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Retro Rebound: James Cameron's PIRANHA 2!!!

In celebration of Avatar becoming the largest (unadjusted) grossing movie of all time, I thought I'd go back and review one of James Cameron's earlier works. It's time again to get into the wayback machine. Let's return to 1981; a time before CG in movies, before Aliens and Terminators... to a time when it was possible for James Cameron to make shitty movies. Unfathomable! I watched the original Piranha about 3 years ago and I loved it. It was the exact balance of cheekiness and horror that you'd want in a low budget horror flick. A movie trying to capitalize on the fame of Jaws except with killer piranhas, how could it be bad? It was great. This sequel? It was not. A big problem with the movie was the incoherent story. The way they cut the film made it hard to follow the main story and all the side stories of the supporting characters. On top of that, random characters are introduced, disappear and then reappear much later. As far as I can remember (yest...

Intergalactic AVATAR, AVATAR Intergalactic!!

Phenomenal. In short: Starcraft within Warcraft + playing World of Warcraft + Aliens (the James Cameron one) + An Inconvenient Truth + the BBC Planet Earth series = Avatar . That ain't a bad thing at all. I'm going to skip talking about the story because basically that's the way I went into the movie (knowing pretty much nothing) and I recommend the same thing for you if you haven't seen it yet. I pretty much avoided all the reviews on AICN, but I did skim over Roger Ebert's who gave it an resounding thumbs up. I will say this though, while the storyline doesn't really reinvent the wheel, it still makes for a pretty damn nice looking wheel. While not completely original, the story is quite layered and allegorical, and I'm sure there's many different aspects that can be singled out that could be related to past, present or possibly future social conflicts. I saw the movie on IMAX 3D and the word 'beautiful' doesn't begin to describe how...