Thursday, September 9, 2010

am i one of the beautiful people, am i on your list?


when i'm impatient i like to look up pictures of classic hollywood couples that I love (Richard Burton/Liz Taylor, Bacall/Bogie, etc etc).

also, this is unrelated, but right now on television there's a special on Avatar (not a favorite). Is it just me or is the Sigourney Weaver avatar thingy just creepy looking? Beads and a belly-shirt, woman? Really?

5 comments:

Sonja said...

I didn't think she looked creepy -- I thought it was actually an interesting get up, mixing up the beads and belly shirt (which also has its own implications regarding gender when compared to...the other doctor's get up (his name escapes me)...) because here she is trying to be more accessible to the natives and totally failing because she can't fully give up her own culture's ideas of attire.

I know I shouldn't like Avatar as much as I do, but for some reason I just do. I think it's because if I had choose between Cooper and Cameron I'd definitely go with the latter...

K said...

hmm, i admit i hadn't thought about her avatar in that much detail. still, out of all of the images in the movie i thought the most annoying one was her appearance when he first undergoes the avatar experience. out of all the blue people i thought she looked the oddest, like Cameron didn't have that much time to spend on her. also i kept thinking, no no, oh god no please don't get it on with each other in avatarland.

she was my favorite character in the movie, though.

and hey, you're obviously entitled to like Avatar. I think it's got some really epic sequences, but I also think it had alot of wasted potential and that Cameron needs to learn to write a freakin' script. i think he's had too many people tell him that he's a god and therefore he seems to think that his very cliched dialogue is in some way poignant or realistic. he annoys me personally, but i do think he's a genius and a total visionary. it just frustrates me that films that are so visually compelling refuse to meet their potential!!

and I'm sorry, I should probably know this but who is Cooper?

Sonja said...

James Fenimore Cooper -- he's basically encapsulizes this sort of American Narrative tradition in books like the Leatherstocking stories (Last of the Mohicans) where the white protagonist grows up with the dying natives and eventually becomes a better Indian than them -- while also being the idealized conceptualization of his own culture (in other words, a total Gary Sue -- gasp, kinda like Jake). You could probably name off several movies where this very same story takes place in different times or lands like Dances with Wilves, the Last Samurai, and Pocahantas (though, obviously Smith was around before Cooper...this kind of narrative tradition goes way, way back). Basically Cooper and his spawn romanticize the idea of fronteiring and westering, etc etc etc.

Avatar just puts this narrative tradition in Space. And twists a few things too - for example, the white guys are usually the "superior" guys, the natives are dying off (as opposed to the very vital Na'avi nation), and Cooper was also /horrible/ in his gender portrayls while Cameron managed to sort of tweak it a bit.

But yeah the movie could have been so much more than it actually was -- and the dialogue for the most part was horrible. Apparently he's writing a novelization of the movie. Wonder how awful it'll be. :p

Laura Allyson said...

Question. How do you put pictures on the blog with its' new format?

K said...

hmmm... i post them the same as i always have. click the "picture" button and then upload it and once it's uploaded move it to the spot i want..