Avatar (2009)

Stock characters, heavy handed political messages, and ghastly production costs. This is indeed a James Cameron film. I will admit that I genuinely think Titanic was a piece of filmmaking brilliance, and Aliens was pretty good as well, but for me, Cameron's ability to make an interesting movie ends there.

Avatar is essentially Last of the Mohicans, Fern Gully and She's All That, made in Three Dimensions(!!!!). As a technical piece, it is unmatched in its visual spectacle. The movie just looks absurdly good. It's genuinely unsettling how detailed everything about the movie is.

At least everything about the movie that doesn't relate to characters or story. Other than the final battle scene, and just the general look of the film, there is really no redeeming quality to the movie.

The characters are characters you've seen from the last action movie you saw. They deliver the lines they are supposed to and either succeed or die in the end, though it's clear who does what. I cringed when the main character had to give his heart to heart to his lady interest that it only started out as a job, but he really was in love, with all the syrupy Freddie Prince Jr. sweetness he could muster.

I can't say I wouldn't recommend this movie, because it was a treat for my eyes. But paying $10 or whatever IMAX is charging to see it only encourages directors to keep producing these kinds of dull experiments in spending as much money as possible. And seeing as I paid to see this and Transformers II this year, I have more than done my part to make this world a slightly worse place, and for that, I apologize.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

I loved Iron Man. Everyone loved Iron Man. So when I first saw a preview for the new Sherlock Holmes film, I thought, "Victorian Iron Man? Someone has been reading my book of dreams." This, of course, is not true as my book of dreams has long since been destroyed.

However, Sherlock Holmes is only the second film I've seen, other than Gone With The Wind, where I actually tried to fall asleep. My inability suggests more about my caffeine addiction than the viewing experience, as reading the back cover of my roommate's Iron Man DVD for an hour and a half would probably prove more exciting than watching Sherlock Holmes.

There really wasn't anything absolutely awful about the film, it's just that I had seen it already, and so have you. The movie is an explosion filled paint-by-numbers piece, which is odd since I always thought Holmes was more of a sleuthy type character. I must admit that I've never read any of Doyle's work, but I would have to assume this was nowhere near what he was writing about.

Robert Downey Jr is the one saving grace of the film, but even his performance was utterly disappointing. The man is not British, and when he fakes a British accent, half of his lines are unintelligible. The film was an attempt at the witty action film with heart (yeah, that's still you Iron Man), but fails miserably at this. The one or two laugh out loud moments are already in the previews, and the rest is just a matter of banal, CSI style crime investigation. But really, I went to this to get out of seeing Avatar, because if I'm going to be bored, I'd rather be bored for about an hour less. So I guess I can't complain.

Antichrist (2009)

Nature is Satan's church. Freud is dead. This is Antichrist, Lars von Trier's shocking horror film dedicated to the memory of Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky.

The film starts with a horrifically beautiful sex/death scene where the two main characters, played superbly by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg engage in the sensual joys (and unlike most every film that isn't a porno, the sex scenes in Antichrist are unsimulated) while their son falls out of their apartment window. The film then follows the mother's grief while her husband, a therapist, tries to help her face her fears while keeping a clinical distance from his own wife.

The first half hour or so of the film is undoubtedly dark and depressing, illustrating the unrelenting grief felt by Gainsbourg's character, but it isn't until the couple gets to their woodland cabin, "Eden", that the film really asserts itself. Modeled after settings in Tarkovsky's autobiographic film The Mirror and his sci-fi masterpiece Stalker, Eden is the location for the films unbearably haunting second half.

I remember there being a big to-do about the graphic violence depicted in Mel Gibson's awful Passion of the Christ, but that film is tame by von Trier's standards. I'm not the kind of person that typically reacts physically to films, but in various parts of Antichrist, I came close to vomiting and crying. I spent entire scenes hiding behind my hands or staring at the wall to the left of the screen. And honestly, I kind of want to watch it again.

Asking whether or not the extreme violence and sexual content is necessary is certainly valid, and in this case, I believe that it is. I can't say I know what von Trier's intent with the film was, but if he set out to make a horror film, that's exactly what he did. I don't ever go to the theater to see horror films, but I can easily say that Antichrist is the kind of horror film that will stick with me for a long time. It isn't for the scenes of violence either, those are just garnishes to the actual horror that's happening between the two lead characters. Antichrist is little more than a remake of Bergman's Persona, drenched in blood from Willem Dafoe's penis.

My one complaint with the film was the computer graphics. I haven't seen any of von Trier's other films, so I don't know if it's typical of his work, but there was quite a bit of CGI in this film. It never looks bad, honestly, it just doesn't seem to fit in with the realism of the characters' struggles at the beginning of the movie.

I would highly recommend this film to anyone and everyone, assuming you can handle the numerous graphic scenes.