AVALON (2001) Ugliest movie I've ever seen. I knew I was in trouble when the movie started with that "everything is yellow" look, and after ten minutes, it still hadn't gone away. Even the attempts at sepia look yellow. You don't get to see another color in this movie until there's 33 minutes to go, and you finally get a full spectrum ten minutes later. Why do some filmmakers continue to delude themselves into thinking this all-yellow look is evocative of anything other than piss? I've read so much love about the beautiful visuals in this movie. What are you people, nuts? Avalon is set in a near-future where people illegally play an addictive virtual-reality computer game, which appears to be little more imaginative than basic combat, though with a futuristic assault vehicle and a cloaking device once in a while. The luminous Malgorzata Foremniak as reclusive heroine Ash is probably the only thing in this movie I liked watching. Arguably the best solo player in a game where most successes are based around teams, haunted by a past team failure, she becomes annoyed when an up-and-comer appears to be challenging her excellence, and then the game itself starts seeming to taunt her limitations. The world within the game is pretty stylized (we are shown how many of the images are two-dimensional and only appear three-dimensional from the players' perspectives), enough that it's a safe bet that the movie will avoid the "we're still in the game!" cliché pandemic in this genre. Made in Poland with a Polish cast and crew (and language) and a Japanese creative team, Avalon reeks of a movie that, like Blade Runner's voiceover-filled original release, was dumbed down to spell things out for us. An introductory pair of title cards set up everything with the game and such, though we see all of what they tell us demonstrated soon enough. We frequently get subtitles telling us Ash's inner thoughts, though we hear no Polish voice thinking them. Incredibly, just twenty minutes in, we're already shown a flashback recap of everything we've seen in the movie so far...in case we've forgotten, I suppose. Avalon is filled with long, ponderous silences, lengthy sequences of food preparation and voracious eating, and other such things which will frustrate anyone looking to this movie for it to follow in the footsteps of The Matrix. In fact there is very, very little action in Avalon, limited to a couple of game sequences where Ash takes on big assault vehicles. That it's slow and lacks the excitement you'd think its premise was promising, isn't the problem. Unexpectedly, it was the silences and the cooking that had my attention the most securely. The problem is that it's boring, by taking the same warmed-over William Gibson ideas and not really doing anything more with them than Johnny Mnemonic did. And it's almost ridiculously ugly, Foremniak aside. Some movies look like shit. This movie - and entirely too many others in recent years - can only wish they looked like shit, because they look like piss. What the fuck is wrong with these directors? BACK TO THE A's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE