The story concerns Max (voiced by Jason Marsden, singing voice by Aaron Lohr) and his relationship with his father, the classic Disney icon Goofy (voiced by Bill Farmer). Max is in high school and wants what most teenage guys want: to fit in, have friends, and get the girl. In the first act, he highjacks a school assembly to ask out the girl of his dreams, Roxanne, but in doing so ends up getting in trouble with the principal. When Goofy hears that his son is causing trouble, he takes parenting advice from his neighbour Pete and tries to get his son “under his thumb” (i.e., earn his son’s respect) with a little bonding time on the open road.

If someone told you that there was a Goof Troop movie, would you expect much more than a made-for-TV cash-in? Surprisingly, this movie is more than that. Yeah, it’s a goofy cartoon (get it?) with tons of slapstick, but it never forgets to include the undercurrent of drama required to maintain your attention for the running time. When the film needs to be quiet and mature, it can be — and there are quite a few touching, insightful little moments thrown in — but A Goofy Movie never forgets that it’s essentially a big-screen Saturday morning cartoon. Personally, I think that’s what makes it so good. I don’t want Goofy’s movie to try to be The Lion King. As a family road trip movie, it works.

The film is also a musical, and though the songs aren’t the greatest tunes you’ll ever hear, they’re not too bad either. They work within the context of the film, and one or two of them do stand out as being memorably good — most notably the first song, “After Today”. The song that marks the beginning of the road trip, “On the Open Road”, isn’t that spectacular on its own but is accompanied by countless visual gags that elevate it. There’s isn’t much to complain about, but nothing to write home about either.

The animation, as I said, is a bit bad by Disney standards. Watch the backgrounds and you’ll see extras conspicuously frozen in place, elements that are clearly painted onto separate cells (having mismatched colours as a result), and there’s even a few sequences that appear to have been artificially slowed down in post-production, causing the frame rate to drop erratically. It’s nothing worse than you’d see in a TV show, however, and the movie makes up for it with some very clever use of colour; I especially like the red light that illuminates the map every time someone looks at it dramatically. It isn’t subtle, but that’s what makes it fit this style of animation so well. For a feature film, a bit more effort could have been put in, but it’s passable.

A Goofy Movie isn’t a grand epic tale that digs deep into important issues — it’s a fun little tale about a boy and his dad. Goofy is definitely my favourite Disney character, and the script does an incredibly good job of keeping him ridiculous while still making me feel some genuine emotion about him. Like in Goof Troop, Goofy is a single dad, but now that Max is a bit older, he finds himself struggling to maintain his relationship with his son. Max is embarrassed by his dad in that way teenagers frequently are… and when your dad is Goofy, it’s a pretty believable embarrassment. I can empathize with Max’s desire to gain some independence from his parent, but I can just as easily sympathize with Goofy. The relationship is done very well. Some people might have wanted something with a bigger scope, but I think this modest story does the movie a favour: the emphasis is on what made the TV show good, while still expanding it to fit a movie format. Maybe a “Goof Troop Saves the World” movie could have worked, but that formula has been done to death. This works fine.

Is it a masterpiece? Probably not, but A Goofy Movie is still one of my personal favourites, bias taken into account. I grew up with those old Goofy cartoons, and I can see a lot of myself in Max and his relationship with his father. Sometimes, it is hard for a little boy to tell his dad, “I love you.” If you don’t understand that, you probably won’t understand what makes me like this movie so much. And if you don’t like Goofy… well, don’t expect him to suddenly endear himself to you.

If you’re a fan of Goof Troop, or if a father-son road trip movie with Goofy sounds like something you would enjoy regardless, check this one out. Maybe it’s not really the best Disney movie, but it’s far from the worst.

Jesse Eisenberg stars as James Brennan, a shy, introspective nerd who plans on going to grad school after the summer. But after the unexpected job loss of his father, Brennan finds himself taking up a summer job at the local amusement park, Adventureland. Here he meets the mandatory assortment of kooky characters: the snarky slacker Joel (Martin Starr), the hot chick Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva), local macho man Mike (Ryan Reynolds), and the love interest, Em. Kristen Stewart plays the lead female role of Em in her typical lip-biting style, but it does work in this instance, proving that she really doesn’t deserve the hate she gets from being in Twilight. She can act when her character actually has a personality.

Where Superbad tried to be a straight comedy with only small dramatic elements to keep it afloat, Adventureland tries to do the opposite. In this, the film is fairly successful.

The characters are, for the most part, well-written and well-developed throughout the narrative; even the archetypal hot chick has a little more depth than you would expect, dating the main character for a brief time and letting some details spill about her background and outlook. The movie has something in common with Lost and Delirious, in that the characters act so consistently stupid and make such obvious mistakes that you want to slap them — but their actions fit their age and situation, and you can’t help but relate to them. If you were ever a teenager, you’ll recognize the people in Adventureland. Even the two-dimensional, undeveloped guy who punches everyone in the nuts is a realistic character, really: I know several people I met in high school who still act like that and never seem to have any depth no matter how long I’ve known them.

Drama is where the movie really shines. Where it starts to falter a bit is the comedy. The structure of the film pools a fair mix of drama and comedy into the first act and partially into the second, but it’s always in the form of a dramedy rather than a comedy — meaning that the scenes are mainly dramatic and have light humour to punctuate them, rather than being primarily funny. The problem is that the movie doesn’t really do this consistently, and ends up becoming a straight drama by the halfway point. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but when the movie starts out like that it starts to wear on your nerves a bit and makes you think, “What happened to the jokes?”

I’m not saying Brennan should wear a clown suit, but the tension is just a tad too much in later scenes of the movie, to a point where it almost starts to seem melodramatic. These are teenagers, yeah, they blow everything out of proportion and act like every little betrayal is a bullet to the head — but they’re teenagers, they’re supposed to be sarcastic and blow off a bit of steam while doing so. For a movie with so many stoners in it, there’s a distinct lack of funny stoned people and an overabundance of philosophical prats. It’s not too bad, but it kills a bit of the movie’s rewatchability — once you know what happens, you can’t muster up that edge-of-your-seat I-want-to-know-what-happens-next feeling, and it becomes a lot less entertaining.

Adventureland is a good film. Hell, it’s a great film that deserves way more recognition than it gets. Is it perfect? Not really; it does go a bit far with the drama at times. But it’s so much closer to being perfect than most movies like it, you have to see it at least once. It’s no Dazed and Confused, but how many movies are?

Splitting the source material into two films means that the final confrontation against Voldemort and the Death Eaters is allowed to span roughly five hours instead of the usual two and half, and this means that the story can linger and pace itself a little bit better. For a series as massive and epic as Harry Potter, a suitably huge conclusion would be needed to cap it off — and for the most part, the director David Yates succeeded once again. Part 1 is a leisurely first act that draws you back into the characters and setting quite effectively, with plenty of action creeping into the second act just to keep the viewers on their toes, then Part 2 is for the most part just a super-extended third act. And while my gut instinct for a situation like that would be to criticize Part 2 for stretching out what’s traditionally supposed to be punchy and to-the-point… I can’t deny that the enormous climax of Deathly Hallows just works.

That’s not to say that the two films are masterpieces. Being made in 2011 amongst the craze of pointless CGI and superhero movies, it seems like the post-production visual effects team decided to be lazy and just reuse some PlayStation 3 graphics instead of doing actual work. For $250 000 000, don’t tell me they couldn’t have made the effects look better than that. Half of the movie feels like a video game cutscene, Attack of the Clones style. But then, I’m really biased against CGI in general. I’ve always held up the other Potter films as my example of CGI done well (you either use it sparingly or have enough dough to make it look flawless), but Deathly Hallows hangs a big asterisk over my example, and that just annoys me.

There’s also a serious problem with the subplot distribution. For whatever reason, either the screenwriter or the director decided to put all that negative stuff about Dumbledore that was in the book into Part 1 — but then didn’t actually follow up on it satisfactorily in Part 2. Unlike in the book, Deathly Hallows doesn’t redeem Dumbledore, and his winking smile to Harry when we do get to see him one last time just sort of makes him look like a prick. What was that about? The majority of the story was done quite well in Deathly Hallows, and it’s not like they didn’t have enough running time to expound on everything they wanted. The humanization of Dumbledore is pretty important to the series’s themes, but if they wanted to cut it so badly, they could have at least cut all of it.

Overall, though, the two parts of Deathly Hallows are pretty good. Not incredible, but none of the Potter series was really incredible anyway. They’re just fun.

See also: my review of Half-Blood Prince, my review of the first five Harry Potter movies.

If you’ve read other reviews from me, you might have noticed that I have a thing for heavily flawed movies that manage to still be good. This is one of those movies.

The film follows a quiet, introspective girl named Mary, played by Mischa Barton. In the beginning of the movie, Mary tells us that her mother has passed away, and her emotionally-distant father has decided to enroll her in an all-girls boarding school. Arriving there, she soon meets her roommates, Tori (Jessica Paré) and Paulie (Piper Perabo). In shocking juxtaposition to the main character, Paulie is outspoken and open about everything, never flinching when the truth needs to come out — except, of course, when it comes to Tori, whose parents can’t be allowed to know the true nature of their relationship.

The first time I watched this movie, I thought it was pretty damn good, but it gets worse on every subsequent viewing. The reason, I think, is that it’s extremely lopsided — movies are a combination of plot, characters, visuals, music, pacing, and theme (the last three forming the broader category of atmosphere), but Lost and Delirious doesn’t do many of these aspects well. The plot scores an absolute zero, hitting nearly every single cliché in the queer and feminist books and being as boring as humanly possible. The visuals are fairly bland, with only one scene being memorably well-composed and many, many scenes which comprise a series of heavy-handed visual metaphors. The music is… well, there’s a reason critics have called it melodramatic. Even the theme, though it’s not done terribly, is kind of… generic. Are you surprised that a movie about lesbians and a shy girl is about feminism? Surprised that a movie set in an all-girls boarding school has something to say about patriarchy?

No, I understand fully why critics hate this movie. It’s very, very flawed, doing many key aspects of filmmaking utterly and completely wrong. But it does one important thing right: characters. The characters are amazing.

Regardless of what you might personally think of them (trust me, you’ll probably want to slap them a few times during the film), one thing you can’t deny is that they are completely honest. Yes, the overwrought musical sequences are melodramatic… but the movie is about teenagers going through what is, to them, the end of the whole damn world. The lengths Paulie goes to to win the heart of her girlfriend are absolutely insane, but I can name three people in my life who would actually do that.

Does that mean the movie can be forgiven for all it does wrong? No, not at all. A great movie takes a personal, emotional scenario, blows it up, and turns it into an experience that accurately conveys the complexity and meaning of the situation to the audience, including and especially outsiders who wouldn’t have understood the situation otherwise. But Lost and Delirious just isn’t a great movie — it’s a cult movie, or maybe you’d call it an insider movie. A movie made by a lesbian, for lesbians; by a woman, for women; and it makes no attempt to include the outside world in its equation. You’re in, or you’re out.

So no, Lost and Delirious isn’t good — but it isn’t necessarily just the clichéd mess that people claim it is. If you can relate to the characters, relate to the melodrama, relate to the age and place where a trite visual metaphor seemed supremely poetic — then you can get swept up in the movie and walk away feeling like someone just stabbed you in the heart. But if you can’t relate to it, you’ll be throwing popcorn at the screen. That’s just how it is with this one.

For the record, I’ve never read the source material myself so I can’t comment on why and how the movie could have been improved in that manner. However, I read that the newest edition of the book has a foreword by the author praising the movie, despite its differences. Take that as you will.

The completion of this task, the so-called “inception”, is vital for team leader Dominic Cobb; unable to return home to his children because of legal complications, he is forced to stay on the run, taking jobs to attempt to buy his way back home. Client Saito’s job offer is irresistible: a powerful figure in the energy market, Saito promises to use his connections to let Cobb return home, presuming the inception is successful. What is already a difficult task is complicated by the presence of Cobb’s subconscious projection of his dead wife Mal, seemingly intent on sabotaging his missions to convince him to stay in the dream world with her forever.

Cobb and Mal’s relationship and the circumstances surrounding her death are key plot points in the film; explained through dream sequences, snippets and emotionally charged flashbacks, Nolan does an excellent job of teasing us with the details and leaving us to guess the rest as he returns to the mission. Perhaps most interesting about the situation is that Mal is only a projection of Cobb’s subconscious, and her anger and attempts to trap him are influenced primarily by the guilt with which he is wracked over the notion he is responsible for her death. His physical conflict with her in the dream world represents his internal turmoil; reconciliation would be akin to coming to terms with her death, and the plot accurately depicts the difficulty involved in forgiving oneself.

A definite master of intrigue, Nolan’s primary policy appears to be that of hiding the secrets until the very end; he lets the film become serious and dark before adding a dash of humour to bring the audience back into the action. There’s no break for thinking: in flashbacks, you’ll be lost in the plot, deeply analytical and trying to guess the meaning; then you’ll be thrust back into the action and the accompanying state of awe as we enjoy fast-paced, gravity-defying fight scenes rivalling those unreal, carefully choreographed scenes seen in The Matrix. His preference for practical effects over computer-generated is admirable; even the most complex fight sequences were patiently shot over and over, take after take to match his artistic vision. There’s nothing trivial about the 100-foot motorised hallway set built in-studio, turning at a speed of eight revolutions per second to simulate shifts in gravity; this is the way special effects should be done.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt skilfully navigates the spinning set, throwing his armed assailants against the wall as gravity changes to his advantage; his character is Cobb’s curiously-mannered point man; perhaps even more curious about the character are the similarities in his mannerisms to those of Gordon-Levitt’s last role, Tom in Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer. Undoubtedly a unique and talented actor, it is somewhat interesting to note that he isn’t engaging his full potential here. The fight scenes are awe-inspiring and epic, but in brainstorming sessions it’s easy to forget you’re meant to be watching a trained extractor and point man, not a smitten greetings card writer.

A better example of acting talent well explored is in the case of Ellen Page, perhaps best known for her role as the eponymous heroine in 2007’s drama-comedy Juno, who portrays architect Ariadne, hired to design the levels within the dream to create the impression of realism for the subject they are attempting to deceive. Nolan’s idea here is wonderful; the world, designed by the architect, is populated by projected manifestations of the subject’s subconscious after they are drawn into the dream. However, if the dreamer changes the world of the dream too much, the subject will subconsciously attempt to find and eliminate the dreamer through whatever means possible. In some cases, the subconscious projections are militarised thanks to training by another extractor, making the process more difficult.

Inception is, without a doubt, the best film of the year so far, and is far more impressive than Nolan’s last work, The Dark Knight. Combining a clever plot with strong, emotionally-charged acting and some breathtaking action sequences, Inception will probably go down as one of my favourite recent films. If you haven’t already seen it, see it now; if you have seen it, you’ll know exactly why I’m such a fan of this film.

Matthew Vaughn, someone I’m totally unfamiliar with, does a good job directing. The action scenes are colourful and inventive in a way that’s awesome rather than just silly — though it is a bit silly in a way that’s appropriate for a film that’s mostly a spoof of the superhero genre. The film has a very modern look without turning its action scenes into an incomprehensible series of blurry close-ups like so many movies do nowadays. It also features a voice-over from the main character (a narrative device I’m in love with for some reason, so bias ahoy). The movie is technically very well-made: Big Daddy’s big action scene, in which the camera zooms through a security recording and smoothly pans across a large rectangular room, is particularly memorable both as a technical achievement and as an ingenious storytelling device (allowing us to see the entire room without being confined to the security camera we’re supposed to be looking at, without losing coherence).

The story takes a leaf out of Christopher Nolan’s idea trough, following Dave’s transition into the masked vigilante Kick-Ass, how he gets known across the city, and how he takes on the mob first and a supervillain second. Like Batman, the movie keeps to a sketchy sort of “realism” which is just barely realistic enough to fit the theme. Kick-Ass gains worldwide popularity through a MySpace page and a shaky YouTube video, becoming famous in the course of a few weeks.

If you asked Bruce Wayne how he picked his costume, you’d get a vague, “Well, bats are kind of scary I guess.” If you asked Dave Lizewski, you’d get the more succinct, “I dunno.” Keeping in mind that the movie is not supposed to be especially serious, I give it points for cutting the crap and getting right to the point. In fact, that’s the main thing I like about this movie. It really doesn’t mess around at all. Dave becomes a superhero less then fifteen minutes into the film, flatly cutting through that “first hour of the movie is an origin story” bullshit that every other superhero movie does.

The only thing that bugs me about it is the last fifteen minutes. After a startlingly effective tonal shift from comedy to drama during the rising action, the actual climax of the movie is very disappointing. Instead of resolving any of the movie’s themes or being at all consistent, we have a huge fight scene that isn’t even focused on the main character — instead, it’s focused on Hit-Girl, now playing the role of Steve Urkel. It’s okay until the last few moments, when the movie suddenly remembers that Hit-Girl isn’t the protagonist, at which point Dave spontaneously appears out of nowhere, having now gained the superpower of not going deaf when firing two Gatling guns on either side of his head.

Funny? Sure. Awesome? Okay, sure. Consistent? No. Annoying? Very much. I know I’m probably in the minority here, but this climax is so paint-drinkingly stupid that it completely stops the movie from being “great”, in my eyes. Don’t get me wrong: it’s fine for a movie to be stupid. The problem here is that, even though the movie is a comedy, it isn’t that kind of comedy. This isn’t Spongebob Squarepants. The movie, except for this scene, sticks to that aforementioned barely-plausible realism that gave it a very specific theme: “If people tried to be superheros in real life, they would suck.” It’s fine to show Hit-Girl being an unadulterated badass and mowing down legions of mobsters with assault rifles — precisely because she’s Hit-Girl, the character we all know to be completely unrealistic and silly. Dave Lizewski — even when he’s Kick-Ass — is supposed to be this ineffectual nerd who gets his ass handed to him in every scene. Turning him into a badass totally ruins the theme of the movie; at least, it ruins the theme I thought the movie would have.

With the climax taken into account, what is the theme of the movie? “Be a superhero because superheros are totally awesome”? Might as well watch The Dark Knight.

Even when it derails Dave’s character for the sake of a great action scene, it squanders the potential that could have had. Watching Dave murder a bunch of people with his testosterone guns is cool, but not nearly as cool as any of Big Daddy’s or Hit-Girl’s action scenes. His later fight with the supervillain is flat-out boring, basically amounting to a couple of sissy punches in a small nondescript room. Nobody even gets injured; they just knock each other out and fall asleep together like a couple of gay lovers.

There’s a lot of nits to be picked if you’re into that sort of thing. Many references are dated in a very head-scratching way. I understand that the movie is based on a comic book written by a 40-year-old man, but surely someone in the cast and crew must have used the internet in the last five years and realized that no one uses MySpace anymore. The film’s story takes some rather huge liberties in adapting the story as it is, so a minor change like that should hardly be a problem. And what world do these characters live in where everyone has YouTube and iPhones, but comic books are considered a huge phenomenon? The comics industry is dead and has been for a very long time, as much as the writers would try to deny it; the fact that the movie doesn’t even attempt to acknowledge this fact is sort of a missed joke.

Overall, you probably think I hate this movie, but I really don’t. If I was asked to review my favourite movie of all time, I’d still find something to complain about. At the end of the day, Kick-Ass is hilarious, exciting, and very much worth your money. I just think it could have been a bit better.

Ben Affleck stars as Holden McNeil, an uptight comic book artist who makes his living on “dick and fart jokes” while he tries to think of better comic ideas. He lives with his inker, Banky Edwards (Jason Lee), who is totally satisfied with the dick and fart jokes. A running subplot in the film concerns Banky’s desire to turn their comic books into a cartoon series, which Holden is reluctant to do because he feels it will make him into even less of a “true artist”.

During all this, Holden falls in love with fellow artist Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams), who draws a less successful but more artistically-fulfilling comic book. Unfortunately for Holden, he only finds out after falling in love that Alyssa is a lesbian. They can only be friends, so Holden tries to let it go and do just that. He fails, as anyone would, but so does she. Even though she’s supposed to be a lesbian, Alyssa falls in love with Holden and the two start dating.

The rest of the movie is a really harsh and realistic look at relationships, sexuality, and art, which I won’t spoil here. The characters are engaging and relatable while still being very funny; no one person stands out as being “comic relief”, as everyone gets their fair share of punchlines and witty dialogue. The plot is excellent and treads some serious ground without becoming too angsty — an important quality in any story. It all works very well to provide a satisfying experience — a movie with deep characters, big laughs, and a plot that should leave an impact on the audience, no matter how they interpret it.

There are minor gripes to be had with the execution, however. The script drags at times and loses a lot of its humour as the film goes on. There are a few too many dramatic monologues from the characters, especially in the third act. Although the acting is very good for the most part, some of these are a bit too on-the-nose to make sense.

One monologue that does work especially well is given by Alyssa about two thirds of the way into the movie. As she lies in bed with Holden, she talks to him about her sexual identity and experimentation – in such an insightful way that it makes me wonder how a straight man could have written the screenplay. This dialogue in particular is what makes Chasing Amy worth watching. You’ll have to watch the movie to understand — a quotation simply doesn’t have the same impact.

Still, there is one huge problem that looms over the movie and almost ruins it for me. This is a problem I have with the film’s message. Chasing Amy is a movie about a lesbian who falls in love with a man, but the movie excludes a certain word entirely from its dialogue-heavy script. Not once does a character use the word “bisexual” in the entire film — even though Alyssa clearly is.

Alyssa’s self-identification as lesbian is all because she doesn’t want to be ostracized by her gay friends. It’s an unfortunate identity crisis brought on by our society’s implicit acceptance of monosexuality over bisexuality. It’s a bad thing. The only thing worse than being gay in a straight world is being bi in a gay world, which is a message that the character of Alyssa conveys quite well — but only in implication. The film refuses to use the b-word.

Bisexual erasure exists — to many, many people, bisexuality is a “phase” that people will eventually snap out of. Sometimes being bisexual is seen as a cheat, like an unfair advantage that should be discouraged. Attitudes like this cause people to be pigeonholed into the discrete categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, all depending on the situation. This is shown clearly in the scene where Alyssa tells her friends that she is dating Holden. To Alyssa’s friends, she is “selling out” by allowing herself to be attracted to men — as if she’s straight now and everything previous was just a lie.

Chasing Amy seems to be making a deal with the audience to accept Alyssa’s sexuality for what it is — and to combat bisexual erasure. But by leaving out the b-word entirely, the film paradoxically supports this attitude. Many people — gay and straight alike — misinterpret Chasing Amy as a movie that shows how the right man can turn a lesbian straight. By obfuscating the real meaning and refusing to make its point clear, Kevin Smith panders to audiences who only want to see this misinterpretation.

It’s still a great movie that has a lot to say about sexual identity, but it doesn’t really make an effort to teach the audience anything. It just preaches to the choir. It could have done more than that with minimal effort.

The question is, does the enormous price tag help make Avatar something worth seeing? Or is this just an expensive tech experiment?

The film follows Jake (Sam Worthington), a marine tasked with exploring the surface of an alien planet, Pandora, and communicating with the natives. Jake gets this position because he has similar genetics to his twin brother, who was a scientist initially picked for the job. To visit Pandora, the scientists and Jake use artificially-created alien bodies as avatars (thus the title).

The aliens – blue-skinned cat-people made out of advanced CGI and motion capture technology – are known as the Na’vi (with an apostrophe for decoration). The Na’vi are very spiritual beings who live in a giant tree, worship a god who actually exists, commune with the animals, etc. They are cliched nature-loving aliens through and through.

Humans are the bad guys who want to destroy the aliens’ big tree, which is located on a large deposit of valuable “unobtainium” (probably the funniest joke in the movie). The whole avatar program is in place so that scientists can communicate with the Na’vi and tell them to move out of the tree. Why the government would spend billions of dollars developing the avatars instead of just killing all the aliens is never explained.

From there, the film turns into Pochahontas. Jake falls in love with one of the aliens, they have a PG-rated mating ritual, and he turns against the evil humans. Some other sympathetic scientists help Jake to stand up for the Na’vi while a generic antagonist with literally no personality whatsoever rides around in a manga-inspired mecha and tries to destroy the big tree.

It’s an environmentalist film, if that was too subtle for you.

Still, even if the story is nothing special, that doesn’t mean Avatar is a bad movie. The delivery is a big part of it, too. And with this much money on the table, it’s clear that the delivery of this film was a big deal to Cameron. He waited twelve years because 1997 couldn’t deliver.

The acting is good. No performance really stands out, but that’s the story’s fault. Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana do most of the movie in motion-capture, which is pretty impressive – it’s hard enough to act in the film industry when you have to do the same scene dozens of times, even harder when you’re working against computer-generated creatures that you can’t see on the set.

The imagination and design put into the setting is also pretty impressive. None of it is particularly original, but there’s clearly been a lot of thought put into fleshing out what’s there. The human technology looks very mechanistic and grey, which is played for contrast against the blue-and-green alien motif. The Na’vi themselves are nicely designed. The filmmakers cheated somewhat by making them very humanoid, but it’s necessary to make the human-falls-in-love-with-alien plot work. If the Na’vi were any less human, the whole film would have crashed because the audience would no longer be able to believe that Jake could fall in love with one of them.

The CGI is gorgeous, of course. Nothing to complain about there.

I’m torn on exactly what to think about Avatar. It has an incredibly trite story that I find very annoying, but the delivery is actually pretty solid. It is a very well-made film that might be worth seeing for the effects alone. It still leaves me with a sour taste, though. Titantic, at least, had something worth delivering, and that made the delivery much more satisfying. Avatar is frustrating because it has good effects that it doesn’t even deserve. It’s a very boring and uninspired movie that isn’t worth 230 million dollars by any stretch of the imagination.

Had the film been made in a realistic setting – not as a fantasy with sci-fi flavour – it wouldn’t be half as annoying. The aliens aren’t necessary, and the special effects only serve to distract. Just watch the trailer and you’ll get the same effect. All the eye-candy without the condescending tree-hugging nonsense.

“Condescending” is the word, really. The aliens and humans are both totally one-note and boring: humans are all evil for no clear reason, and aliens are perfect paragons of good. I find myself rooting for the humans to kill everyone just because the aliens are so perfect and infuriating, and that’s where the story really falls apart. Even with the cliche story, it could have come to life with some engaging characters. Avatar doesn’t have characters; it has archetypes.

Watch Avatar if you want to see some really cool motion-capture. Don’t watch Avatar if you want to see a good movie.

Note: This is only the first season of the show. The second season is called “Shin Koihime Musou”.

Overview

When Kanu was young, her family and their village were wiped out by bandits. As she grew up, she saw more and more of the world, and how so many other families were torn apart by war, disease and other things. And so she sets out on a journey: a journey to find the answer. Not an answer to why life is fair, but rather a journey to find the path that will change the world.

Along the way, she becomes well known for hunting down bandits like the ones who killed her family, and meets and adopts Rin-Rin, a young girl who like herself who lost her family to bandit attacks. Together these warriors and other companions will seek to change the world.

Review

Within the first five minutes of the first episode I knew that I was going to get hooked on this show. Every episode in this season provided laughs, intense action and even some hentai-like scenes. I say hentai-like because the version I watched was censored and the scenes that would have contained nudity were still in the show, but had some way of blocking the body parts. Pretty much every character in this season is hilarious and hard not to like. There are of course some annoying characters, but they’re usually on the show for one or two episodes. The bandits are the main enemy that the main characters usually fight. In this show the bandits are always the same, kind of like Team Rocket in Pokémon, always returning just to get blasted to the sky.

Out of the 12 episodes that this show has none of them are boring. They all provide laughs and leave you wanting to watch more. I went through this anime within two days on a weekend that I was at my dads. It was definitely worth it. I would definitely recommend this anime to everyone that is looking for something that they can laugh at and be excited for the next episode!