Skip to main content

Sad retreat back to the Eywa-tree

But this will not be a post about the tele-genic properties of this or that movie critic -- no!

I would like to simply say that the "theme" of AVATAR is shmaltz, pure shmaltz, and no amount of discussion by a very cool-looking Columbia prof will disguise that fact. No amount of clever technology can disguise that fact. The bones of any good/memorable movie is STORY, and I'm sorry, but the story of "Avatar" is nothing new. In fact, it is a big yawn. (ginseng, response to post, "Stephanie Zacharek talks with Charlie Rose," 4 February 2010)

Re: “The bones of any good/memorable movie is STORY, and I'm sorry, but the story of "Avatar" is nothing new. In fact, it is a big yawn.”

This point gets mentioned a lot. Worth a debate at some point here on Salon (story is a sum of all the experiences you have during the film, much of which is often invisible in simple plot descriptions). I respect that you experienced the film as a yawn, but about it owing to the story not being worthy FOR it not being new -- at least in regards to how others might be expected to react -- consider Morris Dickstein's take on films in the 30s:

Capra's populist simplicity showed up in the way he personalized social problems into Boy Scouts and bosses, heroes and villains. But the same approach enabled him to transform America into a vivid personal myth of archetypal simplicity, affecting humor, and elemental emotional power. Like Chaplin, like Dickens, Capra remained in touch with something raw and vulnerable in himself and his audience, a memory of humiliation, struggle, and inner resolution. The coming of the Depression gave it a more than personal meaning, and helped turn it into a not always comforting social vision. (Dancing in the Dark)

That is, for many people it's not primarily about it being new, but about it being relevant to their lives, to their current emotional needs. Cameron has given them something, though, of the you-didn't-know-this-is-what-you-were-looking-for-until-you-found-it variety, which strikes me as a combination of the already known, yet still completely unexpected. That is, the experienced truth of the matter, is that for many people it FELT new, even if it all it REALLY amounts to is sad/scary primal/populist retreat back to the dissolution-in-the-communal Eywa-tree.

Link: Stephanie Zacharek talks with Charlie Rose (Salon)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Watch out, liberal extremities!

Watch out, liberal extremities! websmith says: “White people and an increasing number of minorities are tired of being called racists by the true racists and more appalled that this loony bleeding has spread from the heart to the brain." This is what many progressives are going to have to get used to hearing -- that THEY are the true racists! I've said this before but '60's liberalism goes down when enough people have decided that, in sum, it was never truly about what minorities, impoverished people wanted/needed, but instead what certain AFFLUENT WHITE PEOPLE wanted to believe those they ostensibly spoke for wanted/needed. They (progressives) will be made to seem, not the most caring, but the most negligent, most truly self-serving. Of course, most democrats in power will not be too afflicted by this, because they're ready to turn on the ’60s too. Why? Because, sad to say, they're getting in mood to want to see the weak and needy set-up as punishment-worthy a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Conversation about Agulis at the Gene Wolfe Facebook Appreciation Club

James Pepe New Member  ·  20 hrs I’ve been rereading BotNS (this is my second read of it) and I just finished the part where Sev fights Agulis with the avern. I’m interested to hear what people think of the accusations Agilus levels agains Sevarian. Agilus says Sev has wronged him three times. Are we meant to take these accusations seriously? They're very strange. Is this just a last ditch attempt by Agilus to get out of being killed, or is Sev actually guilty of something, either legal, moral, or cultural. Are the powers that Agilus refers to simply that the avern didn’t kill Sev when it wounded him? Here the quote, “First by entrapment. You carried an heirloom worth a villa about the city without knowing what it was you had. As owner it was your duty to know, and your ignorance threatens to cost me my life tomorrow unless you free me tonight. Secondly, by refusing to entertain any offer to buy. In our commercial society, one may set...
Post a Comment
Read more

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his  discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense ...
Post a Comment
Read more