Up In Air

So, This is the movie I'm most looking forward to this awards season. Juno was probably my favorite film of 2007, and Thank You For Smoking is one of my favorite satires of all time. Add in George Clooney, who's an actor with an inhuman amount of charisma. Even in bad movies Clooney is very watchable, and we have no hints that this will be a bad movie. This film appears to be a character study/comedy hybrid which is something we don't see very often. Usually character studies in Hollywood are part of an overly self important, super serious drama. Reitman's sharp comedic timing, and expert pacing should allow what could be a tiresome story about a loner learning the value of having relationships in his life. Of course I expect the script to have more depth than that, and I expect Clooney's character to be satisfyingly complex, but even if it was that tiresome Hollywood story, I expect I'd be entertained.

I can't think of a film in recent memory whose soundtrack so brilliantly helped to set the tone of a movie than Juno's. In any other movie, the Kimya Dawson soundtrack would most certainly "too indie" but in Juno it helped complement Diablo Cody's offbeat dialogue to create a truly unique world. Up in Air looks to continue this tradition with 3 truly great songs throughout the trailer that all just feel right. It's hard to explain why they feel so perfect, but they do. The last song in particular, with its upbeat tempo, but decidedly melancholy feel is just spot on.

When Juno came out, there was a lot of discussion about how awesome the acting was, how much depth the script had, and how good the directing was I think people forgot how funny it was. It seems Juno was a better all around movie, then it was a straight comedy, and Up In Air looks to be following in the same mold. A great movie that just happens to be funny, but damn does it have potential to be incredibly funny. Zach Galifianakis freaking out was very humorous, and the exchange about old people and Asians in the airport displayed some very clever writing and made me laugh out loud. Now, there's a good chance I'm setting myself up for disappointment but even its only half the movie Juno was, this could end up being one of the best of the year.

Toy Story 3

I love Pixar. Up, Wall-E, Ratatouille, and the Incredibles are some of my favorite movies ever. With that said, I am a little disappointed to see that next summer's movie is a sequel as oppose to another original title. Now with that said, the trailer looks excellent. If recent Pixar efforts are anything to go by, we should be able to expect several things. The first is for the movie to tell a great story with strong emotional resonance. The story as outlined in the trailer is set up to deal with a number of issues. The most interesting one here involves the struggle to make new friends and relationships after your friends/children move away or go to college. That sense of abandonment or loneliness when someone close moves on with their lives and you're left behind. This is a pretty mature subject for a family movie to handle well, but recent Pixar has a proven track record in handling mature themes well.

The second thing I look for in a Pixar release is great humor. Buzz Lightyear telling the other toys not to be hysterical and the exchange that follows is very funny, ending with the piggy banks great line about checking their prices on Ebay. Spanish Buzz Lightyear is an inspired concept, and the toddlers physically abusing the toys was great. I have no worries that this film won't be funny.

Lastly we can expect Pixar films to look and sound great. Here I'm a little disappointed. Yeah, the trailer looks and sounds great, but its the same look as the prequels. There's nothing new about the films style except that its in 3D which isn't even new seeing as how Toy Story 1&2 were recently re-released in 3D. And amongst recent Pixar Toy Story 3 just doesn't match up. It's nothing compared to Wall-E's beautiful outer space, and strangely beautiful trashed Earth. Or Up's already iconic image of the house and balloons.

It's a sequel, but as long as Pixar can find new and exciting stories to explore with these supremely entertaining characters I'll keep watching. Most sequels grow tiring because they retread the same ideas and themes. For the most part Toy Story 2 avoided that and Toy Story 3 is looking to explore new territory as well. Truly excellent stuff.

Avatar

Avatar is a 400 million dollar picture, and I'm not quite sure that money is being put to good use. From this trailer I'm not at all convinced that you couldn't use actors in makeup shooting on location to create an equal if not superior effect. Is the green screen and motion capture necessary to service the story? I doubt it. In fact with all my previous experiences with motion capture (think Robert Zemeckis), the motion capture technology is strictly inferior to real human faces emoting. Maybe that changes with this movie. Maybe those computer generated faces will be just as good as a real face(and while they certainly look good in the trailer, they don't try to do much emoting) but that brings us back to the question of, why? If a computer generated, motion captured face can only hope to be as good as a real face and never surpass it, why not just use a real face in makeup.

The other part of this huge budget is that the entire alien planet is rendered in a computer. None of it is real. Now it seems to me that for story purposes the important element is that it is an alien world. Shouldn't the film makers be able to create an alien world using locations and sets on earth. Especially a world that is mostly jungle, something we have plenty of on our beautiful planet. Well so what if the movie doesn't use special effects to service the story, the trailer certainly proves they use it well for the spectacle of it all, isn't that good enough. It is, well except to maybe 20th Century Fox whose accountants probably weep over the cost of this thing. But Camerons last blockbuster grossed over 600 million domestically so potential is there. The risk creatively is that too much spectacle will distract from the meat of the story.

Lets talk about the story for a second before we continue discussing the look of the film. The trailer features a lot of relatively interesting plot, but little in the way of interesting characters which worries me. From what I can tell, the plot of this movie is roughly: Mankind wants to loot alien planet for resources, but those pesky natives get in the way. Mankind sends in a marine in the body of one the aliens to find a diplomatic solution. That man falls in love with a pretty alien girl and has second thoughts about his mission. Mankind invades anyways. The marine fights for the aliens. There are some interesting parallels here to current and past events the film can explore as well as some interesting themes about culture, war, and race that could also be explored. The problem is that the film seems to to side with aliens almost exclusively, casting the invading humans as the bad guys. There's no ambiguity, and that is just less interesting to me than a movie that makes you think about things from both sides. The other issue here is that there if the parallels to recent US invasions is too obvious and the film is too one sided, then it could end up feeling preachy, which is something I hate in my blockbuster Sci-Fi pictures.

Now the main character as displayed in the trailer seems alarmingly bland. Zero personality. One of the other characters basically makes a crack about it, "Just relax and let your mind go blank, shouldn't be hard for you." Movies with dull main characters always struggle to entertain over the course of two hours and the supporting cast seems to do little better, albeit we see little of them in the course of the trailer. This makes me nervous but 3 and half minutes isn't a long time to develop a character so...

But boy does the film look pretty. Pandora is gorgeous. The action looks exciting, and the score is appropriately epic. The sense of scale is fantastic; this truly feels like a big movie. My only complaint about the look of the film is that Cameron's aliens look like blue monkey people. A goofy looking design in a movie that does not at all seem goofy. I'll get over it and get used to them over the course of the two hour movie, (I don't know if that's the actual running time; I just assume all movies are two hours until I learn otherwise.) but for a movie that looks so great elsewhere the character design is a weak point.

I know I've been awfully critical of the trailer, but don't think I won't be sitting in the audience with my goofy 3D classes because I still haven't talked about the most effective part of the trailer. The part where it tells me its from James Cameron the director of Terminator, Aliens, T2, True Lies, and Titanic. That's quite a resume. I'm willing to give this one my $7.50

On a final note about 3D: This will surely be the way I see the film because its the way the director intends I see it, but there is nothing about the format that impresses me. 3D can be just as pretty as 2D but never prettier, just like Color isn't necessarily better than B&W. Just different, and probably a waste of money, but hey what else are you going to spend 400 million dollars on 20th Century Fox.