Cameron is an easy guy to hate; his hubris — perhaps the only one in the world that can literally be described as “Titanic”; his pronouncements about the future of cinema; his preference to be seen as an obsessive world-builder and not a movie director; that horrible scene in True Lies. And the hype about Avatar was pretty nauseous.

But the stuff I was expecting to hate wasn’t as bletcherous as expected; the stuff I knew I was going to have to endure didn’t last as long as I feared; and the visuals and Cameron’s direction of same were absolutely extraordinary. I have not enjoyed 3D in the past, and tend to think of it as less the next phase of evolution in cinema as a cynical and desparate attempt by the studios to combat piracy and lure the public back into the theaters. Also, the eye doctor cabal.

But the 3D in Avatar is well executed as in no 3D movie I’ve seen so far; there aren’t many STABBY SPEARS or GIANT FLIGHTS OF ARROWS or YAWNING CHASMS; it’s just another brush that Cameron uses to paint his pictures with. In that sense, yes, I suppose Avatar is the future of cinema, but it’s simultaneously less irritating to me and of less import to Cameron than expected.

The plot is a shambles; the movie could not possibly wear it’s Democratic Party fundraiser politics any more obviously on its sleeve — the treatment of the military reminds one of nothing so much as John Kerry’s tooth-grinding speech accepting the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination; the dialog is eye-wateringly dumb when it’s not NARRATED BY CAPTAIN EXPOSITION. It’s certainly less ethically compromised than Dances With Wolves or The Last Samurai, but it shares to some degree in their frankly racist belief in the power of ONE WHITE MAN to save an ancient culture by becoming a hybrid, superior in all respects, learning in two weeks everything they know and then leading them into battle.

But Cameron has always been very good on gender politics (the female characters are all strong and relatively interesting, with the emphasis on “relatively”), and the movie is, for being eleventeen hours long, remarkably well paced. Giovanni Ribisi plays Paul Reiser reasonably well; Stephen Lang makes a great villain; it’s got Sigourney Weaver in it and she climbs out of a pod in her underwear!

But enough said about the people. The visualization of Pandora is where it’s at, and is honestly the only reason to see the movie. Therefore, I am happy to report that it is astonishing. The Massive stuff (Weta Digital’s crowd software) is used to great effect; the new motion capture techniques, improved since Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy II, are impressive in helping to bridge the Uncanny Valley, albeit trading a real advance in facial expressiveness for a more limited physicality, although that could be just that Sam Worthington is no Doug Jones.

The world as envisioned is convincing enough, although there’s a bunch of stuff that irritated the ecology nerd in me. While the look of the flora and fauna is well-integrated, and there’s nothing too terribly jarring, I was not impressed by the idea that everything has six limbs except the people. I question the ability of a huge herbivore horse creature to derive enough energy to carry a twelve foot tall humanoid at 30mph from drinking nectar. Even in low-grav the flight seems improbable. Some stuff is too solid seeming for being low-grav (giant flower rhinos?); and yet, the low-grav effects aren’t explored where they might be interesting (the humans are just as weaksauce when faced with alien monsters as on LV-426, for instance). And what’s Cameron’s obsession with waldos, anyway? But never mind. I’m a nerd.

When it comes right down to it, it’s a movie that ends with a giant set-piece of dinosaurs fighting helicopters. My 38 year old self surrendered to my 12 year old self and just sat back, grinning.

Highly recommended; sure, it’s a different movie than The Man Without A Past or The Eel but so what? A man ought not live by esoteric foreign fare alone.

Pretty stock stuff, but well executed, as one would expect from Raimi. Alison Lohman is a very appealing protagonist; the plot is nicely put together, ad the ending is great, although telegraphed pretty obviously.

People have said it’s a “return to form”, but I would argue Raimi’s style has been evolving pretty consistently, big-budget spectaculars or no. Certainly nothing in “Drag Me To Hell” would have been out of place in “Evil Dead” or “Darkman”, but you can say that about a lot of “Spiderman”, too.

It’s also nice and short, always a positive. Rent it if you like Sam Raimi pictures, or reasonably gruey spooky supernatural tales of horror.

It’s stylishly put together and reasonably compelling, at least so far. There are some striking visuals, and the lead (Clovis Cornillac) has a nice physicality to him. The plot is not particularly crystalline, but the limited color and light palette and particularly the sound design lend the movie a nice distinctive aesthetic. Being French, there is also a dash of nudity, and a distressing sex scene that is hard to parse.

The overwhelming aesthetic is that of a survival horror video game. But it’s not bad. I’d recommend a rental if you like strange non-Hollywood sci-fi.

I don’t share my favorite movie critic’s fear and loathing of Guy Ritchie (hey, I liked Snatch well enough), but I was concerned about this one. I’m no Holmesian or whatever the hell they call themselves, so fidelity to source material wasn’t particularly important to me (although is there really so much single-stick in the stories?), and I quite like Robert Downey Jr.

The problems going in for me were Jude Law, who can be as dead a fish as ever flopped onto the screen; the slow-mo stuff in the trailer; and the constant quippery. Happily, Law was excellent — he played the respectable Army doctor straight, but with a wonderful sense of timing with the down-market Robert Downey; the slow-mo stuff actually is a useful cinematic device; and the relationship between Holmes and Watson is so well acted and developed that the quippery works.

I would have cut McAdams, whose character appears to be only there to reassure us that Holmes is straight, and it goes on a bit too long, but the balance between comedy and action is well handled, Eddie Marsen and Mark Strong are both great, and the evocation of the time and place is very well done. They’ve also set up the whole business for a sequel in the most obvious way possible; cut the McAdams and about 25 minutes, and it could be fantastic.

Until then, I highly recommend it.

Very, very good. Slightly longer than necessary, but a great central performance from Damon; good work from Bakula and Joel McHale; and, of course, the gripping real life story of international conspiratorial lysine price fixing! Be still, my beating heart!

Also of note is the slightly anachronistic music by Marvin Hamlisch, which was slightly disorientating, in a good way. I have to admit that I generally prefer the conventional Hollywood style work that Soderbergh does (The Limey, Out Of Sight, Erin Brockovich) to his more obtuse efforts (Solaris, Che, Bubble).

Ricky Gervais is surely a genius; but this movie is baggy, overlong, and tedious. Too, Jennifer Garner is as dead a fish as you can find for a romantic lead. The idea is never fully explored, and everything just sort of goes all saggy and moist about half-way through. Skip it, and rent Ghost Town instead; superior in concept and execution, and with a much more interesting cast. Greg Kinnear was excellent, and Tea Leoni is far and away a more gifted comic and romantic actress than Mrs. Ben Affleck.

Stay away.

We walked into this little gem with basically no expectations. It turned out to be excellent, much funnier and more gruey than I had expected. Horror comedy seems like a particularly difficult combination to get right, but I felt that Zombieland struck pretty much the right tone. Also much in its favor is an 81 minute running time. Not a lot of fat to be cut out of this one.

My only concern is that Jesse Eisenberg will end up typecast in -land movies; he was great in this, and really great in Adventureland, but I’m not sure how many more mopey over-educated Jews he needs to play in movies that take place in theme parks.

With that caveat: Highly recommended.

I liked this rather a lot; it’s a good natured documentary about some Canadian metal lifers who were reasonably big in the early ‘80s and have, in defiance of God and man, continued to make mediocre metal records for thirty years while living the lives of decent working-class Canadians.

I was struck by a resemblance to Some Kind Of Monster; the dynamic between Lips and Robb Reiner (Anvil) was much the same as that between Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield; except that whereas the latter live the life of the untrammeled Id; the Anvil guys are basically just a couple of Canadians. They don’t have the corporate structure that gives Ulrich and Hetfield a scaffolding in which they can freely be abusive to each other. Lips and Robb just have to sort of figure it out like any two friends.

This was excellent, if a little light-weight. Much of the movie is constructed around the narratives of This Is Spinal Tap, and the haplessness of the band probably overstated to some degree. It’s forgettable, but I admit I misted up a bit during “Metal On Metal” in front of 2500 dutifully excited Japanese.

Recommended.

I like Jason Statham fine, and I have no real problem with lousy movies. But right off the bat, I discovered Issues, mostly to do with liquefaction, and a poster of The Great Helmsman in the backalley surgery? Unlikey. But the problems continued.

What aesthetic it has (no different from the first picture) is clearly informed by video games, for better or (more likely) worse. What it really reminds me of is Timur Bekmambetov’s Nightwatch and Daywatch pictures, with a less interesting sensibility — rather than a dissociative world of post-Soviet Russian paranoia and Orthodoxy, expressed as a fable of vampires and ghosts, Crank 2 is the fever dream of a 10 year old priapic crank addict, weaned on extreme amateur pornography and Gears Of War 2.

The most pressing thing you’ll notice, then, is that this movie, while at first sort of amusingly puerile, quickly becomes deeply, deeply unpleasant. For starters, the scene where the stripper has her breast implants shot out. Too, Bai Ling makes an appearance. Against her, all incoherence and plotlessness fade quietly into irrelevance. I’ve never been one to complain about violence and sex in a movie (far from it) but the strictly punitive nature of the latter and the incompetent editing of the former just blend into an incomprehensible sludge of tits and guts, rapidly becoming so insubstantial as to lose any power to offend.

Avoid. A real fucking turkey.