Avatar...DONE!

This girl named Laura, who is now spending a small portion of her life in a facility that is training her to become an unstoppable, Russian-speaking missionary, was obsessed with this show called "Avatar: The Last Airbender." She persuasively insisted that I give it a try.

So I did.

Thanks to Netflix, I have now finished all three seasons of this enormously enjoyable cartoon. And let me tell you something about this cartoon--it is ENORMOUSLY enjoyable.

I have friends who hate anime, and I sympathize with them, because, and let's be honest, what's NOT to hate about anime? My exceptions are very limited: anything by Hayao Miyazaki (I definitely had to look that up)--Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl's Moving Castle, and so on--and now, beautifully, Avatar.

Of course, Avatar isn't really anime. It's an American-made, anime-loving cartoon. It's influences (this from our beloved Wikipedia) are East and South Asian, and Western animation, so it ends up being more interesting and culture-rich than any of them.

I can't even really tell you why I loved it so much. The animation is great, I suppose. It's beautiful and exciting. But the writing is often corny, the humor almost unendurably silly, and most of the dramatic dialog is definitively on-the-nose. It's moralistic, and the characters barely escape being flat.

But the story is fantastic. It's not so crazy that you never know what's coming next, but it's deeply imaginative and moves along at a really excellent pace. Each subplot is satisfyingly fun or touching, depending, and the overall story arch--the one that stretches over all three seasons--is really, really cool.

And the characters are actually quite lovable, once you've got half a dozen episodes under your belt. And the humor succeeds just often enough at being incredibly funny.

Crap, everyone, I love this show. I couldn't wait to dig into each disc as it got mailed to my apartment. If I had to go a couple of days without seeing it, I felt like dying. But here's the best part, now that it's over, I'm OK. I'm happy with it. There's no enduring ache that there are no more episodes to watch. The story is finished, everything happened that needed to happen, and I'm satisfied. It's a great feeling.

Want to know what the show's actually about? Well I won't tell you. You can find out more about it here, or buy it here (if you have Netflix, you can watch the whole first season online), or get excited about the movie adaptation Shyamalan is doing here.

Man, I wish I could bend stuff.

Netflixing

I have a subscription to Netflix and I love it.

I use the $14/month plan, which is the 2-at-a-time unlimited deal, along with access to the "Instant" library of movies and TV you can watch online. I might downgrade to the 1-at-a-time plan come Fall semester, as I will no longer have time to breathe, let alone watch a movies two or three times per week, but I digress.

I looked over my rental history, and discovered that within the past eleven (almost) months, I've had just shy of 100 DVDs mailed to my apartment. Now, that number has been somewhat bolstered by multi-disc seasons of TV on DVD, but it's still an impressive figure. And that's not counting the films I've seen in the theaters or on my computer (via that "Instant" library I just mentioned).

Point is: I've got a lot of fuel to burn. So what I'm going to do is go through that list and, one by one, pass along a short review.

Here's my first.

The date is roughly the 22nd of September, and it is the first of many syndicated movie nights. My friend Jon had a very sweet big screen, HD TV, and the surround sound system it deserved. So we decided to set up movie nights where the attendees would be expected to sit quietly as the movie played, respecting the art as much as enjoying each other's company.

There Will Be Blood was our maiden voyage. I think there might have been four of us. Or three. A slow start to a long tradition.

But the film was pretty incredible. Daniel Day-Lewis was often described as a tour de force, and it was true, absolutely. The man devoured us whole from the screen. He was a self-described oil man, but really, he was a typhoon.

I probably don't need to fill you in on the plot because it was nominated for eight Oscars and won two of them the same year No Country for Old Men came out (a film that will get a much broader treatment sometime on this blog in due futurity.) But if you don't know, it was about a man named Daniel Plainview and his hand in the oil industry when it was still very young.

The performances were nothing short of spectacular, which Daniel Day-Lewis won the Oscar for Best Actor. And the cinematography was supernaturally good. The film was stunning every second, and for that it also won the Oscar for Best Cinematography.

After all that, however, I don't feel like I can fully endorse this film because it was perhaps one of the more depressing films I've seen. The culminating moment between the two most important and powerful characters unfolded with such depravity, brutality, and raw human rage that I felt personally injured when it was over. The film wasn't rated R for anything graphically depicted. It was for the hate so meticulously painted on the screen.

To say that I wasn't moved, that this film didn't leave a lasting impression upon me, would be utterly disingenuous. I can't help but admire this kind of craftsmanship and artistry. But it was a dark, dark film. You might hear people quote it--"I - drink - your - MILKSHAKE!"--and laugh. I've joined in. But that laughter, I believe, very often hides the troubling aftermath of this film in the minds of those who watched it. It's sort of the same as laughing at cancer. It's an ugly thing. Humor is a coping mechanism.

***PS: There is a new post on my new blog - That Hideous Strength