Topic: Last movie you watched? (Read 104065 times)

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Yeah, I don't really know if I want to see Avatar. I'll probably wait for it to come out on disc.

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Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers...

Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

Avatar imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent. In the film, a group of soldiers and scientists have set up shop on the verdant moon Pandora, whose landscapes look like a cross between Northern California's redwood cathedrals and Brazil's tropical rainforest. The moon's inhabitants, the Na'vi, are blue, catlike versions of native people: They wear feathers in their hair, worship nature gods, paint their faces for war, use bows and arrows, and live in tribes. Watching the movie, there is really no mistake that these are alien versions of stereotypical native peoples that we've seen in Hollywood movies for decades.

And Pandora is clearly supposed to be the rich, beautiful land America could still be if white people hadn't paved it over with concrete and strip malls. In Avatar, our white hero Jake Sully (sully - get it?) explains that Earth is basically a war-torn wasteland with no greenery or natural resources left. The humans started to colonize Pandora in order to mine a mineral called unobtainium that can serve as a mega-energy source. But a few of these humans don't want to crush the natives with tanks and bombs, so they wire their brains into the bodies of Na'vi avatars and try to win the natives' trust. Jake is one of the team of avatar pilots, and he discovers to his surprise that he loves his life as a Na'vi warrior far more than he ever did his life as a human marine.



Jake is so enchanted that he gives up on carrying out his mission, which is to persuade the Na'vi to relocate from their "home tree," where the humans want to mine the unobtanium. Instead, he focuses on becoming a great warrior who rides giant birds and falls in love with the chief's daughter. When the inevitable happens and the marines arrive to burn down the Na'vi's home tree, Jake switches sides. With the help of a few human renegades, he maintains a link with his avatar body in order to lead the Na'vi against the human invaders. Not only has he been assimilated into the native people's culture, but he has become their leader.

This is a classic scenario you've seen in non-scifi epics from Dances With Wolves to The Last Samurai, where a white guy manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member. But it's also, as I indicated earlier, very similar in some ways to District 9. In that film, our (anti)hero Wikus is trying to relocate a shantytown of aliens to a region far outside Johannesburg. When he's accidentally squirted with fluid from an alien technology, he begins turning into one of the aliens against his will. Deformed and cast out of human society, Wikus reluctantly helps one of the aliens to launch their stalled ship and seek help from their home planet.

If we think of Avatar and its ilk as white fantasies about race, what kinds of patterns do we see emerging in these fantasies?

In both Avatar and District 9, humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress. Then, a white man who was one of the oppressors switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior. This is also the basic story of Dune, where a member of the white royalty flees his posh palace on the planet Dune to become leader of the worm-riding native Fremen (the worm-riding rite of passage has an analog in Avatar, where Jake proves his manhood by riding a giant bird). An interesting tweak on this story can be seen in 1980s flick Enemy Mine, where a white man (Dennis Quaid) and the alien he's been battling (Louis Gossett Jr.) are stranded on a hostile planet together for years. Eventually they become best friends, and when the alien dies, the human raises the alien's child as his own. When humans arrive on the planet and try to enslave the alien child, he lays down his life to rescue it. His loyalties to an alien have become stronger than to his own species.

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it's like to be a Na'vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He's becoming alien and he can't go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what? He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely because he's hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a "cure" for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it's only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.



This is not a message anybody wants to hear, least of all the white people who are creating and consuming these fantasies. Afro-Canadian scifi writer Nalo Hopkinson recently told the Boston Globe:

In the US, to talk about race is to be seen as racist. You become the problem because you bring up the problem. So you find people who are hesitant to talk about it.

She adds that the main mythic story you find in science fiction, generally written by whites, "is going to a foreign culture and colonizing it."

Sure, Avatar goes a little bit beyond the basic colonizing story. We are told in no uncertain terms that it's wrong to colonize the lands of native people. Our hero chooses to join the Na'vi rather than abide the racist culture of his own people. But it is nevertheless a story that revisits the same old tropes of colonization. Whites still get to be leaders of the natives - just in a kinder, gentler way than they would have in an old Flash Gordon flick or in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels.

When will whites stop making these movies and start thinking about race in a new way?

First, we'll need to stop thinking that white people are the most "relatable" characters in stories. As one blogger put it:

By the end of the film you're left wondering why the film needed the Jake Sully character at all. The film could have done just as well by focusing on an actual Na'vi native who comes into contact with crazy humans who have no respect for the environment. I can just see the explanation: "Well, we need someone (an avatar) for the audience to connect with. A normal guy will work better than these tall blue people." However, this is the type of thinking that molds all leads as white male characters (blank slates for the audience to project themselves upon) unless your name is Will Smith.

But more than that, whites need to rethink their fantasies about race.

Whites need to stop remaking the white guilt story, which is a sneaky way of turning every story about people of color into a story about being white. Speaking as a white person, I don't need to hear more about my own racial experience. I'd like to watch some movies about people of color (ahem, aliens), from the perspective of that group, without injecting a random white (erm, human) character to explain everything to me. Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we've seen before. But until white people stop making movies like Avatar, I fear that I'm doomed to see the same old story again and again.


http://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar?skyline=true&s=x
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The Princess and the Frog is the latest movie to be cranked out of the Disney studios, and the first hand-drawn (HA!) piece since 2004. The story takes place in 1920s New Orleans where the latest in Disney's long line of princesses, a woman named Tiana, wants nothing more than to open a restaraunt, and she winds up a frog. She eventually gets her dream, as well has a handsome prince, and she lives happily ever after. The end.

Oh yeah, did I mention that she falls in love and gets married over the course of two days?!

The voice acting was good, which made the movie watchable. The soundtrack was jazzy with a really nice ragtime/big band era feel; it was, without a doubt, the best part of the movie. The style was nice, and the movie was pretty to look at, but I just couldn't get over the story. It felt really rushed, like Disney decided that they wanted to cram as much into a 48 hour period as they could, and cram they did.

It was wacky, and I understand that it was a kid's movie, but I just really didn't like the story so I couldn't get into the movie. Autumn seemed to enjoy it, though.
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mmmmmm I can't wait to see some cartoon porn starring THAT princess hehe
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just saw avatar and it's fucking incredible!
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i saw it last night too in 3D.  it was pretty spectacular visually but the plot was really predictable.   i don't feel like i wasted my money though, so it wasn't too bad.
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district 9, it was okay
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avatar was pretty fucking dumb.  I mean the action was cool but UNOBTAINIUM holy shit. 
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haha yeah i laughed at that
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Avatar was pretty to look at, I'll admit that, and the story was cohesive enough to keep me entertained for the movie, but the moment I heard the word UNOBTAINUM I about wet myself laughing. I'm glad I went to see it, but I'm also glad that I used my theatre points card to get in for free, because if I had paid $13.00 to watch Blue Uhura and friends battle Stonewall Jackson and his merry band of trigger happy extras, well. . . I wouldn't have been impressed.

I will admit, though, that the scope of the movie was impressive, as was the attention to detail done with the CGI. But looks aren't everything. . .
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instead of watching avatar i stayed home and watched out cold. they both sound like dumb movies (out cold is REALLY dumb) but avatar doesn't have zach galifianakis in it.

edit: i also still have synecdoche on my dvr and have not given my full attention to it :(
Last Edit: December 21, 2009, 07:26:44 am by Pasty
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I saw District 9, it was pretty good.

I also saw Inglorious Basterds which was fucking awessssome!
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Dude, out cold is the ultimate bro flick (i went there)
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watched the end of it's a mad mad mad mad world after shoveling snow for two hours. i've seen it a bunch of times and really love the fuck out of that movie. they kinda want out of their way to put together the most recognizable cast ever for a movie and, unlike every other movie that's done that, it actually works in this movie.

if you're curious, you can watch a pretty decent copy of the film(if you watch it in HQ) here. it's worth watching for the most ridiculous ending i've ever seen in a movie.
Last Edit: December 21, 2009, 07:47:51 pm by Hundley
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I watched Grave of the Fireflies.  It's a really depressing movie.
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Just got back from Avatar 3D. REALLY really impressive, visually. The plot and dialogue - eh. Not so much. In fact, I don't even think they did one single rewrite. At all.

Totally entertaining, though.

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Watched 9. Thought it did a pretty poor job of explaining things. I had like a thousand questions by the end left unanswered.
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Just got back from Avatar 3D. REALLY really impressive, visually. The plot and dialogue - eh. Not so much. In fact, I don't even think they did one single rewrite. At all.

Totally entertaining, though.


you can't tell me anyone is brilliant enough to come up with unobtainium on the first try
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Avatar is an amazing movie. Yes, it might be a little cookie-cutter in terms of story (think Pocahantas) but the CG is amazing. Some of the scenery you see in the film is breathtaking and the world the movie takes place in is so alive and beautiful. I actually still loved the story. I kind of knew what was going to happen, but still loved watching it unfold, and there still were a few twists here and there. Everyone should watch this film, best I've seen all year!

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I still can't believe avatar. I never want to see it ever ever look at those fucking aliens

if you told me this was gonna be shown anywhere but on the sci-fi channel, let alone ~in theatres everywhere~ critics lovin it