Can't Stop Geeking

Really?

According to Newsweek, there has been a true civil war concerning the Chinese movie theaters.  Chinese officials ordered several hundred movie theaters to stop showing the Hollywood movie Avatar and screen the government sanctioned biopoc Confucius.  Chinese officials probably wanted to pull Avatar due to the unflattering comparisons people can make between the Chinese government and the military portrayed in the movie.  Film goers responded by essentially boycotting Confucius to the point where the Chinese government allowed the movie to start screeening again in some theaters.

I always thought of Avatar as an allegory of the US/Native American relations in the 1800s, but I guess this is more of a movie with applicability to a variety of situations.

Well, to show that I can see what passes for entertainment in Hollywood, I think I might need a pair of polarized sunglasses like these.

photo from tag_mclaren's at flickr.com

Avatar won for Best picture at the Golden Globes last night.  While I haven’t seen the other movies, I would have to give them the edge in terms of story.  But I guess story is secondary as long as you have CGI and 3D effects.

Sorry, but I got to rant on this one.  Good movies have gotten harder and harder to come by.  I’m not talking the art films with imagery so complex there’s no plot, I’m talking about mainstream Hollywood pawning off old stories with CGI dressing as new and exciting.  Well, for some it might be exciting; I find it boring.  Where am I going with this?

I went and saw the latest CGI lovefest Avatar.  I went to see it with my wife and a couple of friends.  This is nothing more than telling the story of Native Americans allegorically and since it’s fantasy, Cameron gets to end it the way he wants.  It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise how it does end.  At the end of the movie, my friend asked me what I thought of it and I answered with three words, “Dances with Smurfs.”  That’s all this was to me.

Now, I do wish American history concerning Native American treatment was different, but Avatar adds only two things: the CGI and the ending.  I knew how this movie was going to end 5 minutes into it and had to sit through 2 hours and 30+ minutes to get where I knew we were gonna go.  That’s not entertaining for me.  I want a movie to teach me something, a new idea or new way to look at something.  Avatar offers no new perspective, no new idea, just a lot of CGI.  CGI does not a movie make.