Avatar 3d

Avatar 3d, a real case study where extra visual dimensionality leeches from narrative depth, where imaginative visuals decouple from substance. Worth seeing for it's intense psychedelic jelly-fish design alone, beyond that, a high fructose corn syrup jewel, rife with a Hollywood cookie-cutter Noble Savage approach to native culture. After the visual insulin jolt, a mean limbic bottom awaits where one feels empty, cheated..and the cruel twist is that we'll suffer the formulaic polarizations of Cameron to witness the beautiful design.

Yes, I thought we were done with the 18th century Noble Savage approach, but Hollywood has been running on cultural fumes for years. Salient to that dated concept, is that through exposure to the pure natives, white man regains his mojo and outdoes the natives at their own game. But what's most troubling about Avatar's depictions, is not the white Messiah perspective mainstream Hollywood feels compelled to frame narrative, but the lack of awareness on how the leveraged wholesale homogenizing of cultures driven to extinction is constantly trotted onstage by same cudgel-like ethnocentrism.

We like easy targets, and there's plenty of "The Other," they make nice pawnish paper tigers, they're easy to colonize with our ideologies--narrative or political. For Avatar, the native reference is a mishmash of fragile shamanistic mystery, nothing to differentiate, grounded in sledgehammer Disney-esque poles of them vs. us. The most irony for the loss of the unique character of Native American civilization is blabbed in the trite words of the director who says that his film "asks us to open our eyes and truly see others, respecting them even though they are different, in the hope that we may find a way to prevent conflict and live more harmoniously on this world."

If Avatar is a consciousness raising device to this end, we are all doomed in a cycle of revenge and black and white thought.

Allegorical science fiction? Yes, but we want to be entertained at the expense of conscience, so history can wait outside the theater until we're done with our cultural fix.

Oil as Oil

Consider a candle; a wick and fat. A simple invention that burns concentrated energy stores, once animal fats, to provide the revolutionary translation of light. The insatiable desire to consume scarce energies and fats for which our evolution has attuned us, also translates into the macrosmal need for civilization to consume the earth's fats, it's oil, in the name of expansion, satisfaction. American led consumption and materialism, the hallmarks of our culture, declares us a fast food civilizaton, low on nutrients, high in fat, rendering immediate satisfactions prone to cultural opportunism that checks our famed freedom.

So goes the simple grace of a candle under the metaphor of quite possibly the most significant evolutionary event for homo sapiens since the advent of consciousness.

Our survival hangs in the balance as statesmen beholden to the tenants of materialism bid on the highest ground. We have the Rainbow, but not enough cheap lumber to purchase on debt to build an ark. The Rainbow may've been more a promissory bridge to an afterlife, if you believe that kind of thing.

Taking of Pelham 123:

Why is Tony Scott allowed to make films? To churn lengthy commercials which incite us with manipulation to buy aspirin for a headache we don't have? Seems so. He's somehow strayed into feature films, vomiting camera moves across screen, furrowing his brow under no doubt a tiresome baseball cap while pointing meaningfully to meaningless overdone cinematic constructions. His nauseating roundy-round camera moves feel like the Hallmark© Card of suspense films. Especially when their jutted against flashy blunt instrument titles, punctuated with freeze frames, and then if you didn't get the BIG IMPORTANCE, layered with accompanying dramatic sound flourishes. His machinations reek of a hollow mind thrashing in Inferno, grasping at slippery reeds, trying to macho his Soul onto a Platform seconds before Real Wisdom sees through his snake oil cinematic crap, flushing him to a hell of hackneyed Form without Content. Walter Gropius and Abel Gance sit on mushrooms burping methane gas which he must inhale...Oh if it were only true. 21st century scientist theorize his brain must be made of styrofoam, issuing a burning toxic gas of sound and fury signifying nothing.

This film was an complete embarrassment to watch. A stylistic slap in the face, the film was the perfect candidate for the ADD Award, chock full of music videoesque unmotivated camera moves and shaky-cam, set on paper thin characters. Tony Scott wastes any subtlety possible in fine performers like Denzel Washington by larding the screen with whooshy action flourishes, transparently designed to poke anxiety into one's lymbic system, but instead just chaff the eyes like the hot air it is. I think the sympathetic tear I shed for Washington's character was accidental, meant for my own grief at the sorry state of filmmaking.

All of the suspense was made predicable by Scott's iron skillet over-the-head approach to action, deflates believability, rendering it a total farce. One cop car after another flying off overpasses may've been to impeach NYC policing, yet it backfires as a cheap cinematic gruel slopping out of the tawdry bag of hackneyed tricks Scott carries no doubt from commercial days at RSA.

Give up Tony Scott, your work is insulting, pitiful, empty and full of the excess of narcissist reigns on the canvas; you spoil your subject with crass impatience, ruining even the best of talents with nothing more than smoke and shaking mirrors. The money you make to ferry yourself in your luxury car, hang your hat in your overpriced unhumble home is borrowed on the minds of shanghai'ed viewers. Return it and we may forgive you for your abominal stylings you deem cleverly released into the public culture.

Hopefully someone will rope you back to the small screen to contain your hubris, which after viewing Pelham, works only on the lymbic system, hiding in full cowardice to venture further into any meaningful communication with the human psyche. You have the subtlety of a piano falling at 1000 feet, the horror of a refined instrument with only a few keys able to convey beauty in the right hands put into service as a crude gravitational fall, it's refined qualities reduced to sheer mass.

Tony Scott, stop, go back to roots.