BEFORE: So there's this guy on Instagram (and I assume on TikTok and YouTube, too) who posts videos of what he eats - sure, lots of people do that now, and some people are speed eaters and some people are eating for quantity (mukbang?) and some people are shilling for restaurants and some people are protein maxxing - sure, it's a great big wonderful and confusing world of food videos. But this one guy fascinates me because he's obviously overweight, and he goes to fast food restaurants and orders like one of everything, which causes a lot of rage-baiting in the comments. You know the guy who says "Moooood" before he starts and also says "you guys" after every sentence - but he also says, "Watch me eat all this food in the next video" and then maybe there is no next video, so is he really eating all of that? I was raised to be skeptical, but yeah, considering his size, probably. But the videos are still framed as his "weight loss journey" and sometimes he says he's going to be on a strict diet for the next week, so that's an excuse to eat four pizzas and three ice-cream sandwiches in a video before the diet starts.
That's kind of where I stand with narrative films, after tonight I kick off a 50-film Doc Block, you know, for Amurica, to celebrate the semi-quincentennial, but before I go on a narrative story diet, I'm going to binge out by watching both a "Star Wars" film and the latest "Avatar" sequel, which just made it to streaming on Disney Plus. So "Moooood, you guys, we're going to watch a documentary about Sigourney Weaver... AND THEN a documentary about Earth, Wind & Fire... AND THEN a documentary about the movie "Jaws"... AND THEN...
Seriously, though, Sigourney Weaver carries over from "Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu". And here are the format stats for June, which ends today, and I'll post the planned linking for July tomorrow. It's not 100% solid, like a few things could still change, but here's hoping I don't have to move too many things around during the coming month.
15 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Cleaner, From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, 47 Ronin, Good Fortune, Agent Cody Banks, Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London, How I Live Now, On Chesil Beach, Inside, The Legend of Ochi, Aftersun, The Duke, Golda, Eddington, Freaky Tales
6 watched on Netflix: Back in Action, The Rip, Over the Moon, The Outrun, Denial, Caught Stealing
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Playdate
2 watched on Hulu: Big Fat Liar, The Man in My Basement
2 watched on Hulu: Big Fat Liar, The Man in My Basement
1 watched on YouTube: The Last Station
1 watched on Disney+: Avatar: Fire and Ash
1 watched on Disney+: Avatar: Fire and Ash
1 watched on Peacock: Hamnet
1 watched in theaters: Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
28 TOTAL
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Avatar: The Way of Water" (Movie #4,520)
THE PLOT: Jake and Neytiri's family grapples with grief, encountering a new, aggressive Na'vi tribe, the Ash People, who are led by the fiery Varang, as the conflict on Pandora escalates and a new moral focus emerges.
AFTER: We have a new leader for LONGEST movie of the year, this one weighs in at 3 hours and 18 minutes, or 198 minutes, which is longer than "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning", which was ONLY 170 minutes long. Jeezus, Tom Cruise, that's not even three hours long, are you even TRYING? James Cameron just schooled you in how to give the moviegoer more bang for their buck, and also make it impossible for a movie theater to schedule this film more than four times a day. How is a movie theater supposed to make money from this? Oh, right, by selling overpriced popcorn, soda and candy. Well, that's very American, give people salty snacks and sugar water, ruin their health and also overcharge them for doing so. OH NO, you can't bring in bags of popcorn and soda you just bought at the corner store, you have to buy all your food and drinks at the theater itself, because the margins are so tight and they have to kick nearly all of the profit from tickets sales back to the film distributors, so that's really why movie theater snacks are so regulated and also expensive.
But let's get back to how freakin' LONG this movie is - I could not finish it in one night, I had to save the final hour (the final battle) for this morning. To be fair, I did work late at the theater Monday night, I was pretty tired when I got home. But still, I persisted and watched about 65-68% of "Fire and Ash" before calling it a night. I would have preferred to watch the last hour on my computer, which has a full-screen mode, rather than on my phone, which does not. OK, my phone does have full-screen, but phone full-screen is much smaller than computer full-screen.
Please, please, let THIS be the last "Avatar" movie - there have been three very long films in this franchise so far, and all together that's a trilogy that would take up too much of anyone's time to re-watch. I don't think I ever re-watched the FIRST "Avatar" movie, I only saw it once and then I was perfectly happy waiting 13 years for the sequel, and now I've only waited THREE years for the sequel to that. We don't need any more movies in this series! Rumor has it that James Cameron wants to release at least two more, in 2029 and 2031, so realistically, expect them to be finished in like 2047 and 2050. I feel like a lot of this story has been going around in circles - Sully gets captured, Sully argues with humans, Sully gets violent, Sully breaks free and escapes. Repeat as necessary.
OK, I guess they keep adding different clans, like in today's movie they added a fire-based clan, which kind of balances out the water-based Na'vi clan they added in the last film. Should we expect an earth-based clan in the next one, like they live underground or they live in mud? I think a better idea would be to end the series after three, because "Fire and Ash" feels kind of like the equivalent of "Return of the Jedi" in the "Star Wars" franchise, it's a wrapped-up storyline, maybe, and a lot of things feel like they sort of came full circle, so maybe just take a break here? We had "ROTJ" released in 1983 and as far as we knew THEN, that was it for the "Star Wars" franchise, there wasn't even word of another film being made until 1997 when we learned that Episode 1 would be coming out in 1998. "Avatar" could maybe benefit from a similar 15-year break.
Don't get me wrong here, I think these "Avatar" films are quite amazing, even if they're not 100% my cup of tea. There are still narrative plot-holes, specifically regarding how humans got so far from Earth in the first place, like that should have taken hundreds of years for them to travel that far, unless they invented hyperspace travel. Also, how do they communicate with home base on Earth, if they're so far away? Also, does anyone remember what the goal was, in trying to take over Pandora? Does anyone remember unobtainium, the most stupidly-named MacGuffin in film history? I think in the second film the goal of the humans taking over changed, and they started hunting the whale-like Tulkuns, because there was something they could harvest from the Tulkuns that was even more valuable? I forget, though, what was it?
This is a very American attitude, we see another planet, somebody's homeland, something filled with natural resources, and we just say, "Oh, yeah, we want that." And in so doing, we feel that we're entitled to it, manifest destiny, or just plain greed or jealousy, but you know, even if we realize that it belongs to someone else, we still want it, and therefore we think we need it. It's almost exactly why Europeans colonized America, and screw the indigenous peoples, anyway. The Na'vi are still serving as a de facto symbol of Native Americans, a people who are very in touch with the spiritual world, who love and respect animals, who have a sense of honor and decency and rules to live by - also far too trusting of American humans at first, and they learned the hard way how incorrect that was.
I'm sure it's a great, big, beautiful world with many more sections to explore, but come on, let's give it a rest for a while, I'm exhausted....
Directed by James Cameron (director of "Avatar: The Way of Water")
Also starring Sam Worthington (last seen in "Lift"), Zoe Saldana (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"), Stephen Lang (last heard in "My Love Affair with Marriage"), Oona Chaplin (last seen in "What If"), Kate Winslet (last seen in "Lee"), Cliff Curtis (last seen in "A Thousand Words"), Joel David Moore (last seen in "Avatar: The Way of Water"), Brendan Cowell (ditto), Britain Dalton (ditto), Trinity Jo-Li Bliss (ditto), Bailey Bass (ditto), Filip Geljo (ditto), Duane Evans Jr. (ditto), Dileep Rao (ditto), Kevin Dorman (ditto), Alicia Vela-Bailey (ditto), Johnny Alexander (ditto), Phil Brown (ditto), Robert Okumu (ditto), Jeremy Irwin (ditto), CCH Pounder (last seen in "The Naked Gun"), Edie Falco (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple"), Jemaine Clement (last seen in "A Minecraft Movie"), Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "Strange Darling"), David Thewlis (last seen in "Macbeth"), Jack Champion (last seen in "Freaky Tales"), Jamie Flatters (last seen in "The School of Good and Evil"), Matt Gerald (last seen in "The Minus Man"), Daniel Lough, Keston John (last heard in "The Wild Robot"), Jamie Landau, Graham Vincent, Joel Tobeck (last seen in "The Water Horse"), Shane Rangi, Grant Roa, Howard Cyster, Laz Alonso (last seen in "Wrath of Man"), Wes Studi (last seen in "Being Flynn"), Dai Daniel.
RATING: 7 out of 10 underwater spirit trees
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