Hey, NO ONE likes being told the TRUTH when it is the BAD STUFF, right?
Either that or WE HAVE NO MONEY and what little we do have is WORTH LESS and LESS!
"The marketing of a global blockbuster" by Martha Bayles | January 2, 2010
“Avatar’’
***************
this magnum opus from “Titanic’’ director James Cameron....
Well, that film is third on my list an occupied the top spot for a long, long time.
In India, where Hollywood must compete with Bollywood, “Avatar’’ had the biggest opening weekend for a US film ever. And it is just now opening in China....
Some people like seeing the truth.
Like the rest of Hollywood, Fox and its partners are aware of how their success - indeed, their survival - depends on dominating the global market with a particular type of film: the lavishly expensive blockbuster with eye-popping special effects....
A bit of a slight? I'll slough it off and hear her out.
In this sense, “Avatar’’ breaks no new ground....
In another sense, though, “Avatar’’ does introduce a new element: a hard-edged political message that, unlike the indirect and largely symbolic messages of previous blockbusters, is aimed at a specific target - namely, American foreign policy under the Bush administration (and, for some viewers, the Obama administration as well).
Interesting!
I applaud Cameron for having some guts; of course, with all the successes, he can do what he wants (sort of like Mel).
This may seem strange, given that the story is set in the year 2154 on Pandora, an inhabited moon in a distant planetary system. Pandora, a tropical Eden that morphs at night into a phosphorescent fairyland, with “floating mountains’’ hanging like forested chandeliers among the clouds, is well worth the price of admission. And so are the Nav’i, whose animistic culture is three parts Plains Indian to one part African, and whose 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned bodies have long tails, feline features, and preternatural grace.
Watch: Avatar Movie Trailer
But Pandora is being invaded by a multigalactic corporation, backed by a heavily armed mercenary force, seeking to extract a valuable mineral called unobtanium (get it?). The hero, a paraplegic ex-Marine named Jake, is recruited to spy on the Na’vi in a hybrid body called an “avatar,’’ remotely controlled by his human brain (don’t ask). Taken up by a lovely female warrior called Neytiri, Jake grows alienated from his mission, and when the mercenaries destroy the sacred Hometree of the Na’vi, he leads Neytiri and her people into spectacular battle against his fellow earthlings.
Not surprisingly, this depiction of a good-hearted grunt “going native’’ is provoking partisan debate here at home....
So says the divisive newspaper reviewer (in her opinion); I think ALL Americans SEE the TRUTH in this analogy or metaphor -- whether they believe in the wars or not.
Remember, world, about 75% are AGAINST the WARS!!
Government is giving us one of these.
Americans are not used to seeing Michael Moore messages crop up in blockbusters....
Hey, I've got my issues with the guy, but at least he gets the American public started to a certain degree. I mean, the snide elitism is palpable, no?
“Avatar’’ does point the finger, and crudely, too.
Oh, NOW I'M REALLY LIKING it because of my "unique writing verbosity!"
The corporation ravaging Pandora is clearly American, and while the name “Bush’’ is not uttered, the film portrays the mercenaries as culturally obtuse aggressors itching to “fight terror with terror’’ and drop incendiary bombs on the “tree-hugging’’ Na’vi.
If the shoe fits, put it on!!!
This is extreme, because however one feels about America’s current wars, neither the Taliban nor Al Qaeda is a tribe of idealized noble savages living in perfect harmony with nature.
Related: U.S. Wages Chemical Warfare on Afghanistan
I would contest the assertion regarding the description of Taliban there, sorry.
Again, the TRUTH HURTS, huh, American?
Further, there is something unseemly about caricaturing American soldiers as mindless goons at a time when they are fighting and dying far from home....
Hey, I DIDN'T SEND THEM and KEEP THEM THERE because of LIES!!
YOU MSM GUYS DID THAT!!!
Given the high levels of anti-American feeling around the world, only somewhat mitigated by the election of Barack Obama, Cameron may have calculated that a fantasy blockbuster bristling with anti-Bush barbs would be more popular than the usual kind....
Well, not anymore. He's had a year, and pffffft!!!
It's worse than when he started, and DON'T THINK WE are NOT DISAPPOINTED!!
“Avatar’’ is earning twice as much overseas as domestically. If it turns out to be Cameron’s biggest juggernaut, then we can expect others to follow suit and include some dollops of anti-American vitriol in the blockbuster formula.
Yeah, Hollywood doesn't mind spewing that; however, try being anti-Israel and see how far you get.
How successful this will be, only time will tell. But doubtless it will be tried. After all, it’s been a long time since Hollywood worried about what the rest of the world thinks of America.
Or CARED!
--more--"
And this is a great companion piece to the Avatar opinion:
"Hollywood, the Greatest Asset of Warmongers in our Propagandocracies
by Notsylvia Night | January 1, 2009
A new narrative is needed to open our eyes to the truth about war and occupation. But don´t look for Hollywood or other mainline media outlets, either corporate or state-owned, to provide us with such a narrative of truth.
Occasionally Hollywood changes its tune somewhat, but that´s only part of a new approach in the same old propagandocratic game. It is necessary to present some element of critical views to appeal to the disenchanted when the dominant narrative becomes too discredited. However the alternative narrative generally does not challenge the agenda of the elites in any fundamental way and simply serves to re-direct attention from the worst crimes of the state. The establishment media are the most important and most potent tools of our system, the propagandocracies of Europe, North-America, Australia and all those puppet regimes in the developing world.
The other night I watched an American movie with the title “The Kite Runner” on TV. At first it seemed to be interestingly different from ordinary Hollywood fare: It was the story of two young boys, friends from different social classes living in Afghanistan in 1979. One of them finds out many years later, living by then in the US, that they actually had been brothers from the same father. His brother had been killed in the Afghan civil war. And subsequently the protagonist sets out to rescue his brother´s young son and bring him to the “safe haven”, the United States .
At first glance a pretty good story, as I said. Hollywood had also taken a cue from Hollywood rebel Mel Gibson, realizing that Americans are actually capable of reading subtitles. And so the whole movie was more or less in the Dari Persian one of the official languages of Afghanistan, to give it more authenticity.
But that´s as far as Hollywood would go in truth-telling. In it´s 2 hour run-time the movie manages to portray Pashtuns, the people America is fighting and bombing in Afghanistan and Pakistan at the moment, as racists, Russian soldiers as rapists, the Taliban as sole destroyer of a former vibrant oriental country, as well as not only misogynistic hardliners, but also corrupt hypocrites, who break all the rules of their own religion and are violent child-molesters on top of it.
In one stroke the movie manages to justify Americans meddling in Afghan affairs in the 1970s and 80s to save the poor Afghans from the evil Russians and the American invasion and occupation since 2001.
Conveniently the movie never mentions that top American policy makers, like Zbigniew Brezinski, actually boasted about goading the Soviets into the invasion by arming and financing the Mujaheddin and later on the foreign fighters, which now are know by the name “AlQaida”.
The movie also forgets to mention that the Taliban, the most retrogressive of all Islamic movements, were trained in schools built by the American backed Pakistani intelligence agency ISI and payed for by the CIA. They then were infiltrated into Afghanistan and armed once again by the CIA using American tax-payer money.
The Taliban then were able to take over the rule of the country because they were seen by the general population as the most honest of all those Mujaheddin groups America had financed in it´s proxy-war against the Soviet Union. Even now, when Afghans are asked, why they dislike the American imposed Karzai regime, they talk about the corruption and arbitrary violence of the war-lord supporters. They also talk about how the Taliban had established “law and order” in their time of rule.
It was the war against the Soviet invaders and the subsequent civil war between the different Mujaheddin fractions, which destroyed the economy and everything else in that already poor and non-industrialized country, not any corruption on the part of the Taliban.
As for their strict adherence to their faith, the seriousness with which the Taliban took their strict puritanical interpretation of the Islamic religion could be seen in the way they actually eliminated all opium production from the areas they controlled until America and it´s allies invaded the country in 2001. By doing so the Taliban denied themselves an enormously large source of income.
Whatever you can say about the Taliban, one thing they weren’t was hypocrites.
With “The Kite Runner” Hollywood created a master-piece in the art of war-propaganda. While the movie´s plot ended in the year 2000, it´s “logic” made the American invasion and subsequent war against the Afghani people look like an act of mercy, saving the Afghanis from themselves.
A narrative told from the perspective of the bombed, the occupied and the oppressed will not come out of Hollywood or any other North-American or European mainline media outlet....
Also see: What Is Wrong With Hollywood
How AmeriKa's MSM is Like the Movies
That's why I don't go to the movies much anymore.
My feeling is there really hasn't been a good movie since Sicko (one film will never be topped with me).
And WAR is NOT a MOVIE!!!!!!
