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.

2012 (The Year After Tomorrow A Year From Now)

**Warning. This review might seriously disillusion those six people left on earth who really like disaster movies. The rest of us have moved on to liking movies that are themselves disasters. Like Twilight.**

Let me begin this review by saying that I've written about Roland Emmerich before. Let me then follow this statement by saying that I have a mindcrushingly hard boner for John Cusack. Given these two things, you'd expect me to have a similarly large tent in my pants for this movie, right? Wrong. 2012 was actually kinda painful.

First, this is a Roland Emmerich film. You may know him as the guy who brought you ID4, The Day After Tomorrow, and that really crappy Godzilla movie. I know, he's not that big of a name among the breakfast cereal set, but he taps into a deep underlying passion at the heart of every American to see New York burned to the fucking ground, and he's usually pretty good at coming up with creative ways of doing just that. ID4 had aliens who used powerful laser beams capable of blowing the shit out of large buildings. The Day After Tomorrow had freezing tidal waves and environmental destruction. Godzilla had Mathew Broderick trying to pull off a Brooklyn accent, which on principle alone should have caused New York to fall into an angry, murderous pitchforked riot like people forced to watch George Lopez do standup. In this case, Emmerich came up with the idea of making a disaster movie about the Mayan 2012 apocalypse, which, accoriding to Emmerich, is caused by neutrinos from the sun which cause massive environmental damage and tidal waves. Waitafuckingminute. This sounds familiar.

Isn't this the exact same premise as Knowing (2009) staring Nicolas Cage who uses his power of numerology to predict the end of days?

Isn't this just The Day After Tomorrow, except with John Cusack instead of that guy in the hat from G.I. Joe? Haven't we seen the whole death-by-giant-wave thing before? Like here? Or here? Or even here?

The whole 2012 Mayan calendar thing isn't even there, either. This movie makes no mention of how the Mayans made their prediction, who made that prediction, why, or when. The movie may be named 2012, but it is named so only to cash in on a current cultural meme without actually having to make a movie that actually addresses any aspects of that meme. It's like taking a DVD of Towering Inferno and renaming it World Trade Center. Wait. Oliver Stone already did that.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love end of the world movies. There is something about the idea that the end is coming that really gets to people. But this movie doesn't even offer that. The main characters are too busy rolling initiative and jumping away from rocks the size of Roxanne's Tits to really reflect on the value of their lives. There is footage of people praying, so it seems that in the Emmerich-verse at least the people who are constantly dying in increasingly senseless ways are completely at ease with their respective gods as they do so.

And then, Emmerich tries to tack on this absolutely over-the-top preposterous Noah's Arc ending that is ripped, shot for fucking shot, from the ending of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Of course, in Metropolis when the emotional lead character leads all the great unwashed little people to smash the machines that will keep the richer members of humanity alive, the filmmaker is really trying to show us how fucking retarded such populist pathos is, especially because everybody drowns as a result. Emmerich riffs off this scene with a straight face, and instead waves a magic wand and makes everything okay. Considering Emmerich had $250,000,000 to play with and Lang didn't have sound or color, and the Lang ending makes abso-fucking-lutely no fucking sense in this context, I'll just let my frustration speak for itself.

So, in my rage, I'll leave you with the one good end-of-the-world movie I've seen in the last week or so. Or ever. Probably ever.

Enemy at the Gates (or Behind the Lens Cap?)

**Warning. This review contains epic amounts of fail. So much fail, I might add, that it is questionable whether or not there is room for anything BUT fail in this movie. Also, spoilers.**

I first watched Enemy at the Gates on my couch in my apartment, after finding it free on one of those sketchy offshore servers that have been holding down the music industry like a dominatrix during Burning Man. It was a nice night. Then I was thrown into a violent rage.

Enemy at the Gates, a A-list historical drama from 2001, was supposed to be for the Battle of Stalingrad what Saving Private Ryan was for D-Day. Both are films that are epic in scope, filled with soldiers and the people who love them, and feature "sympathetic" looks at the gruff-and-tumble vets with cigarettes dangling out of the side of their perpetually mud-covered faces while they complain that "they're getting too old for this." Though don't be fooled into thinking they're equivalent movies, however. Saving Private Ryan won Best Picture and was, at the time, the most realistic war movie ever put to film. Enemy at the Gates featured a Jude Law sex scene.

Saving Private Ryan focused on American troops deployed in France on a mission for country and brotherhood, facing harrowing combat that taught them the true nature of patriotism and the meaning of freedom. Enemy at the Gates spends so much energy bashing it's communist characters that the Nazis look like schnitzel-eating good guys who want to conquer Europe in the name of puppies.

Saving Private Ryan discussed deep-seated issues of patriarchy and fraternity in the American military institution. Enemy at the Gates had a love triangle so inane that it made Pearl Harbor's subplots look like an epic romance.

Did I mention that, in the worst makeup decision since Orson Welles smeared shit all over Charleston Heston's face, both films use mud as the primary cosmetic device? Were the filmmakers not aware that even people on the battlefield have been known to wash their faces? (How did their faces even get that dirty in the first place? Are their pillows made of coal?)

Enemy at the Gates is about Jude Law, a naive Russian boy, who grows up to become the Soviet Union's most famous sniper with the help of his good friend, a commissar in the Communist Party. Between them there is a woman, Rachel Weisz, who is actually a very talented actress if you watch any other movie, especially if she's not in it. The movie takes place entirely during the battle of Stalingrad, one of the most heroic battles in the war's history. Even Cold War American historians thought that Stalingrad a heroic tale of survival and defiance in the face of Fascism. Enemy at the Gates doesn't buy into that rhetoric, however, and prefers to show wave-after-wave of Russian soldiers getting mowed down in slow motion while dramatic music plays like a cheap knockoff of a Sam Peckinpah movie with slightly fewer Mexicans.

But when it comes to crowning achievements in badness, the ending of this movie takes the cake. I won't reveal it, but I will say that one of the main characters makes a speech about how socialism will never work because of love triangles, and then kills himself. I raged. I threw a fit. If I had been in the theater, I might have actually punched something in the face. This movie pretends so hard to be good. It tries so hard to be that seminal big-budget film about WWII that could get post 9/11 audiences to open their hearts and pocketbooks to the War on Terror. Unfortunately, some war movies just don't know when to quit. The rest of us, on the other hand, should quit before we're at the gates.