In 3 words:
Pocahontas. In. Space.
Posted on 10/19/2014 1:53:44 PM PDT by EveningStar
It’s been 30 years since James Cameron made his name with a futuristic sci-fi actioner starring ex-bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, inspired by his own nightmare vision of a murderous mecha-skeleton. Shot for $5.6 million in 1984, The Terminator changed everything for Cameron and his fellow Roger Corman disciple and producer Gale Anne Hurd. The two have since carved their own influential paths – Cameron with Aliens, Titanic, and his $2.7 billion Avatar franchise, Hurd with AMC's ratings juggernaut The Walking Dead. And they're still proving that original ideas can be profitable in spite of Hollywood’s "fear-based" decision-making, while keeping a polite distance from the Terminator: Genisys that’s coming in 2015 like a T-800 from the future.
(Excerpt) Read more at deadline.com ...
Is Edgar Allan Poe for kids? H.G. Wells?
Yeah, there’s anew biographical documentary out on him on Netflix that’s worth watching. He wrote or directed just about every movie I ever liked from the 1970s through the 1990s, and came up with most of the iconic quotes from them. He was a helluva man.
Only so many ways to fillet a fish..
Or an audience.
I refer to Avatar as “Dancing with Smurfs”
In 3 words:
Pocahontas. In. Space.
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Cameron made a few good movies. Then he let financial success go to his head. After the way he’s ragged on veterans he can go KMA. As far as “Avatar” goes, “District 9” totally pwned it that year. “Avatar” was trite and stupid and had great special effects. But CGI alone doesn’t make a good movie as Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich repeatedly prove. Cameron can’t help but let his hatred for the troops manifest itself in his flicks. Even as far back as “The Abyss” he depicted the military badly. He’ll never get another buck from me and can rot in hell with Oliver Stone.
it was sci-fi horror. the believability/realism of the graphic scenes crosses the genre, plus the suspense/fear factor one can argue puts it in both categories.
Avatar IMO is nothing more than “FernGully: The Last Rainforest” repackaged as Sci-Fi which was nothing but an animated screed against industry and capitalism designed to indoctrinate children into Green Socialism.
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You’re too kind. In my little writers’ group, we call “Avatar” “Dances with Smurfs.” ;)
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned that Alien is clearly an unattributed remake of the 50’s film “It, The Terror From Beyond Space.”
That’s good
Coming from one of the biggest bullies in the biz, this makes me laugh.
It also has elements of Poul Anderson’s ‘Call me Joe,’ where a quadriplegic human takes over an alien body in order to explore Jupiter.
FReegards
And that film was written by Jerome Bixby who wrote the 1953 story “It’s a Good Life” which was the basis for a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone and which was included in Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983). He also wrote four Star Trek episodes: “Mirror, Mirror”, “Day of the Dove”, “Requiem for Methuselah”, and “By Any Other Name”. With Otto Klement, he co-wrote the story upon which the classic sci-fi movie Fantastic Voyage (1966), television series, and novel by Isaac Asimov were based.
It’s well known in Hollywood that virtually every great film has been rejected dozens of times. “Twilight,” despite selling gazillions of books, was rejected again and again. I can only imagine if Gibson pitched “Passion of the Christ” to a major studio: “You mean the movie is about a guy dying? The whole thing?”
Ping. This is right down your alley.
I never knew Bixby wrote It. I have many fond memories of watching that film with my dad on WPIX’s Chiller Theater way back when.
I thought he did a pretty bad job in "Aliens." He pulled out every Vietnam-era cliche in the book for that one. Luckily the dialogue is just punched-up enough to warrant overlooking it.
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