Avatar’s Worldview

I resisted seeing Avatar for as long as humanly possible, as much out of sheer contrarianism as anything else, but ultimately I too succumbed to the phenomenon, and got my eyeful of James Cameron’s latest mega-blockbuster, now the highest-grossing film of all time. Cameron, I must confess, is one of those directors I have never known quite what to do with. His technique is impeccable; his technological innovations known to all; and his capacity for tapping into the collective cinematic unconscious, somehow knowing what people want to see before they do, undeniable. And yet, I have always felt that there is something missing from Cameron’s films. He is a Spielberg without the sense of wonder; Kubrick without the burning, uncompromising intelligence; Scorsese without the pervasive sense of Catholic pity. Often, he seems to be a mere sketch of a great director, calculating, obsessive, utterly in control, and yet oddly and persistently empty. Avatar, it must be admitted, is no exception to this.

Everything its admirers and its detractors have said about it is more or less true. The visuals are extraordinary, the action scenes stunning, the special effects flawless, and the pure splendor of it all at times transporting. At the same time, the story is absurdly derivative, the characters stick figures at best, the dialog lamentable, and its politics painfully didactic. There is no doubt that it is enormously effective on its own terms, but one cannot help feeling that everything about it except its special effects is oddly cursory and even amateurish.

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Nuclear Security and the Church of Obamaism

Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent decision to avoid President Barack Obama’s much-hyped Nuclear Security Summit has been met with irritation and dismay by many. Given that Netanyahu’s motivations are reasonable enough, namely the fear that the Arab and Islamic nations attending would turn the conference into a public referendum on Israel’s ambiguous nuclear status, one would expect that his absence would not have raised many eyebrows, especially among the ostensibly worldly chattering classes.

That this was not the case, however, says a great deal less about Netanyahu and the issue of Israel’s decision to avoid a confrontation over its nuclear ambiguity, and far more about the rather desperate lengths to which Obama’s supporters will go in order to maintain the aura of transformative omnipotence that they have built around their hero. The intensity with which they do so would seem to indicate that they are not only trying to prop up the faith of others, but also their own.

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Alice in Wonderland: Feed Your Head

One can almost see the meeting of studio executives that preceded the production of Tim Burton’s new film of Alice in Wonderland. A half dozen cocaine-addled Bard graduates blinking through the aftereffects of yet another night of silicone implanted satyriasis and quietly musing on the possibilities inherent in Lewis Carroll’s century-old fairy tale. “What,” says one, “if instead of being a little girl, Alice is, like, a hot girl-power feminist teenager?” “Cool!” says another, “and what if like, everything that happened in the book happened, like, before.” “Yeah!” says another, “and what if, instead of just wandering around seeing weird things, she has to go Lord of the Ringson, like, something…?” “Awesome!” says a third, “and what if, like, at the end, the Mad Hatter dances like Michael Jackson? That would be so cool.” At this point, someone calls to find out if Johnny Depp is available.

And so it went, one imagines, until the big budget, 3-D, Dolby Sensurround travesty of one of the most beloved pieces of British whimsy literature was completed; leaving the Walt Disney studios a great deal richer and its viewers considerably poorer in every sense of the word.

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Obama’s Israel Crisis

Now that the rift between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government has acquired the status of “crisis,” it is worth stepping back from the details of the spat and looking at the big picture. While the Ramat Shlomo announcement and its immediate aftermath were the immediate cause of the Obama administration’s ire, this was a crisis that was waiting to happen and was probably inevitable. The primary reason for this is the fundamental disconnect between Obama and Netanyahu, not only as personalities but, more importantly, in terms of their long term goals for Israel and the Middle East.

To a certain extent, Obama and Netanyahu deserve each other. As I have written before, they are, ironically, remarkably similar in many ways. They are both charismatic, articulate, extremely image conscious politicians whose capacity for visionary rhetoric often far outstrips their competence. Both have been accused of being essentially empty and shallow personalities, which is true in both cases to some extent, but ignores the fact that they are also ideologically driven idealists with very clear visions of the future they are striving toward.

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Scorsese’s Element

Roughly five minutes into Shutter Island, I knew more or less how it would end. For a film that invests another two hours and fifteen minutes in building to an ostensibly shocking twist ending, this is not a particularly good thing. All the more so when the film in question is the work of someone who many cinephiles (and I count myself one of them) consider to be the world’s greatest living filmmaker. Shutter Island is most certainly not a bad film, but from the likes of Martin Scorsese, it cannot be considered anything other than a disappointment.

One could argue, of course, that we should simply be grateful to see another Scorsese film at all. In an era when most of his contemporaries from the 1970s New Hollywood era have either burned out (William Friedkin, Peter Bogdonavich), died (Robert Altman), or retreated into comfortable mediocrity (Steven Spielberg, George Lucas), the fact that Scorsese is still making films, and still making them with something like the uncompromising intensity of his youth, often seems like reason enough to be indulgent.

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Biden in Israel

The Israeli press must have been happy to wake up this morning. While the arrival of American Vice President Joe Biden in Israel was an event, no one expected much more from it than the usual exhortations of goodwill and a few gestures toward reviving the peace process. Yesterday’s announcement by the interior ministry that it has approved the building of 1,600 new housing units in Ramat Shlomo, a religious neighborhood in East Jerusalem, however, handed our hapless press corps nothing less than a full-blown diplomatic incident.

The circumstances under which the plans were approved and announced remain unclear, with both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Interior Minister Eli Yishai claiming that it took place without their knowledge and professing their embarrassment over the timing of the announcement. According to Haaretz, Yishai professed on Israeli radio that “The district committees approve plans weekly without informing me,” and “If I’d have known, I would have postponed the authorization by a week or two since we had no intention of provoking anyone.”

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The Jews vs. Joe Lieberman

Hating Senator Joseph Lieberman has been a favorite liberal pastime for years now, but it recently reached new heights of invective, as Lieberman emerged both as a strong supporter of the Afghanistan surge and then as a possible obstacle to passage of the health care reform bill in the United States Senate. American liberalism has, since the 1960s, displayed a remarkable capacity for devouring its own, but the spectacle of an entire political movement engaging in a campaign of feverish character assassination against one of its former vice-presidential candidates was truly remarkably to see. More fascinating still was how the cavalcade of abuse seemed to return again and again, as if by some gravitational force, to the issue of Lieberman’s Judaism, which renders this latest round of hatred deserving of broader consideration.

It must be said that most of the corrosive rhetoric employed in this regard was relatively unremarkable—consisting mostly of childish insults and vaguely comprehensible outbursts of liberal antisemitism. Probably the most remarkable was a combination of the two posted at the semi-literate website Wonkette. Under the title “Monsters,” the author described Lieberman as “speaking from a bottomless pit of pain and sorrow, where he lives on the soul-vapors of crushed children.”

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