Popcorn and Platitudes
–Oh, the earth is the best! That’s why I’m a vegetarian.
–Well, that’s a start.
–Uh, well, I was thinking of going vegan.
–I’m a level 5 vegan — I won’t eat anything that casts a shadow.
If this year’s newly broadened selection of Oscar nominees for Best Picture, doubled from five to ten, isn’t quite as silly as the Dodo’s demand that “all must have prizes”, it is enlivened by the same spirit. All must have honorable mention, and any boost in video rental revenue that might accrue from it, in the hard commercial reality that is our side of the looking glass.
Perhaps the diluted field of nominees will subsequently dilute the indignation of arbiter elegantiarum and also-ran alike when the Academy, say, acquiesces to the brute force of box office by honoring the technological brilliance and treacly storytelling of Avatar,or, observing some other shadowy political consideration, declares the shopworn caricature of masculinity at war that is Kathryn Bigelow’s capable but unexceptional The Hurt Lockerworthiest of worthies. There are more important foci for one’s outrage after all.
Speaking only for myself and having just endured Avatar with a novel combination of awe and abhorrence, I must give Mr. Cameron his due, earned by the sheer scale of his ambition and the fruits of his technical innovations. Uncle. If today’s self-styled cognoscenti condition their praise (or praise mostly out of fear Cameron–or an avatar thereof–will turn up at their door in some sort of amphibious/aircraft/diving-bell plaything), tomorrow’s will resurrect him in some future Next New Wave movement. Right now it’s just “too soon”, like joking about a recent human calamity.
Still, I protest hoarsely through this constricted windpipe: while I understand the epic expenditures of these films necessitate a simplified story that travels well from language to language, need they be so cloyingly cliched? To resort so reliably to hoary politico-sociological themes? I’m just asking. The vast back-catalogue of Western art that is our great public domain brims with basic, broad story-lines that have long ago proven their cross-cultural appeal. Pick a template and leave the demagogy to the politicians, I shout up at the colossus (only echoes answer).
Cameron’s recourse to the theme of colonial capitalism despoiling a land and the wise pastoral folk intimately connected to it for his science fiction epic takes fashionable liberal misanthropy to its logical conclusion. You hate the rich? The West? White people? The male sex? Corporations? All of the above? Sluggard! We hate humans. Game, set, match.
But where does one go from here? The charitable view has Cameron merely throwing red meat (or, more appropriately, something fair-trade and/or free-range) to the censorious set to pacify them as he indulges his, and our, appetite for spectacle. It’s a shopworn conceit already after all (I’m sure I recall “I don’t like humans” surfacing as an epithet for this passé pose years ago among the hipsters). But what to do when, once led by the Sherpas of sanctimony to the summit of conspicuous contrition, we find the land already settled? Come back down, I implore; way too much development on Mt. Misanthrope.
But this is no answer for the ambitious. As a general in the regnant cultural empire, he must conquer new territory always, thematically as well as technologically. It matters little to the martial hero what standard he bears, as long as it bears him. So, if the noble ideal of racial equality, bogged down in the stubborn swamps of human nature, had to turn on itself and declare first that one race (guess which) should become the cathartic repository of the resentment of the rest, then finally that race as such is an illusion (created by the aforementioned “race” and its “science”, thereby brilliantly adapting the shoddy narrative while keeping its villain ever in the foreground) then it necessarily follows that the species itself eventually has to fall from grace.
This we already know as the extreme boundary of environmentalism. Just as the noble ideal of equality of the races of man before God withered in the absence of God and became the perversion, and inversion, it now is, the eminently practical ideal of maintaining the environment for humanity’s preservation has gone the same route. Some now proclaim humanity is the disease threatening the environment’s preservation. First the White man as scourge of the globe, now the species as a whole is the great cosmic pestilence. Next up: “species” do not exist.
Forgiveness is a necessary component of the movie-going experience for all but the best directors in this cinematic Age of Indulgence. All things being equal, artistic freedom is a good thing. But when are all things ever equal? Many of today’s directors would benefit from a little more harness (I know wewould). Taking in a little Tarantino? Don your lead apron of lenience against the careless doctor’s irradiation of idiocy. Bring a jumbo-sized tub of forbearance, salt it as necessary with resolve, and enjoy the pretty flashing pictures. Just don’t confuse them with reality or imbue them with morality.
To be extremely frank and un-PC, I wonder if it was inflated for little more reason than to give a boost to Inglorious Basterds, because the Academy voters who have badly inflated Holocaust-themed films over the years needed to give some sort of award to their revenge fantasies. So let’s just hope it doesn’t get any, and I doubt it will. But generally I agree, and have had little use for new movies for a few years now.
Mr. Ross, “Inglorious Basterds” is a mortal lock for Best Picture. When in doubt, pick the Holocaust film!
Yours in even greater un-PCness (I’m Scots-Irish),
Adam
To paraphrase Higgins (My Fair Lady), “I think he’s got it, I think he’s got it! ”
A conservative response: Avatar has the requisite Earth-Government(s) that have ruined the planet, and rendered themselves irrelevant and useless, the deadly and corrupt remnanents of the military with only one solution to any problem (bomb the natives of some land we wish to conquer), and a corrupt capitalism that rapes the resources of the indiginous peoples and uses the military to bomb them out of the way.
(Anyone hear:, “Bush went to Iraq to kill many hundreds of thousands of civilians so we could steal their oil without compensation?”)
Plants have an animal-like intelligence, and are basically the “God” of this planet. This seemingly advanced race of aliens have no need, apparently, for any spirituality other than worship of their plants.
No homage is paid to the technology that allowed the hero to join the alien race, nor is any mention made of the fact that the hero could have prevented the disasters, simply by doing the job he was sent to do (as if one has no obligation to earn one’s pay by following their orders, “establish communication, represent the corporation’s desires, and pave the way for meaningful trade”).
The libs pertetuate this mentality, so that US Marines in Afghanistan can bleed and die because they can’t shoot at night, can’t shoot if they can’t see a weapon, can’t call airstrikes, and face a US press that constantly calls them criminals, claiming they wish to kill 19 civilians for every bad guy.
Conservative voices on the TAC Blog? Expect libs to ignore us, or, come and call us fat and stupid.
My favorite bit of movie misanthropy can be found in “Barfly,” when a faded alcoholic beauty begins a booze-fueled flirtation with a drunken poet:
Wanda: I hate people. Do you hate people?
Henry: I don’t hate people. I just like it a lot better when they’re not around.
My reaction to Basterds was similar to that toward Avatar. I have to give credit to Tarantino for frame composition (some individual shots are works of art all by themselves) and the ability to build suspense by slowing down the tempo without losing the audience (the opening scene of Basterds, for instance) as well as for the occasional flourishes in dialogue (David Carradine’s Superman riff in Kill Bill, or Sam Jackson’s bible recitation toward the end of Pulp Fiction). He owes more to Sergio Leone than to any other director–and tips his cap dutifully to the great Italian by opening Basterds with a “once upon a time…” title card. (He should also acknowledge the Coens for lifting wholesale from Raising Arizona their hilarious fight-in-a-trailer gag, for Kill Bill.)
But damn if he doesn’t throw us two or three times per film with something so mind-numbingly sophomoric that we feel a tad embarrassed to be sitting still for it. His hideous cameo in Pulp Fiction, for instance, wherein he indulges himself by saying ni**er about a dozen times, or the pawn shop rape scene in same.
Or, in Basterds, the absurd implausibilities: they manage to get Hitler, Borman, Goering and Goebbels all in the same theater, and the Nazis don’t even bother to secure the lobby, much less find the pile of flammable film behind the screen, or station a detail outside that might break the doors down once the place erupts in flames and gunfire.
Sometimes I think he’s making films primarily for the adolescent audience. Reminds me of the old SNL bit with Chris Farley as the idiot interviewer whose entire technique consists of reciting for celebrities favorite scenes, then saying:
” ‘member that? ‘member that?”
“Yes I do”, the interviewee answers
“That was cool”, simpers Farley, who then repeats the process.
Tarantino always writes with that guy forefront in mind.
As for the “kosher porn” (as the execrable Eli Roth enthusiastically called it) of Basterds, I know at least one Jewish group expressed reservations about the profanation of it all. Has anyone yet drawn the comparison between this film and Mel Gibson’s turning the Passion into something like “torture-porn”?
I think Avatar was a simplistic film – development bad, environment good. However, I think that the whole plant intelligence/network concept was lifted from one of Orson Scott Card’s books, Speaker for the Dead (# 2 in the Ender’s Game series).
That said, I think it was visually stunning. While there were echoes of Mai Lai in the movie, I didn’t walk away from it as necessarily anti-military – I think it’s more of a cautionary tale that when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail (Iraq, anyone?).
That said, I also don’t see the media as portraying anyone now serving in the military as killers or criminals – the media just does a lame attempt at pointing out the criminal elements of mercenary outfits like Blackwater.
Jack – “I also don’t see the media as portraying anyone now serving in the military as killers or criminals”
You might try new glasses, or a hearing aid.
…or read pretty much anything Kelley Vlahos has written.