That being said, I think it’s pretty obvious where my Saudi oil joke came from.

I don’t know if you thought that me defending the CGI in Avatar means that I liked the film then no, Avatar was nowhere near my top choices. I do however acknowledge the insane quality of the CGI in it and am willing to defend that.

A friend talked to me today about this. He’s staying at a cottage and asked me why the TV looked funny. I told him why and suggested he play around with the menu to find the refresh rate settings. Hopefully he found this option as well. The last thing you want when staying in a cottage up north is a TV that makes your movies look like video.

Andrew, when you talk about Kashyyyk in SW, are you referring to the environment alone? The wookies throughout that battle are man in suit and I always thought the clone troopers in those films (full CG) looked pretty stiff and terrible.

“WOW! This is CG animation!? I can hardly believe it. This is much more impressive to me than the cartoonishness of Avatar:
http://vimeo.com/7809605
”

I agree with Swarez that this comparison is not really valid. To put it into a pre-CG FX context, it’s the equivalent of comparing spaceship model work to a man-in-suit creature. They’re completely different things. Or are you comparing the inanimate objects in this video to the inanimate objects in Avatar? If you’re claiming that the environments and ships in Avatar looked cartoonish, I would simply have to disagree.

The dumb thing is that it is factory defaulted to ON position when you buy the TV. That freaks people out; understandably.

I got more wonder out of that little clip than I did in the whole of Avatar. And I’m not being snarky. That’s the truth. That clip is brilliant in the way it’s shot. Real, yet still surreal. I want to hang out in that world. Not Pandora.

The reason you feel Avatar is cartoony is because of the giant blue people in it. It’s because it’s something that you know isn’t real and thus your mind is always telling you that it’s fake. The stuff in the short is all things that you are familiar with and know from first hand both by sight and touch.
But to say that the Navi movements and expressions are cartoony is insane.

B) Sorry, but this little clip is just SO much more tactile and immersive (to use the parliance of our times) to me than blue cat-people running through a jungle chased by giant robots.

Yes and no. It’s a leap forward of course (I expect it to be), but SW does not fail to do this. Kashyyyk and the lava planet look awesome and flawless.

BTW; I fucking love the lizard Obi-Wan rides. It comes out of nowhere, and is colorful and extravagant, has great sound design etc. etc. Just awesome playfulness, not logical bullshit like “They dug so deep they dug up the firelords”.

I think you’ve hit Kurt’s primary viewing flaw right on the head. He constantly demands the film adjust to his taste and steadfastly refuses to adjust on the fly to the film he is actually being presented. I mean, how often have we had discussions where Kurt treats the trailer as if it is the movie and sticks to that even when the movie is something else?

The only times he ever seems to break out of this is when it is a pet director of his that he enjoys, and only then he will allow the film to dictate how he should approach it (think David Gordon Green and Pineapple Express).

SW was just as dense with plenty of shit going on and it looked fab (from solely a visual perspective).

The leap in technology has nothing to do with how dense the atmosphere looks, but with how integrated the CGI is with live action. It is a massive leap forward to finally make an entirely CGI world actually look like it is a real environment that the actors are reacting too. The SW prequels fail miserably on this, as has every other CGI heavy film.