Blockbuster Cliches

Well unfortunately it looks like James Cameron's Avatar is a big hit. I say unfortunately because from what I have seen in trailers and heard in scuttlebutt (which has been confirmed) Avatar employs two of the Hollywood left's favorite cliches, the 'evil' military and the 'evil' corporation. I would like to see Avatar for the ground breaking special effects - isn't it kind of scary that we can almost seamlessly blend CGI and real people now? How long before we won't be able to trust what we see on the evening news because someone has scripted CGI events for us to believe? But that's off topic a bit. James Cameron is famous for his hatred of the 'evil' corporations. The entire Terminator series is based on the actions of a sinister corporation that built an all-powerful computer network which turned on humanity. I suppose that we should pity the idiots on the left who can't figure out that the corporation is values neutral and it is the people at the top that determine whether it is nefarious or not. Interestingly enough, men like James Cameron work for some of the most insidious corporations in our society; movie studios. The movie studios work to maximize profits at the expense of the consumer. They backed the Blue Ray disc over the HD-DVD only because it was not backwards compatible with normal DVDs meaning that consumers would have to repurchase their entire collection if they wanted to upgrade to Blue Ray. They enforce Draconian copyright laws against even the most unintentional violations. But worst of all, they slip left-wing propaganda, anti-American values, and every form of immorality they can think of into those movies in spite of the fact that pro middle class virtues and family movies make bigger profits on average.

Recently I also had the misfortune (self imposed) to watch the Spielberg version of HG Wells War of the Worlds starring Tom Cruise. This show employed one of the other most overused Hollywood cliches; the dysfunctional family ('hi-lighted' by the nearly continuous shrill screams of Dakota Fanning). Of course the family survives the horror of the alien menace (even though they made EVERY wrong decision possible and would have all died in the first half hour of the movie were it reality) to work out their issues with each other. The dysfunctional family theme does work upon occasion but its overuse demonstrates that the Hollywood writers are inherently lazy and lacking in creativity. With a little more effort they could write equally satisfying drama for a fully functional family where the menace they face as a team is more than a backdrop for the battle between an unlikable jerk (wonder if Tommy was actually acting), a bitter teenage son, and disaffected tween daughter. At least Spielberg has some redeeming qualities as a director. The military in War of the Worlds was portrayed as caring about the civilians safety and resolutely committed to defending the nation in the face of a seemingly invincible foe.

One Hollywood cliche that makes me snicker instead of develop a facial tic is making another appearance in the upcoming The Book of Eli. This is a post-Apocalypse thriller and like virtually every movie in this genre, it appears that the first thing people will forget after the Apocalypse is basic hygiene - as if the entire world becomes a collection of soap-adverse Frenchmen the moment society collapses. As an aficionado of this genre, I saw it develop in the movies of the mid 70s but it really hit its stride thanks to the Mad Max series. The exception to this rule though is when there is a dystopian group or society that has risen in the wake of the Apocalypse. These people are usually exceptionally clean and this usually signals that they are evil (I guess Hollywood doesn't believe that cleanliness is next to Godliness - or maybe they do and just hate God). While I don't expect people in that situation to be as fastidious about personal hygiene as most Americans are right now, survivors would likely congregate around a ready source of water and reserve a portion of it for bathing in order to keep disease at bay.

Oh well, what do you expect from drug addled, sex crazed Marxists?

I'd like to keep away from politics this week but how can I with Harry Reid and the Keystone Kops robbing the American people at gunpoint? These people are crazed by their own power and need to be stopped. The Health Care bill is nothing but a hodge-podge of special interest deals and back room negotiations all designed to impoverish the American people. It demonstrates the inherent problem with modern liberalism: liberalism is the belief that since you cannot make the people equally happy you must make them equally miserable. The only way to do that is to attack and destroy the American Middle Class which fits into their plans anyway since the Middle Class stands as a roadblock to their quests for absolute power and a monopoly on knowledge.