Sideshow Experience

A Review by Dave Canfield

About the same time I was writing this review I got a new TV. It’s a biggie, 60 inches. So I sat down to re-watch Avatar, mainly because my boys (8 and 12) wanted to, but also because I thought it would test the limits of the TV pretty well. Wow! It was, no hyperbole, stunning- much of the time like looking thru a window. I had expected this. What I hadn’t expected was the added impact the clarity would have on my experience of the film. At that size and that resolution, properly calibrated, the effect of Avatar seemed almost exactly what I had in the Imax screening I first saw it in. Pandora and her inhabitants once again took on that mystical air of the supra-real, as if a long held curtain had been pulled back revealing some ultimate expression of the true wonder of the natural world that had previously been hidden from prying eyes.

That’s what a great collectible does. It calibrates the image, making it clearer for the viewer what always attracted them to the character or object or story in question. It can be a painting, a prop reproduction, a poster, or a statue, almost anything, as long as it takes viewers out beyond themselves, into that realm where art stops being for it’s own sake and serves as a connection to something greater than itself and the viewer. That greater thing is greater precisely because it is available to both, helping the object to fulfill function, the viewer to acknowledge something true. This twin aspect in it’s purest form moves such an object from that which is representational to that which is iconic and moves the viewer from the shadow of the deeper into the deeps themselves, a purity of experience that makes of the willing viewer an icon, a spiritual pilgrim.

Read the rest of Dave’s review on Twitch Film