Tag Archives: Stephen Lang

“Avatar: Fire and Ash”: Spider! He Is Our Hero!

December 28, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Avatar 3 IMAX poster with Oona Chaplin's evil fire-motif warrior astride her pet alien dragon.

Beware the Dragonriders of BURN!

Previously on Avatar: three years ago James Cameron did his part to help save beleaguered theaters worldwide after the pandemic with the billion-dollar spectacle Avatar: The Way of Water, the long-awaited sequel to the 2009 blockbuster. At the time I boiled down my impressions:

The predictably huge box-office smash is the visually stunning James Cameron comeback we expected, an underwater world of wonder that left our IMAX 3-D audience stunned all throughout its three-hour runtime. The beautifully panoramic Pandora ocean-tribe expansion pack and the extended no-holds-barred final-battle extravaganza exceed the baselines even by Cameron standards in all their gloriously maximized CGI razzle-dazzle nonpareil…[but] after exiting the theater and regaining your senses it’s much easier to think again, and disappointing to realize you’ve just watched the most expensive witness-protection story in world history, one in which Our Hero sought to stop endangering his community by moving his family to a strange new neighborhood and endangering them instead. And much of the family’s stresses feel like Cameron reusing salvaged parts from his previous films and from any number of fish-out-of-water family dramas. The technological bells-‘n’-whistles have been upgraded in accelerated leaps and bounds, but the chassis could use some new solder and an oil can.

But oil and water don’t mix, and some guys love laying amazing paint jobs over refurbished parts, so here we go again. Cameron and the same four co-writers continue the saga with Avatar: Fire and Ash, which is here to re-rescue the box office through the healing power of space magic and environmentally friendly EXPLOSIONS!

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Heartland International Film Festival 2023 Screening #6: “Avenue of the Giants”

October 15, 2023 By in Conventions & Events, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A short-haired Elsie Fisher and a slightly hunched, shabbily dressed Stephen Lang converse in the woods.

With no official site and no trailer online, this is the only image available for this film on any entertainment hub that’s covered its film-festival tour.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Since 1992 Indianapolis has held its own celebration of cinema with the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater marathon every October of documentaries, shorts, narrative features, and animated works made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience, usually with an emphasis on uplift and positivity. Ever since the “International” modifier was added in recent years, their acquisition team steadily escalated their game as they’ve recruited higher-profile projects into their lineups. For years my wife Anne and I have talked about getting into the spirit of the festivities. This year we will do better. The festival’s 32nd edition will run October 5-15. I’ve committed to at least five different Heartland showings — one of them virtual in-home, while the others will screen at four different theaters throughout central Indiana…

We’ve now gone beyond “at least five” into festival overtime. Due to unfortunate circumstances beyond our control at our fifth feature presentation, we wound up with a free pass for one more film. I’d already driven 150 miles this week around central Indiana for cinema’s sake — in the midst of a normal 40-hour work week, mind you — and was burned out on driving, but Heartland also had dozens of new films available for virtual rental at home (our first film was among those). After digging through the entire list, I found a drama in Anne’s historical-aficionado wheelhouse of World War II in general and the European theater in particular.

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“Avatar: The Way of Water”, the Weight of a Waterworld and the Wonder of Warrior Whales

December 23, 2022 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Na'vi characters greeting each other in "Avatar The Way of Water".

Jake Sully, a fish out of water, becomes a little fish in a bigger pond, fishes for compliments from his hosts, believes he has bigger fish to fry, and realizes there’re other fish in the sea.

It’s been 13 years since the original Avatar hit theaters in December 2009, made a zillion dollars, and was nominated for a couple of awards. It was two years before this site existed, four years before I signed up for our first streaming service, 4½ years before I bought my first smartphone, and seven months before I joined Twitter. My son was in middle school. Barack Obama had been President for less than a year. Breaking Bad was two seasons in and a handful of AMC viewers thought it was keen.

It’s in those primitive times that James Cameron unleashed Avatar‘s technological might. I saw it twice in theaters, both times in 3-D. The first time, I was enthralled and perhaps a little giddy. The second time, I nodded off during one of the space-pterodactyl taming sequences. Over a decade in the making, the first sequel Avatar: The Way of Water vows that any theater-goer who pays extra to see it in a deluxe format cannot possibly sleep through a single second of it unless the speakers give them a concussion.

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