In then end, however, they liked the film; thought it looked amazing in 3D but are not clamoring to see it again (like with Star Wars or Up).

Did you see David Brooks review? Read it and you’ll feel a lot better about your own review (IMO, yours was the most thoughtful I’ve seen).

The point you bring up about “creating art along the way” is one I probably should heed more often. Sometimes I get frustrated (with myself?) when I get hung up on the politics/message of a work of “art” and perhaps fail to appreciate it more as *art*. I almost deleted (more specifically marked as “private”) this review out of fear I was being overly critical.

Your second to last paragraph nails it – especially the last sentence thereof.

Perhaps I should take my girls (who have expressed some interest but are not keen on *three hours*) who are 13 and 14. Give Cameron more of my mo-nay!

Well… I am aching to see “Moon” which comes out on DVD January 12. Makes me angry it only released in 2 cities. And then critics tell us all we need to go see it! Or do they think no one lives outside LA/NYC?!?

I had heard so much about what was “wrong” with the message (Pocahontas meets Star Wars, US Military Bad/Indigenous Peoples Good, Gaia worship elevated to high art, etc…) that I confess to going in expecting a message film. I also confess that all of this made me not likely to see the movie until the rest of my family begged to go.

Since you’ve done a very thorough job, I’ll just toss out the bullet points…

- I’m a sucker for wounded Marines who want to keep going.
- Stephen Lang’s Col. Quaritch may have been the best performance of the film.
- For me, Sigourney Weaver will always be a character from Aliens.
- Too many political references (“Shock and Awe”, etc…). Boring.
- 9/11 was the first thing that came to mind during the frame showing the tree columns on fire…it drove home to me at the moment that the columns began to buckle. The scene where our hero walks through the ash had to have been done with 9/11 in mind.
- So just which civilization was the more technologically advanced? The humans who came up with the Avatar tech (using all of that gear and energy) or the Na’vi who were able to move the essence of a human into the body of a Na’vi permanently using “only” Nature (with its massive organic network)?
- Great point about Sci-Fi films not needing to be bound to scientific consistency (fiction, duh!).
- The Na’vi people were simply beautiful.

But I walked out of the theater thinking that I really liked the film…because of the stunning visuals (yes, we ponied up for the 3D tickets). I’ve never seen colors pop or relative motion present itself so naturally like this. I’m pretty sure that there was nothing blurred in a single frame (not even the ordinance trails). The way that the ground lit up each time a native’s foot touched it was cool.

In the end, though, Cameron was too clever by half. Folks will go to see this because of how cool it is (and how cool some folks find it to go to an “event film”) and when reminded about the Message, will shrug their shoulders and continue talking about how cool the thing looked. This reminds me of how many fans of the West Wing used to talk about the show. “Great acting!” “Best writing since the Andy Griffith Show!” When I asked about the repeated “Right/Bad Left/Righteous” themes, these folks would get irritated and accuse me of harshing their mellow and say something like “shut up and watch!”

They were (mostly) right.

Cameron clearly joins his fellow lazy thinkers (who have such comfortable lifestyles that they almost live within an Avatar and see themselves as hovering over the planet rather than living within it…until the next time a small person ignites a big explosion near them) in playing the moral equivalence card and wanting to sermonizing yet again from their false self-loathing perspective. But on the way, he has created a work of art.

Avatar will not make my top 5 list of this year or top 10 alltime. But it was a beautiful film.

Here is my take away from this post: Your blog is aptly named. I greatly appreciate your opennness with the struggle to be that new creation.

Best wishes.

Wait – “third rail”?

I am reminded of the rather execrable movie “Disclose” (1994) starring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. Which does however contain a very significant lesson. If you recall the “problem” is when Meredith (Moore) sues Tom (Douglas) for sexual harassment. Meanwhile there are production problems with hard drives coming from a new factory in Thailand. Tom of course destroys Meredith’s accusation. But Tom still gets anonymous messages about “you haven’t solved the problem”. What problem? The problem with the hard drives silly! He focused so much on the harassment charge that he still hasn’t solved the *real* problem – which he then does.

I have always thought that was a shining jewel of a lesson in an otherwise forgettable piece of dreck.

What I hear you saying in a sense is the Republicans need to wake up and “solve the (real) problem”.

For what it’s worth NPR has been running a series of report on the health care debate and had one show in which they explained how/why MRIs are so much cheaper in Japan than in America. Their conclusion (or should we say “argument”) was “the government said that they can only cost so much – and no more”. Propaganda? Probably. But does make one wonder. Do not misunderstand – I still believe in the market.

What concerns me is that Republicans and Conservatives are setting themselves up for a huge and longterm failure on this issue. THE issues here is the cost of healthcare, not the availability of health insurance. As all real conservatives know, cost is a function of supply and demand (I throw up in my mouth a little when I hear a particular Nobel prize winning politician and a particular Nobel prize winning economist talk about “bending the cost curve down” as though it were something that we could do if we just squeezed our triceps hard enough). We (conservatives) at least talk as though we believe that since nothing, on earth, is in infinite supply, the best means of distribution is via a market as unencumbered by gov’t regulation as possible.

As it stands, a significant portion of this supply has been artificially removed from the market by the Medicare programs and for Medicaid and Medicaid type programs. In other words, a big chunk of supply is now being taken up by folks who either end up receiving more of the supply than they’ve paid for or by folks who’ve paid little to nothing for the supply.

If folks on the right and in the center are successful in stopping the folks on the left from expanding this already unsustainable situation to include folks who could afford some supply, then what? We’ll still have the problem of healthcare costs increasing faster than any measure of inflation. And what few folks on the right seem willing to discuss is the fact that in order to impact the cost curve, we’re going to have make significant changes to how much of the supply is taken up by those elderly who haven’t paid for it.

I’m not opposed to taking care of our elderly. What I’m opposed to is treating any area of healthcare as a third rail.