Is Avatar 2 Worth Seeing? PLUS: Christmas Movies!
We continue reviewing every Martin Scorsese movie, and take a look at Nora Ephron's filmography. [12/23/2022]
Merry Christmas everyone! This issue is packed, with a few gifts in here for everybody! We have my promised review of Avatar: The Way of Water, followed by the gonzo B picture Boxcar Bertha as we continue our Martin Scorsese binge. Then we’ll announce a very Murray Christmas present for next week, and determine whether You’ve Got Mail is Nora Ephron’s best movie. But we’re shaking it up a bit in the spirit of the season; we’re going to start with two Collider articles focused on Christmas movies!
Sad and Sort of Christmas Movies
My latest Collider article is a thinkpiece with an odd premise; Christmas movies are depressing. Their subject matter focuses on all the ways Christmas makes us sad. Why is that? Tap the button below to find out, as we dissect why these holiday films might not make you feel jolly.
If you need a pick me up after that piece, check out my more lighthearted take on the greatest “sort of” Christmas movies; here’s a list of holiday cheer that doesn’t get too bogged down by typical Christmas festivities.
And now, drumroll please, as we head into the namesake of this email; my reviews!
Avatar: The Way of Water Review: Old Fashioned Storytelling With New Fashioned Spectacle
You can stop holding your breath for suspense reasons and start holding for your dive deep into the waters of Pandora; Avatar: The Way of Water is a stunning return to old-school blockbuster filmmaking from the master of it, James Cameron. This remarkable film is more than the sum of the parts many point out as being stolen and should be praised for its future thinking mindset in both cinema and society even if the public isn’t ready for it.
As David Sims of the Atlantic pointed out in his article on the original Avatar’s effects on modern blockbusters, the 13 years since the original film have been stuffed, containing 28/30 of the MCU hits as well as the entirety of both the Despicable Me trilogy (and two Minions spin-offs) and the DCEU. Our ideas about what we expect from a blockbuster have changed significantly, dominated by IP and character-driven thoughts rather than spectacular visuals. As swarms of, to use a modern term, “haters”, have been quick to point out, the cultural memory of 2009’s Avatar didn’t seem to include character names for the common person.
This idea of a blockbuster only being iconic due to its characters is a new-fashioned one, forged out of a box of comic book scraps in the same cave out of which Iron Man was born. Characters have been packaged as iconography. The same kind of people that don’t remember Neytiri’s name is the kind that thinks a superhero film “not being comic accurate” is good film criticism. Whether Spider-Man has biological or mechanical web-shooters means more to their determination of a film’s quality than anything about its direction, script, or even special effects.
In a way (of water), this is Avatar: The Way of Water’s greatest strength. When we revisit Jake Sully decades after the events of the first film, we are reintroduced to his world with fresh eyes. Things have changed without our having to read hundreds of words about if that’s a good or a bad thing before stepping into the theater. The Sullies now have children, two biological teenage boys, one much younger girl, and an adopted teenage girl whose origin is a small part of the thrust of the film. While going about their forest-centered Na’vi lives with sprinkles of human traditions involved (including an intentionally silly moment in which the group takes a family photo). When a villain from their past tries to hunt them down, the group must flee this life and seek refuge from a water tribe of Na’vi, whose ways they know very little about.
You’ll notice the lack of human characters. Even more than the 2009 movie, The Way of Water is an almost entirely motion-capture animated film (and should be proud of that). Its special effects supervisors are, deservedly, billed above the cast in the end credits, because just about everything you see is a special effect. The story is well told through this medium. There aren’t a lot of “avatars” in this movie, but the title still fits; the photorealistic world of Pandora is an avatar of its own for our planet, and its inhabitants are our people on the edge of being colonized. Saving the Earth and stifling our need to consume, digest, and defecate other cultures and environments is a world-wide message that needs a blockbuster format just to be seen.
To deflect arguments against these movies’ “cliched” storytelling and nameless characters it’s worth highlighting how true to life this family unit is. Coming from a big family myself, I found myself able to relate to any part of their dynamic. And the 70-year-old Sigourney Weaver deserves an Oscar nomination for her acting as Kiri, a teenage Na’vi. Her powerful presence mixed with fear is even more suited to the role than her much younger counterparts playing her siblings, and the fact she can express such vulnerable awkwardness mixed with arrogant narcissism that’s typical of that age through motion capture tech is as marvelous a special effect as the movie itself.
Look, this isn’t going to seem like a revolutionary take. Avatar is one of the easiest to attack goliaths in the eyes of this generation, and whether by criticizing its originality, politics, or content, they are all eager to claim the David role. But as with every other movie, removing yourself from the populist ideas of what a movie should be, and instead looking at what it truly is from its first shot to end credits will be a more profitable, truthful, and enjoyable experience than anything you’ll find online. Go see this movie. Find the biggest screen nearby with a high frame rate 3D experience. You'll be treated to an immersive experience like no other, one that will thrill you, tickle you, and play you like a musical instrument that inhales and exhales when the musician commands. There's just nothing quite like the amazing way this story builds so slowly, so slightly, so that you feel as strongly about the character's defense of their home as you do.
For many of you, this will be your first experience with high frame rates in cinema and, like me, this will be your first 3D movie in years. Perhaps that, like the movie’s runtime, seems daunting to you. But from experience with that same emotion, I can attest; by the end you will wish you had even a few more moments left to live in the world of Pandora, an emotion we must carry with us into our real world.
Reviewing Scorsese: Boxcar Bertha
While the opening scenes of Scorsese’s premiere feature Who’s That Knocking At My Door gave the perfect first impression of the director, the opening to Boxcar Bertha lets you know how far he is from home, and how lost he’s become in the marsh of 70s B movie schlock. The audience is quickly treated to many close-ups of a woman’s bare legs, a series of rapid cuts standing in for a plane crash that we never actually see, and dialogue appropriate to a middle school play. These continue to bind Scorsese as tries his best to direct his way out of the formless paper bag formed from a script scribbled on with notes on adding more sex and violence.
The source for these failures is producer Roger Corman. Corman was a famous producer of cheap American films for decades, continuing his run well into the 2010s. The idea behind his movies was to give directors free rein to make whatever they want, as long as they were made for very little and there were specific marketable elements that could pose wearing even less. Based on a book about a real-life criminal, Boxcar Bertha covers plenty of the sensationalist ground that makes these movies money. The displaced heroine falls into a life of crime as she travels across Great Depression southern America with a band of other rebels (including David Carradine as Bill, a name he will revisit in Kill Bill).
This Bonnie and Clyde knockoff has nothing to say about crime, love, sex, or the country its showcasing more than that they are sometimes a little entertaining and sometimes a little gruesome. The depression era setting is atmospherically realized but ultimately does little to manage theme. One might compare this movie to Agnes Varda’s film Vagabond because of its episodic structure, but that movie’s thematic focus on gender dynamics ties the movie together, while this one remains a collection of ideas.
Ebert didn’t share my feelings, likely blinded by the tiredness in his eyes from one too many B-movie films. A current movie with a handful of artistic elements from a place that shouldn’t have them can stun Ebert, like any critic, into praise.
“Scorsese has gone for mood and atmosphere more than for action, and his violence is always blunt and unpleasant — never liberating and exhilarating, as the New Violence is supposed to be.” - Ebert, 33
His reference to New Violence invokes the 60s and 70s focus on the freedom and escapism involved in blowing someone away. Much of his appreciation compares the movie to others of this ilk, citing its visuals as exceptional in this field, which I too admit can be stunning. There’s care paid to these characters, such as the first sex scene that goes beat by beat through Bertha’s feelings by choosing not to follow with its lens her thought process, rather than just going for the legs.
But Ebert’s praise is too reactionary, too bound to time and genre rather than cinema itself, and thus outdated. He loves what the movie is not, rather than what it is. I’m sometimes no different; reviewing a current movie like Avatar: The Way Of Water sometimes means giving it a bump for how unlike the MCU it is. My recent review of Smile may have the same short shelf life for how much it focuses on its counter to A24’s self-serious “movies as therapy” threads. That’s why retrospectives reviews can be so helpful; I am unrelated to that part of movie history in a way Ebert couldn’t be reviewing it in 1972.
In a 1981 interview, nine years after the film’s release, lead actress Barbara Hershey diagnoses the film’s issues well. “Boxcar Bertha was a lot of fun even though it's terribly crippled by Roger Corman and the violence and sex. But between the actors and Marty Scorsese the director, we had a lot of fun. We really had characters down but one tends to not see all that, because you end up seeing all the blood and sex.” Ultimately, Boxcar Bertha is bound by its B movie limitations. Scorsese’s direction asks if he can make something artistic out of it, and the film answers with a resounding “no.”
As the Reviewing Scorsese segment continues, I will be ranking every Scorsese movie. Obviously now we don’t have much to go on, but rest assured Knocking eats a Boxcar lunch.
Coming Attractions:
Next week we’re going to try something different. In honor of our first paid subscriber, a certified fan of this actor, we’ll be ranking the best-ever performances of Bill Murray from worst to best. This post will be for paying subscribers only, so if you’re interested in that article you may want to get your 30 day free trial below!
More Anthony:
You may know Nora Ephron for her Meg Ryan movies like Sleepless in Seattle, but did you know that her extensive directing career includes a reboot of the television show Bewitched, a film where John Travolta plays Michael the archangel, and a little-known Steve Martin Christmas movie? Check out my ranking of every Ephron classic for Collider below!
NOTICE: Last week’s email “Spielberg vs. Scorsese: Directing Youth” included a typo in its second paragraph that I wanted to address. Who’s That Knocking At My Door was released in 1967, not 1987. The mistype has been corrected.