Avatar: The Last 3D Mindbender

**Warning. This movie contains a lot of CGI. Pregnant women and people who are sensitive to CGI should not take this movie. Consult a doctor if CGI is right for you.**

Let's talk about colonialism, kiddies.

For the last half a millennia or so, Europeans have been going to other parts of the world, establishing bases, running up flags, and generally kicking ass, taking names, and giving out the occasional blanket covered in small pox. Imagine Christopher Columbus in wrap-around shades with an Uzi in one hand and the Spanish flag in the other discovering the new world so he can BRING THE GODDAMN HURT, and then you've got a pretty good idea of how it went down. If you've ever actually been to England, you'll understand, too, because the place is a boring shithole.

However, eventually people got tired of listening to the 17th century equivalent of "America, Fuck Yeah!" on repeat and watching an unstoppable army of white guys named John O'Sullivan shoot down indigenous people like it was garbage day, so they came up with the concept of the noble savage.

In short, the "Noble Savage" is a romantic way to dress up racism-- In this version of racism, instead of the natives being inferior to civilization, the "savages" have a closer connection to nature due to their primitive, unencumbered-by-civilization state. However, in order to survive the destructive presence of the all-powerful white man, they need to be led into enlightenment by a white man. In noble savage stories, a white man is always the one who saves the day for those poor, salt-of-the-earth virtuous natives.

And that's where I come back to James Cameron's epic Avatar, because it is chock-full of this same racist, hacked-together "noble savage" bullshit I'm tired of being force-fed. I went into this movie expecting to have my intelligence and morals insulted like being ball-gagged and forced to watch The Glenn Beck Snow without commercial interruptions, but then something so rage-inducingly frustrating happened that I can't even put words to the sheer mangled hatred that boiled through my veins.

The movie was actually pretty good.

Does a white guy working for an EVIL CORPORATION(tm) join a tribe of native oversized smurfs, become their leader, and save the day due to his uniquely racial tenacity and ability to think outside the box? Yes. Should that be fundamentally belittling to the plight of native peoples around the globe? Yes. Is the film equally insulting to human civilization, even going so far as to trivialize the sum of human creative, social, and technological achievement as "light beer and blue jeans?" Yes. Is is awesome?

Sadly, yes.

James Cameron's Avatar is good. The CGI is so photorealistic that every single frame of this movie could make an amazing desktop background. The flora, fauna, and native civilization are imaginatively put-together. The character development is thin enough that one doesn't get the sense that this is nothing more than a pompous version of Fern Gully, but thick enough that when the final battle sequence starts TWO AND A HALF HOURS INTO THE MOVIE you almost don't feel like you've lost two hours of your life. The movie is in every way worth your ten bucks.

But beware, all you who might fall prey to the movie's romantic view of nature and criminalizing view of society. Life among those blue-skinned natives isn't so great. Yeah, the Na'vi might be able to fly around on pterodactyls powered only by their minds and have face paint that is metal as fuck, but they don't have any of the benefits of a real human civilization. You may think this a eurocentric point of view, and you're damn right: I'll take having a written language and the scientific method over faith healing and flying pterodactyls any day.

And so, I'll leave you with the greatest example of colonialism I can muster:



And PS: Hardcore movie nerds may have caught the name of this film's macguffin, the little rock that the humans want to mine on Pandora. The element is called "Unobtainium," which happens to be the same name as the plottainium element from the 2005 bomber The Core.

Bonus Flick: Blade

**Warning. This post contains spoilers about Wesley Snipes. Did you know, for example, that he is not just a black version of Stephen Segal? Could have fooled me.**

Last Saturday’s midnight movie was Blade, an innocent action movie staring Wesley Snipes as the eponymous half-undead vampire hunter who mows down creatures of the night like a Wayne Brady riff on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This movie was a smash hit in 1998; it had all the automatic gunfire of Die Hard, half the plot, twice the stunts, and even a scene or two where Wesley Snipes smiles. Truly, it was a masterpiece of American cinema.

The movie starts out with an unsuspecting man being lured to a vampire rave party, where apparently all the partygoers are the vampire equivalent of hot chicks with douchebags. Blood starts coming out of the fire sprinklers because it’s not like it’s in short supply or anything, and then Blade shows up strapped with weapons, which he uses to fight an army of vampiro-mooks who are apparently huge fans of Daft Punk. Oh, and did I mention that half the guys at the party are on loan from the Roxbury?

Oh, and another note about this movie. There are more filmmaking errors than there are good lines of dialogue, and if you count every time Wesley Snipes mutters “muthafucka” under his breath as a good line of dialogue, that’s at least… three major mistakes. For example, Blade explains that vampires can only be killed by a wooden or silver stake through the heart. Nevertheless, whenever Blade hits any vampire with any weapon anywhere on their body, they instantly disintegrate as if they suddenly wanted to conquer Castle Greyskull.

Of course, like all weapons that shoot bullets made of weapons-grade yellowcake Plottanium, Blade’s +5 Keen Vorpal Gun of Mook Slaying only works when the plot allows it, even to the point where Blade’s friend Whistler, who is already critically injured, shoots himself in the head with Blade's supergun but somehow survives to BE IN THE SEQUEL.

Did I mention that the bad guy is essentially an unfunny psychotically evil version of Dane Cook?


Dane Cook and Deacon Frost—separated when they were turned into mindless self-serving vampires by the dark forces of Hollywood many years ago?

Blade soon rescues a damsel in distress, who, conveniently, is not only a hematologist but also an expert in experimental pharmacology and therefore has a degree in OMNISCIENCE. This rescue scene is a little suspect, though. Blade bursts into a hospital and opens fire. Guards show up and start shooting him. Then, when Blade jumps out a window after throwing the damsel into a dumpster, about twenty more hospital guards show up from nowhere with fully-automatic machine guns and fire at him as he flees. What the hell sort of hospital has guards with assault rifles, St. Schwarzenegger of the Micro-Uzi Memorial? I knew the HMOs were tough, but yeesh!

All the while evil Dane Cook has a plan to overthrow the ruling vampires by translating an untranslatable dead language using only his Walkman and a PowerBook G3, and then use that knowledge to make himself the king of all the vampires. When the PowerBook is finally done loading (with it's blindingly fast 32 MB of ram), the text turns into a graphic design program which depicts a special magical cavern which is conveniently in the same city. Somehow. Just go with it.

Meanwhile, Blade is fighting his way through wave after wave of vampire mooks trying to find somebody who knows anything about the plot. He fights a vampire peon named Quinn a few times, who even gets treated to the sandman face, a movie fighting maneuver in which the protagonist slams the antagonist's face into the side of an oncoming train with complete moral impunity, but even that won't get the plot moving. Just when it looks like the movie has totally crashed, the bad guys take the initiative, kidnap Blade, drag him to the magical showdown cavern, and kill him. Sorta.

I'd say the ending is awesome, if it weren't for the fact that when the Dane-Cook-cum-vampire-god character gets hit by Blade's special vampire poison, the words RULE 34 ran through my head like a thought train about to not only derail, but crash into a dynamite factory. The credits roll as Blade, who is somehow no longer critically wounded or addicted to "serum," walks onto the roof of a building and spots another vampire he should kill.

This movie is a GREAT midnight film. There are dozens of opportunities for theater snark, killer opportunities for drinking game mania, wild special effects, and Wesley Snipes. Though I won’t give this film a “Highly Recommended,” if you find yourself facing down a box of old VHS tapes, a fifth of bourbon, and fifteen-to-twenty of you closest friends, don’t pass this one up.

How Many Licks Does It Take? The Core

**Warning--This blog post contains EPIC FAIL. If you are pregnant or sensitive to fail, it is recommended that you feast your peepers on this, baby, because it'll feel like the Bush years. Also, Nicole Kidman is a ghost.**

I have gone to see three movies in the last week, and only one could be called a midnight flick. The midnight movie for this week was the 2003 bomber "The Core," a high-budget disaster about a secret government weapon that (somehow) stopped the millions of gallons of molten iron at the center of the earth from spinning. Yeah. Now, scientists have to DIG INTO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH AND RESTART THE PLANET WITH NUKES.

The science is bad. The acting is bad. The story is bad. And, best of all, it stars that guy from Thank You for Smoking alongside the queen of the jackboots, Hillary Swank. Which is bad.

Some of you may not know who Hillary Swank is, but I'm sure you'll recognize her character, Ms. Mary-Sue Jackboots. Who is Ms. Mary Sue Jackboots? Let me break it down.

First, Ms. Mary-Sue Jackboots is a Ms. The title "Ms" in Hollywood means a sexless, emotionless, hate-filled morlock who would be the embodiment of feminism if feminism had anything to do with acting like an emotional robot or spewing more mysandry than a spit-take session with that chick who shot Andy Warhol.

Second, Ms. Mary-Sue Jackboots is a Mary-Sue. She is not just perfect, but annoyingly, obviously, pull-out-your-hair-I-want-to-smack-this-bitch-with-the-blunt-end-of-a-pool-skimmer perfect. Mary-Sues can do anything, at all times, with no training, BETTER THAN YOU.

Finally, Ms. Mary-Sue Jackboots is a Jackboot. She is a fascist, like the red shirts in Star Trek who are just there to be at the business end of an intergalatic shoop-da-whoop at the appropriate time, except the Jackboot has protagonist powers. These are the people who call you a traitor for singing America, Fuck Yeah! during screenings of Patton. The Jackboot waves more flags than Michael Bay wacking off to glamour shots of The Pentagon between takes.

So, onto the plot. Birds start attacking people in Trafalgar Square, which is apparently in Toronto, and a bunch of guys with pacemakers drop dead in Boston, which is apparently a city where every man, woman and child has one installed at birth. Also, somebody throws a trout.

That Guy from Thank You for Smoking (Who I will just call That Guy), a lonely professor of the textbook-and-tweed variety, figures that all these problems are related. Much hand-waving later, the government finds the earth has stopped and decides to build a ship made of pure Plottanium (a substance that is invincible unless the plot requires it not to be, and can do anything the plot requires it to do unless it dramatically can't) to dig into the center of the earth.

But that's after a space shuttle crashes into Los Angeles.

Randomly. As a form of character development.

They may or may not have flown past the office building Snape and Voldemort were robbing. To borrow a phrase made famous by Cleolinda, this made me facepalm until my palms were bloody and my face was, well, covered by the palms of various people I had co-opted into the task due to it's sheer enormity.

After the whole space shuttle thing, the government finds a guy who can do anything if you provide him enough Xena tapes and Hot Pockets, who promptly does nothing for the rest of the movie except ostensibly sage faggots who talk about the center of the earth on 4chan, while everyone else tries to save the world in a montage. Cause, you know, if you're going to do things that are physically impossible without causing too much nerd rage, you're gonna need a montage.

Twenty agonizing minutes later a crack team of crack-pots on crack are off to the center of the Earth with Mary-Sue Jackboot, Captain Christopher Pike, ye generic Frenchman, That Guy, a pretentious Reedie, and The Black Guy Who Doesn't Die First Because That Would Be Racist in attendance. Here's a hint. Only two people survive, and one of them is not the black guy.

Have I mentioned that the ship is literally piloted with a Logitech Attack 3 game controller? Talk about doing a barrel roll.

Something goes wrong in the core, and therefore the whole mission is scratched because the nukes are no longer powerful enough to restart the core. Nothing, nothing can save the movie! Speaking of, who was the math guy who figured out how to make a perpetual motion machine out of nuke blasts and molten iron? Where's THAT guy?

That Guy and Ms. Jackboots figure it out and survive, riding the nuclear blasts all the way to the surface without drilling. They pop out in the ocean around Hawaii, where they are promptly saved by whales. WHALES. The credits can't roll fast enough.

All in all, this movie is primo, top-rate midnight material. It's entertaining without being good, it's popcorny without being childish, and it's wrong about everything forever without having to apologize for it's wrongness. For example, I didn't even mention the whole scene involving lightning causing the Colosseum to explode as if it were shoop'd by the aliens from ID4. If you haven't seen it, watch it. It's bad, but it's so good.

And, as a farewell gift, I give you this stunning tribute to Jackboots everywhere.

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In other news, my next midnight movie is G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra on Thursday. If you read this blog, you have a universal invitation to come watch movies with The Midnight Movie Guy. 12:01 am Friday morning (Thursday night) at The Regal 6 Pioneer Place in Downtown Portland, Oregon.