goyablog

Between writing and reading, I’ve spent the past week building a pinhole camera from an empty iPhone 3GS box. The inspiration struck when I was looking around my study for containers to make a camera from and when I saw the box and opened it, it was decided. Remarkably, the height of the interior perfectly fits a 120 film spool. There are even compartments that fit the spools well (including 35mm canisters). The quality of the box — well, it’s an Apple product, so it goes without saying that it’s slick and sturdy. It’s made of stiff smoothly finished flat black cardboard, with the lid covering the entire height of the inner box, enhancing its light-tightness. The interior dividers are black foam core. One could almost simply poke a pinhole in it and use it as is, but it would be nice to have a film advance (and, in the case of 35mm, rewind) mechanism. And a better-than-electrical-tape shutter mechanism. And a padded, grippy base. And a frame count window. So, I found and bought parts (balsa wood, dowels, dowel plugs, metal shelf holder peg, furniture felt pads, some random rubber collar that was from an opened lamp conversion kit at the hardware store, electrical tape, thin flat black sticky back foam, a red frame count window taken from the third Hawkeye Brownie I have). I gutted part of the interior to accomodate both full-frame 120 and 35mm film. I drilled and scraped out holes for dowels that serve as spool holders, as well as holes for the pinhole and shutter mount and the frame counter window. Designed and cut out of balsa wood a sliding shutter. Painted and sharpied all light spots black. Etc. The result is aesthetically very pleasing — worthy of an iPhone box. The almost-too-recessed pinhole might cause vignetting, but that could turn out to be a very good thing. It’s loaded with Fuji Provia 100F right now, ready for testing. If the weather is better tomorrow I’ll give it a spin. In the meantime you get photos of the camera, not from the camera:

I just need to paint the knob silver and make some masks so that I can shoot normal frame 35mm and maybe 24mmx24mm. As is, it’ll expose 56mmx35mm edge-to-edge, across the sprocket holes. Can’t wait to see what comes out of it.

First, let’s get the good things about this film out of the way:

1) the imagined world of Pandora is pretty
2) the aerial choreography of the climatic battle scene is spectacular
3) you probably won’t get bored watching it even though it’s 2-1/2 hours long

And now, the bad:

1) story is formulaic, predictable, unchallenging in it’s form and content. We saw this in Dancing With Wolves, a movie that made me gag. Do read the plot outline for that movie — the similarity, even down to the lost legs and use of a native language — is uncanny.
2) derivative to the point of no shame (or attribution), just beginning with DWW. Besides a story ripped straight from DWW (and The Emerald Forest, except this time it’s Sapphire) all of its key concepts and designs are mere tweaks — at best — of what others have already done. Some reviewers have mentioned DWW and The Matrix, but could have added any number of the following (list not exhaustive):
William Gibson’s classic cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer (1984), wherein via a “simstim” a person can experience virtually the bodily sensations of another.
Neal Stephanson’s Snow Crash (1992), which also makes use of virtual experience via an avatar in an advanced computer model (not live world). In fact, this novel popularized this use of the term “avatar.”
Oshii Mamoru’s mecha designs for gunships and armor suits (such as those in Patlabor)
Several Miyazaki Hayao films: Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa being the most obvious for the human rapaciousness versus the spirit of the forest/nature as well as for particular visuals such as glowing plant life, glowing footprints, repair/resurrection via Mother Nature’s life-energy-giving tendrils, and particular types of fantastic creatures like those in the forest in Nausicaa — heck, the whole look of that forest is mimicked. But add to those, Castle in the Sky (floating island with roots hanging out; big spirit tree) and My Neighbor Totoro (big spirit tree).
Minority Report for all its cool media interfaces.
Jurassic Park (the whole scenario of humans venturing into deep forest jungle full of threatening creatures from another world)
Anno Hideaki’s Neon Genesis Evangelion, for the notion of syncing on a genetic level with another body/machine.
Etc. And etc. ad nauseum. If I read another review citing Cameron’s “extraordinary imagination” I will puke ad nauseum.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being inspired or influenced by preceding works, but when EVERY MAJOR IDEA of a film is shamelessly “borrowed” and you spend $500 million on the visuals and technical details and gimmicky 3D spectacle rather than investing in storytelling and dialogue and an honest filmic vision, I can’t call that a great film, or even a very good film. It’s a good film (stretching the term “film” to mean digital artistry and computer wizardry), worthy of three and a half stars out of five.

Go see it and enjoy it; go see it in 3D even just for the “experience,” for that is really all this “film” is about — hyper-spectacle sensorial (sans cerebral) experience. Great films are not reduced simply to “the experience.” I agree 99% with Blunty’s review on YouTube; the 1% difference is when he says the performances were terrific. They were nothing special: