How Much Is That Avatar In The Window?

Having avoided all the reviews and advertising leading up to Avatar’s release, I managed to see it without preconception. I was aware of it being one of the most expensive films ever made - I don’t live under a floating rock - but I had studiously avoided all the rest of the hype. Anyway, the “most expensive” tag doesn’t sway me either way. If you are investing the money well (smashing cars through shopping centres for The Blues Brothers, for instance) go with my blessing.

So - here’s a review of Avatar by someone who doesn’t know what the consensus of opinion is on the subject. I’ll be interested to see where I fit on the spectrum.

Avatar is the first 3D film I have seen since 1980 when I saw The House of Wax. Made in 1953, it was re-released in the 80s I presume to tackle a worldwide 3D-cardboard-glasses glut. It was the type of film that makes you glad that smell-o-vision didn’t take off, because what leapt off the screen at you was a pure bucket of shite.

The first thing you notice when you go to the 3D version of Avatar is that the glasses are much better now. I liked mine so much I kept them.

(Actually, a friend of a friend was there and he was wearing shoes that have individual toes. Sort of like feet gloves. When I happened to look down at them with my 3D glasses on, I assumed that the glasses had some mild x-ray feature and I was seeing slightly into his shoes. Turns out, the glasses only have a temporal vision thing going on, because looking at the shoes again, I could see exactly how long that trend was going to last.)

So, now that the technology is all taken care of, down to the movie.

Wikipedia says the script treatment and surrounding stuff was in development from 1994. Ho-lly-shit. I hope that’s not right. Fifteen freakin’ years to pump that out? You have got to be kidding me.

I won’t go into detail to avoid plot spoilers, but every single plot point is telegraphed so obviously that I saw them coming while I was in line for popcorn. (And I didn’t even have the special specs on at that time.)

I am a discerning Sci-Fi consumer. Ok, I’m total fussbudget of a Sci-Fi consumer. But I find that if the main premise is slightly plausible, I have an easier time putting the rest of my disbelief in suspenders. The film looks fantastic, but too often they’ve dumbed it down to appeal to the largest possible audience… and I don’t think it’s necessary.

The film is racist. The noble savages are sooooooo African or Native American, it’s embarrassing, but I can look past that.

It’s essentially the world’s most expensive Cowboys and Indians film, but I can look past that.

Floating mountains and unobtanium do not make sense but I can look past that.

I can even look past the fact that we have flown interstellar distances to meet aliens who unaccountably wear bikinis, kiss like Earthlings and have knees that work like ours.

But I can’t look past all those things all the time. It’s sloppy and I would’ve thought that with the development budget and time, they could have hired a decent Sci-Fi writer to iron all these things out.

You’ve got time to ponder them, too. I want to introduce a new unit of measurement. I will call it the ‘Cameron‘. It can be used in the following way.

“So how was the flight in from London?”

“Oh man. It was looooong. It was a total Cameron.”

He needs to walk away from a project every now and then and let some editors do their work. (I waited two hours for that guy to fall onto the propeller in Titanic) What he is indulging in is ego-maniacal. Nobody should be allowed to hog your attention for that amount of time.

So with that criticism ringing in my own ears, I’ll sign off with this.

It is lush. It is unbelievably lush. It looks a bundle. It is really fun to throw yourself into and… and… just watch. The design is superb. The animation is flawless. You stop seeing the CG and that’s a good thing because you need all that gorgeousness to distract you from the crap bits. Despite the gaping holes, the treatment of the audience’s intelligence as pond slime, the crushingly obvious pivot points, the script by four-year-olds and characterisation by numbers, it’s really a lot of fun and I reckon you should go and see it.

I give it six and a half giant, good looking smurfs out of ten.

Happy Christmas Everyone

I was going to ignore it. After reading the new self improvement book "Releasing the Grinch Within" I was going to really snarl my way through this one...

Nah. Have great New Year, too.

A Grey Area will return to its normal bad tempered bitching shortly.

We Will Not Go Quietly Into That Good Night... Ooo A Banana

Technology is really ruining things for my tiny pea-brain. These days, I have trouble watching thriller movies from any era before there was ubiquitous mobile phone ownership. I sit there watching our hero desperately trying to beat the clock across town/to the aeroplane/to the editor’s desk and all I can think is, “Put in a call, man. Let your fingers do the walkin’. The coverage can’t be that bad.”

Another one: I’m reading a perfectly respectable little sci-fi book at the moment called The Sails of Tau Ceti that has gone hopelessly out of date in sixteen years. The author just didn’t see the internet coming. One of the central plot requirements is that there is only a mainstream press for the aliens of dubious intention to manipulate in order to take a claw-hold on earth.

The baddies take advantage of an old style news ownership model and cleverly fool the various outlets into not noticing some important things. People are still tearing things off faxes and printing out pages to read. The news has to ‘come out’ and people can’t do a search on the subjects of their choice.

It’s funny, but now the conspiracy theorists have access to an international soap-box and we the readers choose whatever the hell we want to consume, I think an intergalactic plot of Earth domination would be harder to pull off. It’s the democratisation of gossip that will save us from the little green men. The sites we go to see the Britney Spears’ crotch get out of a car shots are the same sites that will have the first “A Martian Ate My Baby: Lindsay Lohan Tells” and that’s when the evil space overlords will realise that they’ve mixed it with the wrong monkey boys.

You just can’t take on an interconnected society that is the evolutionary descendant of curiosity, mutual grooming and bum flashing.

Summer TV: Let The Brain Rot Begin

It’s the summer season of telly and that means I’m trying to get to like things that I wouldn’t normally watch. For instance, I’m trying to come ‘round to a show called Castle.

(I know, I know. I should read a book. But sometimes I get home and I’m too tired to read. I just need something to wash over me that features pretty people doing interesting things. Like each other. I prefer to read when I can actually think.)

The lead actor is Nathan Fillion. I got to like him in a show called Firefly. If you like a bit of space-western and haven’t seen Firefly, give it a go. He was a likeable, charismatic, stubborn rogue and that’s exactly what you want in your space-cowboy. But he is particularly charmless in this crime show and I can’t work out why. It’s sort of like he’s run out of acting. Anyway, something cropped up when I was watching it the other night and it annoyed me. Because it’s Christmas, I thought I’d share.

A crime scene pathologist, or whatever she was, as she was describing what she was seeing on the corpse said, “Our vic died of a ess gee double-you.”

Now, I assume an SGW is a single gunshot wound. But why would you say SGW? The only reasons you use an acronym is to hide meaning or to save time and space. This acronym is not useful in either. She wants to communicate clearly to her audience and SGW has as many syllables as single gunshot wound. Not only that, it sounds awkward saying “a SGW”. I became sensitive to the use of W in spoken acronyms when I was little because I thought it was interesting that NSW was slower to say than New South Wales. Just one of those things.

Anyway, the take home message here is that I am getting distracted by things like that. Probably not a high recommendation for the show.

Maybe I’m wrong about SGW. Maybe it stands for Stargate Wollongong. There seems to be a Stargate series with every other address out there. Again an acronym I don’t get. They shorten the titles of these shows to SGA (Stargate Atlantis) SGU (Stargate Universe) but they spell Stargate as one word. But that won’t stop me from going back for the second part of the new Stargate (this one has the Universe address).

I’ve never watched a Stargate series - I didn’t find the movie compelling. Well, that’s the first reason. The second reason is the fans. There’s something about them that warns me off the show. The upside is that, if I’ve been wrong and the collections of SG TV series turn out to be the finest franchise ever to grace our increasingly large screens, I’ve got thousands of hours of the stuff to trawl through. Even though I’m tackling it out of order, I will be giving SGU a go. It had a nice premise and the right pompous characters died in the first hour.

Know Thine Enemy

You measure a man by the quality of his friends.

Yeah, sure. But, that’s quite an anodyne test. I mean, your mother loves you… and she’s wrong.

No, I measure him by the quality of his enemies. Now, there’s a real window into a person’s soul. Who has he bothered to piss off? Who has he taken the effort to wind up? Who is it he’s willing to throw the conventions of polite society out the window for? Who really gets up him sideways with an arm full of deckchairs, enough for him to declare, “Right. You are now my enemy?”

When I was a kid, I was going to have the best nemesis. My nemesis was going to be Darth Vader, a Cyberman and Moriarty all rolled into one. (My nemesis always had a touch of Servalan from Blake's 7 thrown in, as well.*)

The brainy, violent, universe spanning, hyper-sexy battle that I was going to be involved in was going to be the stuff of legend.

As it turns out… my nemesis is a slightly overweight, balding, 60 year old cafeteria lady who just cannot seem to remember me and can turn the instruction, “Two bits of bread, nothing on them, with two rashes of bacon between them, please,” into a Kafkaesque nightmare.

*Servalan and Avon were my first introduction to a proper, sexually charged ’love/hate’ relationship. This was later complicated by me being unable to tell Servalan and Marc Almond from Soft Cell, apart.

The Diary of Grey Frank: Day 4

We have moved into the attic and all must be very quiet.


Mother plays cards with us and says that we must be brave. We dare not move during the daytime, they might hear us.


Black and white terror is about us.


We have enough food for a week.


Father says the Panda Division has arrived.

(Ok, Emergency Contact said she didn't get it and I'm worried that I'm assuming too much WWII knowledge here. A Panzer Division is a German armoured corp and Anne Frank hid in an attic from the Nazis and as you know I like to pretend to be afraid of Pandas and they have been delivered to Australia, so I thou... forget it.)

Weather Widget Gets Into The Christmas Spirit

I have a little gadget
It is up there on my screen
Designed to tell me what sort of

Weather I’ll be seein’
But it's shuffled north for holidays
Its weather eye is blind

It's bunked right off for santa
It has lost its freakin’ mind

Despite the coming weather patterns

The rest of us expectin'

The little weather gadget

Is in need of some correctin'
Copenhagen couldn’t work this fast
Pacific islands will all still drown
The only way those temps are possible

Was if the world was upside-down

Attack Of The Fifty Foot Santas

There are arms races everywhere you look. Forests are an evolutionary arms race. Suburban mothers in four wheel drives are in an arms race. I got caught in an auditory one last night.

The forest is a good example of how a natural arms race starts up, to no single organism’s advantage. Trees getting taller are using valuable resources to get tall, so that they can get more sunlight than their neighbour. Taller and taller they get, using up more and more resources on big, sturdy trunks. A forest all laid out at ground level would work just as well at catching the sun. Or would work just as well, of course, until the first little ground level collection of leaves disobeys the rules, gets a little taller than his neighbour and becomes more successful.

The mothers in their four-wheel drives are in an arms race that is actively harmful to the overall collective. It’s all about momentary individual advantage. Four-wheel drive cars are not actually safer, they just appear it, which in this instance is all that’s important when it comes to being attractive. The first person sees the vastly bigger car and gets it for its implied safety, others are now at more risk from the monster car and have to follow suit. Pretty soon, everyone is driving around in three tonne cars, chewing up resources and space, and they are now all in exactly the same amount of peril as they were when they were dropping the kids off in a Datsun 120Y.

(Actually, there’s more total peril. Crossing the road once, I was hit by a Datsun 120Y doing about 40 km/h. It ruined the ironed crease on the left leg of my pants and made a little bald patch just above my ankle. Some years later, in the same area, a four-wheel drive turned on its headlights, and because of the power and size of the thing, it left me with a tan and permanently blind in both eyes and one ear.)

The auditory arms race that I got caught in last night is one that would be so easy to avoid, I just can’t believe it still happens:

1. Public Room.
2. Slightly too many people.
3. Alcohol.
4. Music a bit loud.
5. People raise voice and glass.
6. Music increases in volume to be heard over talking.
7. People talk louder to be heard over alcohol induced deafness and music.
8. Music goes up.
9. Ad infinitum, ad clothearum

And pretty soon, you are actually yelling at the top of your lungs with your mouth three centimetres away from the ear of the person you are yelling at. Imagine taking that out of the room and putting it at a bus-stop. It’s assault.

This natural instinct to compete for local advantage will ensure that, no matter what they come up with at Copenhagen, my suburb is going to ignore it all. Every festive season my neighbours generate a footprint that can be seen from space.

The Christmas decoration arms race is on in earnest around my place, and some of the displays are so extravagant, I’m pretty sure I can hear backyard generators ticking over.

In her usual well balanced approach to these things, Emergency Contact was so impressed by one display (character snowmen riding a neon-illuminated ferris wheel next to life size neon reindeer) that she said,

“Cor. I can’t wait till we get a big house. Our display is going to black out the grid.”