Avatar: Still a Groundbreaker in CGI, but Not in Story
I suppose you could argue that the story wasn’t what Director James Cameron was aiming for, it was the visuals. The spectacle of it all was the point, and it certainly shows.

50 years ago, 600,000 people worked in coal mines of Germany. The last active pit Prosper Haniel will close in 2018. Armin Kobzcik has been a produd miner all his life. But now he is forced to quit his beloved job as the last cole mine in Germany closes. Armin is not just losing his job, but his identity. A working-class hero only defining himself over his ability to work wants his life to be of value one last time.
I suppose you could argue that the story wasn’t what Director James Cameron was aiming for, it was the visuals. The spectacle of it all was the point, and it certainly shows.
Lee Daniels’s Billie Holiday biopic The United States vs. Billie Holiday was released on February 26th, 2021, and my immediate reaction to it was one of discomfort.
If you were to watch it on streaming when you have nothing to do, it’s still probably a giant waste of time, but you could do far worse. Paying $18 for a movie ticket and who knows how much for concessions turns this from an exercise in boredom to an exercise in frustration.
There’s been a longstanding criticism of sci-fi films about its lack of Black characters. For the past few years, Anthony Mackie has been successfully representing Black masculinity in the otherwise homogenous genre and I am here for it.
This current year, as well as the past several, has seen a slowly building increase in something the horror genre has required for quite a while in this critic's opinion...originality. I've stated before that I am very hard to please when it comes to this vein of the film industry's offerings, always leaning more towards that which sends chills through my very being in lieu of buckets of blood and gore.