- I saw Avatar today, a visually interesting film, with a fairly ham-handed story line. James Cameron has always struck me as a guy of rather limited intellect who is convinced that he's a genius, and has the knack of convincing others of this as well. (I loathed Titanic -- I kept rooting for that fucking boat to go down and to go down fast.) Anyway, Avatar has a less than subtle pro-environmental, anti-imperialist, anti-military/industrial complex narrative with cartoon heroes and villains to go with it. I assume it will make the guys at Big Hollywood crazy -- already happened I guess (and their readers) -- and the Weekly Standard, naturally, which characterized it as idiotic, banal, and humorless [a pretty good description of the Weekly Standard too] -- except for the creative souls on the right who will see it as supportive of religious faith and tradition.
(My 16-year old turned to me at the end and said "AI Gore could have written that script.") I prefer movies about real live human beings myself, but it was an amusing enough way to spend a snowy day.
- Did anyone else think Frank Rich's column was a piece of crap today? I generally like Rich, but it just seemed like a weird, jury-rigged mess, with a wholly gratuitous shot at Tiger Woods (he's a god-damned golfer, not a banker, not a politician, and not a moral leader -- who gives a damn) and a classic main stream media smear on Obama -- some say he's "a covert anti-American radical," others says he is a spineless corporate whore -- to which Rich bravely concludes "the truth may well be neither." Well for fuck's sake -- isn't Rich at least willing to stick his neck out and suggest that Obama is not a covert anti-American radical?" I am generally a pretty big fan of Rich's column, but this reminded me of the fact that he kind of sucked during the Gore-Bush campaign. I hope that this isn't a sign of things to come.
- Speaking of crappy columns, is there any major newspaper columnist with poorer writing skills than Thomas Friedman? He is completely in love with his half-assed metaphors -- today's is "Earth Race" -- isn't that a new reality show? -- with which he bludgeons us repeatedly. His thinking is uniformly sloppy and banal. It amazes me that this man is held in such high regard by so much of the Beltway elite, where he is seen as something of a visionary intellectual. I don't know whether to laugh or vomit at such sentiments.
