It took a while for me to get around to it, but I finally saw Avatar in 3-D. Everything I had heard or surmised about Avatar was true. The story was paper thin, the characters thinly drawn, there is a none too subtle  liberal-humanist critique of imperialism that nonetheless has the distinct, almost overpowering odour of romantic primitivism, sentimental and not genuinely moving  but on the other hand it is truly epic, the design of Pandora’s ecosystem  is imaginatively realised and the 3-D technology makes that world  living and breathing in a way that the bland, static planets of the Star Wars prequels were never able to capture.

Still, my overall assessment on this could have gone either way. I really hate the noble savage narrative and the oppositions that go with it (e.g. nature versus machine) but on the other hand I appreciated the attempt to give a non-theistic account of Pandora, along the lines of Solaris (it is worth remembering that Cameron was a producer of the 2002 Soderbergh adaptation).  I was disappointed that although the Na’vi culture is quite intricate, they are represented as politically homogenous. Yes, there is the conflict between Tsu’Tey and Jake but that was pretty effortlessly smoothed over, even in terms of a genre film.

Look at me! Expecting political diversity in a genre film! Once I reach that point, I’m clearly quibbling, disappointed that the film is just a good film, not a masterpiece. Yeah Avatar is a good film, maybe even a great film but James Cameron is no Christopher Nolan or Martin Scorsese. Still, instead of looking at Avatar as a glass half empty maybe I should be thankful that it was James Cameron who directed the film and not an even more sentimental, sanctimonious and impotently liberal director like Steven Spielberg or a right-wing, militaristic douche like Michael Bay.

On the noble savage matter, my friend Jax made a fair point. Considering that the film’s target audience is 15 year olds in the age of a new wave of wars of imperialism isn’t the noble savage narrative better than the righteous war of colonisation (see Bad Boys 2)? Raising the indigenous peoples above the brutish civilised people doesn’t really escape the image of thought that got us into the colonial space in the first place, but I may be over thinking this a little.

I want to close with some tentative  thoughts about the title of this post. 3-D technology as it was used in Avatar doesn’t bring us closer to human vision, I couldn’t escape the feeling while watching the film that it is realer than real. It is offering us an experience that is beyond our experience, not just in the content of the image but in the very intensity of the image. This is more than just an academic distinction. People and filmmakers get so caught up on using the cinema to reproduce human perception and vision when the real power of the cinema is to go beyond human perception. I would hate the potential of the 3D to be stifled by such constraints but I guess it is probably inevitable as long as the technology remains too expensive for more experimental filmmakers to work with it.

I am really, really excited about this! May 2011, followed later the same summer by Captain America! Then Avenger sin 2012. I have a good feeling about this.

I’ve been glutting myself on the Dracula cycle of Hammer Horror films and what strikes me over and over again is Dracula’s distinct lack of ambition and sheer pettiness.

For example in Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Dracula is resurrected when a number of hapless English tourists are forced to stay the night in his castle. Two of the four are killed/infected while the other two escape. Now, Dracula has been dead for ten years but what is the first thing he does? He chases down the woman who escaped his castle because he feels that she is already his. Not surprisingly he is destoryed again, only one day after being resurrected! Loser!

Then in Dracula Has Risen from the Grave Dracula is resurrected by pure happenstance only to find that a monseigneur has barred the way to his castle with a crucifix. So what does he do? He he seeks revenge on the monseigneur by trying to turning his niece into a vampire. Really?

Can’t he think of something else to do? Exert control over the political elites of a country ? Enslave humanity? Think big!!!!

I don’t have Taste the Blood of Dracula or the Scars of Dracula so the next one fore  me is Dracula A.D. 1972 and then the Satanic Rites of Dracula.

I didn’t want to rush into anything,  so I was waiting to see if this ipod thing caught on.

I still haven;t found myself inclined to listen to much music but podcasts … I really quite enjoy them. From various NPR and BBC Radio 4 podcasts, to the New Yorker to comic book podcasts it is quite a lot of fun for policy wonks and  fanboys of all sorts.

Green Lantern never really rated on my super hero radar.

There is something about all those colour themed DC superheroes that never really did it for me: Green Arrow, Red Arrow, Red Tornado, Blue Devil, Blue Beetle etc.

I suppose, looking back on things, the other problem was that I never really ‘got’ any of the Green Lanterns. Who are they and why do they do what they do? As near as I could tell none of them had enough of a reason for being to make them jump off the page.

Not that I had anything against Green Lantern, I just had no reason to pick the book up. Until the  Sinestro Corps War that is.  I  guess like a lot of other people this gave me the high concept hook necessary to make the book worth checking out. So I went back to the beginning of the current Green Lantern reboot to have a look, beginning with Green Lantern: Rebirth.

In a nutshell, the Silver Age Green Lantern Hal Jordan had been dead for a number of years (although his spirit was still running around,  fused to a supernatural being called the Spectre) after going crazy, calling himself Parralax and destroying the Green Lantern Corps. As inevitably happens in comics, it was eventually reasoned that the old status quo still had some life in it, so the central conceit of Rebirth is to bring Hal Jordan back to life, expunge responsibility for his murderous rampage, rebuild the Green Lantern Corps and if there is time, give Hal Jordan an actual personality.

gl_rebirth_cv

Given that Rebirth is meant to get us from A to B we perhaps should not expect a great comic but Rebirth does all of its tasks reasonably well. The explanation of Hal’s Parralax episode is almost plausible in a comic bookey way, but it is by no means a seamless retcon. We get told that the whole Parralax episode was engineered by Sinestro which sounded pretty shoehorned to me. And for the life of me I still can’t work out how Hal came back to life.

Most of this stuff is forgivable because we know that by definition  comic retcons have to be shoehorned but it can’t help on occasion pulling me out of the story.

The bigger problem I find is with Geoff John’s writing. I like Johns. He comes up with decent plots but his stories always just seem to be a indistinct sequence of fight scenes. Yes, they are comic books and fight scenes are par for the course, but there is nothing particularly imaginative about how these fights resolve themselves. Not only is this the case in Rebirth, but also what happens in his Brainiac arc, Legion of Three Worlds, Rage of the Red Lanterns and Sinestro War. I give Sinestro War extra marks because at least the Guardians have to remove the kill injunction on the rings to enable the Green Lantern Corps to fight back against the Sinestro Corps.

The weakest element, however, remains Hal Jordan. I still don’t really know or particularly care who he is. Yes, he is fearless, and doesn’t follow the rules but this is still barely a two-dimensional character.

All this being said, I still enjoyed Rebirth. There are worse things that can be said about a comic than it was action packed and the art of Ethan Van Sciver undoubtedly made those scenes more effective. So I’ve hung around and will until the end of Blackest Night, but whether I stick around after that will depend on whether Johns can resolve the event cleverly (as opposed to Hal just blasting away with the ring) and whether the contours of Hal’s character become better defined.

On one level I’m very pleased that the White House is calling Fox news out, but I’m not sure it is the right course of action to take. I wish it was the right course of action, but that doesn’t make it so. For a flavour of the  debate raging, on the pro side we have Weisberg, and on the con side we have Parker. So from a purely pragmatic point of view, what is the right course of action for the White House?

So in the past I would rush straight to the the comic store on Thursday afternoon to collect whatever my order was for the week.Thursday was just the capstone to a week of anticipation as i would consult the various websites to see what was going to be in store,

As there were an increasing number of weeks where there was nothing coming in I found the ritual of being disappointed that nothing was coming in to be depressing. So I have adopted a new approach. I’m skipping weeks where there is nothing or very little coming in in order to have a BIG week once a month.

Now this doesn’t mean I’m reading a month of comics all at once! This strategy has to be coupled with a careful rationing of the incoming comics to take account of the “dry weeks”. So I’m sort of limiting myself to reading two issues of a trade a night. In buoyant times this means I can reward myself with an extra issue here and there if I’m eager to see how an arc finishes (like last night with Captain Britain and MI:13 Volume 2).

(As an aside, this is obviously tied to my fear of being bored and running out of TV/Comics/Books etc and my anxiety on Xmas and Good Friday when the super markets are closed and I’m scared of starving to death.)

So today is my super, bumper Thursday with no less than seven trades waiting for me! It is very satisfying having a big pile next to my bed!

The White House goes on the attack.

I’ll give her that much. I wonder if she would feel so strongly about the second amendment now that her kids are orphans.

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