The Movielicious #17 – Recommental
December 31, 2009 by Florent
Filed under - The Movielicious, .Episodes, Featured
On this episode, your hosts:
- Patrick Beja (notpatrick on Twitter)
- Nicole Spagnuolo (nicolespag on Twitter)
- Mark “Turspter” Turpin (the_T on Twitter)
Discuss these flicks:
- Sherlock Holmes
- Avatar
- And: Nerdcore Rising, Love Actually, Battle For Milkquarious, The Holiday
Enjoy the show!
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And to find out more about our wonderful hosts, go here:
- And don’t forget Nicole’s Ladies of Leet!
- The Movielicious Facebook Group
Join us for next episode: January 13th.
Turpster left the WoW Insider Show so I had to move over to Movielicious. Nothing bad in it, I enjoyed my first episode of the podcast.
I saw Avatar a few days ago. Didn’t like it as much as you did, I think it didn’t live up to its hype. Maybe I should go and see it again because I was ultra sceptic when I went to the cinema. I started to like the movie more and more during it. Sadly my little city doesn’t have a 3D capable cinema so I had to see it in 2D. That made most of the scenes that especially highlighted the 3D a bit bland but they didn’t feel stupid – 3D was just a tool that supported the story, instead of being used for throwing stuff at the viewer.
All in all, I’d give it 4 stars out of 5, which is good. It just didn’t live up to all the hype it had attained.
Oh, and unobtanium was translated into “intelligent metal” in Finnish, which is even more stupid than the original. After all, there are materials named after famous scientists, so naming a metal by its features is fine. Didn’t check its name in Swedish, could have been interesting to see what the translator did there..
First and foremost, I enjoy your show folks. Unfortunately, Avatar was a big turd sandwich. Call me a little old fashioned if you will but I generally like a decent story with my movie and Avatar’s was about as rehashed as it gets. Could they change the name to Space Pokahontas? The effects and visuals were stunning, but that only goes so far when you have dialogue like “We got guns too bitches!”. Shocking. I don’t know how Avatar has managed to avoid being ripped apart in the media at this point. My guess is that two many people have too much money wrapped up in the project to let it fail. How did you not laugh out loud when the robot had a knife? I thought it was hilarious. Anyways…good luck with future reviews…
I agree with Patrick on the story being very thin in Avatar and the character motivations very puerile – black & white – good vs. evil. Some charactters are exact restatements of previous Cameron iterations as well. For example Giovani Ribisi’s character, Parker Selfridge, is the exact same sleeze-ball as Paul Reiser’s Carter Burke in Aliens – though a bit farther up the corporate ladder. Michelle Rodrigues’, Trudy Chacon, the same as Jenette Goldstein’s, Pvt. Vasquez, Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley – all the way down to the torn “wife-beater” t-shirt. We get it Jim – you are hot for chicks in white t-shirts shootin’ guns!
Also, during the sequence where the Na’vi warriors are taking Jake to the flying mountains so he can take his “final test”, even Jerry Goldsmith’s music evoked ‘Titanic’ to me which really yanked me out of the movie entirely – if only momentarily.
The reason I mention these issues is to simply point out that Avatar is ground-breaking in so many other ways that these easily remedied re-iterations just rang very hollow and detracted from the experience.
Overall I left the theatre believing the bar has been raised. If you are planning a fantasy science fiction epic you had better bring your “A” game – I believe it will be some time before this achievement, visually, will be surpassed.
In closing I’d really love to hear, at least from Turpster if not Patrick, (though I understand if you’d rather not say), what their Avatar experience translated into hopes for the planned WOW movie? I mean the floating mountains of Pandora – Nagrand; the lush glowing jungles – Zangarmarsh etc. etc. etc. From a setting perspective it seems WETA would only need minor tweaking to set the entire world… of warcraft on Pandora and call it done. What are your thoughts?
Keep up the great work,
Phil
Sorry, I meant James Horner’s music not Jerry Goldsmith. I consistently confuse the two… don’t ask why.
Great show like usual. Been away for a little while and just finished catching up. Has it come out anywhere why Turpster left the wow insider show? Love movielicious though, keep it up!
Just thought you guys would like to know…”Unobtainium” is a term I learned back at engineering college. It’s a funny, generic word used to describe something that is hard to get, purchase, etc. It’s just like the word “widget,” a generic term for a nonexisting object.
So in the movie, I think the guy was just trying to be funny by calling it Unobtainium, so I don’t think the material was ever really given a name.
Keep up the good work…love the show.
JAS