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Just got back from seeing Avatar...

daveinspain

By daveinspain
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daveinspain

daveinspain

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That wasnt nice. [biggrin]

 

I like the movie avatar but it was all show no story.

 

Was just kidding dem00n.... That was a line from Wayne's World... I haven't seen Hurt Locker yet but I can't imagine anything better than Avatar and there is a pretty good story line if you ask me... But who's askin....[biggrin]

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Bluemoon

Bluemoon

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+1 Very predictable story line and dialogue. No Oscars for the actors but the graphic arts team will win some. Spend the extra $ to see it on 3D or don't see it at all.

 

 

I agree totally. Predictable story. It's basically a science fiction version of "Dances with Wolves." Great movie to watch, though.

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MojoRedFoot

MojoRedFoot

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I agree totally. Predictable story. It's basically a science fiction version of "Dances with Wolves." Great movie to watch' date=' though. [/quote']

 

If I had a dime for every time I heard someone compare to DWW.

 

No one else made the reference to the South Park episode "K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S." #-o

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ChanMan

ChanMan

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Great movie. The family loved it.

 

 

I kinda feel sorry for folks who can't just watch a movie for the sheer pleasure of the movie; there always has to be something deeper.

 

I heard on the news today that there are folks who are suicidal after watching this movie "... because the real world can't possibly match the beauty of Pandora".

 

 

Puh-leez.... [biggrin]

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jannusguy

jannusguy

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i saw and liked it. it was fun! didn't need to be anything else to me as i never expected to be anything but entertained by it. david brooks crapped all over it in his column today. luckily, i don't care what david brooks thinks (even if he might've been right).

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AXE®

AXE®

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This is absurd.

 

Some detect subtext of racism in 'Avatar'

Jan. 11, 2010, 9:40 AM EST

 

Near the end of the hit film "Avatar," the villain snarls at the hero, "How does it feel to betray your own race?" Both men are white — although the hero is inhabiting a blue-skinned, 9-foot-tall, long-tailed alien.

 

Strange as it may seem for a film that pits greedy, immoral humans against noble denizens of a faraway moon, "Avatar" is being criticized by a small but vocal group of people who allege it contains racist themes — the white hero once again saving the primitive natives.

 

Since the film opened to widespread critical acclaim three weeks ago, hundreds of blog posts, newspaper articles, tweets and YouTube videos have said things such as the film is "a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people" and that it reinforces "the white Messiah fable."

 

The film's writer and director, James Cameron, says the real theme is about respecting others' differences.

 

In the film (spoiler alert: read no further if you don't want to know the plot) a white, paralyzed Marine, Jake Sully, is mentally linked to an alien's body and set loose on the planet Pandora. His mission: persuade the mystic, nature-loving Na'vi to make way for humans to mine their land for unobtanium, a mineral worth $20 million per kilo back home.

 

Like Kevin Costner in "Dances with Wolves" and Tom Cruise in "The Last Samurai" or as far back as Jimmy Stewart in the 1950 Western "Broken Arrow," Sully soon switches sides. He falls in love with the Na'vi princess and leads the bird-riding, bow-and-arrow-shooting aliens to victory over the white men's spaceships and mega-robots.

 

Adding to the racial dynamic is that the main Na'vi characters are played by actors of color, led by a Dominican, Zoe Saldana, as the princess. The film also is an obvious metaphor for how European settlers in America wiped out the Indians.

 

Robinne Lee, an actress in such recent films as "Seven Pounds" and "Hotel for Dogs," said that "Avatar" was "beautiful" and that she understood the economic logic of casting a white lead if most of the audience is white.

 

Related story: 'Avatar' tops $400 million in U.S. box office

 

But she said the film, which so far has the second-highest worldwide box-office gross ever, still reminded her of Hollywood's "Pocahontas" story — "the Indian woman leads the white man into the wilderness, and he learns the way of the people and becomes the savior."

 

"It's really upsetting in many ways," said Lee, who is black with Jamaican and Chinese ancestry. "It would be nice if we could save ourselves."

 

Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of the sci-fi Web site io9.com, likened "Avatar" to the recent film "District 9," in which a white man accidentally becomes an alien and then helps save them, and 1984's "Dune," in which a white man becomes an alien Messiah.

 

"Main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color ... (then) go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed," she wrote.

 

"When will whites stop making these movies and start thinking about race in a new way?" wrote Newitz, who is white.

 

Related: Photos from 'Avatar'

 

Black film professor and author Donald Bogle said he can understand why people would be troubled by "Avatar," although he praised it as a "stunning" work.

 

"A segment of the audience is carrying in the back of its head some sense of movie history," said Bogle, author of "Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films."

 

Bogle stopped short, however, of calling the movie racist.

 

"It's a film with still a certain kind of distortion," he said. "It's a movie that hasn't yet freed itself of old Hollywood traditions, old formulas."

 

Writer-director Cameron, who is white, said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that his film "asks us to open our eyes and truly see others, respecting them even though they are different, in the hope that we may find a way to prevent conflict and live more harmoniously on this world. I hardly think that is a racist message."

 

There are many ways to interpret the art that is "Avatar."

 

Decade in Review: What were the best movies of the '00s?

 

What does it mean that in the final, sequel-begging scene, Sully abandons his human body and transforms into one of the Na'vi for good? Is Saldana's Na'vi character the real heroine because she, not Sully, kills the arch-villain? Does it matter that many conservatives are riled by what they call liberal environmental and anti-military messages?

 

Is Cameron actually exposing the historical evils of white colonizers? Does the existence of an alien species expose the reality that all humans are actually one race?

 

"Can't people just enjoy movies any more?" a person named Michelle posted on the Web site for Essence, the magazine for black women, which had 371 comments on a story debating the issue.

 

Although the "Avatar" debate springs from Hollywood's historical difficulties with race, Will Smith recently saved the planet in "I Am Legend," and Denzel Washington appears ready to do the same in the forthcoming "The Book of Eli."

 

Bogle, the film historian, said that he was glad Cameron made the film and that it made people think about race.

 

"Maybe there is something he does want to say and put across" about race, Bogle said. "Maybe if he had a black hero in there, that point would have been even stronger."

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