Tag: James Cameron

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Film Features Film/TV

Now Playing In Memphis: Parties, Planes, and 3 Women

Normally, this is the time for the midwinter blues at the multiplex, but 2023 is starting strong, thanks to our robot friend M3GAN. Here’s my full review of this killer flick.

Stepping up to challenge M3GAN is a reboot of the cult 1990 hip hop comedy classic House Party produced by baller supreme, LeBron James. To answer your first question, yes, Kid N’ Play are in it. So are Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne, and a whole house full of celebrities who show up when cleaners Kevin (Jacob Latimore) and Damon (Tosin Cole) hijack King James’ crib for an epic throwdown. 

Gerald Butler is Brodie, a pilot who crash lands in the Philippines with a full load of passengers in Plane. He soon discovers that the jungle is ruled by a feral, anti-government militia who takes his survivors hostage, hoping to get big ransoms from their families. Bodie must enlist a convicted murderer (Luke Cage’s Mike Colter) who was being extradited on his plane to help rescue the passengers. Beatings ensue.  

In Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, the cutlass-armed kitty cat from Shrek returns with Antonio Banderas in the lead voice role as a swashbuckler on a mission to restore eight of his nine lives. But Florence Pugh as Goldilocks, the leader of the Three Bears crime family, wants the Wishing Star, too. The DreamWorks film was nominated for a Best Animated Feature Golden Globe. 

Never bet against James Cameron, they say. And they’re right! Avatar: The Way of Water recently topped Top Gun: Maverick as 2022’s biggest box office draw, and it’s quickly closing in on the $2 billion mark. It helps that there’s actually a decent story to go with the next-level visual effects. If you’re going to see this one, make sure it’s the IMAX 3D version, and go soon!

At Black Lodge on Sunday is a triple feature of 90’s comedy, including Amy Heckerling’s 1995 classic Clueless. Like, duh!

On Thursday, Jan. 19, the Crosstown Arts film series presents Robert Altman’s 3 Women. The director’s follow-up to his seminal improv comedy Nashville is based on a vivid dream Altman had. Starring Shelly Duvall in her greatest role, and the legend Sissy Spacek before she was legendary, the mostly scriptless film owes some of its psychological complexity to the third woman, Janice Rule, who had just completed her PhD, and went on to retire from acting and become a practicing psychiatrist in Hollywood.

See you at the movies!

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Film Features Film/TV

Avatar: The Way of Water

Jake Sully in 20th Century Studios' AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. ©2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

It took George Miller 18 years to shepherd Mad Max: Fury Road from pre-production to release. He went down blind technological alleys; wrote, produced, and then canceled an anime version; and went through multiple Maxes and Furiosas. But the false starts and revisions paid off — Fury Road was the best film of the 2010s, and arguably the greatest action movie of all time. 

James Cameron’s been cooking his sequel to 2009’s Avatar for 13 years. The Way of Water was originally scheduled to bow in the summer of 2014, but underwater motion capture photography, which had never been attempted before, turned out to be much harder than the director anticipated. Then came the pandemic. 

Miller used his time to refine Fury Road down to its essence, assembling a stripped-down hot rod of a film that goes full throttle for two hours. The years of delay had the opposite effect on Cameron. His original idea for an Avatar trilogy expanded into a pentalogy, and TWOW is a bladder-bursting 192 minutes long — comparable to the running time of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King but with fewer endings. 

We return to Pandora to find that just about the same amount of time has passed there as in real life. Jake (Sam Worthington), the runaway space marine, has married Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and now permanently inhabits his blue Na’vi body. He’s the chief of the tribe, and they’re raising quite a brood: two sons, Neteyam (Jamie Flatters) and Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), and their daughter Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss). They’re also raising Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the Na’vi daughter of the avatar of the late Dr. Grace Augustine (also Sigourney). Who Kiri’s father is, or how any of that works, biologically speaking, is left a mystery for future installments. In the midst of all the techno-wizardry, using mo-cap to empower Sigourney Weaver to play her own teenage daughter turns out to be Cameron’s greatest stroke of genius.

Two Sigourney Weavers meet in Avatar: The Way of Water.

The strangest member of the mixed Sully clan is Spider (Jack Champion), the biological son of Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), Jake’s former commanding officer who died during Avatar’s final battle. Spider was abandoned on Pandora after the humans withdrew and was adopted by the Sullys. 

But Col. Quaritch’s story isn’t over. The Resource Development Administration (RDA) backed up his consciousness as a way of preventing the loss of institutional knowledge. The powers that be implanted his mind into a Na’vi clone. When the RDA returns to Pandora in force, clone Col. Quaritch is sent on a mission to hunt down the traitor Sully and terminate him with extreme prejudice. 

Had TWOW been released on time in 2014, the last decade at the movies would look very different. It’s quite possible the 3D revolution Avatar inspired wouldn’t have fizzled in the mid-teens. Cameron understands the technology better than anyone. Instead of just throwing things at the screen for cheap shocks, he uses 3D to add depth to scenes. Cameron’s goal is to be immersive. And with TWOW, “immersive” becomes literal. The director’s other obsession besides filmmaking is scuba diving, and one gets the impression that he would be perfectly content to jettison all of this annoying story and just take us on a 3D swim with space whales — and I’d watch it.

The Sully family meets the space whales, who are called “tulkuns,” when they flee for the coast to hide among the Metkayina, or “Reef People.” Na’vi who are aqua-green instead of turquoise, the Reef People are led by Tonowari (Cliff Curtis) and Ronal (Kate Winslet), who, like many female Na’vi in this film, is what I like to call “skinny-pregnant.” 

Kate Winslet and Cliff Curtis in Avatar: The Way of Water

Cameron’s ambition for his story is to become the Tolkien of the screenplay format, with Avatar as The Hobbit. Instead of Tolkien’s high European fantasy, Cameron’s idiom is the “hard” science fiction of the 1950s, with a sprinkling of New Wave influence (primarily from Ursula Le Guin, whose A Wizard of Earthsea provides inspiration for The Way of Water’s archipelago setting). Cameron’s gender politics blind spots and gung-ho militarism reflect the limitations of his chosen genre. On the other hand, TWOW is an anti-colonialist work, The Last of the Mohicans as eco-science fiction. Even though he’s a hero to his adoptive world, Sully and his kids are stuck between cultures. The human colonists are mostly craven xenophobes, but even the enlightened Na’vi carry their own prejudices. 

TWOW is big, unwieldy, and sometimes clunky. But it is also truly epic in a way very few films have ever been. After a long wait, James Cameron finally delivers the goods.

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Alita: Battle Angel

Today’s useful Hollywood term is “development hell.” That’s the phase of production between ostensible green lighting and the start of actual filming. When all goes well, that’s called “pre-production.” But when it doesn’t go well, you go to development hell, and you can stay there for a really, really long time. Mad Max: Fury Road is an extreme recent example. George Miller was stuck in development hell for 18 years — with production sidelined by things like 9/11, Mel Gibson’s legal problems, and an unexpected rainy season in the Australian desert. The result was one of the greatest sci-fi action films of all time. But the more common outcome of a stint in development hell is either fatal bastardization or outright cancellation.

James Cameron first decided to adapt Yukito Kishiro’s Alita: Battle Angel in 1999, the year after Titanic put the director on the “top of the world.” For the next two decades, Alita was going to be Cameron’s “next project.” But there were detours along the way, to the alien planet Pandora for Avatar in 2009, and then to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, because he just wanted to go there. Eventually, Cameron decided to devote his directorial time to making Avatar a franchise, and he recruited Robert Rodriguez to helm Alita. And now, two decades and an estimated $175 million later, Alita finally hit the IMAX screen.

Rosa Salazar (above) stars at the eponymous antimatter-powered hero in Alita: Battle Angel.

I’ll have to admit, I had pretty low expectations going in. Cameron has made some unassailable classics, but Avatar always felt to me more like a technology demonstration reel for the 3D cinematography and motion capture systems he developed than a fully realized film. Rodriguez, likewise, is a first-wave indie hero who has done some great work (Spy Kids is fabulously underrated), but seems to have been coasting for the last decade or so (Sin City: A Dame to Kill For should have rotted in development hell). My expectations, I’m happy to say, were greatly exceeded.

Alita (Rosa Salazar) awakens in what looks like a teenaged girl’s room. She has no memory of who or where she is, but her body, while human-shaped, is robotic. She discovers she is the pet project of Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz), a cyberneticist living in Iron City in 2563. Three hundred years ago, there was a terrible war that ended with The Fall, in which all of the Earth’s massive floating cities came crashing to the ground, killing billions. The only one that survived was Zalem, which now hangs over Iron City like a storm cloud filled with rich fascists. Iron City is their heavily populated junkyard, which they rule from afar with a murderously heavy hand. The only sure-fire way to get from the slums to Zalem is by becoming the grand champion of motorball, a kind of combination of NASCAR and soccer played by cyborg gladiators on inline skates.

Alita’s initial quest to find her identity takes us through the war between the United Republic of Mars technocracy and Earth’s oppressive oligarchy. The flying city built at the bottom of a broken space elevator, keeping the huddled masses in line with a fully privatized justice system where police have been replaced by bounty hunters, provides the class war metaphor. In a conflict-scarred world where cybernetic implants are ubiquitous, there’s a lively trade in stolen artificial body parts. This proves perilous for Alita, when it is revealed she is an advanced, antimatter-powered cyborg, and thus greatly in demand. It’s refreshing to see a new world, not based on a Marvel hero or Star Wars, that feels integrated and lived-in. The story, adapted from five years worth of manga and who knows how many script drafts in the last two decades, ends up feeling episodic as Alita explores the aspects of her fallen world.

Perhaps Alita would have felt more timely had it been made when originally planned, back when the kick-ass kawaii girl still felt Buffy fresh. Ghost in the Shell covered similar thematic territory, but Alita is superior in every way. Salazar is a natural, and, thanks partly to a patiently paced first act, she really grows on you by the time the stakes are the highest. Rodriguez avoids grossly sexualizing his heroine, even while she navigates her tragic teenage love story.

What holds the whole project together is the incredible visuals, which push Cameron’s 3D IMAX tech to its limits. Iron City has layers upon layers of architecture, built up as the centuries passed and technology advanced and retreated. Flashbacks take us to a spectacular battle on the lunar surface. If world building is your thing, Alita is your movie.

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Film Features Film/TV

Terminator Genisys

I’m going to risk my film-geek cred by going on record as not hating Arnold Schwarzenegger.

There are a lot of reasons I should hate him: Commando; Kindergarten Cop; Jingle All the Way; Mr. Freeze in Batman & Robin. Not to mention his years as Republican governor of California and his role in popularizing the Hummer as a civilian vehicle.

But there’s something about the guy that makes it impossible for me to banish him to Steven Seagal land. Maybe it’s the fact that he was downright brilliant in two of the best sci-fi/fantasy movies of the 1980s: Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator. Directors John Milius and James Cameron, respectively, knew how to use Schwarzenegger’s impressive physical presence and limited command of English to create their title characters. As his career (and English lessons) advanced, he revealed a self-deprecating sense of humor that his contemporaries Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme lacked. In 2015, I find myself intrigued by the prospect of his return as Conan, even though it won’t be in Milius’ long-rumored King Conan script.

But instead of seeing him wear Conan’s Crown of Iron, we got Terminator Genisys.

In these dark times of unnecessary sequels and reboots, Terminator Genisys stands out as particularly unnecessary. The original Terminator was a master class in low-budget exploitation sci-fi made by an acolyte of Roger Corman. The second was a lesson in what happens when a plucky underdog gets a big enough budget to fly a helicopter underneath a viaduct while a semi explodes in the background. Then things just got silly.

Okay, maybe the original premise of The Terminator is pretty silly: Skynet, artificial intelligence spontaneously generated from defense computers, initiates a planet genocide by starting a nuclear war in 1997. Then, 30 years later, when it is on the verge of defeat by a human resistance movement, it sends a robot in the form of Arnie back in time to kill a woman named Sarah Connor, whose son John would grow up to become the general who will defeat Skynet. It was pulpy fun and fairly self-consistent, since Skynet accidentally created its own nemesis when Kyle Reece, the soldier John Connor sent back in time to defend his mother ended up being his father.

But time war is a tricky thing. Once you start violating causation, you’ve opened up a major can of worms. Thor: The Dark World director Alan Taylor tries using Back to the Future, Part II as a template for the story, which sees Kyle Reese, now played by Jai Courtney, traveling back to save Sarah Connor (Game of Thrones‘ Emilia Clarke), only to find that the past ain’t what it used to be. Yet another terminator has been sent even further back into the past to terminate the terminator Reese was supposed to terminate. Who sent it? Nobody knows, but it has something to do with former Doctor Who Matt Smith, who plays yet another, higher-tech terminator that is Skynet made flesh. This is the kind of super-twisty plotting that could, in the hands of a genius science-fiction writer, pay off big time.

Unfortunately, Terminator Genisys doesn’t take its own plot seriously enough to build real tension. Instead, Schwarzenegger occasionally spouts a few lines of half-assed technobabble, and away we go to make bigger booms. Even as the story falls apart, it’s still burdened with leaden exposition. In place of Cameron’s relentless action-inventiveness, we get derivative hackery and callbacks to action sequences that were better staged 25 years ago. Clarke makes a brave run of it as Sarah, but she can’t live up to Linda Hamilton’s iconic heroine, and Courtney is too well-fed and bright-eyed to effectively channel the desperate future soldier Reese.

Watching old Schwarzenegger fight young Schwarzenegger is the best thing about the movie, but unlike Jurassic World, the action sequences aren’t good enough to help the audience ignore the shoddy characterization and indifferent plotting. The whole thing reeks of what it is: a dumbed-down version of a successful product created to exploit the overseas market. You can be forgiven if that gives you a sense of déjà vu.

Terminator Genisys
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The Sweet Thereafter

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Memphis Flyer (our first quarter quell, as it were), I have chosen my personal favorite film from each year since the Flyer began publication. Then, for each of those films, I unearthed and have excerpted some quotes from the review we ran at the time. — Greg Akers

1989: #1 Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch (#2 Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee)

“While all the scenes in Mystery Train are identifiable by anyone living west of Goodlett, their geographical relationship gets altered to a point where we start to trust Jarmusch more than our own memories.” — Jim Newcomb, March 8, 1990

“Filmed primarily at the downtown corner of South Main and Calhoun, Jarmusch does not use the Peabody Hotel, the Mississippi River, Graceland, or most of the other locations that the Chamber of Commerce would thrust before any visiting filmmaker. His domain concerns exactly that territory which is not regularly tread by the masses, and his treatment of Memphis is likely to open a few eyes.”
— Robert Gordon, March 8, 1990

1990: #1 Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese (#2 Reversal of Fortune, Barbet Schroeder)

“This may not be De Niro’s best-ever performance, but he’s got that gangster thang down pat. His accent is flawless, his stature is perfect, and, boy, does he give Sansabelt slacks new meaning.”
— The Cinema Sisters, September 27, 1990

1991: #1 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron (#2 The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme)

“Terminator 2 is an Alfa Romeo of a movie: pricey, sleek, fast, and loaded with horsepower. By comparison, the first Terminator was a Volkswagen. On the whole, I’d rather have a Volkswagen — they’re cheap and reliable. But, hey, Alfas can be fun too.” — Ed Weathers, July 11, 1993

1992: #1 Glengarry Glen Ross, James Foley (#2 The Last of the Mohicans, Michael Mann)

“Mamet’s brilliantly stylized look at the American Dream’s brutality as practiced by low-rent real estate salesmen who would put the screws to their mothers to keep their own tawdry jobs doesn’t relax its hard muscle for a moment. In the hands of this extraordinary cast, it is like a male chorus on amphetamines singing a desparate, feverish ode to capitalism and testosterone run amuck.”
— Hadley Hury, October 15, 1992

1993: #1 Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater (#2 Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg)

“Dazed and Confused is a brief trip down memory lane. The characters are not just protagonists and antagonists. They are clear representations of the folks we once knew, and their feelings are those we had years and years ago. Linklater doesn’t, however, urge us to get mushy. He is just asking us to remember.”
— Susan Ellis, November 4, 1993

1994: #1 Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino (#2 Ed Wood, Tim Burton)

“Even though Tarantino is known for his bratty insistence on being shocking by way of gratuitous violence and ethnic slurs, it’s the little things that mean so much in a Tarantino film — camera play, dialogue, performances, and music.”
— Susan Ellis, October 20, 1994

1995: #1 Heat, Michael Mann
(#2 Toy Story, John Lasseter)

“I’m sick of lowlifes and I’m sick of being told to find them fascinating by writers and directors who get a perverse testosterone rush in exalting these lives to a larger-than-life heroism with slow-motion, lovingly lingered-over mayhem and death, expertly photographed and disturbingly dehumanizing.”
— Hadley Hury, December 21, 1995

1996: #1 Lone Star, John Sayles
(#2 Fargo, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Although Lone Star takes place in a dusty Texas border town, it comes into view like a welcome oasis on the landscape of dog-day action films … Chris Cooper and Sayles’ sensitive framing of the performance produce an arresting character who inhabits a world somewhere between Dostoevsky and Larry McMurtry.”
— Hadley Hury, August 8, 1996

1997: #1 L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson (#2 The Apostle, Robert Duvall)

L.A. Confidential

“L.A. Confidential takes us with it on a descent, and not one frame of this remarkable film tips its hand as to whether we’ll go to hell or, if we do, whether we’ll come back. We end up on the edge of our seat, yearning for two protagonists, both anti-heroes … to gun their way to a compromised moral victory, to make us believe again in at least the possibility of trust.”

— Hadley Hury, October 2, 1997

1998: #1 Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg (#2 The Big Lebowski, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Spielberg is finishing the job he began with Schindler’s List. He’s already shown us why World War II was fought; now he shows us how. … Spielberg’s message is that war is horrifying yet sometimes necessary. And that may be true. But I still prefer the message gleaned from Peter Weir’s 1981 masterpiece, Gallipoli: War is stupid.” — Debbie Gilbert, July 30, 1998

1999: #1 Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson (#2 The End of the Affair, Neil Jordan)

“Magnolia is a film in motion; there’s a cyclical nature where paths are set that will be taken. It’s about fate, not will, where the bad will hurt and good will be redeemed.”
— Susan Ellis, January 13, 2000

2000: #1 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee (#2 You Can Count On Me, Kenneth Lonergan)

“Thrilling as art and entertainment, as simple movie pleasure, and as Oscar-baiting ‘prestige’ cinema. Early hype has the film being compared to Star Wars. … An even more apt comparison might be Singin’ in the Rain, a genre celebration that Crouching Tiger at least approaches in its lightness, joy, and the sheer kinetic wonder of its fight/dance set pieces.”
— Chris Herrington, February 1, 2001

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

2001: #1 A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg (#2 Amélie,
Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

“What happens when Eyes Wide Shut meets E.T.? What does the audience do? And who is the audience?”
— Chris Herrington, June 28, 2001

2002: #1 City of God, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund
(#2 Adaptation., Spike Jonze)

“The mise-en-scène of the film is neorealist, but the cinematography, editing, and effects are hyper-stylized, as if The Bicycle Thief had been reimagined through the post-CGI lens of Fight Club or The Matrix.”

— Chris Herrington, April 3, 2003

Lost in Translation

2003: #1 Lost in Translation, Sofia
Coppola (#2 Mystic River, Clint Eastwood)

“Lost in Translation is a film short on plot but rich with incident; nothing much happens, yet every frame is crammed with life and nuance and emotion. … What Coppola seems to be going for here is an ode to human connection that is bigger than (or perhaps just apart from) sex and romance.”
— Chris Herrington, October 2, 2003

2004: #1 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry
(#2 Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino)

“This is the best film I’ve seen this year and one of the best in recent memory. Funny, witty, charming, and wise, it runs the gamut from comedy to tragedy without falling into either farce or melodrama. Its insights into human loss and redemption are complicated and difficult, well thought out but with the illusion and feel of absolute spontaneity and authentic in its construction — and then deconstruction — of human feelings and memory.”
— Bo List, March 25, 2004

2005: #1 Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee (#2 Hustle & Flow, Craig Brewer)

“The film is a triumph because it creates characters of humanity and anguish, in a setup that could easily become a target for homophobic ridicule. Jack and Ennis are a brave challenge to the stereotyped image of homosexuals in mainstream films, their relations to their families and to each other are truthful and beautifully captured.” — Ben Popper, January 12, 2006

2006: #1 Children of Men,
Alfonso Cuarón (#2 The Proposition, John Hillcoat)

“As aggressively bleak as Children of Men is, it’s ultimately a movie about hope. It’s a nativity story of sort, complete with a manger. And from city to forest to war zone to a lone boat in the sea, it’s a journey you won’t want to miss.”
— Chris Herrington, January 11, 2007

2007 #1 Zodiac, David Fincher
(#2 There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson)

“[Zodiac is] termite art, too busy burrowing into its story and characters to bother with what you think.”
— Chris Herrington, March 8, 2007

2008: #1 Frozen River, Courtney Hunt (#2 The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan)

“Frozen River is full of observations of those who are living less than paycheck to paycheck: digging through the couch for lunch money for the kids; buying exactly as much gas as you have change in your pocket; popcorn and Tang for dinner. The American Dream is sought after by the dispossessed, the repossessed, and the pissed off.”
— Greg Akers, August 28, 2008

2009: #1 Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze (#2 Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron)

“I know how ridiculous it is to say something like, ‘Where the Wild Things Are is one of the best kids’ movies in the 70 years since The Wizard of Oz.’ So I won’t. But I’m thinking it.”
— Greg Akers, October 15, 2009

2010: #1 Inception, Christopher Nolan (#2 The Social Network,
David Fincher)

“Nolan has created a complex, challenging cinematic world but one that is thought through and whose rules are well-communicated. But the ingenuity of the film’s concept never supersedes an emotional underpinning that pays off mightily.”
— Chris Herrington, July 15, 2010

2011: #1 The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick (#2 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson)

“The Tree of Life encompasses a level of artistic ambition increasingly rare in modern American movies — Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood might be the closest recent comparison, and I’m not sure it’s all that close. This is a massive achievement. An imperfect film, perhaps, but an utterly essential one.”
— Chris Herrington, June 23, 2011

2012: #1 Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow (#2 Lincoln, Steven Spielberg)

“Zero Dark Thirty is essentially an investigative procedural about an obsessive search for knowledge, not unlike such touchstones as Zodiac or All the President’s Men. And it has an impressive, immersive experiential heft, making much better use of its nearly three-hour running time than any competing award-season behemoth.”
— Chris Herrington, January 10, 2013 

2013: #1 12 Years a Slave, Steve
McQueen (#2 Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón)

“Slavery bent human beings into grotesque shapes, on both sides of the whip. But 12 Years a Slave is more concerned with the end of it. McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley are black. It’s one of those things that shouldn’t be notable but is. If you consider 12 Years a Slave with The Butler and Fruitvale Station, you can see a by-God trend of black filmmakers making mainstream movies about the black experience, something else that shouldn’t be worth mentioning but is.”
— Greg Akers, October 31, 2013