Your review is pretty much in line with all the reviews I’ve read about this movie. I remember watching the first one and not being particularly impressed with it as a story. A spectacle, yes, but a story? No. I enjoyed the villain very much, and loved his one-dimensional drive. But I wasn’t interested enough to watch it again, nor am I interested in watching the sequel, especially since it’s three hours long.

Thanks for the review.

Or maybe the Na’vi are just so fundamentally silly that no adult would sit through three hours of nonsense.
I believe Hitchcock observed that no film should be longer than the capacity of the human bladder, or words to that effect, and we have two 3+ hour movies released the same week. The absolutely moronic Avatar add on, and the genuinely disgusting Babylon. (Seriously, I expected way more from Damien Chamelle).

I hope at least some of you saved three to six hours of bladder discomfort Christmas Day and rented the greatest of Christmas Classics:

Die Hard

E.T. was adjusted for inflation the highest grossing box office movie of the 1980s, and it has been pretty much forgotten today.

I’ll pass. Saw the original. Other than the special effects–which were quite effective–I wasn’t impressed. And I could have done without the so-called “message”, which was banality on stilts.

so imagined aliens tend to set off our innate alarms about birth defects.

Thank you Steve

Epic film review

a respectable but not overwhelming return this month

What made an overwhelming but not respectable return this century was the policy of “benign neglect”. Remember that term?

‘Benign Neglect’ on Race Is Proposed by Moynihan

(Sorry for the wretched digitization; the date is March 1, 1970, p. 1, if you have a key to the paywall.)

Isn’t that what “stand-down” and “doughnut shop” policing amount to? It’s the “anarcho-” in anarchotyranny.

We get the tyranny.

Why do all these rich White guys make anti-White movies? You don’t see Indians or Chinese or blacks making movies that put down their people. What brain disease has infected the White race and is there a cure? Maybe the mutation that made Whites rise up over every other race also contains this suicide gene that causes some to turn on their own kind? I don’t get it.

xenophobic as this may sound in the current year, its 10-foot-tall alien heroes are ugly

“Our most sincere apologies! We forgot about our appearance generators.”

a respectable but not overwhelming return this month with its first sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water

If by “respectable return” you mean “on track to lose extremely large amounts of money.” It needs to gross more than $2 billion to break even and it is nowhere near that.

OT — News you pretty much already knew: giving parents effective permission to allow infinite sick days is like a 1980s honor system newspaper dispenser adapted to sell beer. It tends to be a quarter of students per school district, but in some predictable cases it goes up to a third or over half. All of us could do more. How have you helped China to beat us?
https://archive.ph/bKe9F

Hollywood? zzzzzzz Even golf course architecture is better.

Some cute aliens

Inkblotistani Birbs pic.twitter.com/1RdTwmi7rx

— Ink Blot (@inkblotistan) December 27, 2022

There are too many thoughts in the article. Without addressing them …

“Titanic”, apart from spectacular-romantic winning combination, has two climaxes Cameron was, I’m sure (whichever his non-religious beliefs are) was certain about: when the ship sinks, it is all wrapped in a hymnodic-exhilarating music, implying that those who went down with the ship have been spiritually transferred to some better, higher, heavenly world. This is confirmed in the final scene, when old Winslet character dreams/dies to encounter Jack again (and the dead “Titanic” crowd) in a spectacularly luxurious afterlife – which may be interpreted materialistically (she just dreams), but a more convincing interpretation is that she’s now gone to be reunited with her true love who’s been waiting for her in heavenly realms.

“Avatar” was a watchable flick, although it was absurd without suspension of disbelief. If a human mind is transferred to a non-human body & retains his essential features, it is impossible that the old-new mind will find non-humans emotionally & physically desirable. If the blue people were visually chimps, viewers would be disgusted with the idea of a man falling in love & boinking a chimpette (and it would be impossible for his still human mind to feel attraction to a chief chimp lady). The same, although modified, with N’avis (whichever their name).

The blue people are bearably ugly for the first time, but one can look at them as cartoon almost-human exotic people, like a bit modified Polynesians. After all, they are not THAT ugly.

Also, this is why people find chimps comic: they are too similar to us, visually. Nobody thinks that cows or horses are hilarious, because they are not cartoons of us. Then- there is a root of racism towards blacks (apart from other things). They look to whites & most others like cartoons of ourselves. Even worse with Abos & Tasmanians.

Avatar 2 is, I guess, too much because cartoonish humanoids are not eye candies. All other ideological things apart.

The sequel soon becomes an anthology of Cameron’s greatest hits. Did you like Sigourney’s exoskeleton suit in Aliens? (Of course you did.) Well, there are about a dozen of them in this movie.

Uh, Cameron already did this in the original Avatar.

“Cameron is a hard sci-fi guy”

Well, he was anyway. With the Avatar franchise he’s taken the George Lucas approach to film making: A cozy director’s chair positioned in front of a massive green screen. I suppose with the accomplishments he’s made in creating hard special effects, dare I say even more impressive than George Lucas’s, he’s certainly earned the right to sit back and take it easy. But the final product definitely reflects the lack of blood, sweat, and tears.

There’s actually a sort of parallel between Cameron’s and Sailer’s careers. Both started out as hard product guys, JC with his gritty sci-fi realism and SS with his gritty realistic observations about taboo subjects.

But both guys got older, and among other things and as with most men the estrogen dial starts to tick upward, so that hard grittiness has taken a back seat to sentiment and emotion. Cameron with his guilt saturated yarns about ugly boring aliens, Sailer with his fear of dying as projected through his kovid beliefs and his inverted sense of right and wrong with regards to the Ukraine mess.

Lastly: Steve, I was going to finally start sending you donations, but I decided to just skip the middleman and send a few hundo’s straight to Zelensky via 3rd party out of state traveler’s check. Can I still get instant moderation now?

Re: “Native Americans have fallen further out of fashion.”

Is that true? It seems to me I’ve hear the word “Indigenous” a LOT more than I used to, these last few years. And I don’t think land acknowledgements were A Thing yet when the first Avatar came out.

I really enjoyed your review of “Avatar: W.O.W?”, as I expect it to be soon known as. But one surprising omission: The hair! Even the “struggling-to-be-good” white kid (Spider), has the expensive and time-consuming-to-maintain super-braided hair (sure, some of which doubles as some kind of universal bio-electric interface with certain flora AND fauna). Bad, “transitioning” white U.S. Marines and “Men-of-Dastardly-Commerce” faux-Na’vi” seem to have less or none of this “magic” hair. And wouldn’t it be one of the all-time inside jokes if the terrestrial, “real” (un-real?) Na’vi suffered some “sun-n-salt water” bleaching out of their expensive and important hair, as they moved into Waterworld? Come on, man, more with the hair. It’s almost its own, stand-alone character in “W.O.W?”

Star Trek: Discovery would have profited from using that “appearance generator” on Stacey Abrams. My reaction to her is similar to that of these characters when they see the alien octopuses.

Demography is destiny. Ensuring Israel's Jewish majority is neither offensive nor indefensible @EricYoffie Opinionhttps://t.co/cMBcX5qyYP

— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) July 19, 2021

And here I had been thinking that the redeeming quality of CGI was that it would eventually eliminate the arrogant, narcissistic actor class. And now that it’s on the verge of doing that, it makes them ugly.

“I suspect this second race of Na’vi is inspired in part by the nomadic seafaring Bajau people of Southeast Asia, who have evolved larger spleens to allow them to stay underwater longer as they dive for shellfish.”

Or maybe those sea monkey ads in old sci-fi magazines.

And yes, the best space alien is somebody that looks like Han Solo.

You’re so right about E.T. Have never revisited it even once since I was eleven. The thing about it that was novel was its setting. Spielberg made good use of what no one had before, that I’m aware of: the unfinished suburban housing development encroaching upon nature. A lot of us lived in such places then.

Tying the whole thing to an unproven candy like Reese’s Pieces seemed brilliant but not so much in retrospect. No one likes Reese’s Pieces.

I remember being repulsed by the fetishistic way people spoke about the first movie. And knowing I despised the vast majority those people’s thoughts and ideas, I was prepared to hate the first Avatar.

And I did. I remember being baffled at how anyone could even like the movie let alone name it as a “life changing” event as many implied.

Now I know better, I simply won’t see this one. I’m not averse to cinema my family and I really enjoyed the new Top Gun in theaters this summer.

I’ll skip this one though.

I’m sure this has been posted ad nauseum, but official USA government statistics reveal that Na’vi murder whites at seventeen times the rate that whites murder Na’vi.

I wish I could have seen an Editor’s Cut minus about 45 minutes.

Tip: See movies like this in a 4DX theater, in about the third row. Avatar WoW went by really quickly for me because the flight simulator seat and spraying water made the movie into a theme park ride.

With the first installment I was so enchanted by the 3D I saw it a second time two weeks later … and then when I discovered there was an IMAX version I saw it a third time a month or two later. WoW was fun, but I probably won’t see it a second time.

I was hoping you’d mention the Maori noble savage aspect of the turquoise people, and the ridiculous female general (human side) and 8-months pregnant female warrior (turquoise side). You go girl! And the cognitive dissonance of the woke stuff versus the family values, father knows best patriarchal angle of Jake’s Catholic-sized family.

That said, the fundamental problem with Cameron’s Avatar franchise, which has made a respectable but not overwhelming return this month with its first sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, is that, xenophobic as this may sound in the current year, its 10-foot-tall alien heroes are ugly.
~ iSteve

The Na’vi–which is like Blue Man Group meets black people.
~ Red Letter Media (https://youtu.be/uJarz7BYnHA)

Both true, I’d say.

First “Avatar” also didn’t set records on opening weekend but it had incredibly long legs.

I mentioned Babylon’s 3 hour run time the other day and how it effectively ended any chance I’d check out the movie. I looked at 3 hour movies in this century to see if I was being short-sighted and basically the only good movie was Magnolia. Anything else longer than 3 hours worth watching is a documentary.

Colombian immigrant Gisele, 18, bundles up against the cold after spending the night camped alongside the U.S.-Mexico border fence on December 22, 2022 in El Paso, Texas.

All Colombian migrants should be allowed in through the border and shouldn’t get randomly kicked out by Title 42.

They all look like Jackie Kennedy.
My sister saw it, not knowing it was 3.5 hours long with no intermission. Don’t they want to sell drinks?

Surprised that Cameron has not, yet, opted for a sex change.

Of course, many critics also rated ET as one of the best movies at all times but all I saw was a remake of the The Cat from Outer Space

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077305/

It’s ironic that after all you’ve written, this is what is finally gonna do you in: “a big blue space monkey”

Speaking of Anarcho-Tyranny, this looks like a life sentence to me, under the McMichaels Rule.
If she is still in prison at election time, is she eligible to be a candidate for Los Angeles County District Attorney?

https://www.theblaze.com/news/st-louis-car-thief-murders?utm_medium=push&utm_source=pushnami

A woman was charged with murder after she tracked down a man who stole her car and got into a gunfight that led to the death of two men and another one injured, police said.

The alarming incident unfolded at a Speedie gas station in St. Louis, Missouri, on Wednesday at about 10:30 p.m.

35-year-old Demesha Coleman reportedly told police that she had gone to confront whoever had stolen her vehicle.

Police said that surveillance video showed Coleman approach the Hyundai Tucson at the gas station with a handgun alongside another man who also had a handgun. The video reportedly shows her spark the gunfight by shooting first while opening the door to the vehicle.

She is accused of shooting and killing 19-year-old Darius Jackson and 49-year-old Joseph Farrar. A third man was shot in the head and was taken to a hospital.

I have to disagree about the appearance of the Na’vi. Skinny, graceful, regular, vaguely catlike features, smooth unblemished skin — the Na’vi were carefully designed to be visually appealing, and I suspect most moviegoers will find them so. (I’m particularly amused by Cameron’s take on the “sexy alien” trope: the barely there bikini tops that somehow manage to conceal… um, what exactly?) In fact the entire world of Pandora is designed be beautiful and magical, far more than even the unspoiled Earth ever was. (Where are our telepathically bonded flying dragon mounts?) All the better to make moviegoers feel bad about humanity’s environmental sins!

The Prudes rented E.T. last night. Forgotten? No: “E.T. phone home” lives eternal.

Last time we watched E.T. [some four years ago] I left the TV room to discard the empty pop corn bag in the garage. I turned on the light and was startled by the sight of a hanging, skinned, headless deer carcass dripping blood into a bucket. I forgot I left that in there. It was like someone grabbed my head and shoved it in a bath of ice water. So, no: E.T. is not forgotten.

” a somewhat human-looking extraterrestrial that us earthlings would have found beautiful to gaze upon with fond regard”

Do the female elves in Middle earth count? Cate Blanchett as Gladriel, and Evangeline Lilly as Tauriel. Fond regard, indeed.

E.T. was adjusted for inflation the highest grossing box office movie of the 1980s, and it has been pretty much forgotten today.

I never understood the hype behind that film.

Interest in this movie is zero.

I will never forget the marketing ploy engaged in by the studio for the first Avatar movie via a Drudgereport link, which was another little nail-in-the-coffin of my trust in Drudge and the Media in general: Supposedly professional counselors were present at theater lobbies to help with moviegoers in grief that they couldn’t stay in the movie-planet as depicted in the film. Just think of all that went into this publicity stunt: Someone actually hired a couple of people (who probably wore name tags identifying themselves as counselors) to stand outside one theater, and pester folks leaving. Some prepaid moviegoer probably was paid to act as if he needed help “coping” with Avatar-world not being real, and some newspaper/magazine hack was paid to interview at least 2 or 3 pre-selected people to substantiate this HOAX situation. A publication puts the hoax on their website, and Matt Drudge was paid to link to it in a disgusting little bit of “viral” marketing.

Now we are hoaxed all the time, shamelessly, by entities that are not merely movie studios

He used to be a human himself, but in the first film he transitioned via species-affirming care into a big blue space monkey for reasons that no doubt were explained in detail in the 2009 original—Cameron is a hard sci-fi guy, not a fantasist, so he comes up with technical explanations for everything—but which I’ve completely forgotten.

I watched the original for a bit and gave up. I found the whole self-loathing ideology bizarre and incomprehensible – and obviously unappealing. Had I known back then where the American culture was headed a mere decade later… At least Dances with Wolves (another film with a self-loathing ideology as well as maudlin noble savage mythology) had some historical coherence, decent acting, and wonderful scenery (and a measure of truth, to be fair – it was not unheard of for some white men to run off and join the Indians, as Sebastian Junger discusses in his book Tribe).

A neighbor was a lobbyist for the MPAA, and I got to see it in their DC theater before the hype started. It was enjoyable, but I was never tempted to see it again.

This movie strikes me as being “Catcher in the Rye,” immersed in a Cameron mystical, repellent world. It is about the the embrace and struggles of adolescence – – the alienation, the idealism, the outrage, the narcissism, the transformations. It will be enjoyed by the same audience that enjoys Catcher.

Camera’s former made WEIGHT OF WATER.

Connection?

OT: Some iSteve bait…

Human monkeypox virus infection in women and non-binary individuals during the 2022 outbreaks: a global case series

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)02187-0/fulltext

“Women”

The cohort comprised 62 trans women, 69 cis women, and five non-binary individuals (who were, because of small numbers, grouped with cis women to form a category of people assigned female at birth for the purpose of comparison).

I’ve never seen all of avatar. Which is weird, because if they just advertised it as an animation live action mix it would hit my movie categories.

Dances with Na’vis

“What I was saying,” Mr. Moynihan continued, “was that the more we discuss the issue of race as an issue, the more people get polarized, the more crazy racists on the left and maybe crazy racists on the right shout and yell and make things seem so much worse than they are, when in fact the nineteen sixties have been a period of enormous progress.

That could go for a lot of things!

Dances with Wolves (another film with a self-loathing ideology as well as maudlin noble savage mythology) had some historical coherence, decent acting, and wonderful scenery

Dances With Wolves, putting aside the lefty self-hatred, was an objectively good movie. The problem with Avatar appears to be (I have not and will not see it) that it is a poorly written movie wrapped in special effects. So you get the lefty claptrap, poor writing with the only redeemable quality being the visual effects. No thanks.

This guy is the best – or at least most entertaining – living film critic, and I trust his take on Avatar 2:

I sometimes think of myself as Lieutenant Dunbar, with White Patriots being the demonized enemy with noble qualities (although no humans are as faultless as the Indians portrayed in DWW).

E.T. appealed to children and women. I was/am no fan, but Mrs. Prude, who was raising a small boy, like Elliot, at the time loves the movie. She even thinks the grotesque little alien is cute.

What’s amazing that no one seems to comment on is the lack of diversity in the Na’Vi people. Why are there no black and green Na’Vi? The whole film looks like the diversity people from earth are attacking the non-diverse other worldly beings, regardless of who the underlying actors are. Some one needs to be alerted about this.

it was not unheard of for some white men to run off and join the Indians

1676: Joshua Tefft, drawn and quartered in Rhode Island

The Execution of Joshua Tefft

The Tefft Papers: Home

Documentation for the execution of Joshua Tefft, 1676-01-18

I’m a bit surprised it didn’t happen more often. It’s a lot more fun to be a hunter than a farmer.

He used to be a human himself, but in the first film he transitioned via species-affirming care into a big blue space monkey for reasons that no doubt were explained in detail in the 2009 original

His human body was crippled and the blue Navi doppelganger (originally for his scientist twin who died) was fully functional, so after defeating the evil white capitalists it was a no-brainer to be able to run around and have ponytail sex with blue aliens rather than remain a cripple.

I am curious to know Sailer, how supposedly anonymous commenters are granted instant moderation.

He used to be a human himself, but in the first film he transitioned via species-affirming care into a big blue space monkey for reasons that no doubt were explained in detail in the 2009

I only saw the movie once, however long ago it was in the theater, but I do remember this.

The eponymous “Avatar” being some kind of genetic hybrid chimera creature that is able to be controlled remotely by the genetic host in some kind of suspended animation. (The genetic part being the basis for the disruptive storyline of bringing in an outsider twin to replace the original host).

At the end of the film, the host human dies, but the noble savages use some kind of native black magic to reanimate the chimera thing with the soul of the dead human. That was literally the ending, albeit dressed up with the ecological hive mind mumbo jumbo.

So for all of the intricate technical details devised by Cameron, at the end the final idea is, “Magic!”

This anti White spiel is being called racist.
For not having real poc as cast members.

The left hates each other viscerally.
A real right could take advantage of this.

The crazy quilt of freaks can dissolve.
If only there was a real right opposing them.

Hollywood and media are losing its appeal.
They have lost 500 billion in dollar value.

This brave ghey world is not selling.
The blacks are not happy they are now secondary.

The naked attempt at appeasement failed.
Like it was always going to.

Offending your audience is the new thing.
Asia is the biggest market and they hate black and ghey something fierce.

The goobermint is now floating subsidizing the media.
The media cannot make money this way.

What cannot go on won’t.
The audience has walked out of the theater.

Guys like Cameron are more invested in the tech wizardry than storylines.
The stories are now just fractured morality tales from Babylon.

ET has become a classic kids film, it is hardly forgotten. It was also never meant to spawn a franchise, while Avatar clearly was.

no intermission. Don’t they want to sell drinks?

The studios seem to have no interest in helping movie theaters make a profit.

I’ll take that under advisement, Mister Cowboy.

Yeah…..funny how that works.

To be perfectly fair, it’s astonishing how many people have forgotten about (or never heard of) classic , award-winning or “important” films. I can’t count the number of people, from college-age to retirement age, who draw total blanks if I reference Chinatown, Dr. Strangelove, or Butch Cassidy.

He had my attention until I saw Ethiopian “Jews”. Then, I simply turned off….

E.T. was adjusted for inflation the highest grossing box office movie of the 1980s, and it has been pretty much forgotten today.

As have, I believe, most Spielberg movies. Nothing he made is an enduring classic. Same is true for George Lucas. Even the original Star Wars movies are unwatchable, now.

The problem with sci fi (both literature & movies) is similar to religions’ related problems, especially the afterlife.

When you start asking more & more logical questions, and delve into hows & whys of crucial elements – the entire edifice somehow naturally collapses.

Seven Samurai
The Right Stuff
Lawrence of Arabia
Dr Zhivago
The Leopard
Godfather part 2
Gone with the Wind
Ben-Hur

Off the top of my head.

It was enjoyable, but I was never tempted to see it again.

Could just mean that you are old. Steve has pointed out that our music tastes are imprinted on us around the age of 14. Could be that we go through a cultural learning phase from 12 to 22, and most of the films, books, or songs that we enjoy experiencing on repeat come from this time in our life.

Slightly, but not too much OT (films & Jews): I quickly clicked over the cult classic I saw long time ago:

It is- all Malle’s inventions & film language subtleties aside- a film about questers for “the meaning of life”, one spiritual-ish & inquisitive (and newageyishly shallow), the other “happiness is in small things” type.

I liked the movie when I first saw it, and perhaps it is still good. But I am reminded of Orwell’s musings about his childhood:

I have never been back to Crossgates. In a way it is only within the last
decade that I have really thought over my schooldays, vividly though
their memory has haunted me. Nowadays, I believe, it would make very
little impression on me to see the place again, if it still exists. And
if I went inside and smelled again the inky, dusty smell of the big
schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the
swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only
feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How
small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in
myself!

Well, not deterioration, but maturity, I’d say (in my case). But with the “small” part of the sentence I completely agree.

“Do you like giant ships sinking?”

yes Yes YES. Sinking in a sea shallow enough wherein I can dive on its wreck. Sinking from orbit and crashing into the planet in a spot where I can pick over the remains and loot the dead.

Left likes American Indians only when they’re useful. They like Indians when they can scream “Stolen land!” and use Indians as club to beat whites with.
Left’s support for immigration however, shows they have no intention of returning “stolen land”.

Why do all these rich White guys make anti-White movies?…What brain disease has infected the White race and is there a cure?

It’s not a brain disease; it’s just a flex. “Follow me, I’m a *good* white man… possibly even a great one.” It won’t go away until the reality that we’re no longer living in a white-dominated world sinks in for more people. Then it will just start to seem passé, and ambitious whites who want to distinguish themselves will find some other banner to wave.

You don’t see Indians or Chinese or blacks making movies that put down their people.

I dunno about movies, but Salman Rushdie made the protagonist of Midnight’s Children a [spoiler alert] bastard conceived by a white English colonist and a married Indian woman who have a consensual tryst, and the story’s villains are mostly Indians (in particular Indira Gandhi), not the departing English. His line about the “ineluctable superiority of northernness,” in addition to being a nod to Joyce and meant with more than a bit of post colonial irony, suggests that he’s had some mildly interesting reflections on historical patterns of colonization and conquest. I’d say that Rushdie’s attitude toward Indians is pretty similar to Joyce’s attitude toward the Irish, which is to say that they are simply his subject, warts and all.

Answer: Who controls the movie studios in China and India? Probably Chinese or Indians.
Is there a movie industry in Africa?
I assume you are talking about black-made movies from Hollywood. Well, blacks make movies that are anti-white, just like the Hollywood moguls do, so what’s the problem?

Why?

Spielberg’s movies don’t lend themselves to good sequels. E.g. Jaws and Jurassic Park‘s sequels all suck and are forgotten, although they tended to make enough money to justify making another. The only ones that worked were the Indiana Jones ones, but they were designed to mimic the old serial films that were continuous adventures and not merely a big leadup/payoff.

I think the issue with bad sequels is that Spielberg initially makes family-friendly “monster” movies, where the reveal of the monster is a Really Big Deal and the Escape from Monster is scary and thrilling but is safe enough for most youngsters to enjoy. However, by the end of the movies, the monsters are totally revealed for what they are and how to kill them/contain them/deal with them is given. This is important, because if there’s any mystery left at the end of the movie or unexplained thing about the monster kids/young adults/people who don’t like horror movies won’t like it and will be too scared. E.g. E.T. goes home, the dinosaurs are trapped on the island, Jaws is blown up.

This is in contrast with “adult” monster movies, where the explanations about the monster at the end of the first movie are not complete, so you can play with sequels. E.g. Alien, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween all have cryptic scary endings where, yes, the heroine seems to have escaped the monster but then there’s a twist where you really aren’t sure and the monster may have some comeback abilities.

So what allows Spielberg the ability to make great horror movies for the whole family also limits the ability to build a good franchise off him.

So E.T. not becoming a franchise makes sense. But forgotten? Nah. Its just more a scary movie for kids.

The Na’vi in Avatar all look like 18 year old twink/chick models: super-skinny, athletic-looking, long limbed giraffe-type creatures with big eyes and high cheekbones.

Precisely the type of creatures that infest Hollywood looking for jobs/serving as waiters/sleeping with directors/working as prostitutes. Cameron took their look from the kind of innocent, naive prey Hollywood destroys on the regular.

It’s even in their name: “Na’vi”=NAIVE.

Ms Coleman seriously damaged Sailer’s law.

I am only sorry she won’t have time to enjoy her marital bliss:

https://www.theknot.com/us/demesha-coleman-and-eddie-coleman-jul-2022

Demesha & Eddie

Date To Be Announced • Saint Louis, MO

Cameron movies are always technically impressive but not great films. No great stories, sometimes great experiences, though. He takes old science fiction ideas and turns them into exciting movies. I didn’t find the original avatar interesting at all, just common science fiction themes turned into a really expensive movie.

Like Titanic.

With its 3+ hours length, it should have been titled Avatar: Which Way Do I have to Go to Pass Water.

In the series South Park they made that into “Dances with Smurfs”.

I never understood the hype behind that film.

………… That’s when Drew Barrymore was little and cute.

It did have a great sequel though, where E.T. was revealed to have been a plant working for a foreign power (sort of an intergalactic Max Boot).

the human (a.k.a. American, a.k.a. white) bad guys have transitioned into Na’vi themselves through genetic engineering

…….mRNA technology perhaps ……The government would never do that to their soldiers…..Oh, wait ,I take that back.

What do you guys mean ET was forgotten? I constantly see it parodied and referenced. “ET phone home” is an iconic line still

The trailer does not look right/ is visually unattractive.

And I don’t think land acknowledgements were A Thing yet when the first Avatar came out.

Land acknowledgements are pretty much the Woke ideology distilled to its essence. They do absolutely nothing for actual existing Native Americans , nor are they intended to. They are an inter-White status signaling game. After all if any of these universities were remotely sincere about the ‘theft’ of Native American lands, nothing is preventing them from giving the lands back or paying rent for them.

Supposedly professional counselors were present at theater lobbies to help with moviegoers in grief that they couldn’t stay in the movie-planet as depicted in the film.

Do the same next time Birth of a Nation is screened.

Cameron is the Great Canadian Filmmaker, true. But he’s setting himself up for what has (finally!) always been obvious about Star Wars and all that. Moviemakers are suckers for making savages seem noble and the rest of us as stormtroopers. Bad long-term strategy.

I left the cinema half-way through the movie.

It was pleasant to watch, but lacked substance.

Comments in mods.

This claim from Sailer struck me as bizarre. I’m too young to have caught ET in theaters, but of course I know it precisely because it has endured. Would Stranger Things exist if not for ET? It has to be one of the most “enduring” of Spielberg’s films after Jaws & Raiders of the Lost Ark. Perhaps Sailer is too old to have seen the film as a member of its intended audience (children).

ET has become a classic kids film, it is hardly forgotten. It was also never meant to spawn a franchise, while Avatar clearly was.

At the time, it was claimed to be a “classic kids film”–it was supposedly going to be to Gen X what The Wizard of Oz was to Boomers (once Oz made the jump to annual television showings), but as an Xer, I can tell you it has been utterly forgotten, or dismissed as “A Boy and His Dog” story. You can forget about Milennials or Alphas knowing anything about it. The modal moviegoer of 2022 statistically was born in 1998. ET is something they have to look up on wikipedia.

Cameron is a hard sci-fi guy, not a fantasist, so he comes up with technical explanations for everything.

No need for science when applied phlogiston (“thank God advances in [given science] have made [narratively expedient capability] possible!”) is easier, and that it is thus forgettable is a feature–no one can demonstrate it’s impossible if you leave out the details.

Side by side on Takimag: a Sailer review of a dud sequel to a genre movie and another by David Cole.

Cole is a story teller and has the inside story of an awful plot redeemed by unconventional casting and the subsequent regression to mediocrity of both plot and choice of stars.

Steve, long ago a market analyst, begins with a startling, personally significant glimpse of the director’s art and continues with considerations about the shapes on the screen, how they are made and their diminishing power to attract consumers.

Two first class pieces of writing about matters of no ultimate consequence. Read them both.

“Willow” was never meant to spawn a franchise, but it did, terribly so. Give it time, they’ll have an ET sequel before you know it with ET back this time for a love affair with another ET: Extra Transsexual.

So for all of the intricate technical details devised by Cameron, at the end the final idea is, “Magic!”

Many supposedly sci fi movies use pop-prana (life force, shakti, ch’i, ..). Western folksy Taoism at its worst.

Quite sensible

Or at least putting tribal slot machines in public places

A good double feature depicting 70s-era NYC would be “My Dinner with Andre” and “Taxi Driver.”

They might still be able to enjoy marital bliss. Instead of her being a guard at Eddie’s prison, maybe Eddie can be a guard at her prison.
Poletown in Detroit, Milwaukee Ave. in Chicago, Saint Stanislaus Kostka Polish Catholic Parish in St. Louis…Funny how they always sic the blacks on the Poles.

Ah yes E.T.

Great movie.

“Only Barnes can kill Barnes.”

“Just a moment. Just a moment. I’ve just picked up a fault in the AE-35 unit. It’s going to go 100% failure in 72 hours.”

“I’ll show you where the iron crosses grow.”

“You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”

“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn!”

Our local news did a remembrance for those who have passed away this year. I just happened to turn and look at the exact moment William Hurt’s pic was shown. For a 1/2 second,with his gray hair and beard,I thought it was Speilberg! 😋
There’s always next year!

Any box office smash can spawn a potential franchise. And Spielberg did seriously consider making one before dropping the idea. Since ET is his creation and he doesn’t need the money, he had the final say.

I never understood the hype behind that film.

That is because you were neither an 8-year-old kid nor an English speaker at the time. An American background also makes a big difference, which explains part of your confusion.

It is a children’s movie. There was a lesser-known children’s fantasy film in the same era (two years later), ‘The Never-Ending Story’, that you have probably never heard of. It was also of zero value to anyone older than 12 but pretty wondrous to an 8-year-old kid.

Anything space-related was also ‘hot’ at the time, as this was right between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, so that helped the hype cycle. A space alien for children.

AVATAR 2 has grossed over a billion dollars worldwide at the box office in just twelve days. Only two other movies released this year have made that much in their entire runs – MAVERICK and JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION. The latter movie, which was released in June, just barely – the AVATAR movie is already slightly ahead of it.

Neither of the three major Marvel movies (DOCTOR STRANGE, BLACK PANTHER, THOR) nor the DC remake of THE BATMAN nor the perennially-popular cartoon flicks (MINIONS sequel) have managed to do it in much longer runs.

So THE WAY OF WATER is behind the original on ticket sales, but it’s still going to do a ton of business and ensure that the rest of the decade is filled with more AVATAR sequels.

Agreed. Cole and Sailer are both talented writers. But this is Steve’s joynt and I say his James Cameron/Captain Nemo analogy is apt considering Cameron’s plummet into the Mariana Trench. Cameron’s real-life adventures are more interesting than anything he’s splashed on the silver screen in recent years. I’m waiting for him to discover a mysterious island controlled by a hive of giant psychic bumblebees.

As an Xer with Gen Z children, I can assure you that ET still lives. It is not Wizard of Oz, but, like Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller, it appears to be an 80s film that the next generation considers one of its own. „Stranger Things“ also gave ET a boost with older Gen Zers revisiting the source material.

Part of Alaska’s point was since 2000. He’s not saying that 3 hour movies can’t be good he’s saying recent ones should be presumed not good. What he wrote was “I looked at 3 hour movies in this century to see if I was being short-sighted and basically the only good movie was Magnolia.”

I enjoyed the villain very much, and loved his one-dimensional drive.

Steven Lang did a terrific job chewing scenery as Colonel Quaritch:

I’ll take that under advisement, Mister Cowboy.

Yippie-ki-yay, Mr. Falcon!

Intermissions should be brought back. Let people urinate and then hit the concessions again.

Cameron’s Terminator movies and Aliens were visceral entertainment. But he’s getting drippy in his dotage. The warning sign might have been 1989’s The Abyss. I liked the sub smash, the drilling crew, the helium tremors of the SEAL team leader, the liquid breathing apparatus, . . . the list goes on.
Plenty there already to make a good film, but Cameron had to ruin it by introducing a maudlin, cod-religious, happy ending: Wise aliens save the day.

‘I mentioned Babylon’s 3 hour run time the other day and how it effectively ended any chance I’d check out the movie. I looked at 3 hour movies in this century to see if I was being short-sighted and basically the only good movie was Magnolia. Anything else longer than 3 hours worth watching is a documentary.’

It occurs to me that this is why I like Mark Felton. The average running time is about ten minutes.

” … it’s still going to do a ton of business and ensure the rest of the decade is filled with more AVATAR sequels.”

And with each sequel Cameron will tell the press how much he disavows his past toxic masculinity transgressions. Which is convenient now that he’s nearing 70. Hey Jim, your films up to the one where you made the killer robot James Bond have been grand adventures, full of technological innovations. I thought your script for Strange Days was some of your best work. Please don’t associate masculinity with toxicity. You may be pushing this line to meet the ESG standards of the funding source for your blue people movies. But the world needs more guys who’ll drop into the deepest trench in the Pacific in a tiny submersible; guys who make movies that inspire and thrill young men. The current global male villains who seek world domination are toxic but not masculine. The world is circling an abyss; we need a prevailing masculine spirit and men who’ll do what needs to be done.

“It occurs to me that this is why I like Mark Felton. The average running time is about ten minutes.”

The Three Stooges shorts are longer but still worth watching.

That’s only because GenX was pretty much the last American generation to experience common cultural touchpoints.

Just look at the increasing weakness of 90s and 2000s retro callbacks; the combination of splintered attention spans and disaffection with even the kitsch elements of pop culture in general has made it almost impossible for anything to be “iconic” rather than fleetingly viral.

E.T. is still able to be referenced, but only while the GenXers are wringing 3rd-hand laughs out of tired in-jokes. Already there’s at least two generations who have no idea when to laugh at Seth MacFarlane’s one-liners. How long can milennials really milk Titanic quotes and Jar-Jar Binks references?

I’m going to have to reach out to my eldest son, who told me he planned on going to see it, for his take. When I was still in Illinois we went to movies together often. I always accepted any invitation from him to see a movie. Once I declined but thought afterwards, “How many late twenties guys want to hang out with their dad?” I never turned him down again. Of course, the fact I always popped for the tickets and snacks was probably a contributing factor to his invitations.

I went with him to see the first Avatar which I thought was basically The Last Samurai and Dances with Wolves in outer space. It was impressive visually but the IMax 3D gave me a freaking cluster headache. But if he comes up here for a visit in the near future I’ll go with him.

Movies and celebrities are a more sophisticated form of state propaganda, and exist, not to entertain you, but to tell you (among other things) that life itself is toxic and slavery is freedom. It happens that some of them are entertaining by accident, that sometimes (because it is not literal state propaganda, and embraces a certain amount of freedom out of practical necessity) there are trend-buckers like John Milius, and, because the trend is always worsening, you can try to trick of looking into under-celebrated older material. But expecting stuff like we used to take for granted in the current year is like expecting the Conspiracy to Popularize Suicide to tie wages to inflation when every day they put out talking points saying that wages are the problem and inflation can only be tamed by legalizing slavery.

Interesting, and perhaps even vaguely on topic. The NYT has an article about Ashleigh Barty’s life after retiring from tennis, and other than a passing mention of her autobiography, “My Dream Time,” there is not a word about her Aboriginal ancestry.

Wasn’t it Luntzed (or, if not properly Luntzed, effectively focus group tested) for Things Kids Like, like almost every other entertainment product at that time? See also the Ewoks being essentially living teddy bears.

I don’t think there were any blacks in that movie.

Then it will just start to seem passé, and ambitious whites who want to distinguish themselves will find some other banner to wave.

I think if you’re an ambitious white in a majority non-white country you just leave, like Elon Musk, or fade into the background like the Syrian and Iraqi Christians after the Arab Muslims take over. Richard Leakey is the only ambitious, motivated white guy I can recall who stayed to make his mark in post-colonial Africa and nearly got himself killed in the process. Steve needs to do a deep dive on Richard Leakey; he had an interesting, eventful life.

I think the usual course for ambitious, idealistic white people in majority non-white countries is to get themselves killed or imprisoned.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-12-29-mn-25922-story.html

https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/us-couple-facing-charges-in-uganda-for-trafficking-foster-child/

There might be a niche for ambitious whites in a non-white country as being the only people with sufficient IQ and impulse control to keep things running, e.g., Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsome.

Intermissions should be brought back. Let people urinate and then hit the concessions again.

The other night I re-watched 2001: A Space Odyssey on Amazon. The streaming version still has the original ten minute break in the middle with nothing but the word “INTERMISSION” on the screen.

Entertainment Pro-Tip: Instead of watching whatever mediocre junk is being newly released, just watch some of the vast catalogue of excellent movies from the past. There’s no way you’ve seen them all already. And even if you saw them years ago, you’ll still see new things to appreciate.

I was in Mexico recently and some millennials and I talked about ET

I think there is a 2000s canon developing or at the least people my age seem to get the reference

The 3d movies made me sick and I usually ended up having to sleep during them

Like all the girls in all Luc Besson movies happening to look like the kind of girls Luc Besson likes.
The real test of a movie, which allows itself to be skeptical about the importance of beauty in movies — will our Han masters whiten the poster?

Remember when monkeypox was the New Covid?
Remember when it started to look like monkeypox only seemed to ever affect active homosexuals?
Remember when they started to find monkeypox in dogs and children, and then they pretty much stopped talking about monkeypox?

Nah. Cameron tends to like androgynous, wallflower but mature females with wiry muscle (Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, Sarah Connor in Terminator, Jamie Lee Curits in True Lies, etc.), not willowly teenage big-eyed wisp models like the Na’vi.

And for guys he likes men who aren’t androgynous at all: Arnold, Ed Harris in The Abyss, Michael Biehn. So the Na’vi males’ look is out for him as well. The bad guy military leader in the Avatar movies is way more like Cameron’s usual male lead.

About the only time he veered from this formula was in Titanic, where he combined voluptuous Kate Winslett with Tiger Beat-looking Leo, likely due to studio demands that he give them leads that non-scifi romcom audiences wanted. But even then, the combo wasn’t 18-year-old-skinny model male w/ 18 year old skinny model female.

In other words, he’s making a statement with the Na’vi look being so close to 18 year old male and female models in Hollywood.

‘The Never-Ending Story’, that you have probably never heard of.

You are a straight-up moron. I mean, it’s really sad how ignorantly stupid you are. That was one of my favorite movies as a teenager (and I read the book too). But the sequel, predictably, was bad.

E.T. never appealed to me, not because I wasn’t a kid or because I didn’t speak English, but because it was alternatingly saccharine and coarse. For me, it didn’t have the charm or the genuine sense of thrill of The Goonies or Gremblins.

My wife also found it much too hyped (“Just okay, nothing special”). I even liked The Last Starfighter better.

All these other 80’s kids films aged better than E.T. in my view.

He was a great villain. His avatar villain in this second film is less so.

Exactly. But then again everyone can comment. I do not understand an intelligent fellow like Sailer chasing after celebrities.

I miss the double features of my youth (which were already on the way out back then). I always thought it was cool to let a kid see two films for just a little more than the price of one. Sure the second film often wasn’t very good and not worth paying for, but sometimes a really good movie got second billing.

Hollywood tries 3-D every 25-30 years or so as a cheap gimmick to try to drum up some extra business, but after a few years the fad falls flat. They tried it in the 1950s, then the early 80s ( Jaws 3-D, Friday the 13th Part 3-D), and then the 2000s. Look for it to be tried again in the 2030s if Hollywood still exists.

Stephen Lang’s second wind of a career has been a pleasant surprise. He had a few minor roles in the 90’s where I remembered seeing him. In particular Ike Clanton in “Tombstone” and General George Pickett in “Gettysburg”.

The warning sign might have been 1989’s The Abyss.

The man likes wah-wah.

Makes you wonder if the ship was the villain in Titanic. Go water!
Good nature, bad machine(like the Termie).

A technophile with technophobia.

Like Lucas is a fasciphile with fasciphobia.

How about the ultimate movie? Ewoks + Gungans vs the Blue Navies.

(The Navies aren’t drawn from American Indians. They are too jungle-tropic and aquatic. They seem like a combo of jungle Africans and sea-faring Polynesians.)

Hobbits are ugly too, but LOTR was big.

Star Trek is the ugliest thing I ever did see, but it’s been successful forever.

Gotta kill a woman first. Alec Baldwin killing a woman and then not transitioning is a major power move.

I re-watched ET recently. It still retains its magic. It may be ‘forgotten’ because, like Close Encounters, it is sequel proof(in a time when ‘franchise’ is the thing).

Ugly can be part of the appeal. Beauty and the Beast. Phantom of the Opera. Frankenstein. Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Spielberg understood this and made the monstrous lovable.

Now, Shrek, that is ugly.

ET was popular but also scared a lot of kids at the time because of ET’s appearance. He was pretty freakish looking. He wasn’t like Baby Yoda. Also those older animatronic puppets they used to use and their weird jerky movements tended to scare kids.

Cameron is a solid director of entertaining action movies, but he’s not really a great director. Aliens for example was fun but it was just a shoot em up action flick, purged of all the mystery and drama of Ridley Scott’s original.

Regarding Star Wars movies, the Rogue One movie that came out several years ago, which Steve described as the Battle of Midway in space, might have been the best Star Wars movies of them all in terms of overall quality and entertainment, including the originals.

so imagined aliens tend to set off our innate alarms about birth defects.

It’s not just that.

The more a creature resembles humans, the more we are repulsed by identification.

Even though apes and monkeys are closer to us, we are more likely to find them ugly than dogs, cats, bears, horses, dolphins, and even pigs.

Most animals seem so different from us that we appreciate them in their own right.
But apes and monkey do resemble us, and we can’t help applying human standards, and that makes them seem somewhat grotesque.

This is even truer of early hominids. They are far closer to us than any ape or baboon, but I’d rather see Bonzo the chimp or Clyde the orangutan than illustrations of early proto-man that look like the ugliest mofos that ever lived.

Paradoxically, more something resembles humans, more repulsive we find it.

Ewwwwwwwwwwwww:

I’d rather look at a warthog

By the way, apes feel likewise, which is why the release of Way of Taylor was a big flop, esp among the chimps. (Gorillas sort of got it)

OT –Really good pol comment on why things are the way they are right now:

Governments violated their public contracts with lockdowns and arrests. This is the type of resentment that never goes away and starts causing people to behave erratically.

There is zero public trust in any government right now, especially in the US. Normalcy bias keeps things looking boring from the outside until suddenly it’s not.

The conditioning is utterly collapsing, merely due to the fact that the powers that be rocked the boat during COVID when they promised they wouldn’t and wrote it all down in 1776.

If there’s a draft for this Europe [turmoil] anytime soon it’s absolutely over. With a dominant agnostic/atheist population, there’s no afterlife planning or even base level pontification about what happens. You’ve seen how faggots reacted to a germ over the mere possibility they or someone they love could have DIED. Imagine how they’d react to being forced into another world war they had nothing to do with.

Postscript: this could probably be relieved by recognizing wrongdoing and then punishing the guilty parties, but there’s no chance of that happening.

Cameron is not half as good or as interesting a director as his ex-wife, Kathyrn Bigelow.

He makes more money, but her movies are better.

Tombstone was not as accurate as Wyatt Earp, which came out around the same time, but it was highly entertaining.

Honestly….. Who cares?

I recently watched the first Avatar. People complain about the ideology of the movie, but I don’t have a problem with that. Traditionalist natives expelling invaders from their land and rejecting globalist values, what’s not to like?

The problem was that the script and characters are stupid and sub-par. The evil general with the exoskeleton was cringe.

I do remember E.T. I watched it as a child. You have to watch it as a child.

Most Hollywood films would be forgotten in 10-20 years if they didn’t have endless sequels or reboots or remakes.

Again… Who cares?

Old time movie reels were 11 minutes long. A feature film would typically come on 8 reels. But cartoons, newsreels, Chaplin shorts, etc. would be single-reelers.

On a somewhat related note, chimpanzees used – or formerly used – in entertainment, (see for example the wonderful series of PG Tips Tea TV commercials from the UK of the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s), are, as a rule, either infant or juvenile examples of their species.
You see, young chimps are generally considered to be cute, cuddly, loveable and clownish, mischievous little homunculi.

However, you never but never see mature chimps featuring in entertainment. They happen to be grotesquely and hideously ugly. Monsters, more or less, in this case the anthropoidal character works against them. And, apparently, not only do they look like monsters, they *act* like monsters.

And “The Way of Water” in the winter is to turn into snow and ice, which NYC will have in spades.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/nyc-electric-garbage-truck-plans-hit-wall-after-trucks-conked-out-plowing-snow-after-just

In a move that absolutely nobody could have seen coming, New York City is scrapping its brilliant idea for electric garbage trucks after finding out the truck simply “aren’t powerful enough to plow snow”.

The pipe dream of converting the city’s 6,000 garbage trucks from gas to electric in order to try and limit carbon emissions (because there’s no other problems that need to be dealt with in New York City right now) is “clashing with the limits of electric-powered vehicles,” Gothamist wrote this week.

https://gothamist.com/news/snow-go-for-nycs-electric-garbage-trucks-that-cant-handle-winter-weather?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=shared_twitter

Fortunately London will be spared because the Geniuses at The Guardian assured us that there’ll be no more snow by 2012.

“Die Hard”

I proudly watched the ultimate Christmas movie while wearing my “Nakatomi Plaza Christmas Party 1988” Sweatshirt.

The alarming incident unfolded at a Speedie gas station in St. Louis, Missouri, on Wednesday at about 10:30 p.m.

35-year-old Demesha Coleman reportedly told police that she had gone to confront whoever had stolen her vehicle.

Police said that surveillance video showed Coleman approach the Hyundai Tucson at the gas station with a handgun alongside another man who also had a handgun. The video reportedly shows her spark the gunfight by shooting first while opening the door to the vehicle.

She is accused of shooting and killing 19-year-old Darius Jackson and 49-year-old Joseph Farrar. A third man was shot in the head and was taken to a hospital.

Give that woman a badge!

I might rewatch that sci fi classic, “Alien”, recently re-released as “Undocumented”.

For some reason, all Korean movies run at least two hours. Larger bladders?

It still pops up.

https://nightshiftbrewing.com/brewing/what-we-brew/beer/phone-home/

“And with each sequel Cameron will tell the press how much he disavows his past toxic masculinity transgressions. ”

Was he toxicly masculine though? His two most prolific franchises: Terminator and Alien, feature strong female leading roles. As did the Abyss. Even in True Lies, the JLC character follows a similar arch to Sarah Conner: feminerdy doormat finds her inner ass kicker through adversity.

Why do all these rich White guys make anti-White movies? You don’t see Indians or Chinese or blacks making movies that put down their people.

Market research!

Movies are marketed worldwide and translated into several languages. White Anglo-Saxon people no longer constitute the majority audience for movies.

Even in the James Bond movies, the villains have nearly always been white guys.

Attractive Latinas will become citizens of the United States.

Were they Mexican? If so, that confirms Sailer’s statement that Hispanics like whatever Anglos liked two decades earlier.

I think you have to submit 50 posts which meet certain standards of literacy and relevance, and avoid obvious no-nos like ad hominem attacks, on other posters, libelous by statements, illegal content, etc.

If you look carefully the Anons are assigned a number, which is probably a unique identifier.

If I ever achieve instant moderation I’ll take it as a sign I need to up my game.

Are you asking how can we work to get more students away from the school more often or how to better lock up the criminal element of the youths?

Spielberg’s movies don’t lend themselves to good sequels. E.g. Jaws and Jurassic Park‘s sequels all suck and are forgotten, although they tended to make enough money to justify making another.

Spielberg seems to have a unique capacity to tell a story in a movie. In my opinion he must have been heavily influenced by Hitchcock.

Jaws was a pretty second rate novel by Peter Benchley, a former National Geographic writer about the problems of a New England cop being pressured by local businesses to open the beaches while a serial killer white shark is chomping down on local bathers.

As I recall, a shark expert comes to town and fucks the cops wife, while on breaks from hunting the shark. (Kind of John Updike-esque.)

Spielberg transformed the story and made the mundane scary with shark music and fake fins that had you on the edge of your seat.

The sequel Jaws movies were not made by Spielberg, and their makers had no idea of the secret sauce. They just used the name Jaws to dupe naive cinema-goers who had enjoyed or heard of the original movie.

I believe it was the movie Jaws 3 that gave us the phrase “jumped the shark”, meaning something that was totally ridiculous. Or maybe it was Happy Days. Anyway the phrase applied to Jaws 3.

All these other 80’s kids films aged better than E.T. in my view.

Yet, if you ask today’s 8/9 year olds E.T. is probably the only one they will have seen.

There might be a niche for ambitious whites in a non-white country as being the only people with sufficient IQ and impulse control to keep things running, e.g., Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsome.

As far as keeping things running, Gavin Newsom has certainly been keeping people running out of California–it’s the state with the highest loss of population.

However, after years of that consistent growth, the population recently declined. Based on preliminary findings, from January 2021 to January 2022, California shrank by 173,173 people or -0.44 percent. Simply stated: the births and deaths component could no longer fill the void created by California’s recent outmigration.

https://www.rubyhome.com/blog/leaving-california/

Increasingly more people are saying high taxes, the high cost of living, and even politics are making them choose to leave the Golden State. A report released over the summer showed the state’s population growth hit a record low. Over the past five years, California has ranked in the top ten states people are moving from.

https://kmph.com/news/local/people-are-leaving-california-at-record-rates

“Nothing—is written!”

“All I want is to enter my House justified.”

Not sure what you’re getting at here. Bruce Jenner didn’t kill a woman until after he transitioned.

Saw it once…and once was enough.

I prefer my aliens malevolent. Give me Jim Arness as the original “Thing from Outer Space” or the monstrous “Alien” anytime. Even the comic aliens from “Mars Attacks” (a real hoot, by the way) beat Spielberg’s Talking Turd.

A good double feature depicting 70s-era NYC would be “My Dinner with Andre” and “Taxi Driver.”

My Dinner With Travis.

“Nobody thinks that cows or horses are hilarious,”
Gary LArson’s Far Side cartoons beg to differ.

Market research!

Movies are marketed worldwide and translated into several languages. White Anglo-Saxon people no longer constitute the majority audience for movies.

It’s really a combination of the two.

Hollywood movies have an international audience but the culture of Hollywood attracts anti-mainstream White types.

Hollywood is filled with bitter nerds that resent their midwest cousin for not just having a decent life but enjoying it. That is why there are so many movies about mainstream Whites cheating on their wives, secretly doing drugs, exploiting workers, etc.

Have you ever been to Hollywood? It’s disgusting and the rent is ridiculously high. You really have to motivated to live there.

There are good looking women everywhere in Hollywood because so many women from small towns move out there to catch a big break. They end up working basic jobs along with the nerds that don’t become famous writers or producers. The whole area is filled with failed rock stars, actors, etc. It’s an awful place. A f-ning nightmare actually unless you are wealthy or just visiting.

Only the 18 year old females should be let in. Maybe women would stop supporting mass immigration if that happens.

As far as keeping things running, Gavin Newsom has certainly been keeping people running out of California–it’s the state with the highest loss of population.

That has long been the plan.

They want to push out family oriented Whites and replace them with Hispanics.

It’s been a resounding success in fact. The Democrats have a supermajority thanks to Hispanics and can pass whatever they want.

Don’t forget about how Republicans told us that Hispanics are natural conservatives.

Due to hype I reckon.

Most Spielberg films are formulaic – if you saw one, you’ve seen all. The exceptions are those that were not commercial blockbusters. My favorite Spielberg film is probably Empire of the Sun though I also liked Duel.

Most Spielberg films are formulaic – if you saw one, you’ve seen all.

So if you have seen Indiana Jones then you have seen Jaws and Jurassic Park?

But ET is definitely overrated and he has done some straight to DVD crap that no one talks about like Ready Player One and Adventures of Tintin.

OT: Magnet school delays telling students of National Merit Awards in the name of equality, so the winners can’t use it on their college applications. It looks like Asian students were disproportionately affected.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/top-virginia-high-school-accused-withholdin

Nice coinage, “unsightly valley”.

I liked both Avatars fine. I don’t mind the ugliness. Any animated characters are ugly, except maybe Disney and some Japanese products. So why not embrace the ugliness of the virtual worlds in which we increasingly find ourselves?

What made the water Avatar loooong for me was that they seemed to always be fighting. I like a good battle scene, but not hours of them.

What I liked about the first one were the equal parts wonder at discovering a magical world and kick-ass action scenes. And a nice tale of redemption. The new one? Eh. Revenge, family dynamics…

Having just watched a defense of colonialism, in the third movie I’d like to see a treatment of the “positive aspects of” colonialism and industrialization angle. We’re not likely to be talking to trees or jacking into beasts, so how about talking about some of the good sides of our very very flawed civilization?

“That has long been the plan.

They want to push out family oriented Whites and replace them with Hispanics.”

Actually it’s the plan for the entire country. And not just Hispanics — they’re steadily pushing out UMC/educated whites in the managerial and tech overclass and replacing them with dots and Chinese. In education, they’ve already replaced normal whites with gays and psychopath ideologues. The student body in the universities is largely foreigners and POCs. The military is… well, you probably already know. The only people who will not be replaced are Guess Who.

Elections are now irrelevant, all policy is entirely controlled by cliques and palace eunuchs and Hof-juden, not the people. White Americans are now essentially a voiceless, stateless people. The Jewish destruction of America is approaching its mop-up phase. And trust me, the remaining whites WILL be mopped up.

Imagine Wallace Shawn righteously dispatching NYC pimps. “Evil doers beware!”

Actually, Scorsese’s film is inseparable from NYC, while Malle’s could be filmed in Barcelona or Frankfurt & it wouldn’t make much difference.

Andre’s & Wally’s “arguments” are, generally, variations on Gurdjieff’s “man is asleep” theme with rational anti- Jungian synchronicity refutation added plus expected critique of liberal affluent capitalism (when you’re not the affluent one).

Ahhh….got it! I suppose we could do worse!

Demensha Coleman, more like.

How is that even possible?

Yet, if you ask today’s 8/9 year olds E.T. is probably the only one they will have see

E.T. has really good trailers.

It really looks like a special movie from the trailers but the best scene is the bike launch and it takes forever to get there.

Someone should do a fan cut that is only 30 or 40 minutes.

Never-ending Story is the same way. Has a great trailer but what a slog to get through. Same for Dark Crystal. Those are family movies that people own but never watch.

Shrek is an awful creation: Crude from beginning to end. The lesson being taught is tolerance and love of all ugliness, no matter how vile. Except for short people. They have small peckers and can be mocked endlessly.

For some reason, I take offence to that.

Baby monkeys and apes are cute. Cuter than human babies. What do you make of that?

The ultimate battle scene was very well-done with land, naval and air elements. But there were still some hilarious lapses in logic and juvenile writing. It was the last Star Wars movie I saw and I wrote a review on it a while back, so I remember the bullet points pretty well from when I was watching this thing unfold in the theater.

–The unremitting, heavy-handed, villainous villainy of the Imperial villains. Like, none of these millions of men in service to a highly successful empire have wives, families, value systems, complex motivations?

–I don’t recall much of the plot, but the scene that sets the movie in motion came off as contrived and illogical. Mom wouldn’t get herself killed and abandon her daughter when the Empire shows up to commandeer hubby. Mom takes the family with hubby and tells him to figure out how to extract a big pile of FU money and they’ll leave when the job’s done.

–This rogue unit is creeping around a heavily guarded military base that’s absolutely lit up with radar and smart tech and nobody even notices them.

–The controls for the defensive dome are located 1,000 feet off the ground, on an open-air platform, as the set-up for some dramatic hand-to-hand fight scene.

–The plans for the super-weapon are on some sort of long-ago-far-away version of a floppy disk, prompting this unintentionally hilarious hot-potato game as the rebels dodge Big Bad Darth. Why wouldn’t you just upload it into your mobile computer and transmit it to whoever you need?

–Speaking of, a bunch of 10-year olds cheered when Vader finally showed up. Also, whoever was in the Vader costume had none of the measured, graceful movements of English bodybuilder David Prowse.

–The heroine is noticeably petite despite being draped in layers of soldierly-looking cloth to camouflage her lithe figure and short stride. Imperial storm troopers in full armor are swept off their feet and knocked unconscious with sticks.

–The most compelling character was the big android guy. The humans were wooden and unsympathetic; Garth Edwards got zero range out of them but he directs monster films. Also, this galaxy far, far away seems strangely devoid of romance and sexual tension between young adults in their prime but again, it’s a film you take kids to.

–Galaxy-spanning tech, warp-speed travel, death-stars but nobody seems to have gotten round to terra-forming. There is no need for desert planets or snow planets.

–They’re having to continually mine the franchise for “prequels,” so there’s this whole tendentious plotline that has to build and then retrospectively kill off all the characters because they’re not going to show up in the earlier films. You must have zero sense of irony to work as a writer for the Star Wars franchise. Part of this of course requires CGI-Peter Cushing and CGI-Carrie Fisher, which was extremely distracting and unrealistic to me, having actually seen Cushing and Fisher decades ago.

E.T. never appealed to me, not because I wasn’t a kid or because I didn’t speak English, but because it was alternatingly saccharine and coarse. For me, it didn’t have the charm or the genuine sense of thrill of The Goonies or Gremblins.

I recently re-watched E.T. for the first time in years. And… it’s not that good. The Spielbergisms in the direction are tiresome as hell. Shot after shot with light piercing through fog, even in the kid’s bedroom! The humor is still pretty decent. And the heart-renchy stuff is ok.

The best part about E.T., frankly, is how everybody in it is white, and there is zero politics of any kind. If they filmed it now, at least one of the kids would be bi-racial, the single mom would be depicted as a hero (with a black boyfriend) instead of a frazzled mess, and the gang of kids in the bike scene would have a fat Asian, a gay Hispanic girl and who knows what else. It’s also cool that the gang of bike riders is entirely boys. No token go-grrrrllll nonsense.

As for The Goonies, I watched that for the first time in my life a few weeks ago, on a whim, wondering what the fuss was about. And it’s one of the worst pieces of garbage I’ve ever seen. A totally idiotic movie in which every line of dialogue seems shouted or screamed. Awful. What do people see in that movie?

Ride the High Country

If you got eleven minutes to spare…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukie

Nukie is a 1987 South African science-fiction film directed by Sias Odendaal and Michael Pakleppa. The film stars Anthony Morrison, Steve Railsback, Ronald France, and Glynis Johns.[1] The plot concerns an alien, Nukie, who crash lands on Earth and seeks help from two children to reunite with his brother, Miko, who has been captured by the US government.[2] The film was considered a knock-off of Steven Spielberg’s 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial[3] and is also considered one of the worst movies ever made.

https://unobtainium13.com/2015/09/05/film-review-nukie-1987-dir-sias-odendal-and-michael-pakleppa/

I always thought of Rogue One as the “Guns of Navarone” in space. People operating behind enemy lines.

Hollywood is filled with bitter nerds that resent their midwest cousin for not just having a decent life but enjoying it.

The most beautiful of Mrs C’s high-school classmates headed out to LA because that is what the most beautiful classmate does everywhere.

This woman is now happily married to a farmer in Iowa.

Steve,
I hope you comment on Pele (Edson Arantes do Nascimento). Three wives (all non-black) and seven children.

I never saw ET once. When it came out, my Navy Cross uncle said it was silly and sentimental. Always thought I should watch it. But I have always been worried, I’d agree with him.

Looking at the stuff Spielberg does, it seems to cleave to the cloying stereotypes (Close Encounters, AI). Probably the movie of his I liked the best was Minority Report.

There’s still time.

You’re so right about E.T. Have never revisited it even once since I was eleven.

I still haven’t seen it even once. I wasn’t even interested in seeing it as a kid, and the primary reason was the ugly lizard looking alien. If that thing landed in your backyard, any normal person would want to blast it away with a shotgun rather than help it.

I agree with Sailer that it’s a numbers thing. Designers can come up with cool or lovable aliens – eg Chewbacca or ALF (from the tv series) – but they’re mainly cool and lovable because there’s only one of them. If the movie were set it a world containing huge numbers of Wookiees or ALF’s, it would hit the viewer very differently.

It’s similar to race and immigration. Numbers determine virtually everything about how race and immigration are experienced. A few or many? It makes all the difference. No matter how much feelgood propaganda is shoved down people’s throats, they still react according to the logic of numbers.

Cameron had two success with sequels.

Aliens but not his idea.

Terminator 2, his idea.

The remaining Terminator sequels sucked from what I hear.

I hear Way of Water has to gross 2 billion to barely break even.

Waterworld is a tremendous movie but it bombed big.

Will Way of Water be the Waterloo for Camoron?

Instead of making a movie, he should just build a giant aquarium and fill it up with fantasy creatures. It could be like Disney world.

You think the Hobbits in the LOTR are ugly? I didn’t like the films, but the hobbits are not presented as ugly in any of them. If anything, they’re presented as cute young teenagers with hairy feet.

Sometimes movies become great not because of the story or characters, but because they contain very memorable scenes or shots or visuals, almost screen-caps. Let’s face it, 2001 is long, boring and incomprehensible, but it has something like two dozen very memorable scenes and visuals. (HAL singing “Daisy” as it gets shut down, monkey throws bone in the air and smash-cut to a spaceship rotating the same way, the mystery black monolith, the incomprehensible Space Baby at the end, you get the idea.)

ET is a great movie almost entirely because of that brilliant shot of the bicycle flying across the moon.

Most animals seem so different from us that we appreciate them in their own right.

Now if we could only think this way about races.

I’d rather look at a warthog

We still have “seething ghetto riots”!

Now if we could only think this way about races.

As I said, we do. Or at least, I do.

Which leads me to the question of female erotic idiocy: their throwing themselves at black ugly celebrities, ugly by any standard imaginable (Wilt Chamberlain, Tiger Woods, and Pele- sorry Pele for putting you in this company because, as far as I know, you were a truly good man).

Female promiscuity is disgusting even with white celebrities, but white lotharios have been, at least, attractive (I’m judging by male standards): from Valentino to Nicholson and Beatty.

Forget about the “manly” meme,because those blacks were not manlier due to different racial physiognomies which separate them from male Caucasians.

But apes and monkey do resemble us, and we can’t help applying human standards, and that makes them seem somewhat grotesque.

‘…A third man was shot in the head and was taken to a hospital.’

Demesha needs a tutorial on ammunition and possibly hand gun selection.

Then again, maybe not. After all, we may find ourselves meeting Demesha under different circumstances.

‘That cheap, fully jacketed stuff: that’s what you want. You load up with that, girl.’

Them hobbits look like a Trekkie Soyboy Convention.

Ewwww.

But both guys got older, and among other things and as with most men the estrogen dial starts to tick upward, so that hard grittiness has taken a back seat to sentiment and emotion.

One of the reasons I have never quite been able to take Sailer seriously is because one of my first experiences reading him occurred when I somehow happened across this ancient post from the old iSteve blog:

The latest crisis besetting affluent white women

In this post, Steve confesses to being a low-testosterone kind of guy who prefers golfing to driving around in muscle cars. He further states that this predilection became socially useful to him when the alpha-male executives, with whom he worked, aged into their 40s, experienced a testosterone drop, and traded in their muscle cars for a day on the links, thereby enabling him to hobnob with them and show off his knowledge of the local golf courses.

I found this very disturbing for two reasons: 1) I had to wonder about the perceptions of a person who would carve up the world in this way and assign cause and effect in such a haphazard manner; and 2) I’m a little creeped out by the lack of moral fiber in someone who would basically admit to being a cuck and who declared that he didn’t really have a problem with being a loser in the game of life as he understood it. Let’s take these one at a time.

1) I don’t think there is any one-to-one correspondence between cars and testosterone levels. For my part, I am not a car guy, as I have mentioned before. I have never been interested in cars, or auto-racing, or motorcycles, or any of that stuff. But there has never been any problem with my testosterone levels; cars just aren’t my cup of tea. For the record, I have no interest in golf, either. Obviously, whether or not you go in for these activities has everything to do with your social conditioning and whatever is de rigueur in the crowd you run with. A man with a strong will to dominate will want to have the fastest car on the strip if cars are his thing, and he will want to beat everyone else at golf if golf is his thing, but can anyone honestly say that the car-guy’s will is stronger than the golf-guy’s will, or that any of this was caused by miniscule differences in T-levels, much less that a miniscule change in T-levels would cause a guy to shift from cars to golf? No, this is all ridiculous. A man whose mind works in this way is not only engaging in extremely shallow materialism, he is also catering to some very crass stereotypes that wouldn’t survive the light of day or a few moments’ critical scrutiny.

2) One of the more glaring problems with evolutionists is the fact that the vast majority of them are not good candidates for “the fittest.” They love to talk about dominance and survival and sexual selection as the laws of the universe, but have they applied their criteria to themselves? Maybe if they really were Nietzschean supermen, their claims would be a little more believable. Maybe if they were all 6’7”, and looked like Tom Selleck, and had constantly made their living by plundering and destroying lesser men, they would be more credible when they propounded their paganism. Instead, we get a lot of these nerdy little Wallace Shawn types who crow like Achilles and scoff at the restraining morality which is the only thing preventing them from ending up a castrated galley slave. Only a pair of desperate psychological defense mechanisms working in tandem can explain this bizarre disparity. In the first place, instead of the fortunes and vagaries of life, they think they’ve identified a game; and in the second place, they think that, in merely identifying the game, they’ve won the game. Thus, the ego builds up layers of protection around itself to prevent falling into despair when they realize their insufficiency.

This forms the root of everything you will get from Sailer, which is why he hasn’t been correct on any of the signature issues of our times.

So probably much better than Mack And Me.
South Africa is truly a great source of bad movies. They gave the world the Or Die series, in which almost nobody dies, and I believe the Apple was filmed there. Gold is melodramatic goofkino but parts of it are very good.

That, and my Fellow Whites control Hollywood. You know how much they love to make films hating on Whites.

Whites bad, non-Whites good.

James Cameron now lives in New Zealand. No Schwartzes there, which might be a major appeal for him.

That’s why the ending to LA Confidential is a happy one. People survive Hollywood and escape it.

Mr Ed was a hit for years and a standard rerun for longer. It’s actually really hard to find something about which a skilled writer cannot make comedic material.

There is nothing wrong with laws that preserve ethnic/racial composition of a nation. In fact, that’s what nations are for (erm, unless those nations are just “ideas” lol).

Spielberg said later that ET really was about Jews. ET was the talented, misunderstood, persecuted Jew minority in a sea of goyim. The central message of the film was that Jews feared but deep down love the goyim and the goyim should tolerate and celebrate them. Good schtick.

A common mistake is believing “fittest” means being the strongest. No. It means being able to survive long enough to reproduce. That’s all. Survival of the fittest doesn’t mean survival of the best, look at Germany, all the best Germans died in WW2, the ones able to crawl were the “fittest” to survive. Which Jews made it out of the camps? Not the ones who were tough and stood up to the guards, not the ones who shared their food or tried to help the sick and injured. Those who could hoard, who would steal a sick prisoner’s food, who would rat out the troublemakers, who would crawl through the dirt, survived. They weren’t the best, they were the fittest.

I didn’t say they were manly; they’re just not ugly.

I’m a Millennial and you’re wrong.

How is that even possible?

As the Maestro said when asked by a tourist “How does one get to Albert Hall?” Practice, dear boy, practice.

I lean closer to the theory that it was a mockery of the gospel (three from the sky, government persecution, sacred heart, apparent death and rising, healing of wounds, return), but probably, it was He-Man or Strawberry Shortcake happening to get one of the best directors working: a cynical 80s market targeting, seeking how to reach all those keeds. I am suspicious of all claims that somebody “remembers” years later that there was this whole subtext nobody picked up on.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/29/football/brazil-pele-soccer-died-intl-latam-spt/index.html

I would absolutely talk to a lawyer even if unable to sue. Imagine working like an Asian and then not getting what you worked for. There should be a hashtag, Hurting Asians Doesn’t Help Blacks.

More like Intelligent Dasign-language-would-be-better-for-you. (And us.)

From now on, just communicate in ASL, so the rest of us won’t understand your tedium.

Goonies was great if you saw it when you were young. Bunch of kids stumble across a treasure map, set off on their bikes, fight off the badbies, have an all round awesome adventure. What normal kid wouldn’t have wished for something like that to happen? I watched it again a few years ago and my feeling was lol, what is shit? Didn’t age well at all.

3 hours of water being sprayed in your face? Not for me in any way, shape or form but do color me impressed.

The Chinese have already taken over and several key policies and communications have clear Chinese characteristics. How best can we serve our Chinese masters as faithfully as Mitch and Nancy?