Teradome.

Tracking the inevitable technocracy.™

A weblog about culture and technology by Noah Mittman • Feedback

Feb4

Jan27

Jan25

Last thing I'll say about Avatar

Apparently there’s some Avatar backlash after it took the Golden Globe for Best Picture, Drama. In my buddies’ Chatterous room, we had an epic argument about whether or not Avatar was a good movie. Obviously we netted out that it all depends on your definition of “good,” and how you set your standards for movies. This was my “closing statement”, modified with some of my preceeding thoughts to be a complete blog post:

You can say Avatar is a thrilling action movie, like an Indiana Jones film, where you have fairly one-dimensional enemies like Belloq & the Nazis. But there’s a number of things: first off, Belloq isn’t that one-dimensional, he has a history with Jones and he has a desire for the Ark that supercedes what the Nazis want with it. Ultimately, he’s using them, he gets moments to say so, and that fills in his character.

Secondly, his antagonist role is supported by the Nazi forces which are FAR from one-dimensional; Even if you present Nazis as pure evil, all of WW II comes along with them as subtext, it’s unavoidable. James Cameron doesn’t have this “shortcut”, he’s got to paint everyone in. But instead of drawing clear groups on the Human side he drops the conflict in as entirely Human vs Na’vi, even if Jake, Grace and useless unmemorable third guy are outliers.

The bad guys in Avatar are just bad guys because they’re bad. They want money, and we never actually know what the Unobtainium is used for. Does it push the story along? Sure, if that’s all you want. The general/captain/additional unmemorable character wants nothing more to execute his orders, he doesn’t even get the benefit of being tired of being on Pandora and wanting to go home, he just loves getting to shoot crap down and revels in the destruction he creates.

And this coming from the director who got a honestly moving performance from Arnold Schwartzenegger as an unstoppable killer robot.

It’s not that the storytelling is simple — Hell, Ponyo is a simple story, but it’s also real & honest, and frankly even more imaginative and inventive than Avatar — it’s that Avatar’s storytelling is just flat-out lazy. And that, to me, is a bad movie…or at least a movie that shouldn’t be winning Best Picture awards.

1 notes

Jan21

Jan12

Audiences experience 'Avatar' blues - CNN.com→

Spoilers ahead…:

Reached via e-mail in Sweden where he is studying game design, Hill, 17, explained that his feelings of despair made him desperately want to escape reality.

“One can say my depression was twofold: I was depressed because I really wanted to live in Pandora, which seemed like such a perfect place, but I was also depressed and disgusted with the sight of our world, what we have done to Earth. I so much wanted to escape reality,” Hill said.

This was my primary complaint about the plot of Avatar, even above the whole Mighty Whitey fantasy it lives within: It portrays humans as wholly cruel without good reason, where the outliers of this future either die, or discard their humanity entirely.

By “cruel without good reason,” I mean that squashing a native culture is not in any way balanced by a statement about how the “unobtainium” is necessary to keep humanity alive, or keep Earth going, or anything. The most horrible things in our history were still done in misguided attempts to try and do something good for someone, insanity aside.

It’s clear if Earth is a dead planet (which it’s not made clear, which is part of the problem) then having this material as an energy source is part of a desperate attempt to keep humanity alive. There’s a bigger story behind why a corporation/government would go to such extremes to get this material than just “this shit makes a lot of money.”

I could be wrong: Cameron certainly wants to make a political statement that these kinds of atrocities happen in remote, isolated places where corporations are operating without government oversight, and where reports of such activity will never make it back to the people who could force them to stop. Maybe they are cruel for no reason after all.

So the characters we root for are all aliens, and the humans are without hope. How should the audience related to these characters? They can’t. That’s what this article is highlighting — those who agree with our protagonist are left feeling the only option is to change sides, not to change policies, or beliefs, or habits.

I think Cameron wanted to make the Human -> Na’vi change a symbolic message of “you need to completely change the way you live if you want to make a change” but the human condition is so realized on the one side, that I think this point is getting missed by a lot of people, and what’s left is just plain misanthropy.

The real point about privacy

  • Rumpus: You've previously mentioned a master password, which you no longer use.
  • Anonymous Facebook Employee: I’m not sure when exactly it was deprecated, but we did have a master password at one point where you could type in any user’s user ID, and then the password. I’m not going to give you the exact password, but with upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,’ more or less. It was pretty fantastic.
  • Rumpus: This was accessible by any Facebook employee?
  • Employee: Technically, yes. But it was pretty much limited to the original engineers, who were basically the only people who knew about it. It wasn’t as if random people in Human Resources were using this password to log into profiles. It was made and designed for engineering reasons. But it was there, and any employee could find it if they knew where to look. I should also say that it was only available internally. If I were to log in from a high school or library, I couldn’t use it. You had to be in the Facebook office, using the Facebook ISP.
  • Rumpus: Do you think Facebook employees ever abused the privilege of having universal access?
  • Employee: I know it has happened in the past, because at least two people have been fired for it that I know of.
  • Rumpus: What did they do?
  • Employee: I know one of them went in and manipulated some other person’s data, changed their religious views or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he got reported, got found out, got fired.
  • Source: http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/

Jan5

Jan4

Dec31

At Disney this is called the 3 oclock question because the most common question asked at Disney is, “What time is the 3 o clock parade?” Apparently cast members get tired of answering this ridiculous question over and over again and so Disney trainers now proactively train cast members to be prepared to answer “3 o clock” questions.
commenter Lori Reed, on the blog post “First Impressions and Rethinking Restroom Questions”

Dec29

Is Google going to become the computing platform for the enterprise? Is a bank going to run itself on Google? Is an airline going to run itself on Google? Is IBM going to run its supply chain on Google? Is Bharti Wireless going to run themselves on Google? Is the banking system of China that we’ve built going to be on Google? Is the Russian Central Bank that we’re building going to be on Google? No.
IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, on the idea of “Google Dominance”