Author Archive for Zacqary Adam Green

How One Simple Cut Could Have Made Avatar’s Story Excellent and Let It Win Best Picture

WARNING: The following post discusses key story points in Avatar. They are not “spoilers” per se, because everyone has already seen this movie (if not literally, then figuratively).

Avatar’s story is the one thing that has elicited a near-universal “meh” from the entire world. We’ve all heard it before: hero infiltrates enemy, learns the enemy is his friend and his friends are the enemy, helps former enemy fight former friend, and said fight is a standard progression of hero almost succeeds, then he fails, but then he miraculously succeeds. Archetypes like this aren’t a bad thing; after all, we humans have been telling this same basic story for thousands of years, keeping it fresh with minor variations (i.e. Avatar’s transhuman motifs), and it’s always interesting if not particularly groundbreaking. But with all the love and attention Avatar’s visuals got over the alleged 14 years James Cameron worked on them, the script is admittedly less polished. That’s probably one of the big reasons why Avatar didn’t win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

There are many little things which Cameron could have done to twist the Hero’s Journey archetype — perhaps Jake Sully should have betrayed the Na’vi willingly before feeling remorse later on, for example — or simply cleaning up some of the dialogue and filling some plot holes would have sufficed. But perhaps the best thing Cameron could have done to Avatar is to make one simple removal, changing nothing else. This one removal would make Avatar’s criticisms of the War on Terror, racism, technology, and destruction of the environment immensely more powerful.

Following the scene after Hometree’s destruction, when we see slow-motion shots of Jake and Grace being wrestled out of the avatar links, Grace shouting “you murderer!” at Parker, fade to black. Roll credits.

Okay, that may be a “simple” cut, but it’s pretty major. Still, it would have made Avatar a much better film. Here’s why:
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Subtitling on YouTube — Now Deaf People Can Giggle At My Videos Too

YouTube still doesn’t have nearly the audiovisual quality and presentation of Vimeo, but I gotta hand it to them for providing some fairly awesome features.

I know they’ve had closed-captioning and subtitling features for a while, but I never bothered to try it out until now. I suppose if I don’t do the subtitling now, it’ll soon be done for me by Google’s speech recognition robots, and done very badly.

So here’s “Let’s Meet the Lerners” with full closed-captioning. Click the arrow in the control-bar-thingy, then the “CC” button to turn it on. And if anyone reading this is fluent in another language and wants to translate it, download this .srt file, open it in Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac OS X (if you’re savvy enough to use Linux, I probably don’t need to tell you what your text editor is called), and rewrite all of the texty things while leaving the numbers intact. Then send it to me, of course.

According to Netflix, Paul Blart: Mall Cop is a “Suspenseful Movie”

Image of "Paul Blart" listed under "Suspenseful Movies"

That is all.

Why a World In Which Movie Piracy Were Legal Would Have No Drawbacks Whatsoever

Why a World In Which Movie Piracy Were Legal Would Have No Drawbacks Whatsoever — Average US movie ticket price: $7.50; Time the decision to pay this price is made: Before the movie; Total US gross of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: $402,111,870; How much money would it have made if the decision to pay $7.50 were made AFTER the movie? See? No drawbacks.

Sources:
» Ticket Price
» Gross

Your Face Is Still a Saxophone, But Not Until April

So it seems Your Face is a Saxophone is taking me a lot longer than I originally anticipated.

There have been a great deal of technical issues preventing me from working as quickly as I’d thought I would be able to. These issues, however, are in no way insurmountable, just really, really annoying. Expect to know more in March, and see the final product in April.

For now, here’s a still image of something or other happening: