Good, got that out of the way.  Now the bad parts.

            When summarizing Avatar’s plot, I’m tempted to just write “Pocahontas in Space” and move on, but I like to think I’m more mature than that.  Basically, humanity has colonized Pandora and is mining it for some particularly shiny rocks.  The natives of Pandora, a race of super-Smurfs known as Na’vi, are a proud, spiritual people with an annoying habit of planting their magical Christmas trees on very large deposits of shiny rocks.  So naturally, conflict has broken out between the stupid, ignorant Earth military and the brave, honorable Na’vi warriors.

            Avatars are Na’vi bodies that are genetically linked to specific humans that can be controlled while the people sleep like the coolest video game ever.  We see the action through the eyes of James Sully, a paraplegic Marine, falls into the Avatar program after his twin brother, a scientist in the program, dies, and James is the last person on Earth with the same DNA.  With hours of arriving, James finds himself in the middle of a feud between the scientists and military about how to best solve their little pickle with the natives.  The scientists want to stroll in with their Avatars wearing flowers and headbands while singing “Kumbaya” and eating vegan burgers.  The military, alternatively, believes genocide is a far more intelligent course of action.

            Through a series of misadventures, James meets a Na’vi warrior princess named Neytiri and finds himself sort of accepted and going through the “become-a-man” rituals of a local Na’vi village, well on his way to being trusted.  James is offered the choice of selling out the Na’vi for new legs by the military, and if you don’t know how this problem will be resolved, I suspect you have yet to complete the fourth grade.

            The worst part of Avatar is its predictability.  The plot is drenched in cliche and unoriginality.  You see each important event coming a mile away, and when it happens, the film tries to present it like it’s some big surprise.  It’s actually quite perplexing.

            The Earth military force is headed by Miles Quaritch.  You may remember Quaritch from his tour on Blood Gultch, where, as a sergeant, he led Simmons, Grif, and Donut in a brave campaign against “those dirty blues.” Since then he’s been promoted to colonel, but his feelings towards blue people have not improved.  All kidding aside, Lang’s character is impossible to take seriously.  It’s like someone mixed General Patton, a redneck, and a massive dose of concentrated stupid.  And the problem is not helped when he starts brandishing a pistol that looks like something you’d find in Toys R Us.  In fact, most of the humans in the film are pretty damn dumb.  One of the Marines actually shouts “GET SOME!” in the climatic finale.  The corporate dude bears special mention in this category.  He represents big business’s interest in Pandora (since Cameron felt one two dimensional hate figure wasn’t quite enough) and acts more like an insult comic than a respectable businessman.

            You know, I’m just about sick of the “evil humans oppressing innocent aliens” stories.  I’m a white, middle-class male.  I’ve already got plenty of cultural guilt.  I don’t need to be feeling guilty about crimes we haven’t committed yet.  These stories interesting at first, but now it’s been done so many times that I’m beginning to see some holes in it.  When and if humans do make contact with aliens, I’d like to think we will have matured enough as a species that we wouldn’t go and burn them at the stake.  Besides, by that time we’ll have so many alien oppression stories that it would be a taboo before it even happens.  And as crazy as this sounds to you celery-chomping hippies, the military is not entirely run by drunken frat boys.  They have rules of engagement. We could try to give them some credit.  I mean, they did stop the Nazis.

            Another problem I had with Avatar was the relationship between James and Neytiri.  I know complaining about Hollywood’s cheesy, forced romantic subplots is like trying to stop the sun from rising, but could they at least stop making interspecies relationships?  I can’t be the only one who is disturbed when the chicken and the cow end up together at the end of a kiddy movie.  I know in Avatar James is technically falling in love in a Na’vi body, but that didn’t really help.  It still felt a little creepy.  It was also not helped by the fact that the Na’vi wear barely any cloths.  There is something very wrong about a tall, blue man wearing a thong.

            Despite all these complaints, I actually enjoyed Avatar.  In the end, it’s not great, but it is a very palpable film that will succeed in keeping your attention for two and a half hours.  I’ve a feeling it will end up as one of those movies that I watch if I see it on TV, but won’t go out of my way for.  Bottom line is that this is a film for spectators.  You’ll probably enjoy it in theaters with all the shining gimmicks, but become bored if you buy it for yourself.  Personally, I found the plot too cliched and pointless, but I heartily recommend it if you never saw Disney’s Pocahontas as a child or did see it but felt it needed more violence and swearing.

Once upon a time, when the world was drowning in an abyss of dull television, a man named Tim Kring rose over the darkness.  He came up with an idea that would shatter the television world.  He gave us a superhero show of epic porportions that exceeded all expectations.

If you haven’t seen the first season, stop reading this right now.  I won’t be responsible for spoiling such an awesome show for you.  Go to iTunes or your local video store or Best Buy or something and purchase or rent it.  It will probably take you a few days to watch it, so I’ll wait.

…….

Done?  Good.  Aren’t you glad you did that?  And, I know the temptation is difficult to resist, but don’t go rent season 2 after seeing that teaser.  It’s not something you want to see.  But more on that later.

It’s difficult to say what the best part of season 1 was.  The plot was clever, smart, and full of twists and turns that had me scrapping up my jaw from the floor every 10 minutes.  It was told in brilliant, artistically appealling way meant to recreate the unique story-telling technique used in comic book story arcs.

The characters were all unique, interesting, and well-presented.  They did a great job at making me sympathize with all of them, even the villians, until I didn’t want anyone to die.  It was like watching a Shakespeare play if Hamlet could stop time and Claudius was telekinetic.

Hiro, Peter, and Sylar really stood out to me as characters.  Peter was a good-natured guy just trying to help people out in a tough world.  Sylar’s mystery and complexity as much as anything else made him an excellent villian.  Hiro was probably my favorite character, though.  His innocence and simple desire to be a hero made him instantly appeal to that child in all of us.  It reminds us of a time long before we were cynics when we would tie a towel around our necks and run around protecting pretend civilians from a ferocious pretend monster.  Hiro is an innocent, optimistic character entering a world that is determined to break him.  His story is about him trying to mature in this world without becoming the cold, cynical future-Hiro whom Ando and him meet when they go into the post-explosion, hellish future.  Speaking of which, is there anyone who didn’t tear up when future-Matt was reading present-Hiro’s mind and he thought “I just want to be a hero.”  Man….

If I had to criticize it, I would say that some of the twists in the later episodes start to lose their impact or get a little hard to swallow.  If I wanted to nitpick, I could also point out a few logical problems or how some of the powers seem to have very flexible rules, but I choose to save these complaints for the next seasons when they evolve from pointless nitpicks to gaping plotholes.  All you need to know is this: Stan Lee makes a cameo.  If Stan Lee, the father of Marvel Comics, thinks this non-Marvel show is good, who are you to argue with him?

Unfortunately, during season 2 the show suffered a tragic, undeserved fall into the dark abyss of crappiness.  It’s an unstimulating story and criminally short (which I should be thankful for).  My first red flag should have gone up when it turned out Nathan survived the explosion, a clear case of “comic book death,” but I excepted it like the idiot I am.  I did get a little pissed off when they started to slowly kill off Micah’s parents.  So Nathan can survive a nuclear explosion and a 2 mile fall, but the guy who can phase through solid objects gets killed by a guy with a gun?  D.L. was one of my favorite characters and he had a lot of room to develop.  And what’s up with Sylar?  If the Company could catch him and inject him with a power-neutralizing virus, why wouldn’t they just put a gun to his head instead of leave him in the viral equivalent of a James Bond death trap?

But I think the worst thing season 2 does is explain things.  The best part of season 1 was that you knew little more than the characters, which wasn’t a lot.  I liked it better when all we knew was that there’s a big evil organization and bad stuff will happen if the heroes don’t do something.  There are no major mysteries hanging over season 2.  We know pretty much everything from the word go.

Season 3, volume 3 was better in this aspect, introducing Pinehearst (although in terms of plot, this is basically Primatech with different wallpaper).  I liked the new characters who were introduced in this installment.  They all had lots of potential, especially Daphne.  Unfortunately, every single one of them is killed off.  Of the characters introduced in season 3, only Tracy made it to the current season, and even she had to endure a comic book death.  I don’t know why the Heroes creators are so opposed to change.  There’s nothing wrong with a changing cast.  It keeps things fresh.  Using the same characters over and over just makes us bored.

Season 3 is probably the second strongest installment.  I prefered volume 3 because it’s more colorful, but I liked volume 4.  It had a dark and tense tone, admittedly not the best way to go with a superhero show, but for the most part it worked.  It was a lot  better than season 2.  At least we found out where the hell Micah had been.  But what really stood out for me in season 3 was the character of Sylar.

Season 3 may have been  Sylar’s best season as a character.  He’s a murderer. But now he wants to recover.  And in the future he’s a dad who likes waffles.  Now he’s just fighting an addiction.  And all of a sudden he’s Pete’s bro, only he’s really not.  And now he’s dating the electro chick.  And he can take power’s without killing, but he actually prefers to kill.  And then he’s some sort of super powered Jigsaw.  Now he takes on an apprentice but ditches him.  And now he wants find his dad, who actually killed his mom.  And now he’s Danko’s B.F.F., but he’s doesn’t know who he is anymore.  And now he just wants power and lots of it.  It’s some very good characterization, which makes it a shame what they did with him this season.

After the first few episodes, I was ready to declare season 4, volume 5 (or whatever they’re calling it) the best since season 1.  However, I’m beginning to doubt it’s quality.  The twists in this series are becoming predictable, even the one’s they haven’t tried yet.  The second Gretchen became Claire’s roommate, I literally thought to myself “she might be a lesbian.”  So either I’m gaining powers too, or the writers need to step up their game.

This was immediately followed by the realization that Gretchen was going to die or fall off the face of the earth.  Seriously, how many love interests are going to be arbitarily written out of the show?  All the main characters haavI know a key aspect of the characters is their humanity but you know what else is a human?  Maintaining a damn relationship.  Every main character has had at least 2 love interests in past seasons.  Claire has had almost one per season.  Several have died.  Many have simply walked away and been completely forgotten about (remember when Nathan had a wife? Me neither!) Two are currently trapped in time.  Matt is the only one still with his season 1 significant other, and I don’t see that lasting long.  This is a shame, because I feel a lot can be done with that sound wave woman Peter’s been eyeing.

Heroes seems to be unable to keep their villians either.  Daniel Linderman, Maury Parkman, Arthur Petrelli, Knox, Danko, Adam Monroe, and Elle Bishop are just a few perfectly good baddies who have been killed off in favor of milking the character of Sylar as much as possible.  And I think I’m pretty much over Sylar as a character.  During the first four seasons he was always dealing with something that made him three dimensional and you could sympathize with him thus.  The writers apparently ran out of ideas towards the end of the last season, and made his motivation sheer determination towards being a bastard, which makes for poor characterization.  I thought for a minute that they realized this last episode and were going to kill him off.  But no, it turns out they’re just killing Nathan, who was already dead and was one of the least interesting characters anyway.

What happened to the old days when the villians were interesting?  Linderman, Petrelli, Monroe, and Danko were all villians who thought they were heroes.  They believed they were making the world a better place, and that’s what made them so interesting and realistic.  Now were stuck with Samuel Sullivan, a pretender.  For the first few episodes I was ready to declare him my favorite villian in the series.  He was an original character with good intentions but flexible morals.  Now we learn that he’s nothing more than a megalomaniac!  He still gives the touching speach, but they’ve lost all their effect because we know he doesn’t believe a word of it.

By the way, remember how Nathan told the US government all about people with abilities last season?  Well, you’re the only one.  Yes, after the events of last season, everyone involved who didn’t have enough screen time to make it into the next season acquired an inexplicaple case of amnesia.  Even Matt Parkman, who appeared on national television as a terrorist with a bomb strapped to his chest, found it surprisingly easy to return to his job as a damn POLICE OFFICER.  Actually, this is not the first case of cross-season amnesia.  If you remember, during the second season Matt and Mohinder jointly adopted Molly Walker, giving the show an uneasy feeling of homoeroticism.  But after season 2, there’s absolutely no sign of the girl, and Matt and Mohinder seem largely unconcerned (presumably due to them being distracted by their new, over-compensatingly hot chicks).  And while I’m on the subject of cross-season inconsistencies, where the hell is Monica.  You killed off D.L. and Niki, two of my favorite characters, in order to characterize her.  The least you can do is use her in the story.  As it stands, that entire subplot seems absolutely pointless.  I mean, they’re clearly not using Micah anytime soon.  It makes you wonder why they didn’t just tell us that the three of them lived happily ever after an introduced some new characters in season 2.

They attempted to replace Niki with Tracy, her sluttier test tube twin (a plot point that has been basically abandoned), and I suppose that is working out fairly well.  Although it feels like they just wanted to use the character of Jessica without being anchored by Niki’s life.

I like what they did with the Matt/Sylar thing (I almost thought a main character would actually die), but for the most part, Volume 5 gives you nothing but more stories about characters you already know inside and out.  If you like the characters like I do, that may be enough to keep watching, but it becomes increasingly obvious that the characters are dried up.  There’s no more “who am I?” interest to be had, although the writers try desperately to make you think otherwise.  The fact is, we already know who the good guy and the bad guy is, and we have a pretty good idea of who’s gonna win.

All in all I’m left wishing for the long lost days of season 1.

Now that that’s been said…

This crap sucks!  You know, I’m actually glad some thoughtful producers took it upon themselves to make a movie that consolidates everything I hate about modern action movies into one convenient pile of crap.  Now instead of listing all the things that bug me I can just pick 300 apart and you’ll pretty much get the message.

The characters are as good a place to start as any.  I don’t think they could get more one dimensional if they were all paper cutouts.  The Spartans are all generic, selflessly heroic badasses with a puzzling distaste for there primary weapons.  The Persians are all stupidly evil and faceless, so it’s OK to kill them in the most brutal way imaginable.  Leonidas is generic action hero #2347 and therefore eats daggers for breakfast.  His wife, Gorgo, is an utterly sexist depiction of women who seems a little to willing to sleep with Spartan officials.  Xerxes is overly effeminite, just in case he wasn’t evil enough to make you manly men hate him.  The sad part is, I feel like these characters could have been decent if they had been fleshed out a little more, but the film was too busy showing us gore and naked women.

I take issue with movies selling themselves on sex and violence.  There’s nothing wrong with having them in the movie, but they shouldn’t be the main attraction.  It’s like trying to make a cake entirely of frosting.  Someone’s bound to like it, but you’re only hurting them in the end, and everyone else will think you’ve both lost it.  300 is the definition of what I like to call “gore porn.”  The action scenes are not so much a part of the plot as they are extended “let’s-see-how-graphically-I can-kill-this-guy” sessions.  Action should blend seemlessly with the story in an action movie (see: The Dark Knight).  If you keep them separate from each other, the audience doesn’t have any emotional stake in the battle’s outcome and it ceases to be interesting.

Clearly, 300 has a very specific audience in mind: sweary, hormone-driven, Halo 3-playing young men.  That’s why it’s so perplexing  that all the Spartans are overly-muscular naked men.  Did they just forget who they were marketing to, or did Snyder honestly think a bunch of teenage boys would enjoy staring at a dude’s g-string for 2 hours?  I’ve seen a lot of logical problems in movies, but I never thought I’d see something that would make me wonder if the director’s mind didn’t have a plothole.  And remember how this was based on a historical event?  I’m pretty sure the most elite military force of the time had the presence of mind to equip their soldier with more armor than a modern day stripper.

The writing is sub-par at best.  Those awesome quotes that everyone keeps repeating stick out like a sore thump in the midst of dialogue, and I get the impression they were put there just for the sake of quoting.  The plot is cut and dry.  I guess the only redeeming trait of this movie is the special effects and fight choreography, and you know what?  I’ve seen better.

The whole movie also has this artsy feel to it which tells me it’s trying to say something, but the only message I could make out was “killing stuff is cool.”

And you know the worst part?  I heard they’re gonna make a sequel.  How?  Everyone died!  And besides, it’s a movie based on a book that has no sequel!  Did we learn nothing from Jurassic Park 3?  How in hell did something so awful get so popular?

Actually, scratch that paragraph.  I want to see the sequel.  I’m curious just how horrible a movie can get.

Bottom line: This sucks.  Don’t watch it.

That’s not to say it’s perfect.  I have a number of complaints I’d like to get out of the way quickly.  First off, there’s not much in the way of a plot.  It pretty much drops four people in the middle of a zombie apocalypse and says “have fun.”  This probably isn’t bad, since it makes room for the action and comedy.  And because the parts where they tried to form a plot came across as stale and generally unneeded.  When Tallahassee taught Little Rock how to shoot, is there anyone who didn’t predict she would use that very technique to save the day?  There were several trite moments like this, and they weren’t bad, they just felt sort of forced and unneccesary.

It also felt a little bit stretched, which feels weird to say given it’s disappointingly short running time.  I got the impression that the writers had a bunch of great zombie jokes and action sequences in mind but didn’t really have a way to connect them.  Of course, in a post-apocalypse zombie film there’s not really a whole lot you can do in the way of story development other than “they try not to die.”

The movie also suffers from minor logical plotholes, which are my moviegoing pet peeves.  Why were Witchita and Little Rock hanging out in the back of a random zombie-infested grocery store? Just on the off chance two guys would come with guns to steal?  And if the entire world was taken over by zombies, where are they?  They travel long distances (on surprisingly clear, wreckage-free roads) and don’t appear to encounter more than two zombies at a time.  They even drove through downtown LA and ran into less than a dozen zombies.

Well, now you can tell I’m nitpicking.  Zombieland is a great movie with a lot of funny jokes and surprisingly awesome action sequences.  Columbus’s “Rules for Surviving Zombieland” are fun and always entertaining.  While none of the jokes really stood out for me, I did keep up a more or less constant stream of laughter.  The cinematography is beautiful and the style is brilliant.  There’s an awesome cameo half way through that I won’t ruin in case you haven’t seen it.  Woody Harrelson was made for this role as the gun-toting, twinkie-obsessed redneck, Tallahassee.  The whole cast had great chemistry, but he really seemed to stand out.

Actually, the characters were the highlight of the movie for me.  I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but they seem to be covertly poking fun at the zombie nerds who are into this sort of thing.  Tallahassee is the kind of gun-wielding badass that zombie nerds dream of being.  Columbus is the kind of socially inept recluse that zombie nerds are.  Witchita is the kind of strong, dark, hot girl that they dream of hooking up with, and Little Rock is the kind of adorable little kid with a shotgun that many people would love to have around during a zombie apocalypse.  OK, the Little Rock argument was a little weak, but I still think I have something.

Bottom line: Zombieland is a fun movie that does a lot of interesting things, and I look forward to buying it when it comes out on DVD.

I never watched the original movies or television shows.  I was one of the “cool nerds” who watched Star Wars.  If nothing else, this will insure that I have an unbiased view on this summer’s praised action blockbuster.

I went in expecting a thrill ride of an action movie with a great plot, and to an extent, that’s what I got.  Unfortunately, I can’t give them points for the plot, because half of it was ripped off the original Star Wars movies (I chose to take this as an act of surrender from the Trekkies to us Star Wars fans).  Misunderstood hero from a farming community.  Bar fight broken up by mysterious mentor. Giant, planet-destroying space ship.  A tense rivalry friendship between the two male leads; interested in the same woman.  Good guys blow up evil ship.  Metals all around.  End credits.

I found this unbearably disappointing.  I was under the impression that the Star Trek franchise was known for having original and clever stories, and I was really looking forward to that in an action movie.  As it stands, its a Star Wars clone minus the originality.

I’m sure the characterizations were great for old fans, but the film didn’t spend enough time on it.  Kirk was a cookie-cutter generic action hero and I don’t even remember what the Russian dude’s name was.  The villains were decent, but they all look the same so you couldn’t tell the boss from the cronies.

I got the impression that I was missing many inside jokes and references.  I don’t know why filmmakers feel the need to reinvent franchises that ended years ago (or at least should have).  They had a great run, but the last Star Trek movie was in 2002.  Seven years is too long for a sequel.  And the first Star Trek movie was in the seventies!  Don’t they know every franchise dissolves into crappiness if left alive too long (see: Star Wars)?  No franchise I can think of has maintained more or less consistent quality after the third movie with the possible exception of the Harry Potter franchise (and they were based on a series of books, so they already had decent plots to work from).  Franchises are not meant to go on forever, and Star Trek has more than run its course by anyones standards.

Understand, Star Trek is not a bad movie.  It’s actually extremely well put together.  The special effects blend seemlessly with the action, and it doesn’t have that Transformers crap where you can’t tell what the hell’s going on.  So it may be crap, but at least it’s a good looking piece of crap.  Zachary Quinto’s Spock was the best part of the movie for me.  I’m a Heroes fan, so I thought I would just see him as Sylar, but that wasn’t the case.  He gave an awesome portrayal of an interesting character.  In fact, I might even rent the older movies just to see more Spock (but probably not).

Bottom line: Star Trek is a fun movie without a single challenging thought that I might watch if I wanted something mindless to unwind to.

By the way, earlier I implied that Star Trek was a sequel to the older franchise, and it is in a way.  It basically destroys the old timeline and not-so-subtly promises a sequel and a new, presumably ”better” series of films.  This may be a minor complaint, but such a move seems like a total kick in the balls to fans of the old.

I’m a big fan of the Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories, so this would be the second franchise of great importance to me that Mr. Downey has headed (lending credence to my theory that he is somehow stalking me), and I could not picture anyone else in the role.  Based purely on the trailers, Mr. Downey seems to have mastered every quirk of the famous sleuth, from his violin and martial arts to his intense focus to his irritability and general lack of social tact.  The other actors seem to fit their roles well, and I’m particularly interested in seeing more of Jude Law’s Watson.

They seem to have blended action and comedy relatively well, which is no small feat.  Obviously Hollywood increased the action a great deal from the original stories (I don’t remember very many explosions in Doyle’s stories) and that worries me a little bit.  Also, I’m a little fearful about how the love interest will play into the story.  Holmes was never concerned with women and retired single (only Irene Adler ever impressed him, and she was more like a rival mind).  The relationship with Alder in the film could be potentially disasterous to the movies quality.  I wonder if Hollywood will ever realize that we don’t need a romantic subplot in every movie, particularly with a characte like Holmes?

But despite these worries, I’m still excited.  I mean, its a Robert Downey, Jr. movie!  That alone should be worth the price of admission.

And while I’m on the subject, I think Iron Man 2 will be awesome.  If you haven’t noticed, recent superhero movie franchises seem to follow a certain trend.  The first movie is pretty good (Spider-Man, X-men, Batman Begins), the second movie is fantastic (Spider-Man 2, X2: X-Men United, The Dark Knight), and the third movie royally sucks (Spider-Man 3, X-Men: The Last Stand, Batman 3).

And yes, I know they didn’t make the third Batman movie yet, but it’s inevitable isn’t it?

I have some things to say about the recent movies I’ve seen (Zombieland, Paranormal Activity, 2012).  They’re all original concepts, and I liked them to an extent.  Most movies these days are just treading old ground.  Many big name movies are just old franchises being “reimagined.”

There are some upcoming films I’m quite excited about.  Avatar appears to be an original concept, although I fear its big budget may have hurt it.  I’m also excited about The Avengers film, Sherlock Holmes, Kick-Ass, and Iron Man 2 even though they’re all based on books and comics.  I love superhero movies, and I’m an big fan of Sherlock Holmes.  I’m positive Batman 3 will be terrible, due to dominant trends I’ve seen in superhero movies.

But, who knows?  I guess we’ll see what happens?

Any movies you want me to talk about?