Avatar.

So yes, three years curiously following the movie. Hearing directors from Steven Spielberg to Ridley Scott saying that this is something revolutionary.

The trailer, to say the least, will be a letdown if you're expecting something amazing. Great expectations, I suppose are rarely met.


The big downer will be the looks of the aliens. Hardly impressive, very unnatural. But then they are aliens and the mind thinks as much. The unfortunate uncanny valley.

Anyway, looking forward to it in 3D. Can't be worse than Transformers 2, can it?

P.S. Seems like most of those who went for Avatar Day (i.e. the worldwide brief preview of Avatar) say that it's the 3D that changes the whole game. Indeed, one notices the mixed reviews for the teaser trailer  vs. the almost universal acclaim for the footage shown on Avatar Day.

I guess one can't judge the film by the trailer. Not that I usually do that. Heh.

Self-Study (Note No. 112)

Looking at MIT's Open Course Ware is a great way at formulating your own self-study curriculum, except that once you have everything in place, you have no idea where to begin.

Listening to one of their classes, you realize that fancy universities have noisy students (the lecturer constantly has to shush the students). And I thought my college wasn't exemplary when it came to talking in class. As someone remarked, it's a universal thing, talking in class.

I realize I read too widely, and I think it's a bad habit .But it is difficult to trim down my subjects of focus. I have over a thousand (digital) books in my library and need to sort them out.

Initial areas of interest: Philosophy, History, Theology- None of which I have a passion in (I no longer have a passion for anything). I only have likes and dislikes, with my most liked being ostensibly the things I would first like to do.

The Hurt Locker

The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug...

The Hurt Locker opens with this framing quote by Chris Hedges (you can find it in an interesting article he wrote here). Framing indeed, because if it was omitted you would have seen this movie in a different light. You would have seen it as just another above average war movie- decent, well-acted but alas forgettable. Such is the power of the opening quote.

What is interesting is what the full paragraph has to say:

"I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth makers -historians, war correspondents, filmmakers novelists and the state - all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks just below the surface within all of us." (Emphasis Added)

Fortunately I have never shared Mr. Hedges experiences, so I cannot comment on this movie's accuracy in approximating actual combat. A few seem to say it does.

As for me, I am impressed by the filmmakers' great pains in depicting simulating Iraq (and I must say, I had to wonder how they were able to film in so gritty and honest locations and conjure up such spine tingling suspense). Of course, the old adage that TV is life without the boring bits stills holds true here.

So does war possess all the attributes Hedges lists above? Excitement, exoticism, a bizarre and fantastic universe? The Hurt Locker says yes. So what can we say about war? War is unreal, war is hell and now, war is a drug. War is many things then, and eventually as the "myth makers" begin to run out of ideas, war becomes anything. That's a scary thought.

District 9

Here's an eviction notice. Not that you'll understand what it is.

One half unsubtle social commentary and another half shoot-em-up, District 9 is fresh but not wholly original. The two halves don't fully mesh together, which would've made for a brilliant movie. Instead we have a National-Geographic/News-ish shaky cam setup (Cloverfield haters might not enjoy the first two-thirds of the movie) which then (devolves?) launches into full guns and blasters and you realize that they put the leftovers props from Halo to good use.

It's good and entertaining and while it becomes frenetic, it never launches into a full-on assault of your senses. Along with Star Trek, the two halfway solid movies of the summer, both happen to be sci-fi. And if Avatar delivers even half of what it's promising, all bets are off as to whether we are going to see another glut of science fiction coming our way (akin to the epic/fantasy binge we saw after LotR).

Not that I'm complaining.

Little Steps

My cat has a routine that is almost impeccable. From morning to evenings she lays on a box near my bed, hidden by a curtain. From the evening to night, she is in my brother's room lingering. I would not know what she would be up to till the dawn, but she's always busy, so I'm assuming as much.

We rarely look out at the night sky because there's nothing to see. Unless its rocks burning up in our atmosphere, then everyone goes out only to find the sky is overcast. In the city the lights drowned out everything. Even here, where stars blossom, I rarely look up. Force of habit, I suppose.

I rarely talk about work because there's hardly anything to say. It's work, in front of a computer screen - oh how dull has the computer made work. Even the car mechanics look at the computer now, because cars have become like computers. Most of the books I read are from a single grayscale screen. Convenient. I miss paper, but then I am rarely sentimental over such things. Things are things, plastic or metal or paper. One would think as much.

Movies and books are getting more boring. I have been watching a lot of movies and reading a lot of books. Have I been learning? Yes. Will one eventually run out of things to learn? Some would I say no. All things come to an end, but I am just too young to understand that, right?

So we take little steps going as slow as we grow and in a few years we realize we have gone so far and the road is going to end and you begin to wonder and regret the things that you had missed and the things that you had done. Would I have done things differently? Of course. Could I have? I don't know.

Most of our paragraphs end with assumptions, indeed most of what we believe in is conjecture. But whatever works, works.