AVATAR- the Movie: Pros & Cons?

[Cittasanto]

I don't like the film, not seen it, or anything like that, but it stole its name from a nickelodian aname style cartoon which is being released as a film this year at some point.
it is based on eastern philosophies generally and the cartoon has many references to Dhamma so hopefully the Movie will.
it is being called the Last Air Bender, Aang - the last airbender, or Avatar, the former is the title of the movie and the cartoons can be called one of the three depending on where you are.

sorry for the off topic, but it is related in a loose sense.

yeah, that threw me for a loop at first before it came out, I was thinking, "Is this Avatar(the Airbender), or not?" but after I heard an interview with the Cameron guy on the radio about the film, I decided to check it out. The Last Airbender movie previews look pretty cool to though!

Oh Yeah,
I will be going to see it if I can, not many cinemas over here so may have to wait untill video

[Kim OHara]

I saw it last night, in 3D, and enjoyed it. I agree completely with those who have said the special effects were fantastic, and with those who saw more indigenous peoples' beliefs in it the story than dharma.
Congratulations to Tilt for the darkroastedblend link: the connections that article made were all great, too. (I'll just throw in a free plug here for Ursula Le Guin, whose 'Word for World' was mentioned there: she is one of the most deeply humane sf writers anywhere, anytime, and I recommend her books to everyone here. Can't recommend the movie of 'Earthsea', though - it misrepresents the book.)

But I now have another reason to like 'Avatar'. Someone I hardly know sent me a link in reply to something I said about (surprise!) climate change. Andrew Bolt is a prominent (am I allowed to say 'horribly prominent'?) right-wing Australian journalist and blogger. As far as I can see, he stands for absolutely everything I oppose, so I figure his response to 'Avatar' means its political message is right on target.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andr ... ens_dream/

Kim

[Ben]

But I now have another reason to like 'Avatar'. Someone I hardly know sent me a link in reply to something I said about (surprise!) climate change. Andrew Bolt is a prominent (am I allowed to say 'horribly prominent'?) right-wing Australian journalist and blogger. As far as I can see, he stands for absolutely everything I oppose, so I figure his response to 'Avatar' means its political message is right on target.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andr ... ens_dream/

Yes, you may say the man is 'horribly prominent'! Andrew Bolt is, as you said, the worst sort of right-wing political commentator in this country. I remember vividly his style before John Howard was booted out of office. Bolt was then, and still is, a mouth-piece for the conservative right and appeals to the lowest common denominator. Intellectually bereft.
Kind regards

Ben

[christopher:::]

Avatar just smashed all box office records, making it into the top five highest-grossing movies of all time in only 17 days. It took Dark Knight 33 weeks to get to that spot. The film just opened in China, yesterday and will probably be #2 by this time next week, right behind Titanic, lol...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hi ... sing_films" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

So what is it with Cameron and his movies?

[cooran]

Hello all,

It had to happen ...

Is blue the new black? Why some people think Avatar is racist
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters ... _some.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

metta
Chris

[Kim OHara]

Hi, Chris,
That title should have been 'Why some Americans Are ...

But I tracked down LeGuin's criticism of the Earthsea movie for you, since it's on the same issue:
http://www.slate.com/id/2111107/

Kim
(BTW, I'm thinking of running a poll on what people reckon *my* skin colour is ... what do you think of the idea? )

[cooran]

Hello Kim,

Thanks for the link ~ interesting read. It must be frustrating to be an author and see films not reflect the truth of the novel.

As for the Poll ~ go for it! How would we ever know the truth though - even if at the end you published a photo .... then we could have a Poll on whether it was really you or not? Is blue the new black the same for butterflies?

metta
Chris

[christopher:::]

I think Avatar is filled with paradox and contradictions, purposefully...

The feminist writer Maria Bustillos saw the movie as sexist male fantasy, with the Navi women "pornographically subservient to the alpha males."

I Hated 'Avatar' With The Fire Of A Thousand Suns, by Maria Bustillos

And yet watching the film what i noticed was how frequently Jake was submissive toward Nytiri, she played the "teacher" role in the movie, showing him how to shoot, fly, speak the language, etc. I think she saved his life not once but at least 3 times? Here's a guy who back in the human world is a "jarhead" in a wheelchair.

The paradox extends even outside the movie. This is an anti-military anti-capitalist "eco" flick which was backed by R. Murdoch, owner of Fox News, probably one of the most nationalistic and conservative Pro-War news stations in America.

Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ Is a Big, Dull, America-Hating, PC Revenge Fantasy

So, is Avatar racist? From one angle perhaps, and yet from another Cameron has offered one of the greatest "boundary crossing" romance stories ever put on film. Way beyond Jack & Rose in Titanic, where the divisions of class, wealth and social status were all they had in the way. Here's a human male falling in love with a 12 foot blue cat-like alien female, falling in love with her culture and planet as well- and audiences are pulled into that, applauding a movie where another "species" and "planetary culture" are presented as more attractive and fulfilling then our own...

What blows me away is how popular this story is, how people love seeing this.

The movie is already one of the top five most successful films in history. What does that say?

[tiltbillings]

Kim
(BTW, I'm thinking of running a poll on what people reckon *my* skin colour is ... what do you think of the idea? )

I would not even guess as to your gender.

[Kim OHara]

The movie is already one of the top five most successful films in history. What does that say?

Hi, Christopher,
I think that says lots of people have seen it - and it doesn't say much more than that.
There is no need to make out that it is great art, profound, epochal, ... whatever, and trying to do so is a mistake.

It is a very well made Hollywood movie, with lots of money available to the makers and lots of money for publicity. Sure, it's a bit smarter than some - but then, many are so dumb that if they were people, they couldn't tie their own shoelaces. It's a bit nicer than some - but then, many are awful.

The story is largely recycled from the sci-fi parts barrel - look at the darkroasted link a few posts back. Rather than seeing deliberate complexity and contradiction, I see some pretty stupid inconsistencies that could and should have been resolved before shooting started. (One little one: blue-skinned people couldn't have evolved in that environment, where they show up like a banana in a coal-scuttle. So why are they blue? (1) because that lets the audience see them, (2) because that makes them 'alien' or (3) because making them a more believable colour would have risked charges of racism. Choose any reason or several.)

That's all pretty negative, but only to counter incipiently excessive enthusiasm. I did like it a lot, but it's still illusion, still samsara.


Kim

[christopher:::]

'Avatar': Why do conservatives hate the most popular movie in years?

As a host of critics have noted, the film offers a blatantly pro-environmental message; it portrays U.S. military contractors in a decidedly negative light; and it clearly evokes the can't-we-all-get along vibe of the 1960s counterculture. These are all messages guaranteed to alienate everyday moviegoers, so say the right-wing pundits -- and yet the film has been wholeheartedly embraced by audiences everywhere, from Mississippi to [Tokyo].

To say that the film has evoked a storm of ire on the right would be an understatement. Big Hollywood's John Nolte, one of my favorite outspoken right-wing film essayists, blasted the film, calling it "a sanctimonious thud of a movie so infested with one-dimensional characters and PC cliches that not a single plot turn, large or small, surprises.... Think of 'Avatar' as 'Death Wish' for leftists, a simplistic, revisionist revenge fantasy where if you freakin' hate the bad guys (America) you're able to forgive the by-the-numbers predictability of it all."

John Podhoretz, the Weekly Standard's film critic, called the film "blitheringly stupid; indeed, it's among the dumbest movies I've ever seen." He goes on to say: "You're going to hear a lot over the next couple of weeks about the movie's politics -- about how it's a Green epic about despoiling the environment, and an attack on the war in Iraq.... The conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism -- kind of. The thing is, one would be giving Jim Cameron too much credit to take 'Avatar' -- with its ... hatred of the military and American institutions and the notion that to be human is just way uncool -- at all seriously as a political document. It's more interesting as an example of how deeply rooted these standard issue counterculture cliches in Hollywood have become by now."

[imagemarie]

Others are critical too..

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec20 ... -d23.shtml" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"An astonishing technology, but not necessarily the same thing as important or interesting filmmaking"..

[Kim OHara]

Kim
(BTW, I'm thinking of running a poll on what people reckon *my* skin colour is ... what do you think of the idea? )

I would not even guess as to your gender.

Hi, Tilt,
That was a joke, sort of, playing on a thread I started on e-Sangha that gave a lot of people a lot of thought-provoking entertainment.
I had been posting there regularly for a year without identifying myself as male/female before anyone publicly made an assumption about my gender (simply by saying 'Kim said she ...' or something). I used that as the trigger for discussing 'Does gender matter on e-Sangha?', given that it hadn't come up for a whole year and then was (as I revealed a long way down the track) wrong.
My eventual answer to the question was, 'Not much, but knowing more about each other strengthens our sense of community so unnecessarily hiding information about ourselves is generally not a Good Thing.'

I think the same can be said of ethnicity or skin colour. I'm not suggesting for a moment that anyone should be pushed into revealing personal information they don't want to share, just that openness has benefits.
But the point of my joke is that, mostly, we don't know the ethnicity of the people we're chatting to here and that (thankfully) it doesn't matter much at all.


Kim

[christopher:::]

My eventual answer to the question was, 'Not much, but knowing more about each other strengthens our sense of community so unnecessarily hiding information about ourselves is generally not a Good Thing.'

I think the same can be said of ethnicity or skin colour. I'm not suggesting for a moment that anyone should be pushed into revealing personal information they don't want to share, just that openness has benefits.
But the point of my joke is that, mostly, we don't know the ethnicity of the people we're chatting to here and that (thankfully) it doesn't matter much at all.


Kim

Good thoughts, Kim.

Back to the movie for a second, i think one of the interesting issues it deals with is not so much race as culture. Many of the battles on our planet now, among humans, are culture wars. The Western culture is presently dominant, has been subduing and dominating other cultures for the past 500 years. How to react to that? Last Samurai, Dances with Wolves and Avatar all suggest that people should fight back, literally or metaphorically...

Currently the Islamic "extremists" on our world have taken to battle in a very literal way, much like the Navi in the movie. Avatar presents "Custers Last Stand" done over again, in a sense. It alludes to the Muslim/Western tensions symbolicaly, though not overtly. This is a pretty powerful message.

Now, as Buddhists we can stand to the side and say "we wouldnt do that, no way." Buddhists are beyond warfare and violence. But if the pressure were on bigtime, to destroy all Buddhist culture, destroy the teaching and transmission dharma, would we see Buddhists fighting back like this as well?

Interesting and important issues raised, imo.

[Dan74]

Any time a big blockbuster movie raises any issues worth thinking about is a cause to cheer. This of course doesn't make it a "good movie", but it perhaps does more good than a brilliant art house flick seen by 100000 people... I am not sure.

_/|\_