What movie do you think will win Best Picture in 82nd Academy Awards?

[rocketpig]

tarheel91 said:

rocketpig said:

tarheel91 said:

HappySqurriel said:

I saw Avatar last night and I was really unimpressed. It’s (essentially) a heavy handed and preachy retelling of the story of Pocahontas, that doesn’t bother with creating a decent motive for the antagonist’s actions, and a tacked-on Hollywood ending; with the exception of a couple of characters the acting and dialogue was only adequate, and the directing and cinematography was very beige.

I’m not trying to say that the movie was bad, it was a fairly well paced movie with good special effects and plenty of action; but I would say that outside of the effects categories any awards it wins would be more a statement of weak competition than anything else. There are movies like The Wizard of Oz which were visual spectacles when they were released that people are still interested in 100 years after they’re released; and a movie like Avatar will have a massive box-office, great DVD sales, and get decent TV play for the next handful (5 to 10) years and then be forgotten because it is so unoriginal and has been done so many times (so much better) before.

To everyone who tries to compare this to Pocahontas, I ask them this.  How does the whole becoming a Na'vi (more generally, becoming one of the native people) fit in with Pocohontas theme and message?  Oh wait, it doesn't.  A lot of people formed opinions about this movie before going in, and were thus blinded to everything that showed otherwise (confirmation bias, for anyone who's taken psychology).

Generally, yes, it's similar to Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, Heart of Darkness (although less similar in this case), etc.  However, we all know everything can be made to look similar if you back off enough.

Let me ask you this: did any of the aforementioned titles make any connections to today (No, I'm not talking about the whole destroying the earth thing)?  Did any of the aforementioned movies look at anything beyond a single case of imperialism?  Did any of the aforementioned titles focus more on creating a living world and culture that people cared about above all else?  Did any of the aforementioned movies create a scientific, relatable explanation for the native system of beliefs?  Did any of the aforementioned movies have a white man decide to give up his whiteness, and become a native, effectively suggesting that the white man's way of life is inferior?

No, they didn't.  Once you start to consider such things, you start to understand that the ending wasn't "tacked on," the reason why the antagonists and their motives were so generic, etc.

Let me be clear, I don't think this is the best movie ever, but I think it deserves a lot more credit than a lot of people want to give it.

You're too hung up on details and are missing the point of what a "theme" is... It doesn't necessarily have to go into such detail as the person physically transforming into the "alien" race, it could be a psychological transformation and retain the same effect. You're trying to differentiate Avatar because of aliens and physical attributes when the actual meat of the story is in the mental changes that occur within the protagonist, a theme which has been done a million times in the past, whether it be aliens or native peoples or a foreign race. Avatar's physical tranformation is NO DIFFERENT from a thematic standpoint than Dances with Wolves or Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now. Each character "shed their skin" in a way, making the physical (sci-fi based) transformation in Avatar a moot point that really brought nothing extra to the story other than a 10 ft. blue creature that James Cameron could so beautifully animate.

Anyway, back on topic, The Hurt Locker was by far the best movie I saw in the past year. The sheer terror displayed by those characters and how real everything felt was very unnerving. It did a great job of putting the audience in the shoes of those soldiers.

RocketPig.  I've seen you get pissed when people do this to you.  Why are you doing this to me?  You counter one point out of several, and pretend like my entire answer has been answered.  That's not good debating.  You know that.  You seemed to misunderstand the one point you did respond to, as well (or you were just constructing a straw man argument).

My point is that there's a marked difference between simply switching sides and becoming one of a group.  In the former, the white, western, whatever person still remains in many respects seperate from the other culture.  Generally, there's a sense of his superiority maintained (not explicitly stated, of course) throughout the movie, novel, or whatever.  With Jake's becoming one of the Na'vi, he's completely relinquishing all ties to his human (symbolically Western) way of life and beliefs.  He's implying through this decision that the other culture is something not just to be respected (as is the case in the former situation) but that is superior to his own.  The physical transformation only serves to underscore the completeness of such a transformation (it was not the important difference you made it seem like I was presenting it as).

Yes, this theme has been done a thousand times,* but so has every other theme.  There's no such thing as an original theme or story.  What's unique is the way that story is told and the way those themes are presented.  I pointed out 4 ways (out of many) that Avatar was unique in that regard.  It's your turn to explain to me how all of them weren't really unique.

*Why don't you rag on Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, or whatever for being unoriginal by your definition as well?  They were hardly the first to touch on these themes.  Heart of Darkness was written over a century ago.

The reason I didn't respond to your other points is because I don't think they matter, honestly. The core of the story, while offering slightly different details than other movies that have handled similar themes, is pretty bland. There isn't much room for any kind of interpretation, which is my main problem with the movie. The villians and most of the protagonists are horribly cookie-cutter and I found no reason to question anything in the movie. It was really base-level stuff and I expected more out of it, frankly.

And have I said a single thing about Dances With Wolves or Pocahontas? I think Pocahontas was a piece of shit and Dances With Wolves a pretty good movie,  maybe a little better than Avatar. That was due to the character interaction and questions of what was "right", which I thought the movie handled better.

The shining example of this theme in film is Apocalypse Now, which was outstanding on nearly every level. By the end of the movie, the audience ends up questioning nearly every character and their ambitions, which is what a film like that should do, IMO.