Go ahead, ask me if I've seen James Cameron's Avatar, if you enjoy the warm sensation of blood pouring from your fist-crushed nostrils. I've accepted that every rat bastard and his brother is hopelessly infatuated with Cameron's brilliant remake of Ferngully: The Last Rainforest by now, and even the promise of very real injury does nothing to keep these gibbons from hooting over this amazing, presumably heart-filled $200 billion dollar CGI masterpiece.
No, I have not seen Avatar. No, I will not ever see Avatar. I saw every frame I needed to see in the trailers. Had there been one single thing on screen that held my interest, I might have gone to see it. But what I saw was a crippled guy rolling his old-school wheelchair past swarms of high-tech robotic walking exo-suits that I guess were invented for some other purpose, and aliens that look like what would happen if a Smurf knocked up a Thundercat who drank too much during pregnancy. Fuck you and no.
If you liked Avatar for whatever reason, I'll wager you think I'm being unfair towards it. Too bad. The days of playing fair are deader than Vaudeville. The internet killed them for good. Once upon a time, there was this thing called "perspective". Perspective was the difference between legitimately criticizing something for its shortcomings and mistakes, and calling a director a cock-snarfing faggoceros. Twenty years ago people would look at an unemployed college-age man as a sad pariah if he never stopped ranting about the people he felt were unworthy of the Hollywood limelight. Nowadays, that man's website gets a million unique hits a week, and that's not even counting his YouTube channel, where his "friends" number in the thousands.
Since Avatar premiered, my scroll-finger has suffered through endless post comment threads begging please, PLEASE, don't write the movie off just because you dislike how the aliens look. Don't hate the player, hate the game's ugly aesthetics! To truly experience the rich, original universe Cameron has created, you have to look PAST the ThunderSmurfs with Tracy Chapman corn-rows and fetal alcohol syndrome that the entire concept is hinged upon! And I'm not just saying that because the ugly blue bastards stare at me from everywhere in the form of billboards and banner ads, like goddamned Angelina Jolie after a lifelong colloidal silver habit!!
Sorry folks, but I lack this wondrous ability to tune out the dealbreaker. Just like you lacked the ability to get past your weird obsession with Jar Jar Binks being a coded symbol of Niggerdom. Or like how you couldn't get past the 18 seconds of CGI monkeys/prairie dogs, Shia LeBoof as a faux-Brando, those things you told EVERYBODY WHO WOULD LISTEN WERE ALIENS, or whatever else stuck a wild hare up your ass in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. (I lost track after a while.) Or like the two whigger-bots in Revenge of the Fallen that you use as a talking point (other than all the farting and nut jokes you can't help but bring up) during your vicious, highbrow takedown of what everyone else can see is a FUCKING TOY MOVIE.
The planet in Avatar is named PANDORA. There are bargain-bin PC space simulators from 1995 that use more imagination than that. The MacGuffin is called Unobtainium. If I was a working actor and these names had to come out of my mouth, I would instinctively shove them back in with a bullet chaser. How many times in your furtive, laborious arguments against [insert any Star Wars episode here] do you bring up how [insert either Harrison Ford or Samuel L. Jackson here] said to George Lucas, "It's easy for you to write this shit, but it's goddamn hard to speak it", during shooting? Oh yeah- also, the soulful, beatific, OMG-it-lookz-REALZ!really aliens* in Avatar are the "Na'vi". If you are dyslexic, that's how you spell "native". GET IT? GET IT? OMG I'M CUMMING THAT'S SO BRILLYINT!!!
*fetal alcohol syndrome.
The reasons everyone is falling all over themselves to praise James Cameron are simple. (Unless you're a woman, which means you of course got on board with Titanic, then inevitably soured on Cameron when you found out he goes through girlfriends like Peter North goes through Kleenex.) Cameron didn't re-edit Terminator to make the guns into Walkie-Talkies, like Spielberg did with E.T., a kids' movie that was wholly forgotten as 80's syrup before he began tinkering with it and gave his detractors some real ammo. Cameron didn't tweak Aliens with CGI landscapes to make them actually LOOK "alien", instead of Tunisian deserts circa 1977, as Lucas of course did with his original Star Wars chapters. Even through his unsteady, overblown excesses, like The Abyss and True Lies (now safe from hipster criticism, due to their longevity of existence), Cameron has rarely expanded on his past work outside of "director's cuts", and thus he has largely been spared the ire of the change-fearing American moviegoer. And, I grant you, the fact that Terminator, T2 and Aliens are still nearly flawless decades later certainly doesn't hurt matters.
But herein lies the issue: perspective. Why do audiences swallow every positively un-womany line Cameron can put into an actress' mouth, while Lucas' Attack of the Clones is still held up for ridicule as the apex of wooden romantic dialogue? Has no one ever noticed that Cameron does strong females so convincingly simply because they're written and directed as though they were men? Watch Terminator 2 now that I've pointed this out to you. Again, don't get me wrong, T2 is one of my favorites of all time, but the most authentically feminine thing about it is Edward Furlong singing Axl Rose on his little moped. Even Kate Winslet's beloved Rose in Titanic doesn't fare much better; when she isn't doing full frontal for DiCaprio, she's hocking lungers off the bow to impress him.
This is where perspective is so important. Did the feeling that Rose was written no more feminine than DiCaprio's character take me out of the movie, or ruin it, back when I apparently gave a shit? Answer: all the femininity I needed was there when she showed her tits and bush. Eventually I could see the parts in question on the internet, and I stopped caring about Titanic. Really, the entire soundtrack is based around that Celine Dion twaddle. It's like being forced to listen to some unceasing, horrible, howling cunty thing for over two hours. So THAT ruined it for me. I had an easier time with The Trial of Billy Jack*, and its last hour (of three) is folk singing and crying.
*No.
If I don't like the way the aliens look in Avatar, and these aliens occupy 95% of the movie according to the people who can't shut up about it, then yeah, I'm going to skip it. And yes, it's probably partly rooted in resentment over how certain recent movies I like have been vilified in certain corners. But it's primarily because I just don't care. The thing's made enough money without my blessing, so what difference does it make anyway. Well, I'm sure the technology will work its way into the next Transformers movie, probably the instant motion capture part (although Michael Bay is said to be considering 3D), so then I'll care.
Plus, SILVERBOLT is cast for Transformers 3, and it's UNCLE PHIL, from Fresh Prince of Bel Air!!! Do I even have to explain how awesome that is?!?
See, THAT'S how you get me to care about a movie!
-MBA
PS: Recently, through my own incompetence, I erased my Wordpress blog database while trying to update it. That is where it's gone. Restoring it in some form is on my to-do list, but you know how that goes.
