Perfect example: the sopranos uses crime/mafia as a backdrop. It’s more of a character study, and life post 9/11.
Assessing something's value entirely by whether you can name a character is how we're in this IP-driven nightmare now. Most people on the street can't tell you Rick Blaine's name or Jake Gittes either, and I'll be damned if you're going to tell me those had no impact. (And before someone makes a bad faith response, I'm not saying Avatar is on a par with those movies)
Chinatown and Casablanca came out decades ago. Avatar came out a decade ago. Chinatown and Casablanca were dramas for adults. Avatar was a tentpole blockbuster. Chinatown and Casablanca have famous quotes. No one remembers a line from Avatar. There isn't much point in comparing them. Cameron's own previous films had more cultural impact than Avatar. If it was not for the sequels in the works, it would be talked about even less.
Didn't Avatar spur a phenomenon where people were genuinely depressed that they didn't live on the planet with the Navi or something? Edit: links The Avatar effect: Movie-goers feel depressed and even suicidal at not being able to visit utopian alien planet | Daily Mail Online https://www-psychologytoday-com.cdn...g-hope-preventing-suicide/201001/avatar-blues
it certainly had an effect at the time of release, but for a film of its size/revenue, it’s become a glorified footnote a decade later in a way that no other film really has
Hah eh, it's a harmful movie, it doesn't bother me. It's a fun action movie adventure set in an alien world with beautiful scenery. It's all good. It's definitely incredible that out of all the movies Avatar is #1 in box office all time. It's also absurd that Cameron is spending TWO decades to make 3 more follow-ups to a movie, that i admit, no one really cares about. But hey, it's a movie that has mass appeal so i get why producers are behind it still.
The gap in the sequels is what is so bizarre about the whole thing. If it does really come out at the end of 2021, it will be twelve years between films. Someone who was in fifth grade when it came out would have graduated from college by then. The gap between Titanic and Avatar was partly about getting the technology to a point that Cameron felt that it worked, but you would think it would be able to just keep going after the first film.
Outside of the tech it’s hilarious to read about how much time and work went into them reverse-engineering an entire biological habitat and a native society with its own language and culture and music, just for them to end up barely addressing any of it in the film. Can’t find it rn but there’s a funny YouTube video about how Cameron hired these anthropologists and musicologists who spent years taking the alien’s language and figuring out how they would talk and what their music would sound like compared to actual native societies and then creating that music as part of the soundtrack/score of the film, just for Cameron/the producers to immediately dump it because it wasn’t as generally appealing as a generic film score
Whether or not humor works for you is one of the most subjective things in movies but I’d agree, I didn’t find it funny at all and more often than not it made me cringe or roll my eyes.
Scott Pilgrim wasn't anything special. Edgar Wright has been mostly below average outside of the Pegg-Wright films.
Scott Pilgrim is good, books are better, etc. Is A Fistful of Fingers even available to watch anywhere? Besides that his only other film is Baby Driver which is just whatever. So it’s kinda funny to say “outside of the Pegg-Wright films” considering he has very little work that isn’t those lol I guess he did some tv shows in the 90s but I don’t think I’ve ever once heard anyone talk about those