Sephiroth_deus said:
Seriously Bob, I would think you would know enough about flamewars not to participate.
Nah, I'm having fun
I decided early on in this venture that I was going to engage the audience on this show, and I can't very well turn tail just because THIS time the reaction is mostly negative. You learn from criticism, one way or another.
fozzy360 said:
but many on here are simply trying to understand why you gave Avatar such a glowing review when technically it's just as cliched as Book of Eli
Alright. I still really, REALLY on-principle reject the idea of doing the "how can you like X but not Y?" thing with two movies that have absolutely nothing substantial in common other than the fact that one of them has entered the "it's popular so it's cool to hate it" phase... but okay, I'll bite.
From where I sit, "Avatar" simply
isn't as cliche'd as "Eli." They're both telling well-worn stories, but the key is in the details: "Eli" takes it's well-worn story, adds the most obvious/overused macguffin possible, a set of stock characters we've seen hundreds of times before, not a single genuinely inventive action sequence and the same cinematography and art-design used in every other film in it's genre. "Avatar," on the other hand, plants it's well-worn story in a context (hell, a WORLD) that I've never seen on film before, fills it tech and biology that's either never been seen before (pretty much everything on Pandora) or never been realized as well before (the mech-suits) and even throws in curveballs like the ecosystem-as-bio-internet concept that are pretty damn intriguing in their own right.
Plus...Tank-Girl? Really?
"Tank Girl" is a better movie than "Eli," however well-intentioned the former may be. It's more fun, the animated-transitions are a genuinely novel budget-busting technique, the half-man/half-kangaroo guys are properly-absurd and Lori Petty plants one on Naomi Watts - what's not to love?

(Also better post-end-of-world movies than Eli: Steel Dawn, Demolition Man, Blood of Heroes, Lunar Cop, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, Six-String Samurai, Surf Nazis Must Die.)
DrkStar Cion said:
and also, when you blatantly throw your superior knowledge of atheism around and even go so far as to screw at a film for having a religious motif you're bound to annoy people.
I don't know that I've ever claimed to have much knowledge of atheism, certainly not any sort of "superior" knowledge. I mean, I've never studied it all that much. For that matter, I'm also fairly certain I've never "screwed at" a movie... though once I find out how you do such a thing, I'm definately going to give it a try
Unless, of course, you meant to say "throw around the superior knowledge of [my] atheism," in which case I cheerfully invite you to find the point in this piece wherein I declared myself to be an atheist
Incidentally, here's a GOOD version of "Book of Eli," telling the same basic story and message a thousand times better and more-powerfully in under 9 minutes back in 1939: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8stkqssLYc
(seriously, give it a watch. Easily one of the greatest animated cartoon achievements of all time.)