Noel Murray
‘Pandora – The World of Avatar’ Takes Riding the Movies to a New Level
By sheer chance, last week I spent five days at Disney World with my son’s high school choir, at the same time that Animal Kingdom officially opened its new “Pandora - The World of Avatar” area. Our group was slated to go to Animal Kingdom on Memorial Day, and I was eager to see how Disney had turned James Cameron’s 2009 prog-rock/science-fiction/eco-propaganda experiment into a real-world habitat. So on the morning before our designated day, I opened up the “My Disney Experience” app on my phone to check out the wait times. About forty minutes after the park opened, the line for the “Na’vi River Journey” ride was already three hours long. And the wait for “Avatar Flight of Passage?” Four hours.
The 25 Blu-rays Every Movie Lover Must Own
Given how much space physical media takes up, it’s hard for movie buffs to say no to the great promise of “cloud storage,” and the idea that we could summon anything we want to watch with just a couple of clicks. But so far, reality hasn’t matched the hype. Streaming services have been focused on exclusives and original programming, to the extent that the only way to have access to everything available is to spend hundreds of dollars a month on subscription fees. Meanwhile, older films keep disappearing from the digital archives; and even items that cinephiles “own” sometimes become inaccessible whenever software updates or a site shutters.