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Last-minute Christmas shopping is never a good idea, but I gotta say traffic wasn’t as much of a nightmare as I’d expected. That said, waiting in line behind an older gentleman complaining about his defective TV wasn’t met with a good deal of enjoyment by yours truly. His detailed notes littering the pages of the TV’s manual were almost enough to send me into a festive holiday rage. Alas, said rage exceeded my desire to take a picture of him, so you’ll have to make due with a picture of the relatively mild traffic getting out of the shopping plaza.

209 of 365
209 of 365

Avatar | A

director: James Cameron
starring: Sam Worthington, Zoë Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, Stephen Lang, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel Moore

avatarDirector James Cameron’s long-awaited and heavily-hyped return to the big screen finally arrives in a dizzying tour-de-force of special effects and storytelling mastery. While the script doesn’t quite live up to the visuals, Avatar is a singular moviegoing experience – one that will serve as a milestone in film experience history. The film does indeed live up to the hype on a visual level. In fact, it succeeds on such a scale as to almost completely overwhelm the comparatively lightweight script and cliched characters, flaws that might stick in your mind after you’ve come down from the high of the in-theater experience.

On more than one occasion, I found myself comparing Avatar to Cameron’s 1986 masterpiece (as far as I’m concerned), Aliens. In fact, I tend to compare quite a few movies to Aliens each year (one example), likely because its original formula has been copied so many times since, with varying degrees of success. And while a story featuring a tribe of blue-skinned aliens trying to protect some sacred trees doesn’t quite echo “space marines fighting against a horde of terrifying, slimy aliens,” the key points are all worth comparing.

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