Avatar review

1 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

this film made me cry!!, 27 Mar 2010

By

J. Clay

This review is from: Avatar [DVD] (DVD)

i'm only puting 1 star for this film because when i saw it at the cinema it made me CRY! i havent cried so much at a film since i saw new moon, honestly this was the most amazing dilm ive seen since new moon. the only thing that would make this film better is if they someow crossed it with new moon so you could have BELLA and EDWARD togehter on pandora, they could live in piece in harmony with Nature and with each other, there are no werewolves or bad vampires on pandora are there!

really this film gets FIVE STARS!

Reviews:

A. Vlad says: Nice attempt, troll.

Mr J. A. Hetherington says: An opinion is one thing... but REALLY?! There are no words.

Lee J. Simpson says: Are you for real?

Chapman says: Worst. Review. Ever.

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I'm amazed that these comments were all made within a few hours of submitting the review last night. There's a lot of Avatards lurking about Amazon, clearly. To be fair, though, people only have to click on my profile link and look at my other reviews to see that I'm obviously a troll with nothing better to do.

Apart from abusing Avatar fans, I got a job at Durham starting in October. It's left me in the weird position of having July and August free without any work or research planned and I'm trying to work out how to fill them. My ideas so far include one or more of the following:

1) Going on an intensive French course somewhere, probably Lyon

2) Going hiking

3) Sitting at home watching Deadwood

4) Renting a cottage in Donegal through July

Re. number 4, I'd aim to get a place with 2 bedrooms so anyone out there who fancies a summer break in the west of Ireland could come for a week of their choice and we'd share the rent for that week. (The cottage would be about €400 per week.) So if that tickles yer fancy get in touch; if I go ahead I'll need to find somewhere pretty soon in order to book a whole month.

It's a good day to die

Starship Troopers 3 is one of the biggest mistakes ever committed to celluloid, but this song makes it worthwhile.

Car laptop tray

I despair, I really do. (Click to enlarge.)

Eating like a caveman

For the last month I've been following my first ever conscious diet. I started it because I happened to stumble across an online article which led me to the homepage of Arthur De Vany, a professor of economics and fitness guru who's developed something called Evolutionary Fitness. His fairly simple argument is that the best possible diet and fitness regime for humans is the one to which evolution adapted us over millions of years. This does not include any foods produced by agricultural techniques.

This got me looking into the so-called Paleo Diet, which led in turn me to the low-budget comedy documentary Fat Head by Tom Naughton, a kind of rebuttal to Morgan Spurlock's problematic Supersize Me. The basic message of the documentary is that the dietary meme that has been repeated in western societies for the last fifty or so years (saturated fat = higher cholestoral = heart disease) is completely bogus, and always has been.

According to this new (for some people, not so new) theory the healthiest diet for human beings is high in vegetables and high in saturated fat from meat, fish, eggs and nuts, with liberal amounts of sugar from fruit. The most important thing is to avoid simple carbohydrates and trans-fatty acids, since they raise blood sugar levels, cause the body to store the sugar as fat and in many people can lead to diabetes and heart attacks. This means no cereals or grains or starchy foods - corn, bread, pasta, rice, potatoes - and only naturally occurring oils for cooking, so out with corn oil, sunflower oil, any kind of vegetable oil, all of which has to chemically extracted from the plant, and in with ladlefuls of butter and extra-virgin olive oil.

As an experiment I decided to go cold turkey on all cereals and grains and stick with the diet for a month. Since for years I've basically eaten some kind of cereal or grain with almost every single meal, this left me rather disoriented for a few days, but I bought a basketful of herbs and spices, explored forbidding corners of the vegetable market and looked for good lean meat, and soon, for the first time ever, I realised that cooking was actually rather fun.

Having tried it out quite strictly for a month, I see no reason to stop. I've decided there's no point being fascist about it if I'm in the mood for a hot cross bun or a pizza or a takeaway, but so far I haven't missed bread or pasta or rice at all. That in itself says something about my body's needs, I think. I've been experimenting with a few different recipes which I may post at some point. The best thing about the revelation, though, is that suddenly this...

... is good for me. Yes. A good heavy fry-up of quality meat and eggs in a pan of olive oil or melted butter is good for me. All that oil and saturated fat does not clog up my arteries. It was all a humungous myth which has been soundly debunked by the latest research, even if the massive momentum of the health and food industry, with the occasional exception such as the Atkins Diet, will not advertise this fact for years. Provided I also eat lots of fresh vegetables, I could have a fry-up every morning for the rest of my life (minus the bread, of course), and my body would thank me for it. This is happy news indeed.

Oooohhh yeah

Beckship Troopers

During one of my occasional trawls through the blogosphere of the rabid left I came across a clip from Mr Glenn Beck's opinion show on Fox. Beck has hit on a genius formula of being so absurdly irrational and extreme that he is effectively beyond parody. He seems to frustrate the left in part because his arguments are not really arguments at all, but a series of disjointed assertions repeated in similar forms over and over again, like some kind of multi-layered conceptual jazz experience aimed at an audience of Neocon traditionalists.

Anyway, Beck is not very interesting any more. He's like a car alarm that's gone off outside your place of work and shows no sign of stopping; one just has to try to get on with things and try to ignore it. But he said something in the clip which actually made the sci-fi nerd in me laugh.

He was ranting about recent leftist groups who have been protesting against budget cuts in education. Apparently they've been waving suspiciously red banners and claiming that education is a universal right, and indoctrinating schoolchildren with such socialist propaganda.


Beck: Education is not a right, it's a privilege! How many of our students even look at that "right" as a privilege? They sit there, they don't listen! [dramatic pause] Because they don't have to earn it. Unless you earn it, you don't value it.

Leaving aside the fact that moaning about how children never listen in class rather undermines his claims that they're being successfully indoctrinated with anything, his words reminded me of the classroom scene from Verhoeven's classic 90s ultraviolent spacefest Starship Troopers, which, in case you haven't seen it, is set in a kind of Nazi Star Trek version of the future.


Michael Ironside: Let's sum up. This year we explored the failure of democracy, when the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since. You know these facts. But have I taught you anything of value this year? Hm? You - why are only citizens allowed to vote?

Student: It's a reward. What the Federation gives you for doing Federal Service.

Michael Ironside: No. No! Something given has no value!

He took the words right out of Beck's mouth. Beck strikes me as the kind of fellow who might watch Starship Troopers and not realise that the whole package is an ironic spin on Robert Heinlein's thoroughly un-ironic book.

It's bollocks, of course. None of us "earned" the right to be born in the first place. Does that mean we don't value our own lives?

We're not talking about university or college education here. The debate is about basic education. What kind of nutter goes on national TV and claims that no child in the country should have an automatic right to a free, state-provided basic education? What century is this guy living in? Not in the distant future century of Starship Troopers, sadly.

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Someone commented that my blog wasn't allowing anonymous comments, so I've fixed that now. Sorry.