Martha Bayles: January 2010 Archives

Looks like Confucius is not going to whip any blue butt this movie season.  According to this latest report, the sage is not attracting enough business to justify keeping him on all the 2-D screens in China.

According to this brief item in today's New York Times, the Chinese government has yanked Avatar from the vast majority of that country's movie theaters in advance of the time it was scheduled to close - and replaced it with a new state-sponsored biopic of Confucius.

Whatever the merits of this new biopic, Avatar is so hugely popular in China, it's hard to imagine why the government would choose to market its own film in such a counter-productive way.

For reason, some have suggested that the climactic scenes in Avatar of giant bulldozers moving in on people's land is striking a chord with the many dispossessed people in China. Needless to say, this is not an interpretation that would not have occurred to most of Avatar's American critics (including me).

In case you missed it, this parody promo reveals the many parallels between Avatar and a semi-forgotten animation feature, Fern Gully, released from Fox in 1992.  Same company, same theme, as you will see.  I still like Avatar better, because it is much more impressive to look at -- not because of its updated politics, which I'd describe as anti-globalization ca. 1995 (with a soupçon of crowd-pleasing anti-Bush venom thrown in).

The biggest box office success of the year is unfolding with Avatar, not just in the US but around the world.  Indeed, this new special-effects extravaganza from James Cameron may be the film to break the all-time record of his previous smash hit, Titanic.

I enjoyed Avatar immensely, but in this op-ed from the Boston Globe, I wonder whether it signals a new genre: the anti-American blockbuster ...