1. Avatar (2009): I was not impressed. With so much hype preceding the opening and then the fervor following the opening, there was no possible way the movie was that good. No movie is THAT good. The problem here is that the movie is not good at all and it's made worse because everyone seems to think it's so wonderful and ground breaking and new. It's just not.
a. Blue people are not original. See 1980s cartoons.
b. Cat people are not original. See 1980s cartoons.
c. Earth Mother stories are not new. See the history of mythology and literature.
d. There was no need to relive Titanic through the music. Seriously, adding a few "nature" noises doesn't make it new and it only serves to remind the audience (me at least) about that other annoying James Cameron movie. Try reminding us of the good James Cameron movies (and, no, Sigourney Weaver is not enough).
e. The visuals aren't enough. Sorry. They aren't. They're cool for the first, oh, half hour. The nighttime glow-y forest scene is gorgeous. The rest is just the same.
f. If you're going to use 3-D, use 3-D. This movie really did nothing with it and it's annoying to sit with those glasses for 3 hours.
g. Get your actor (and I mean you, Sam Worthington) to get control of his accent. He really had very little face time on screen so there is absolutely no reason an American jar-head character should have a little Australian accent here and a little British there and a little British trying to be Southern over there and a newscaster midwestern accent everywhere else.
h. "I see you" is only poignant if you don't use it to say "hello."
i. This isn't a movie about everyone coming together to save the natural world. This is about blue people killing human people (while both destroy the natural world, I might add) in order to salvage the natural world. I'm not saying the blue people shouldn't have fought but they (and the audience) can't maintain the self-righteous "we're saving the world" attitude. Blue people blew up shit, too.
j. If you're going to have the human-brain-synapse-like network of nature do something cool to save the world, have it do something cool. Having the animals bend to the will of the blue people is not cool.
k. Don't kill off all of the good human women while saving all of the good human men. Not cool.
l. Have an interesting story. I shouldn't know what's going to happen in the first ten minutes.
m. The villain has to at least be sort of maybe kind of morally ambiguous.
n. That's all I can think of right now but I'm sure the points fill the rest of the alphabet and back around at least once more.

2. Book of Eli (2010): This movie actually managed to be all about The Bible without making me want to shoot myself. While I'd prefer it be about a different book, I very much appreciate the poetry of the end. Denzel Washington surprised me pleasantly and Gary Oldman is always a fun villain. I would have liked a little less let's-keep-everything-secret tension in the beginning but they did manage to roll out the twists and secret info with good timing and in line with the story and characters. Entirely watchable.

3. Australia (2008): Sigh. I love Baz Luhrmann but this was a misstep. It's over-long, over-dramatic, and under-edited. It feels like it's full 165 minutes times 2 and some of the acting is a little over the top but the story and feel of the movie doesn't support that melodrama the way Luhrmann's other movies would. The trouble is that it's an interesting story that could really pull the viewer in but it's just too long and desperately needs to be condensed.

4. Geisha, A Life by Mineko Iwasaki (2002; translated by Randa Brown): This is the memoir by the geisha who provided Arthur Golden the inside information for his novel Memoirs of a Geisha (1997) and who he later had to pay an undisclosed settlement for breach of contract when he included her in his acknowledgments. I'm not a huge memoir fan just because I'm much more used to a novelist and his/her art. I often find memoirs lacking in art. And that holds true for this book as well. It lacks a certain structure that might have helped the story-telling. But, it is an interesting look inside the geisha life. I appreciated and liked the first-hand story and was intrigued by the connections and disconnects between her story and Golden's. I found her persistent insistence that geisha are not courtesans or prostitutes a bit too "the lady doth protest too much." She could and should have shown instead of stomping her feet and insisting. And she actually did show that she was not engaged sexually with her clients (save one with whom she had a separate personal relationship) so she could have left it at that. Golden's book is fiction and smart people can distinguish between fact and fiction. I loved her descriptions of everything (especially the kimono and obi) and found the story engaging and found myself wanting to know more about her life post-geisha when I finished the book. I read it in only a handful of sittings and would readily teach it in conjunction with Golden's novel and the film.

About the translation: Are all Japanese to English books so clunky? All of those I've read are and it's disappointing.