According to The Sun, morons are have taken to naming their newborns after characters from Avatar.


"Pandora is tipped as top choice among US fans, with UK parents set to follow." These illiterate slack jaws are naming their daughters Pandora? Why not just name her Daddy's Little Failure or Doomhilda?

Labels: Avatar, miscellaneous, movie news

Short Review: A long movie without one humorous scene. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t laugh-out-loud funny.



Avatar is a half a billion dollar toilet seat of a movie. Because Home Depot toilet seat movies like Dances with Wolves or Pocahontas aren’t good enough. No expense is ever too great to remind us of a central dogma of our age: that our culture is bad, bad, bad and “indigenous cultures” are oh so very good. Throw in a couple of corollary doctrines relating to new age spirituality and Gaia worship, and you have the perfect leftist didactic fairy tale disguised as a sci-fi adventure.

But a strange thing occurs to one as the expensive toilet seat comes crashing down on one’s head. How disconcerting it is, how un-humanizing it is to turn indigenous peoples into aliens. Cameron’s intention is to make we humans into the aliens, but because of the film’s central metaphor, that’s not how things work. Usually metaphor is employed to get someone to see something from a different angle. The central metaphor of this movie is that hominid Na'vi of the moon Pandora are just like the aboriginal inhabitants of North and South America and Australia. Except that their blue skin and tails are about the only thing different. Their rituals, weapons, religion, even war cries, are pretty much the same. So why did we have to go to Pandora to listen to this Rousseau-ian sermon? Beats me. The metaphor eventually becomes so thin and the parallels so heavy-handed that you may find yourself, as I did, laughing.

While the plot is a tedious checklist of the civilized-savage-meets-enlightened-primitive genre, the visuals help to redeem the effort, at least as purely aesthetic diversion. The word is beautiful and richly realized. The creatures are wonderful, with a subtle, unspoken evolutionary backstory*. The huge CGI budget can’t make this thing successful, however.

One final, disconnected note: this movie fails utterly as science fiction. The central science fictiony element (the telepathic link between human minds and Na'vi bodies) is never explained or explored. It functions only as a convenient plot device.



* A thoroughly inconsistent one, however. The animals we see close up have a six-legged body plan and four eyes. The Na'vi, however are humanoid. Where are their evolutionary cousins?

Labels: Avatar, film, guest review, James Cameron, movie review, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana

The first time I saw the trailer Avatar (below)



I thought of this wad of peacenik self-loathing (Battle for Terra)





The great Jim Treacher* nails it "Then again, people said the same thing about Titanic. Just think how much MORE money that would've made with azure CGI Thundercats!"

Both have greedy, mean humans (mostly of European descent) terrorizing the peaceful, wonderful doe-eyed aliens. Man, we suck!

If you've watched the trailer and get that creeping feeling that we're in for yet another liberal screed, READ THIS.

The question I'm left with is this: am I the only one struck by the irony that Cameron had to blow $500,000,000.00 in order to remind us the superiority of primitive cultures - you know, the kinds that don't have the technology to watch his stupid movies in the first place?




* - If you're not reading Treacher's Twitters Tweets then you're not using the Internet correctly.



Update: My pal Robert reminded me that John Nolte posted his thoughts on Avatar over at Big Hollywood. Per usual, Nolte gets it right.

Labels: Avatar, Jim Cameron, miscellaneous, movie trailer