The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
Resurrecting the Movies thread...
oilgun:
This is not at all in the same league, but I saw DAYBREAKERS today! The Vampire movie with Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe & Sam Neal:
A shot of captured humans having their blood harvested like we do to dairy cows.
The film was pretty much what I expected: a decent and innovative addition to the Vampire canon. It's not a great movie by any means but I thought it was good fun. There were a few niggling details (and plot holes) that bothered me but nothing too serious. The main one being that the vampires have no mirror reflections which is a ridiculous vampire trait that most contemporary writers discard so why they use it here is beyond me. Especially since it has no bearing on the plot whatsoever. At least sunlight does harm them, unlike the fangless faux-vamps of the Twilight saga. It's very gory with exploding heads and blood and guts flying all over the place but it's all very cartoonish. Recommended to Vampire addicts only. 7/10
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: oilgun on December 19, 2009, 06:06:35 pm ---RUN, do not walk, to see AVATAR!
I don't say that very often, but I was completely enthralled by this spectacle of a movie. I gasped, I laughed and I even shed a tear or two. Of course, this being Cameron, the script is a bit weak but I didn't even care.
Yes, Blue is the new Sexy (and the new Green)
--- End quote ---
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on January 10, 2010, 07:13:09 pm ---Just reading in my Celtic history about the early Celts who painted themselves blue with woad (whatever that is), bleached their hair with lime and went naked and dreadlocked into battle, scaring the Romans into retreat!!
Haven't seen Avatar yet but want to so much. Can't get ennione to go with me, so I'll go by myself.
--- End quote ---
--- Quote from: sopylicious on January 10, 2010, 07:05:59 pm ---thanks john for the report, you really have inspire me to watch it now.
--- End quote ---
I'll just add to Gil's very succinct and dead-on review: if you can, go and see the IMAX 3-D version. It's unbelievable! Brilliant!
I wear glasses because one of my eyes (the left) is much, much weaker than the other, and somewhat astigmatic as well.
B.A. (Before Avatar ) I had never before been to a 3-D movie, half thinking that the necessary visual stereo effect would not work for me.
Happily, I was wrong. I wore the supplied (free) goggles:
the slightly more expensive-looking pair in the first smaller theater, and then this slightly cheaper affair at the largest IMAX screen in Manhattan--
Either pair of goggles, comfortably worn in addition to my own prescription pair of glasses, had the same result: resplendent, eye-popping beauty.
If anybody was hesitant, well--in re both Avatar and movies in general--I think it is a new (3-D) world! Give it a whirl!
serious crayons:
I saw Avatar today with some friends in a fancy theater that had food and cocktails and huge comfy seats and tables. It was great, but next time I'm going to forgo the frills and sit closer to the screen.
Anyway, I liked it a lot! I do understand why conservatives wouldn't like it. In fact, I would think that for some conservatives it would pose a minor moral dilemma: they couldn't help but appreciate the coolness of the film, but there are so many anti-conservative messages in the plot (it's anti-military, anti-corporate, pro-environment) that it might leave them feeling conflicted.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on January 11, 2010, 12:06:50 am ---I do understand why conservatives wouldn't like it. In fact, I would think that for some conservatives it would pose a minor moral dilemma: they couldn't help but appreciate the coolness of the film, but there are so many anti-conservative messages in the plot (it's anti-military, anti-corporate, pro-environment) that it might leave them feeling conflicted.
--- End quote ---
Maybe not so a minor moral dilemma, Katherine; all during my first screening, I was wondering what the American born-again christians would be thinking....
Aloysius J. Gleek:
But of course. How could I have missed it? The New York Times's junior conservative columnist had to comment,
his Harvard robes worn lightly, working hard:
"As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming" and "As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted"-- ::)
And like Mr. Brooks, Baby Ross Douthat has had to take issue with the "enviably slender" Na’Vi.
(Feeling a little bit pudgy there after the holidays, Ross, old boy?)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/opinion/21douthat1.html
Op-Ed Columnist
Heaven and Nature
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: December 20, 2009
It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It’s at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.
But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.
In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine, but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the “All Mother,” described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every living thing.
If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”
Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the “religion and inspiration” section in your local bookstore is crowded with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs about the “spiritual energy” of trees and mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na’Vi.
As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming. The American belief in the essential unity of all mankind, Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, leads us to collapse distinctions at every level of creation. “Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator,” he suggested, democratic man “seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole.”
Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal. We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.
At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps “bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.
Indeed, it represents a form of religion that even atheists can support. Richard Dawkins has called pantheism “a sexed-up atheism.” (He means that as a compliment.) Sam Harris concluded his polemic “The End of Faith” by rhapsodizing about the mystical experiences available from immersion in “the roiling mystery of the world.” Citing Albert Einstein’s expression of religious awe at the “beauty and sublimity” of the universe, Dawkins allows, “In this sense I too am religious.”
The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.
Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.
This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.
Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.
But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.
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