Oscar Preview 2010: The Best of the Best Pictures

At Oscar time last year, I had watched very little of what was actually being shown, but I had watched The Wrestler, loved it, and I really thought that Mickey Rourke should have won Best Actor.  It was the best performance I'd seen in a long time, but when Sean Penn won for Milk, I was outraged.  But because I hadn’t seen Milk, I had no business feeling outraged; I was comparing a performance I had seen and loved to a performance I had not seen. So this year, I thought, well, of course, you can’t watch every movie that's nominated for everything, so I decided to watch every movie that was nominated for Best Picture.  That means that when I inevitably disagree with whatever movie wins Best Picture, I can legitimately disagree with the Academy's decision.  The Academy extended the number of picture nominated this year to ten, which doubled my workload, but it was a labor of love.

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Awesome Avatar Message Board Exchange

I recently posted a summary and link to my extremely negative Avatar review on a fanboy site; this elicited no fewer than twelve err, umm, avatars to insult me and accuse me of being a troll.  A routine link bomb had turned into solid entertainment.  Some highlights: 

Vanessa791 says, "It never fails to amaze me that trolls love to get on a FAN site just to be able to trash a movie that the other members love. You actually think the garbage you are spewing is going to open our eyes??? You sir, are a fool then. Go spew your crap on a board where it is wanted, it isn't wanted here."

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Avatar Review Disclaimer

Although Avatar definitely sucked, I must admit that I watched the movie in Japanese because I wanted to see the 3-D.  There was an English version available in my city, but it was the 2-D version, and, really, let's face it, the only reason to go see Avatar is to witness stereoscopic film-making.  As a result, I may have been frustrated - not because I don't understand Japanese - but because I find dubbing to be in poor taste and distractingly ridiculous.  I might understand the rationale behind dubbing - as opposed to subtitling - a special effects movie: people want to focus on visuals and not on reading subtitles.  Nevertheless, dubbing is the norm in Japan for all foreign media.  There are probably only five or six voice actors, and they all sound like Don LaFontaine, even the woman who regularly plays Miley Cyrus.  I attribute this to either widespread hidden illiteracy or widespread poor taste.  Either way, it may have affected my mood as I watched the film.

Avatar is an Elephantine Heap of Excrement

Rowan Atkinson's Na'vi

SPOILER ALERT: If you didn't guess from the title, this review trashes Avatar.  If you still want to enjoy the film, don't bother reading it.  Let's skip over Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, Ferngully, and all that really funny, funny stuff, because that's played out like a Jheri Curl.  Instead, lets explore the less-covered ground of why the movie really sucks: its crude, ham-fisted politics, invidious racism, crappy animation, unfortunate impact on film-making, and hackneyed unoriginality.   

James Cameron's self-righteous injection of partisan politics and one-dimensional morality that is the story of Avatar is ponderous, underhanded, and due to the whopping success of the film, destined to make us all dumber.  The RDA mining corporation, run by a character named Parker Selfridge, is represented as profit-motivated and evil, willing to do whatever it takes - including genocide - for uncertain returns.  The clash between the Na'vi (Honestly, what's with the breath mark?  An umlaut seemed too pretentious?) and RDA reminds me of the simplistic good versus evil narrative of most comic books, where the superhero is endowed by some sort of natural or spiritual deus ex machina and battles the evil forces of - inevitably - a wealthy businessman or scientist.  As Avatar has all the thematic complexity of a bad comic book, it's hard to see it as the masterpiece twelve-years-in-the-making it's been hailed as, and not as the product of the decadent final stages of a pervasive Hollywood meme.  I wonder if director Cameron was so lost in focus groups, financial projections, and delusions of grandeur (He is the King of the World after all.) that he failed to realize his film treats adults like morally incompetent losers in a Spurlockian fashion.  In the words of Turtle from Entourage, "“James Cameron, baby! This could be the worst piece-of-shit movie ever and it’ll still make a billion dollars.”

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