Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)

Sigourney Weaver in Avatar

Jake Sully: Sam Worthington
Neytiri: Zoe Saldana
Dr. Grace Augustine: Sigourney Weaver
Col. Miles Quaritch: Stephen Lang
Trudy Chacón: Michelle Rodriguez
Parker Selfridge: Giovanni Ribisi
Norm Spellman: Joel David Moore
Moat: CCH Pounder
Eytukan: Wes Studi
Dr. Max Patel: Dileep Rao

Director: James Cameron
Screenplay: James Cameron
Cinematography: Mauro Fiore
Production design: Rick Carter, Martin Stromberg
Film editing: James Cameron, John Refoua, Stephen E. Rivkin
Music: James Horner

When it first appeared, James Cameron's Avatar was as much an event as a movie. People flocked to see its groundbreaking 3D and motion-capture CGI effects and to marvel at its colorful creation of a distant world. Even most of the critics raved, caught off-guard yet again by Cameron's expensive audacity, as they had been with Titanic in 1997. But as with Titanic, the passing of time has taken some of the glamour off of the film. Cameron had certainly excelled his contemporaries as a technological innovator, but 3D is beginning to become passé (as it did in its first insurgence in the 1950s) and motion-capture has become a standard technique. So it's possible to concentrate on Avatar as movie, and thus to find it wanting. For one thing, it's shamelessly derivative. The central plot, of a soldier "going native," is that of Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves (1990). The Na'vi belief in the mystical unity of all things is identical to the Force from the Star Wars movies. And the gung-ho Marines and villainous representatives of the military-industrial complex are borrowed by Cameron from his own Aliens (1986). Even the Na'vi, with their elongated torsos, big eyes, flat noses, and long round tails, remind me oddly of the Pink Panther. Except blue. The characters are stock: Sigourney Weaver is again playing the tough, adversary whom the exploitative bad guys underestimate. Sam Worthington's Jake Sully is the white man savior of the native peoples. And Stephen Lang's bull-headed Col. Quaritch is the hissable villain with no apparent redeeming qualities. Cameron even calls the material being sought by the earthlings in the movie "unobtanium," a variant spelling of the impossible substance that has been called "unobtainium" by engineers since the 1950s. The Marvel Studios screenwriters at least have the wit to call their minerals "adamantium"  and "vibranium." But maybe that's quibbling: Avatar remains an influential and extremely watchable movie, even if it's predictable and overlong -- cuts of the film range from 162 to 178 minutes.

Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)

Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation currently has a 95 percent favorable rating on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer and a 7.8 score on the IMDb rating system. It won Sofia Coppola an Oscar for best original screenplay and a nomination for best director, along with nominations for best picture and for Bill Murray as best actor. But I have to admit that it left me cold when I first saw it, and my opinion of it has warmed only somewhat since then. I grant its originality of concept and its effective use of Murray and co-star Scarlett Johansson, who was only 18 when the film was made, a major step in her career as a film actress. Murray and Johansson have a fine chemistry together that stops short of inducing the queasiness that might result from their age difference. Coppola effectively portrays the melancholy of these Americans lost in a lively, vibrant culture they can only glimpse superficially. But I can also sympathize with the Japanese critics who found its depiction of the people of Japan to be little short of caricature. I felt this most strongly in the scene, early in the film, in which someone sends a prostitute to the hotel room of Murray's character, and she demands that he "lip" her stockings. Much supposed hilarity ensues from the stereotype of the Japanese confusion of "l" and "r," which was funny when the Monty Python troupe performed "Erizabeth L," with such characters as "Sil Wartel Lareigh," but I think it falls flat here. Otherwise, Coppola evokes the experience most of us have felt in a country where we don't speak the language. Murray plays a film star, Bob Harris, in Tokyo to shoot a Suntory whiskey commercial with a Japanese director who gives complicated instructions that are reduced by a translator to little more than "turn and look at the camera." A New York Times article after the film opened revealed what the director is actually saying, but Coppola chose not to provide subtitles, leaving the non-Japanese-speaking audience as much in the dark as Bob Harris -- and in fact Bill Murray himself -- was. Coppola also subtly suggests what her characters might be feeling, without spelling it out for us, as when Charlotte (Johansson), who has been left on her own in Japan while her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) travels about, visits a Buddhist temple in Kyoto where a wedding is taking place. But Coppola's lapses in control of the film's tone, as in the scene with the prostitute, are sometimes needlessly jarring.