Shane+A's+OpEd+Article




 * BULLCRAP MOVIES**

George Lucas once said a long time ago that “special effects are just a tool... a means of telling a story... a special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.” Unfortunately, his words fell on deaf ears two of which were his own. After creating a trilogy of fairly cinematically valuable films Lucas went on to excrete the greatest let down in cinematic history, move motion picture technology further in the wrong direction, and tragically become the the “man” of the hollywood system that he declared himself independent from in the nineteen seventies. George established a new tone for major motion pictures to be released in the 21st century with the trifecta of schlock that was the Star Wars prequels. He laid the ground work for what would be a decade long defacing of the sanctity of film, turning the magic that went into creating the original trilogy on its ear with what we now call digital filmmaking.

Now I do not want to vilify digital filmmaking, there are many filmmakers doing extraordinary things with RED cameras, HD DSLRs, and certain artistic visual techniques. Unfortunately, these works do not receive the attention that lifeless, digitally saturated movies like “Transformers” get, which is incredibly sad and unfair. George Lucas’ regime of eye-candy films have distracted people from the value of what some might now call “simple” films. If you were to take your average teenage mouth-breather and sit them in front of a Jim Jarmusch film their mind would trail off to a monkey with cymbals so quickly you would not have time to even //think// the word “Avatar”...Which brings me to my next point...

//Avatar//! The biggest f*ck you to the filmmaking world since //Paranormal Activity.// At its core //Avatar// is just //Dances with Wolves// with christmas lights. James Cameron wrote the script in the early nineties (he says), and it reads like the early nineties cartoon //Ferngully: The Last Rainforest.// Now I am not saying that he took elements from the //Ferngully// plot and worked them into //Avatar// without properly paying the child’s cartoon it’s dues, what I am saying is James //completely// ripped off the plot. The similarities are so vast that you could say the only difference lies in the natives’ skin colors and height. But perhaps this is too strong, I’m willing to give James Cameron the benefit of the doubt, but even with that //Avatar// is still a childish mess of goodie-goodie shallow nonsense that uses every trick in the book to tickle its audience’s already idiotically vulnerable heart strings. He uses imagery so obvious that your ears hurt from how loud he yells his cliche message at you. With words like “unobtainium” and “Pandora", along with the laughable, stereotypical, white, racist, buff, southern, military general are some painfully obvious examples of this directors broken attempt at meaningful motifs of reality. This of course all occurs along side an orgy of special effects and 3D, which is in place to distract the audience from the fact that they are watching a cinematic train wreck of cheesy plot devices.

I am not sure how the George Lucas rash can be remedied. Lars Von Trier tried to stir up some retaliation with his Dogma 95 Collective, which was a short lived movement of independent filmmakers, pledging to distance themselves from the symptoms of the 21st century George Lucas hangover. Unfortunately Lars’ greatest production to come out of the Collective was a film about danish nudists (//Idioten),// hardly enough to reinvigorate us 'art-skeptical' Americans.