Posts Tagged ‘ James Cameron ’

The Attack of the Terminators Is Already Overdue

April 22, 2011
By
The Attack of the Terminators Is Already Overdue

By Mike Gray They should have made the first film and forgotten about the sequels — but that’s not how Hollywood operates: The date 21 April 2011 has been prophesied in the Terminator series as Judgement Day, when the machines rise up and bring about the end of human society as we know it. When you mess around with history — but especially the kind that hasn’t happened yet — you’re going to get confusing discontinuities: TERMINATOR TIMELINE 4 August 1997: The date Skynet goes online according to the first Terminator film 29 August 1997: The first Terminator film claims this is when Skynet becomes self-aware and destroys human civilisation 25 July 2004: This is the date Judgement Day is pushed back to in Terminator 3 after the Skynet research is destroyed in Terminator 2 19 April 2011: The date Skynet goes online in The Sarah Connor Chronicles 21 April 2011: The date in The Sarah Connor Chronicles when Skynet launches its first missiles The creator of the Terminators thinks there’s something more worrisome than berserk androids: “Kyle Reese said in the first film that it was only one possible future — clearly,

Read more »

James Cameron vs. Glenn Beck

March 25, 2010
By
James Cameron vs. Glenn Beck

“King of the World” director James Cameron is holding a grudge over Glenn Beck making a joke about him when Beck had a show over on the unwatched CNN Headline News network three years ago. Beck said the man who foisted “Titanic” on the world — especially Celine Dion’s awful “My Heart Will Go On” upon the culture — must be at least in the running for election to become the Anti-Christ. It was a joke. Did I mention it was three years ago? But, apparently, a mantle full of Oscars and a few billion dollars worth of box office receipts can’t heal the wounds Beck inflicted in jest. Cameron unleashed a profanity-laced tirade Tuesday against Beck, and even The Hollywood Reporter is too dense, biased, or lazy to correctly place the easily discerned reason for Beck’s “offensive” quote. Hint: It has nothing to do with Cameron’s 2007 documentary, “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” which (1) no one has heard of, (2) didn’t air until March of 2007, and (3) aired after Beck’s comments of February 26, 2007. We’ll let the rest of the story be filled in by Beck’s reaction to the flap on his show Wednesday night: Why is

Read more »

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien Are Not ‘Real’ Artists?

March 10, 2010
By
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien Are Not ‘Real’ Artists?

Not according to James Bowman. They and numerous others create what Bowman dismissively refers to as “fantasy art.” And fantasy art isn’t Art. It always surprises me when I run across them, but I have to acknowledge that some folks just don’t like J.R.R. Tolkien. Shocking, I know. The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit. The Silmarillion’s mythopoeic tales. What’s not to like? Great works of art and creativity, right? Well, they might be creative, but they do not qualify as Art. Mr. Bowman is among that group of curmudgeonly scolds that just can’t seem to abide anything that smacks of fantasy. According Bowman, fantasy is not art, at least not in the sense that the term has been understood within the Western mimetic tradition going back to Homer. … Indeed, Western culture is so intimately bound up with the tradition of imitation in art … that the now more than century-long vogue for fantasy art, beginning with George MacDonald, J.M. Barrie, and Kenneth Grahame and continuing through Lewis and Tolkien to the more unrestrained science-fiction and fantasy cinema of our own time, should be seen as a repudiation, conscious or unconscious, of that Western tradition

Read more »

A Horror Comic About an Aborted Child Deftly Avoids Propaganda

February 18, 2010
By
A Horror Comic About an Aborted Child Deftly Avoids Propaganda

A work about abortion easily lends itself to propaganda, either for or against this controversial subject. Matthew Lickona deftly avoids simplistic moralizing around this polarizing issue in his self-published horror comic Alphonse. Lickona understands that “good horror stories are moral anxiety writ large” and “that there is moral anxiety about abortion.” He would like to claim that this is what inspired Alphonse. Lickona sees these truths in his work only when he thinks about it in hindsight, which is always 20-20. In “Why I Did It: How I Came to Write a Comic Book About an Aborted Fetus,” Lickona recognizes the moral anxiety over abortion. I think abortion is “heart-wrenching” because something dies in an abortion—something that, ordinarily, would eventually grow into what everybody agrees is a human person. Some people think this “something” is a human person from the moment of conception. Others think it is a human person only after it leaves its mother’s body. Many others fall somewhere in between, and believe that abortion should be legal, but restricted in this or that way. Why do they fall somewhere in between? I don’t think it’s absurd to suggest that it’s because they’re uncertain. Yes, they affirm a

Read more »

Avatar Review: The Worst Blue Movie I’ve Ever Seen

February 1, 2010
By
Avatar Review: The Worst Blue Movie I’ve Ever Seen

Conservatives have been quick to criticize the megahit movie Avatar for the liberal boilerplate it obviously is, but there are criticisms that are much more effective, that show the true horribleness of the movie on so many levels.  One very funny lad from Milwaukee, I gather (ht Big Hollywood), has done it this way: Part 2:

Read more »

Denying Hollywood’s Agenda Prohibits a Culture of Liberty

January 7, 2010
By
Denying Hollywood’s Agenda Prohibits a Culture of Liberty

The only explanation I can come up with to explain those who deny Hollywood’s left-wing agenda is that they want to remain on the “Above the Line” cocktail party invite list. Either that or they are lying to themselves, and are nothing more than useful idiots to left-wing ideologues. The Washington Post recently reported on Hollywood’s turn toward films promoting spiritual themes. The litany of spiritual themed movies includes Avatar, The Road, The Invention of Lying, The Lovely Bones, The Blind Side, The Book of Eli, Legion, and The Last Station. While many might pause at the “spirituality” the Dream Factory promotes in some of these films, I was struck by this opening quote from Greg Wright, editor at HollywoodJesus.com: “The more paranoid elements of our culture tend to think Hollywood has a proactive agenda, that producers have a grand scheme to use movies to shape the thinking of audiences. I don’t subscribe to that school. I believe that Hollywood gives audiences what audiences want to see. If people don’t want to see movies with certain messages, they won’t buy tickets. So if there’s a trend out there, it’s one reflecting what people are already thinking and feeling.”

Read more »

James Cameron Would Hate to Live on Pandora

December 20, 2009
By
James Cameron Would Hate to Live on Pandora

James Cameron would have a very hard time making his movie in Pandora. In fact, he’d have a hard time just watching his latest spectacle on that planet. Moreover, there is not a lot of time to just sit and meditate on one’s hatred of Western Civilization while trying to survive as a hunter-gatherer. Avatar is another case of hypocritical, liberal-left, “Do as I say, not as I do” moralizing. So argues Popular Science: Unlike Lucas’ more playful science fiction epic, Cameron reaches for a heavy environmental message. Avatar is every militant global warming supporter’s dream come true as the invading, technology-worshiping, environment-ravaging humans are set upon by an angry planet and its noble inhabitants. But the film’s message suffers mightily under the weight of mind-boggling hypocrisy. Cameron’s story clearly curses the proliferation of human technology. In Avatar, the science and machinery of humankind leads to soulless violence and destruction. It only serves to pollute the primitive but pristine paradise of Pandora. Of course, without centuries of development in science and technology, the film putting forth this simple-minded, self-loathing worldview wouldn’t exist. You’d imagine Cameron himself would be bored to tears on the planet he created. There are no movies

Read more »

"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
Subscribe to The American Culture.

 

February 2012
S M T W T F S
« Jan    
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
26272829  

Archive

Twitter Feed!

Follow the American Culture and S. T. Karnick on Twitter! Send message "follow stkarnick1" to 40404 on your cell phone or go to twitter.com.

Packages Seo