December 2009 Artist of the Month: James Cameron (Fan Selection)

The readers have spoken and our artist of the month for December is James Cameron, the director behind notable science fiction contributions like Aliens, Terminator, and (with luck), the upcoming Avatar.

There is absolutely no denying the importance of the films Cameron has put out, which really have contributed heavily to action and science fiction filmmaking. In visual effects, the director’s work has always pushed the boundaries of what has been accomplished before, venturing into new territory. Despite all of this, you may have noticed not everyone is excited about the selection of Cameron as your year-ending artist of the month (Our podcast crew has been rather vocal about it on the weekly show, after all). While I don’t mind the selection of Cameron and am happy to revisit his movies, I’d like to offer a little insight as to why I was rooting for someone other than the Titanic director.

To me, Cameron is lacking two things that I was hoping for when we started the artist of the month program. First of all, his work doesn’t contain a ton of diversity. For the longest time the director pushed the envelope of action/sci-fi. Then he drifted towards romance with Titantic, but that’s about the scope of his work (a scope that looks to be combined through the story of Avatar). His work is also tremendously popular and well known, which means we won’t be exploring much in the way of new, unfamiliar movies here. Sure, there’s Piranha II, his campy horror debut, and Ghosts of the Abyss, the journey into documentary work, but otherwise most of his movies have a lot of familiarity to most audiences.

It is my hope that we can build on that familiarity to have deeper conversations about Cameron’s movies this month. That means this month more than ever, as our listener base, we are expecting you’ll be bringing a knowledge base as you listen to our discussions. With Cameron’s last commercial venture being over a decade old, we’re going to worry less and less about spoilers, and more and more about looking at the movies from a critical vantage point as we discuss Cameron’s movies on the Weekly Blend Audio Show:

Widescreen Warrior.com Presents: James Cameron

December 5th Episode:
• Aliens
• The Abyss

December 13th Episode:
• Terminator
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day

December 20th Episode:
• Titanic
• Ghosts of the Abyss

December 27th Episode
• True Lies
• Strange Days (writing/producer)

Full filmography available at IMDb