Thread: Avatar

Point #1: syme you white man no tell me proud brown man about co-loe-nee-a-lie-zsation

Point #2:

Originally Posted by Syme

the fact that it included a main character who smoked cigarettes without anything ever being made of it

i think people should be able to smoke if they want to, and by "smoke" i mean both tobacco and marijuana, neither of which i smoke.

but come on. i can't remember ever seeing smoking obviously demonized in the movie theater aside from some "documentaries" where there was full disclosure about the film's message and what person is sending that message, and you're telling me that you don't ever notice "good" characters smoking in movies? the majority of movies have some smoking in them, and often it's the good characters that smoke.

What I meant is that when I saw Sigourney Weaver light up for the first time, I thought to myself "man, before this movie ends, someone is going to hassle her about smoking, or she'll decide to give it up, or something". Then I was pleasantly surprised when it didn't happen. That's not the same thing as expecting smoking to be "demonized", BTW. And yeah obviously there have been recent movies where "good" characters smoked, but I think you are overstating how often it happens, at least in big-name blockbuster-type movies (like Avatar). A quick google research expedition reveals this: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/06/03...ies/index.html, suggesting that smoking in such movies really has become fairly rare in recent years--certainly it does not appear in a "majority" of such movies, if you have to watch four such movies (on average) to see a single smoking scene. Anyhow, I don't want this thread to become a discussion about smoking in movies, so again, all I meant was that I expected something to be made of it in Avatar and nothing was. Maybe it was the overly-preachy nature of Avatar in particular that gave me that expectation, who knows. Or the way in which they had a very famous actress very prominently smoke in her first appearance in the film, that seemed like kind of a set-up. And I don't smoke tobacco either, except for the occasional cigar, and don't smoke weed at all.

Getting back to Avatar, let me also say that I had kind of a hard time cheering for the protagonists in the final battle, since it basically amounted to cheering as alien monsters slaughtered my fellow human beings. Maybe I reveal my shameful speciesist bigotry by saying so, I don't know. I was kind of left wishing that the humans would come back with a much better-equipped expeditionary force and mop the floor with the aliens. Certainly if real-life human history is any guide, and if that unobtainium stuff was valuable enough to justify the initial expedition, that's probably what will happen. Which made it kind of stupid, IMO, when the movie implied that it was all over and the humans would never come back again since their first try didn't work out. Of course they are just going to come back again with more guys and more guns.

Originally Posted by Syme

What I meant is that when I saw Sigourney Weaver light up for the first time, I thought to myself "man, before this movie ends, someone is going to hassle her about smoking, or she'll decide to give it up, or something". Then I was pleasantly surprised when it didn't happen. That's not the same thing as expecting smoking to be "demonized", BTW. And yeah obviously there have been recent movies where "good" characters smoked, but I think you are overstating how often it happens, at least in big-name blockbuster-type movies (like Avatar). A quick google research expedition reveals this: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/06/03...ies/index.html, suggesting that smoking in such movies really has become fairly rare in recent years--certainly it does not appear in a "majority" of such movies, if you have to watch four such movies (on average) to see a single smoking scene. Anyhow, I don't want this thread to become a discussion about smoking in movies, so again, all I meant was that I expected something to be made of it in Avatar and nothing was. Maybe it was the overly-preachy nature of Avatar in particular that gave me that expectation, who knows. Or the way in which they had a very famous actress very prominently smoke in her first appearance in the film, that seemed like kind of a set-up. And I don't smoke tobacco either, except for the occasional cigar, and don't smoke weed at all

Makes sense. Also, my bad: I was citing a out-of-date statistic...