is moving in.

Boxee, for those who don’t know, is a service that aggregates certain video from all around the web into one media center-like experience. It’s sort of like having a TiVo that has (at least until Friday) unlimited access to lots of top quality content, and minus all the useless crap that comprises the majority of content on other video sites.

Content owners, like Hulu, generally found this less objectionable (or so the theory went) than simply stealing the content, since Boxee preserved any advertisements within it. It acted more like an RSS reader than the good old pirate-laden days of YouTube.

It’s tempting to pass Hulu’s request off as old media dinosaurs not understanding new technology, but Hulu itself (a joint venture between two of them) seems to disprove that. That site is a damn near perfect mixture of old media and new delivery methods. If NBC and especially Fox seem to get it, and if they are objecting, there’s a reason. They must fear something happening if services like Boxee are allowed to grow.

There are a few obvious disadvantages to Boxee for Hulu. They lose the ability to run display ads alongside content, which they don’t seem to do yet anyway, but may one day. And, perhaps more importantly, they lose the ability to track people around the web using standard browser cookies (which presumably don’t work on Boxee since it isn’t in a browser) which can be used to target ads and increase revenue rates.

But all of that still might not be enough for them to feel the need to pull the plug. My theory is that they fear Boxee growing large and offering an end-run around the networks for content producers. They’re already pissed that YouTube got as big as it did, almost entirely due to their content, but YouTube is at least too mired in music videos and losers screaming “Leave Britney alone!” into webcams to pose a serious threat to the networks. They’re just not where you turn for high quality content.

Not so with Boxee, they’re playing Facebook to YouTube’s MySpace. They’re building the endless TiVo, with dozens of hand-picked, high-quality channels, and one they plan on integrating with existing hardware like televisions and DVRs and gaming consoles. They will, if they’re successful, deliver professionally-produced content to millions of people.

From the networks’ standpoint, that’s not a good thing. It shifts the balance of power. Currently if a Hollywood producer decides to make a television show, he’s got only a few major networks and a handful of cable ones (most of which are owned by the same companies as the majors) to shop it around to. Put Boxee in a few successful TVs and DVRs, and you’ve got a viable new network right there. Put them in 100 million homes and computers and you’ve got a monster.

The networks are nothing more than a middleman between the people who make content and the ones who consume it, and they know it. And like all middlemen, they lie awake at night hoping the people on the ends don’t find a way to cut them out. The relatively slow bandwidth in most of the first world and the lack, until recently, of internet-connected hardware attached to televisions has relegated online video to little more than kittens on treadmills, but the writing is on the wall.

Hulu is the networks’ best chance to keep control of the middle ground, and Boxee is a direct threat to that. Their streaming hundreds of thousands of Hulu videos per week seems like a gift right now, but it’s a Trojan horse and the networks know it.

I expect we’ll be seeing a lot more from Hulu in the future. They’ll be in all of the same places Boxee wants to end up. In your TV, on your Wii and iPhone. Removing their content from Boxee is the first salvo in the battle to retain control of the middle ground, and one they have to win to ensure their survival.

Apparently they crowd-sourced an entire movie. Everything from the script to the casting was voted on, presumably by the same lunkheads who turned Digg into an extension of Apple marketing interspersed with unfunny comics and left-wing commentary. It’s a process scientifically designed to produce a film that’s mediocre for its budget range, which apparently was somewhere in between what a student film normally costs and my monthly car insurance payment.

Nothing good can come of this.

The trailer can be found here, but if you don’t feel like watching, let me sum it up. It’s every other low-budget slasher film trailer you’ve ever seen, but more low-budgety. Lots of short, blood-soaked clips fading out of and into blackness, some roars and creaky fence sounds. But in this case they couldn’t even afford the narrator with the really deep voice that everyone else uses, so they just show some words, because if there’s one thing we know slasher film fans love, it’s reading.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s neat the way the process worked, but I guess I’m unable to see the value in coming up with a novel way to produce more cinematic detritus. Hollywood regurgitates this crap 10 times a year, except (judging from the trailer) with more polish. They don’t need crowd sourcing to add to the dung heap.

It’s true that this gives a lot of people outside of the film industry a chance to participate, but I’m not so sure that is a good thing. The industry is sufficiently easy to at least attempt to join that anyone not motivated enough to try doesn’t belong on the set or in the production credits. Letting a gas station employee play director is perhaps less dangerous than letting him be a thoracic surgeon, but it’s no more likely to achieve a good result.

Hollywood isn’t incapable of good movies or new ideas, though you’d be forgiven for thinking that if you walked by a theater today. There’s an entire independent film system out there working very hard at making actual art. Lots of unknown people from a gas station in Whereversville end up getting their movie produced that way (or even through the major studios occasionally) every year because they send in something good. Not every movie is written by a John August or a Josh Friedman.

In fact, the one thing the movie industry has going for it is that it’s still much more meritocratic than most of the rest of America. A good script is a good script, no matter who wrote it, and the same is true of acting and directing. If a gas station attendant is still years away from breaking through, there’s a good reason for that. The system is flawed and imperfect, and probably ripe for change, but it still functions at a level where if anyone is so good that they can’t be ignored, they’ll end up on top.

So while the process is definitely new, I’m just not sure that making a movie via the crowd is a good idea if more of the same crap that’s been destroying the industry that some of us still love for the last 20 years is the result. Perhaps I’m just a curmudgeon clinging to some silly notion of the movie as America’s greatest art form, but this looks like something that nothing good can ever come of.

Still, I did a pretty good job of ignoring the hype (which is easy to do when you don’t watch TV) so I went in optimistic. It kinda let me down though. It wasn’t a bad movie really, but it wasn’t anywhere near as good as the last one. And Heath Ledger was actually really good, but not great. He wasn’t even close to what won last year’s Best Supporting (Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men).

I mostly felt that the movie just tried to do a little too much at once. Superhero sequels almost always do. Spiderman 2 suffered from the same problem, as did X-men 3. They strive to be bigger and faster than the previous ones, with more CGI, more explosions, more villains causing more fight scenes. More of everything.

And it’s sad because what made them work, if the originals were really good, was their characterization. The special effects have to be top-notch, because they enable you to suspend disbelief when they are, which is pretty critical when you’re watching a movie about a man who can swing around from buildings on webs that shoot out of his wrists, but they shouldn’t be the main attraction.

But in order to top the previous ones, the sequels’ trailers need to have more fists flying, more stuff going boom, and more evil-looking dudes making the fists fly and the stuff go boom. And the basic humanity that makes you see a guy in a bat suit fighting crime and actually relate to it is lost somewhere around the third senseless explosion, which is usually about five minutes in.

Also, I think I’m fairly willing to suspend disbelief about a lot of things. A wealthy media mogul/ninja in a bat suit fighting crime? Sure. Another guy dressed like a clown causing it? Ok. A car that can eject a motorcycle from itself? Alright. But Maggie Gyllenhaal being pretty? Sorry, that crosses a line. Let’s just say the last time I saw something that ugly, I pulled the lever and immediately took a double dose of Kaopectate.

So either way, if you haven’t seen the movie yet (and if so, judging by the box office gross, you may be a fictional character) it’s missable. Catch it on DVD.

I just got done with Frasier. That took me months because there are so many episodes. In fact, I’m not even sure I started that one this year. I feel like it was one of the better examples of the old vanguard sit-coms (3 cameras, studio audience/laugh track). But it still always felt a little too contrived, but not in the fun, obvious sort of way that Seinfeld was. In fact, Frasier, like almost every sit-com other than Seinfeld, made you feel that the outrageous situations were often just hashed together to enable one-liners, whereas with Seinfeld it was the other way around.

So I liked Frasier (enough to watch 11 full seasons of it, much from an elliptical machine) but I didn’t really like it, let alone love it. Nonetheless, it was better than staring at a wall while running in place.

I’m not sure what I’ll watch after my current project, since it’s only 8 episodes. I might take someone’s recommendation on some of the Adult Swim shows. I also may check out The Wire. I watched a few episodes and didn’t really care for it, but everyone I know is telling me how great it is. Can they really all be wrong? Maybe I should find out.

I’m thinking of turning the basement into a home gym, which will probably boost my TV-watching time, unless I can figure out how to play poker while doing bench presses. Strangely, I feel like I don’t watch much television, yet I can name at least 20 shows I’ve watched straight through. And I don’t know if I ever watch more than an hour in a day, and many days it’s zero.

Enough blogging about my boring life. But thanks to everyone whose recommendations made working out a little less soul sucking.

P.S., if you get the joke behind the title of this post, you spend too much time playing poker.

But since I’ve started working out, I’ve been watching quite a bit more. I’ll run on the elliptical machine for long enough to watch about one hour of TV (minus commercials). Generally I just pick a show that looks good and watch it from beginning to end. With most programs you can either rent the DVDs or download the whole series, so you get to watch them in order with no commercials. I have a fairly elaborate home media network set up for that purpose, as I find I exercise more when I have something to distract me from the fact that I’m working out.

What I’ve noticed is that otherwise good shows often fall apart when you watch them back to back in a short period of time. For instance Lost, which I generally like when watching as it comes out weekly, turns into a cliché when watched in order. Every episode features the same things. A few people get shot (but somehow usually not dying, despite being on an island with no hospitals) and one guy who appears to be drowned. Then another character (usually Jack) does the whole chest pumping CPR thing for a little while. The drowned character doesn’t respond and everyone thinks he or she is dead. Maybe someone says “it’s over Jack”. But Jack refuses to give up. And then, at the very last possible second, the victim coughs up a little water and is basically back to full health two minutes later. On TV, not breathing for minutes never causes brain damage.

And then there’s everything Aaron Sorkin ever did. It’s all the exact same. Back when I used to watch television I thought Sports Night was the wittiest thing I had ever seen. Watching the whole thing in order, I’ve realized that every conversation in every episode is identical.

Character 1:     ”I need to talk to you.”

Character 2:     ”I don’t want to talk about x.”

Character 1:    ”I didn’t come here to talk about x.”

Character 2:    ”Ok, because I really don’t want to hear about x.”

Character 1:     ”I swear I don’t want to talk about x.”

Character 2:    ”No x?”

Character 1:     ”No x.”

Character 2:    ”Ok, then what did you want to talk about?”

Character 1:     ”I want to talk about x.”

That’s funny maybe once or twice ever, but watch the series while running on an elliptical and it happens about once per mile. And Sorkin’s other two shows seem almost identical. No wonder he’s only batting .33 on television.

I think that when you watch TV the way most people do, following it from week to week, you just don’t notice that level of detail. Even if the episode is largely the same as the one preceding, it’s been a week and you’ve forgotten. But watch multiple episodes in one sitting and you can’t help but notice the repetitiousness.

A few shows hold up tremendously though, and unsurprisingly, they’re among my favorites. Seinfeld, Scrubs, Family Guy, they do a lot of the same types of things (flashbacks and asides in the latter two) but never to the point where it feels formulaic.

Now I’m running out of TV shows queued up to watch. Any suggestions? And if this post is poorly written, it was done from a cell phone. My bad.

But there is one thing I’m positive of. In my 27 years, it’s the only thing I’ve decided that I know for sure. And it’s a bombshell. Ready?

Star Wars sucks.

Not a little. A lot. And I don’t mean the latest ones, which are, in fact, far better than the originals. I mean the very first. Episode IV, A New Hope. And every one thereafter. They’re all just terrible movies.

I know, it’s shocking. It shocked me when I realized it. I was that guy who went to see all of the rereleases and sequels the day they came out. I stood outside grilling and playing games with friends all night to get tickets to Episode 1. I even have a little plastic Yoda that I bought lying somewhere around here.

But really, they’re just not good movies. I’m sorry, it’s true. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but I feel you have a right to know.

Fans always complain about the newer ones. Common gripes are “the plot is slow and goes nowhere” or “the acting is terrible.” Makes me wonder if the people voicing those opinions ever even saw the originals.

I can sum up the entire plot of each of them succinctly in two sentences. And the acting is one of the greatest abominations in modern film history. Want empirical proof? They were the most ridiculously popular movies of all time when they came out. They broke every box office record known to man, were the original summer blockbusters, and are the reason opening weekend gross is now the most important metric in the industry. And none of the main characters but Harrison Ford managed to have a significant career afterward, except maybe one guy who did some voiceovers.

I think the mythos surrounding Star Wars is due to originalism, the belief that things are better when they are (or at least were) unique. And the Star Wars franchise was most certainly that. It broke the mold as far as special effects go. But beyond that they’re all completely vacuous.

When you watch the movies through the lens of the child seeing them for the first time, they’re quite special. Same from the viewpoint of the person who sees them only now but has been told all of their lives just how special they are. But if you could live your life in a bubble devoid of hype, what you’d find is a few movies with excellent special effects for their time, very little plot development, cookie cutter, black and white characterization, and the worst acting up until Gigli.

Really, they are just awful movies. And the only reason people complain about the new ones is that enough time has passed that they’ve come to realize they’ve been bamboozled by the most efficient marketing machine in the history of Hollywood and quite possibly the universe. The new movies were a lot of things, but it was impossible for them to be unique. They could, at best, be the same thing but with better special effects and better acting (and they were). But because the intervening decades forced people to judge them on their merits, rather than their originality, there was no shot that they’d measure up because not even the originals could.

And the reason is clear. George Lucas is a brilliant marketer, and he makes brilliant use of technology. But he’s a sucky film-maker. Thanks to years of fond memories of action figures and Pepsi commercials, people were expecting Akira Kurosowa, or at least Steven Spielberg. Originalism and marketing had, in their minds, elevated him to that status. But what they got was Michael Bay with a beard which, in reality, is all he ever was.

There you have it. Feel free to shoot the messenger in the comments.

I’ve never actually purchased a song due to jamming to it on a video game, but I will say that if you told me two years ago that I would ever stumble across a song by Kansas and not change the station, I might have punched you in the nose. Yet just today, I heard Carry On My Wayward Son, and instead of flipping faster than John Kerry talking about Iraq, as I would have before GH2, I instead rocked out on the tiny plastic guitar in my head.

I just pray they don’t add anything by Linkin Park into the next version, because if I start liking them I may have to neuter myself for the sake of humanity.