Avatar Review
Suz and I saw Avatar this past weekend, 3D IMAX.
I really enjoyed it, but I couldn’t help watching with a critical eye. I think most people have just been so wowed by the spectacle and technology that they’re calling this a great movie when it definitely has some plot holes and/or character flaws.
The 3D was quite awesome. It’s by far the best movie I’ve ever seen done in 3D. The glasses were somewhat annoying but tolerable.
What makes this special is that absolutely everything was shot in 3D… live action, CGI, all in 3D. It’s not a gimmick (or *just* a gimmick).
That said, it’s still not going to be the Next Big Thing in movies (as 3D has been hyped to be – in the 50s, before in my life, and now again with this movie). It’s beautiful, interesting, but it’s not really helping the storytelling. Given the expense, it doesn’t seem likely that anyone is going to go through such an effort to do this again anytime soon… anyone that isn’t named Jim Cameron, at least.
I loved the Colonel. Great bad ass. Sigourney also fit her role well.
Spoilers Below
So my complaints with the plot:
- They never explain how the link is made between the human and the avatar. One presumes some sort of electromagnetism (since there’s no other option in our current universe). Yet when they went to the Magic Floating Mountains, the link still works? Of course this had to be done, else it would have been a trivial matter to find the humans after they went rogue; if the avatar and human can link, then that human is emitting something that would be easy for the other humans to find. The whole thing was a little bit of hand-waving that I’m prepared to accept, though.
- Michelle Rodriquez’s character is essentially a marine pilot. She trained with the people she flies with and fights with. She depends on her comrades with her life, and they depend on her. War historians have shown time and time again that the reason people give when they fight in horrible battlefield conditions is “for the man next to me”. Not for country, not for honor… but for the men they fight with. That man is your brother, and you are his. You will give you life to save his, and vice versa.
She may have thought what was going on was bullshit, and maybe she wouldn’t pull the trigger on innocent natives. Maybe even she’d bust out the Good Guys to go help the Space Elves. However, no way do I see her actually opening fire and killing her own people. It could happen, but Cameron didn’t give us a reason to believe it.
- How is it that in the first half of the movie, all the arrows bounced off the ships, but then started to penetrate in the final battle scene. Did they get armor piercing arrows?
- Why in the fuck would the armor battle suit (a la Aliens) have a huge armor battle suit knife in its holster? If a knife was ever actually necessary, the gun ALREADY HAD ONE.
- So the Space Elves have a ceremony where the spirit of a human can be transformed into the body of a human engineered half-breed creature by Gaia (or whatever the Pandora mother spirit was called)? This has come up before?
- Clearly the Space Elves were patterned off the modern myth of the Native American in harmony with mother nature. This is a myth, as it turns out that Native Americans were pretty brutal to the local ecology… they just moved on when an area was decimated, and they simply didn’t have the numbers to do any serious damage to such a vast area. I’m just sayin’.
- The Space Elves were pretty fucking stupid. Hey, huge war machines are rolling into your house. You’re going to wait until it’s ON FIRE and FALLING before you get the fuck out? Makes you wonder if Darwin’s rules don’t apply on Pandora.
Again, it was a fun movie, it was interesting. It was done extremely well. It was pretty. It’s just not a *good* movie; it’s not going to stand the test of time.
Wow, congratulations from a fellow XS1100 enthusiast!
I was just poking around lamenting my current lack of a bike and I came across your blog. I live in Evanston, IL and it was cool to see familiar places in the pics from your trip. How long ago was your trip? Do you still ride? How will the baby effect your biking?
Best Wishes,
Ian
(ianwarsenault@gmail.com)
Fuckin’ A, brother!
Looking for some comic relief, I typed in JohnStewart.com and expected to find a few Daily Show videos to laugh along with.
Instead, I find your blog.
First, let me congratulate you for turning down all of those lucrative offers for your domain name. Obviously a man of principal – or just holding out for more?
Secondly, I appreciate a well written commentary on such an important topic, your well chosen quote and an excellent diety disclaimer.
If only the rest of the blogesphere were as well educated.
Keep up the good work, John Stewart
Congratulations to you both! Jane alerted me to the news. This is very exciting.
Everyone around me is having babies!! There must be something in the water.
Send my best wishes to Susanna as well!
Eiher the guy above me was being sarcastic or he really doesn’t know you…I kid yer pretty smart. I wonder if they let you out of GitMo early if you convert to Chris
+T
haha, thats funny cause I recieved an Obama ad in my ancient yahoo account, musta bought some pretty old list. Can’t figure it out though cause I’ve never voted for a democrat, and there’s no way in hell I’ll vote for this one. Not that I want McCain either.
Hahaha, he spoke at Sturgis and they played a clip on the radio. Is it just me or does he sound like Little Nicky(adam sandlers movie)?
Red and irritated, eh? You sure it’s not just the game?
Found via Google blog search; thanks for the call-out.
Let me put it this way: this is why you care. While Washington negotiated, we lost yet another bank yesterday, Washington Mutual. There are only two levels of safeguard left that prevented everybody with their checking and savings accounts in WaMu from losing everything yesterday, and we used up one of them. WaMu was put into a forced buy-out by JP Morgan Chase, a clear violation of anti-monopoly law we wouldn’t put up with if we weren’t desperate. How desperate were we? Had WaMu simply gone under, as it would have done today without this, 2/3rds of the entire reserve of the FDIC would have been gone. So if we lose two more banks that size, the American people lose their checking accounts and savings accounts. OK, more likely, the taxpayers end up on the hook for it, but we are at serious risk of a cascading bank failure.
Also, your employer depends on those banks being at least minimally healthy and able to operate. So does everybody’s employer. The last time we had anything resembling a wave of bank failures, unemployment roughly doubled. So take the number of friends and family you know are out of work? Roughly that many more of them will be out of work.
Yeah, it maters.
Congratulations John and Susanna! We’re extremely happy for you both!
Great looking boy. Glad everybody is okay and now the fun begins. lu
That kid’s head is like Sputnik!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRmLGYSc0XQ&feature=related
I was wondering what was holding everything up. 33 hours!!! And then a c-section? Herregud!
Congrats!
Hey congratulations guys! Can’t wait to see you all.
Lor & Kell
Congratulations!! We will miss you at our game(s), but you are definitely needed elsewhere! Wow, sounds like a very healthy (future-frisbee playin’) boy!
Congratulations!
Congrats Guys, August looks very cute!
Wow, 33 hours! I certainly hope Amy doesn’t try to beat that record
-N8 and Amy and ???
Congratulations!! August is adorable!
Wow, I’ve been wondering how that all turned, then ding! check his site! Congrats on the cute kid! And hats off to wifey, thirty-three hours?! Man,i can relate to the towels in my butt but not for that long. Looks like a scholar to me!
Congrats! Very cute baby. Way to go guys!
drew
LoL!
Welcome to the world of parenting!
Grats, by the way, you 3! He is *adoreable* !!! I stalk your pictures now
~Crystal
In the case of Obama, the term African-American is neither imprecise nor inaccurate. In fact it’s one of the most precise applications of the term that I can think of…
Why is he African-American? Because his father was born in Kenya? Barack himself was born in Hawaii. That makes him an American-American, or just plain American.
His mother is from English descent. That makes him as much an English-American as African-American.
Yet why do you use this term to refer to him? BECAUSE OF SKIN COLOR.
So let’s use the right term. We’re talking about skin color; let’s call him black. I’m white. I may also be a Scottish-American, but it doesn’t say anything about the point at hand, which is a discussion of my skin color… THIS is why it is imprecise.
What about white people from South Africa? I saw an episode of Top Chef where a white woman, who had a parent from South Africa, describe herself (half-jokingly) that she was a very pale African-American. People GASPED as if this was some huge racist comment. It’s not and shouldn’t be perceived as such. We should stop giving reverence to a term which isn’t useful and was invented to dance around people’s perceived sentitivities.
Furthermore, on more general terms, “African-American” is in most cases an INACCURATE term (admittedly, it’s only half-inaccurate in Obama’s case).
In fact, I recall reading recently (can’t find it right now, so obviously this is not gospel) that genetic testing shows that a high percentage of those who self-identify as African-American actually have no African ancestry!
Should we call black people with no African blood African-American? How about we just use the more precise and more accurate term for what we REALLY mean… black! It’s not an epithet!
Not all Africans are black and not all black people are from African descent! Also, not all black people in America are actually American citizens.
Drilling further, if we want to get into the roots of human ancestry, we’re ALL descended from homo sapiens originating in the horn of Africa. Therefore, we’re all African-American in this country.
Does that make it a useless enough term?
Whoa, apparently I touched a nerve. I was just trying to be snarky.
But I stand by my point, that he is correctly called an African-American, in the sense that he’s a hybrid between an African and an American. I do agree that the term is all but meaningless in everyday use, and is just a polysyllabic way of saying black. Like my high school English teacher said, never use a 50 cent word when a nickel word will do.
Also, I’m not sure the term was “invented to dance around people’s perceived sensitivities.” I think it was adopted by black people as a way of describing themselves, in the 60s and 70s, presumably because the term black was becoming an epithet.
You’re right, Malcolm X first popularly used the term in the early 1960s, and it became more popular through the 1970s over the term Afro-American. Jesse Jackson further pushed for its adoption in the 1980s:
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/African-American%23African-American-population
This about surveys of the black population on the term:
http://volokh.com/posts/1204569019.shtml
However, this from a black man on the subject:
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_latimes-why_im_black.htm
It’s time to move on.
Great write up, I came over for your election thoughts, but this brought a tear to my eye. I think the birthing process is something you really can’t fully comprehend or appreciate until you’ve been through it. Congratulations.
Now, more importantly, when are you going to introduce him to the MSOP.
robert
awwww, now that is sweet! Is he sleeping or just being cute?
either that or u better start calling me Irish-american…and my ancestors were slaves too so I want my reperations from the British
Fuck yeah, that’s in Tulsa, baby! Those gold skyscrapers visible in the background at around 1:40 are part of Oral Roberts University. I could tell you exactly what coffee shop she stormed out of if I knew south Tulsa a little better (haven’t lived there in about 6 years).
ORU is pretty much Crazy Christian Central.
I have always insisted on calling white people of undetermined/mixed ancestry (including and especially myself) Euro-Americans. No matter how hard my relatives look for a darker, more ancient American ancestry and despite the fact that my people arrived in the early 1600’s, we still have an identity based from Colonial European culture, and anyway — why are mine the only people who are deprived of a hyphen?! The only (blank)-Americans are the tribes, and even they migrated from somewhere, but at least they did it first.
That said, “black” is more inaccurate than any geo-political designator. Most people are some shade of brown. But the WORST is calling people “non-whites”! If you’re going to be on a mission about language, blast any media source that uses that repulsive term. Hopefully soon, any mention of skin color will comply with the Crayola Appearance Descriptor System.
Hi
As a fresh johnstewart.com user i just want to say hi to everyone else who uses this forum
Aloha guys!
You have a very interesting forum.
So i’d like to know if someone of you or your frineds was fired because of a financial crisis?
LOL – Jeff felt exactly the same way until Marin was at least 9 months old. You’ll have to swap fatherhood stories when we get together. (Suz … shh … we’ll keep the fact that we’re right about the “going out” clothes between us.)
dude. you actually have a cute kid. who woulda thought!
Nice work.
You totally stole my name though.
I enjoy reading your posts on fatherhood. you funny guy.
You must get alot of trafic being the first google result for John Stewart!
First off, his name is Jon Stewart, not John Stewart.
Secondly, I’m nowhere near the first result for “John Stewart”. I’m curious what search strings you used to find this place.
Every time that dude does something (now, Cramer, previously, Crossfire), I get some response like this. I wonder how you find me!
You lucky bastard. Your boy is a gem.
you can try
john stewart is a badd ass name a name they only give to gods