Trailblazing. This aptly describes the movie Avatar. Proud and bold, it is ground-breaking in every sense of it. Excuse the overhyping, but genius is even too lame to describe its poetic beauty. James Cameron (Titanic) successfully made a film where animation and reality intertwined seamlessly and perfectly. Whereas most 3-D films heavily rely on visual spectacle, Avatar incorporates the human-ness in its character. The emotions engendered by the Na’vis are so evocative we forget they are not played by real actors. That's quite a rare feat. But the icing on the cake of Cameron’s ethereal imagination is the visual beauty of the film. Simply breathtaking! The idea of Pandora is a work of meticulous art and the attention to detail is flawlessly superb. But is Avatar a perfect film? Not really! Time and again, Mr. Cameron yet provided us with another cheesy, cringeworthy dialogues and a not so clever story (Dances With Wolves, anyone?). But these should not blot the overall landscape as Avatar pushed the boundaries boldly and as an offshoot, is a creation of great cinematic proportions. But will the conservative Academy give Avatar a best picture nod? Well, if District 9 is being snubbed by the critics’ circles and The Dark Knight was shrugged off big time last year as well, then Avatar’s chances are still up in the air.
Romantic comedies are, generally, painful to watch. The cheesy rhetoric, the predictable plot and the generic soundtrack - I just don’t buy it! Oh well, maybe the mathematics of romance is just incomprehensible to me. But when a romantic comedy is offbeat, has that unique charm and a European allure (Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, anyone?), then I’m in love with it. Enter 500 Days of Summer. Just when I thought that the first few scenes of boy-meets-girl cliché would wreak havoc, the nonlinear narrative is a rather quirky saving grace. Otherwise, it would have been 95 minutes of a humdrum familiarity. Refreshingly, 500 Days of Summer deviates the "she's just not that into you" trap and focuses rather on the male emotions in an unshameful way. Dreading that Marc Webb’s music video affinity (although the musical number was tastefully delivered) would turn the film into a completely shitty travesty, he gave us a fresh, almost avant-garde, perspective of a romantic comedy skipping the trivialities and overkill melodramatic scenes. And bravo to Joseph Gordon-Levitt (that adorable crooked smile!) and Zooey Deschanel for pulling off a semi-hippie couple having respective quirks in a post-sexual revolution milieu. By the way, what a killer soundtrack!
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