Random Avatar thoughts: ships and episodes

Rewatched bits and clips of ATLA's "Crossroads of Destiny" episode, the season 2 finale. And it still delights me. Delights me! My reaction, after numerous repeats?

OMG.

SHIPPIEST. THING. EVER.

For both popular ships, in completely different but equally interesting ways.

Why did fandom go so crazy when this came out? With prophecies of doom or victory, with declarations of what is the death/birth of one pairing or another? BAH! SILLY CREATURES! It's easy to look at season 3 and make judgments about who belongs with who or all that nonsense, or who's going to make out with who next/again/ever, but if you forget all that and just look back on the season 2 finale, you have to admit it: SHIPPIEST THING EVER.

And that's my random Avatar squeal for today. I'll update later this week with something witty about the elections, or a poem, or something. But right now, I'm just enjoying a heady rush of fannishness. Why? No idea. Just am.

EDIT: When is the next episode coming out? CANADA DON'T FAIL ME NOW. I need my magical-boy pseudo-Asian mythical fantasy epic world war cartoon.

Everyone needs a magical-boy pseudo-Asian mythical fantasy epic world war cartoon!

With revenge! And regicide! And brainwashing! And flying buffalo! And murder most foul! And orphans! And pyromaniacs! And genocide! And hydromaniacs! And megalomaniacs! And duels! And tea!

CLOVERFIELD, spoiler-FREE

Fuck what people say. This movie rocked.

It's a very, very strong execution of an exceedingly simple premise: unknown giant thing attacks a city, and regular people run around for an hour and a half with a camcorder recording their own survival flight.

It feels real. It feels more bare-boned and realistic than pretty much any monster/disaster movie you'll ever see.

This is a disaster movie as much as a monster movie, and while its certainly got its creep factor, it's actually not a horror movie. And while the comparisons to Blair Witch are inevitable, that movie felt a lot more like a horror movie than Cloverfield ever did.

This movie was tense. Intense. There was so much energy and movement and insanity that you could never build up the kind of subtle, ever-deepening fear that a classic horror film evokes. This was far more about disaster. Disaster, sudden violence, and grief. Terrible things happen, one after another, but the characters' reactions feel real and plausible and normal. These people aren't going to save the day. They're barely trying to save themselves. They can't figure out how to beat whatever's attacking the city because the entire event is so far beyond their comprehension that the effort to just keep moving is all they have.

In the movie Signs, the family figures out the alien's weakness is water, and they defeat the ones attacking their homestead. The characters in Cloverfield don't even have time to discover that much. They just run. Run and hide and run and die. If you ever wondered what those little extras in Armageddon, or Godzilla, or Independence Day were feeling... this movie is a look into the little guy's POV. The one who gets knocked off a building, or stomped on, or eaten, or bounced on a titanic propeller, and who never gets to have a last name. They may not be brilliant and they may not make all the right decisions, but they do their best to last the night.

This movie is about them, and about us, because most of the people watching would fare no better---would be lucky to last even as long as these characters do. The characters have a video and record much of their cross-city flight, and there's a moment where one of the main characters takes the camera, looks into it to make some kind of declaration or testimony, and ultimately he can't say anything. He doesn't need to, because it's written on his face.

I liked it. I thought it was worth seeing on the big screen, especially since a matinée in Salt Lake only costs 5 dollars. I recommend you see it, though it is quite jerky. Even so, though, the jerkiness here (rolling camera, dropped camera, swinging camera) felt less disorienting than the action sequences in films like The Borne Ultimatum or Transformers. Even when the view went haywire I could still visually track events, which is more than I can say for certain scenes in those two movies. As for gore... there was some, but considerably less than a lot of other monster movies. It was used sparingly and only when appropriate, for maximum effect.


And at the end of the movie, in the credits, I saw that it was written by Drew Goddard.

ULTIMATE DREW GODDARD!

How did I not know this going in? That's crazy! I'm Ultimate Drew minion #290, according to his first official fansite! Click on that link and scroll down, seriously, my name is right THERE.

I blinked and pointed at the screen and said to my cousin, "Oh my god! It's written by Drew Goddard! Ultimate Drew Goddard! He wrote some of the best episodes of the last seasons of Buffy!"

My cousin just kinda shrugged me off with "yeah that's him" but I didn't care, because I find this information delightful. Good for him. He's writing movies and he wrote a pretty decent one.

ALRIGHT, FANDOM....

Who's going to write me a Doctor Who/Cloverfield crossover?

Anyone? Anyone? Beuller?