Avatar on DVD

I cannot believe this movie was so popular when released in 2009. All I can say is Americans sure must be cynical to think our US Marines Corps in Iraq leaving with their tail between their legs during Obama's drawdown is the enemy in James Cameron's pretentious portrayal here. This tawdry film sinks to a new low like his outstanding Titanic. Unlike the Sunnis & Shia in Mideast political insurgency, the Na'vi on the planet Pandora (Pandora's box perhaps?) are seen as a primitive civilization much like our Native American nations-living in a tree of souls, riding around on flying reptiles, equipped with poisonous bows and arrows. Dances With Wolves in a Jurassic Park meets Tarzan. Real acting is forsaken with special effects of blue monkeys in a Garden of Eden. The premise of this show errs with the cynical notion the USMC seeks to secure mining rights for a floating rock from the floating mountains by invading Pandora using helicopter gunships & walking Star Wars-like transformers. Then the movie audience is patronized to accept our wheelchair ridden hero as a dreamwalker, teleported as an experimental hybrid of human DNA and the indigenous tribes by climbing into a computerized clamshell to be embedded with the alien inhabitants-not convincingly at all as beaming down or up like in Star Trek. Our hero assimilates to their way of life which in the show is nothing like al-Qaeda or ISIS today; the Na'vi are not terrorists, the Marines in the show are the bad guys, ala blue coats in our Indian wars. Okay Cameron got that far, but where he fails in this farce is our leathernecks of Iwo Jima and Korea fame didn't go to Baghdad to take their oil. America sought to secure the Middle East from chemical, biological or nuclear weapons from being used in another 9/11-like attack on US soil. "Strong heart, stupid baby" rejects his citizenship a little like Edward Snowden of the intelligence agency did, to defeat our Marines and live happily ever after with his lady in the forest. Hell is paved with good intentions perhaps, but the only stupid babies are the ticket holders who got duped by a very unpatriotic James Cameron. Semper Fi.

The Revenant, My Review

The new Leonardo DiCaprio film about Hugh Glass the mountain man in the Rocky Mountain West was right up my street-at an AMC theater I only occasionally go to anymore. Set in 1820s Montana and Dakota Territory beaver pelt trappers from Missouri worked the frontier, competing with other fur companies, the French, hostile Arikaras & the unrelenting elements. The story is about his survival following a grizzly bear attack, then left alone for dead by his companions as they escape a savage Arikara attack for return to Fort Kiowa. A spiritual theme of honor persists throughout as Hugh Glass cares for his Pawnee son, following the death of Hawk's mother by French soldiers in the Mound villages. I believe the Mandans whom Lewis & Clark met along the Upper Missouri River were also in the region-not far from Sioux lands. Hugh Glass lives in the Native American tongue and philosophy of forbearance amid strife by respecting the wind, the trees through his humanity toward a Pawnee man eating buffalo meat as well as saving an Arikara woman being raped by Toussaint Charbonneau in the French camp. The French trade pelts with the Arikara but the Indians want horses instead; the Arikara are looking for the missing daughter Powage on the war path throughout the plot. Revenge is the main story line here as Hugh Glass seeks John Fitzgerald who took his rifle, supplies; betrayal by Fitzgerald ensues as he had agreed to stay with Glass and Jim Bridger to later be paid by Andrew Henry their leader gone ahead with the others for the fort.

The film is visually stunning with camera pans of great trees, ice-covered grasslands, golden spacious plains cut by what's likely portrayed as the Powder River country, the Yellowstone perhaps, the rapids scene, bison herds, elk crossing a stream and snow-covered mountains of avalanches, storms, bitter cold; the moon growing ever larger during this chronology in the winter landscapes! Hugh Glass makes it back alive, reclaiming his redemption as an Arikara party with the woman he saved trot past him on the river bank, following his encounter with Fitzgerald. This movie has been nominated for 12 Academy Awards, a great engaging performances comparable to Jeremiah Johnson, Dances With Wolves, Cast Away or even The Martian which I also saw on DVD this week.