This weeks offers yet more Peter Greenaway, two very disparate Tom Cruise vehicles, two not-quite-as-disparate John Frankenheimer thrillers, Barry Jenkins’ debut, and maybe the most experimental movie ever put into wide release, but all people will be talking about is Avatar. I find that “why do people like this?” is not a productive way to look at movies but I have no other options with The Way of Water, especially when the people getting so moony-eyed over it are so (justifiably) cynical about the Hollywood product that’s hardly any blander than this. I get what they might enjoy in it, the expectedly strong James Cameron third-act action that tosses its humans around with gleeful malevolence, the human teen with white-boy dreads who talks like the hero of a Saturday-morning Avatar cartoon, and that it seems to have spawned a large-scale revolt amongst our planet’s sea life (no matter what I say here, you won’t see me badmouthing Payakan the wrongfully-accused whale). That’s all well and good, but an awful lot of its three-hour runtime (which breezes by like an overlong two-and-a-half hours) is devoted to blue Sam Worthington needing to learn to not be so strict with his teens, and why would anyone care? Is it just because one of those teens sounds exactly like 73-year-old Sigourney Weaver? I don’t see any other remarkable features that could cover up the hole in its center, its VFX are obviously stunning but become ordinary after looking at them for a few seconds and its dialogue is flavorless action-movie patter. James Cameron has made great films but this just makes me think about everything I don’t like about him, especially that he seems to be aiming for high-level competency rather than excellence. And that’s apparently enough even for supposedly above-it-all Film Twitter folks.
If I may make a counter-recommendation, why not watch Nida Manzoor’s Polite Society, a very fun Edgar Wright-a-like that’s as annoying and as endearing as the little sisters it pays tribute to? It made me feel a lot more deeply about the power of family than James Cameron did, and its cinematographer Ashley Connor has done much more to push forward the visual possibilities of cinema than Cameron and his floating CGI trees ever will.
Avatar 4K (Disney)
Avatar: The Way of Water 4K (Disney)
The Firm 4K (Paramount)
The Game Trilogy (Arrow)
Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant (Warner)
The Manchurian Candidate 4K (Kino)
Medicine for Melancholy (Criterion)
Polite Society (Universal)
Romeo Is Bleeding (Sandpiper)
Ronin 4K (Kino)
The Servant (Criterion)
Skinamarink (RLJ)
Vanilla Sky 4K (Paramount)
A Zed & Two Noughts and The Falls: Two Films by Peter Greenaway (Zeitgeist)