AVATAR : Nature Lovers

Dear US Media Machine,

Avatar is not just a free swing in the jungle with Tarzan! This is a movie depicting how much harder Tarzan is than any of the scariest villains! Gardening is 'hard ass' work, especially when one gardens a deadly jungle by not throwing a hoe towards the ground and making straight lines so as to organize your unforgettable crops. The director, James Cameron is on about much more than athletic superiority in his film-art of Avatar. Cameron's talking about 'found cultivation.' As such, this is also really a film about the oncoming local elections. We need to start electing our civil engineers to positions of power rather than our engineering accountants because we tend to think of the planet Earth in any state whatsoever as our world. James Cameron uses light to suggest this assuming might be erroneous. Unable to breath on the lush and diverse Pandoran planet, doesn't detract enough to keep many an audience member from wanting to stay there, staring through glasses they believe prevent them from asphyxiating.

People can only live on their resources just like anything can only exist according to its resources. Our world necessitates certain resources from the planet Earth. On Pandora, a chief that blamed the problems of his own home tree on another home tree would be fired for threatening trees instead of practicing better gardening. On earth, a leader that blames social problems on the presence of other societies is sometimes hailed as a chief rather than a superstitious wacko who obviously didn't get the proper education and thinks he may find it elsewhere in secret as his minions conduct a costly war.

Only by cultivating the dangerous ecosystems that feed them may the N'avi people inhabit the delicate rain forest. They know that to exterminate their frightening neighbors would be biting the godly hand that feeds them, making the Na'vi prisoners to some other home tree. Herein lies craziness defined. Where modern war machines tend to thrust solitary confinement onto the awkward ('insane') so as to study deficiency over time; the Na'vi expose the awkward to sociability as comedy. And that's why I love this piece of art: it's not another 'fish out of water, growing up story in 3-d to help cognitive degenerates robbed of essential time in nature to better empathize with avatars of fear that cause panic within the ignorant,' (jm) and it's not a vanity mirror for a billion dollar industry fraught with friendly fire; it's the familiar story of human trespassing told in nobly savage English. It's as realistic as any greedy general overextending his cavalry into a feigned retreat, sooner or later the, 'Warrior hero who dreamed he could bring peace,' will have to wake up because chiefly peace lies before the warrior hero and rarely in his wake for when might is right, peace is weak.

Giovanni Rabisi, brilliantly underplaying a young Donald Rumsveld, reminds our hero, Sigourney Weaver, that she's, 'supposed to be winning the hearts and minds,' so that the 'blue monkeys,' can be easier to move and manipulate so that his cooperate bosses can collect the delectable 'cheddar.' To collect the 'cheddar,' humans must undergo five light years of cryogenic freezing aboard an inter-stellar space craft and join an army to mine and fend off the disapproval of an athletically superior race who mocks the human metabolism by refusing, 'Medicine! Education! Roads!' because, 'they want mud!' just like the mining corporation… Except, the Na’vi don’t just dig mud. They cultivate it as a nutritious jungle.

Avatar's humble lesson: it is most unfortunate being without the resources to collect more resources in another's domain as one might quickly discover the thrill of cancerous growth to be unworthy of award. Avatar is much more than a just another Puritan movie about mastering the elements with cotton; it's a critique of the Catholic obsession to view everything in terms of bread & wine. The jungle does not need to have it's bread or grapes imported to be one w/God - it's already got pain killers, accidental penicillins, quiet places and the like. Which is why US colonialism finds a place in Avatar, because we've grown accustomed to exporting a western desert to trade with ourselves so that we take nothing from our trading partners besides some ocean front mud. Avatar suggests that the US war machine's foreign policy has bigger structural issues than world peace such as it's affiliation with combustibles and traitors, which is why the US corporate power phrase book can be summed up with, 'Nothing's over while I'm still breathing - how does it feel to betray your own race...' of nothing? James Cameron asks the audience if they know why a superior alien race would help us. Incredibly, they might indeed still represent something and so fill our experience.

AVATAR : STOP YOUNG LITTLE VAMPIRES! STOP THE CANNIBALISM!

I think about the future. I think about getting there with grace. I think about myself in a state of grace. I think about myself as Cary Grant. So when in the cinema last weekend, alone, I almost yelled, yelled, mind you, 'Where are the young, little vampires and why can't we see them projecting away now?' But I didn't, I, amazed whispered it. I, like countless around me, just recently had the mystical experience of being spared death in a three dimensional context by a savage beast and was still in a state of shock and possibly humanism. Therefore I expected the blockbuster after Quentin Taratino's Hamlet Rewritten to clearly state the meaning of life. I expected the hard questions of 'Black or White?' 'Pirate or Ninja?' 'Robot or Wizard?' to melt away forever before the splendor of the Avatar. I expected Mr. Cameron to publicly scrap the lame cadences of mumming that attempt to bisect Yin/Yang for periods of time longer than any concept of context whatsoever. 'Cyborg or Alien?!' FOR WHAT?! UPRIGHT BBQING?! FIGHTING RENEGADE 'ANGELS' WITH BALLISTIC WEAPONRY! DESIGNING AND CONSTRUCTING CROWD CONTROL KILLING MACHINES?! GOD CAN SCI-FI AT LEAST START WITH A HUMAN TIME & PLACE & REDEEMING EXPERIMENT AND MAKE SENSE FROM THERE WHILE REPORTING THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF A STORY?!

YOU AREN'T EVEN ADVERTISING NATURE ANYMORE CAMERON!

The experiment in Avatar seems to be the patenting of individual consciousness in a world where a cryogenically frozen professional soldier who is shuttled 5 LIGHT YEARS through interstellar space can still be economically undeserving of the costly surgery to regain control of his legs. Many 'actual' (militantly over paid) critiques have complained over the stupidity of the writing. Obviously this is stupid! It doesn't serve you or I: that's the point. Cameron projects incorporated state policies of late in order to criticize war to posit the beginning of the end of humanity! Kinda like 'Running Man.' Yes, there are many stupidities present in this narrative. Giovanni Rabisi's character calls the native precious metal 'unobtanium.' Some actual critiques criticized the name for the special substance as 'stupid,' but haven't pointed out other character stupidities like calling the Na'vi 'blue monkeys,' when they're obviously 'cat people,' or attempting the genocide of a population of aliens whether or not they can shoot arrows straight into hurricane force winds; for that matter, strip mining in the age of Light Speed is pretty stupid. While positing the question, 'Cyborg or Alien,' in the linear experience of time as a species may be stupid, Cameron's writing is quite realistic. Many live in the stupid world of their bosses constantly trying to cut costs while increasingly vacation time for themselves. As our hero Sigourney Weaver asks of the audience, the question, 'What's wrong with this picture,' is much more empowering in rating Avatar's Time-Capsuleness than the beauty of the picture of a rain forest itself.

So young little vampires, let's stop the cannibalism all together now. Neither cyborg nor alien shall yield y'all fruit. No more should I have to admit the existence of sucking persons who consider 'jungle' to equal that metaphor that excuses their own cannibalism. No more should documentarians mistake their cameras for mirror shooting machine guns and their subjects for the natural foliage of astronomical budgets the size of NASA for I have heard of videographers stating that their shooting 'script' was capturing their subject, 'prove their worth,' as if they themselves were worthless and yet the authors of said university founded indigenous behavior. Persons of this nature that ignore the prime directive in this day and age are nothing but war mongers who believe a privatized war could be apolitical. Is your play social or antisocial? Sustainable or Forgettable? Classy or haughty? Informed or babish? If of the former, then please declare yourself an intergalactic planetary marine, if not - go home to practice mining as digging and then practice building as stacking blocks so as to drop the art of absentee civilian entirely... or just go off bleeding with hungry sharks before lobbying Public Programming for a job for James Cameron as a director on a show like Nature or Discovery because I want to learn more about how good boy scouts defeat bad marines.

SHERLOCK HOLMES : A Pickle Portends

Guy Richie made a picture. A fair picture suitable to his hypnotic, footnotic style I call 'A Pickle Portends,' if not, 'A Game's Afoot.' It is topical and educational and most of all gritty. Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes proves that the empire's terrible infant may discipline the sink of humanity that is conscript central. This is after all, London Towne, England's only hope against the swamp, home of the plague, county country, coventry canyon, the wet desert and pastural stone where any man may his quietus make with all bodkin, midget or dwarf.

Guy Richie takes a swipe at the superhero and takes a culture with Sherlock Holmes and the Doctor Watson as the swab test for the fecund urban sink. Ever wonder why villains have such long monologues? It's the chemical compound their brewing; it's their commodities portfolio fattening. Holmes, the renaissance man gone renegado against frustrated fascist forces, tests chemicals on his pet Bull Dog (the french one), crashtests a homemade gun silencer, corrals flies to test the power of musical scales, and plays dress up to check up on friends he fears may be in danger. In short, Robert Downey Jr. embodies the scientist role model at war with liberal curiosities with discipline and fortitude even if it's only because his 'brain rebels at constant stagnation.' Where Downey's Holmes functions, 'beneath the mask of logic and a sense of fragility,' Jude Law's Dr. Watson is spic & span, swarthy and silently utterly complex as military man, doctor, gambler, rabble rouser, private eye, & pulp author. The two enjoy their wits in the waining days of empire when Mixed Martial Arts was fought in stalls to maximize space.

'Terrified of life w/the thrill of the macabre'? Go crime fighting those that wield their gnostic education to terrify with the magic of tested scientific formula if only to slum with the dirty cops who take bribes to keep their jobs. Holmes and Watson take on the gravediggers and forensic accountants and even the Gilded Age itself to keep the elite from warping the masses with the steady monetary streams of mass produced chemical baths. Manipulation is Guy Ritchie's chief watch word, motivation, and smoking gun. The will to power, according to Richie, navigates common folk away from the temptations of the hoarding mob towards the post-modern consumer ghettos of today. Guy Richie reminds the bedazzled spectator that 'there is no magic, only conjuring,' with daring and fit flair to establish at least a jury of peers for peerless unions.