District 9 versus Avatar

Last year I blogged about two science fiction films that had been nominated for Oscars: Oscar battle: District 9 versus Avatar |Khanya, though in the end neither of them won and the winner was a film that had a meaningless (to me) title The hurt locker.

I had seen District 9 when it was first released, and blogged about it here, but had not seen Avatar until it was shown on TV a couple of nights ago, so now, for the first time, I'm in a position to compare them, though I should probably watch District 9 again, as it's 18 months since I saw it.

I hadn't realised that Avatar was satire until I saw it. Most of the descriptions I'd read suggested it was a kind of parable of colonialism, and that while it was science fiction, and so broadly in the same genre as District 9 I didn't realise how directly comparable they were.

I enjoyed Avatar, but I think District 9 was better.

In District 9 the satire works at multiple levels, not least because it satirises the genre itself. In one scene, where the protagonist Wikus van der Merwe is driving a robocop-type machine, it could even be satirising Avatar. In District 9 there are no good guys, there are wheels within wheels and plots within plots and the satire is liberally splashed on everyone.

Spoiler altert - if you haven't seen Avatar, what follows gives away the plot

Avatar, by contrast, is much more simple. It is like an old-fashioned Western, where the white hats fight the black hats, and the white hats always win.

The plot can be summarised in one sentence: Redskins fight Palefaces; Redskins win and send Palefaces home.

Only in this case the redskins are blue, and "home" is another planet.

In District 9 the aliens are stranded on earth, in an anything but beautiful environment. In Avatar the earthlings themselves are the aliens, out to rape the planet of its mineral wealth and exterminate any natives that get in their way. The natives, Na'vi, live in a beautiful environment that the alien earthlings destroy, and it is an environment that earthlings cannot even live in. They can only enter it by creating remotely controlled avatars, using alien DNA - another parallel with District 9, where Wikus van der Merwe becomes contaminated with alien DNA, which makes him a desirable property to corporate and Nigerian gangsters.

On another level Avatar has parallels with C.S. Lewis's novel Out of the silent planet, which has the same theme of science and high finance in an uneasy partnership to exploit another planet, Malacandra (Mars). In Lewis's book the natives have a similar relationship to a planetary deity, the Oyarsa, as the Na'vi in Avatar have with their deity Eywa. But Out of the silent planet doesn't end with the same shoot-'em-up scenes as Avatar.

Avatar is entertaining and has a moral message, and no doubt deserved the Oscar it got for special effects, but it falls a long way short of District 9

American Communism and the Rise of Feminism

I read this article on American communism and the rise of feminism, and I couldn't work out whether it was serious or a tongue-in-cheek send-up. savethemales.ca - American Communism and the Rise of Feminism:

In a 2002 book, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation, feminist historian Kate Weigand states: 'ideas, activists and traditions that emanated from the Communist movement of the forties and fifties continued to shape the direction of the new women's movement of the 1960s and later.'(154)

In fact, Weigand, a lecturer at Smith College, shows that modern feminism is a direct outgrowth of American Communism. There is nothing that feminists said or did in the 1960's-1980's that wasn't prefigured in the CPUSA of the 1940's and 1950's. Many second-wave feminist leaders were 'red diaper babies,' the children of Communists.

Communists pioneered the political and cultural analysis of woman's oppression. They originated 'women's studies,' and advocated public daycare, birth control, abortion and even children's rights. They forged key feminist concepts such as 'the personal is the political' and techniques such as 'consciousness raising.'

Hat-tip to Ibid.

So what do you think it is?

Satire? A serious academic article? A loony rant? Or something else?

You might be an American Evangelical if...

You might be an American Evangelical if:

10. T-shirts with Christian catch-phrases are a part of your evangelism strategy.

9. Your car is equipped with the ever-popular license plate frame that reads, "In case of rapture, the car is yours!"

8. You're convinced Jesus was a Republican.

7. Tim LaHaye's Left Behind book series is gospel truth.

6. Your favorite authors are Stormie Omartian and Joel Osteen.

5. Anyone who disagrees with you has taken the wide path.

4. You're convinced Sarah Palin has a bright future as a political candidate.

3. Your notion of God's purpose for your life happens to correspond nicely with upper middle-class suburban life.

2. You can't fit anymore music on your ipod because it's full of songs by John Tesh and Michael W. Smith.

1. You feel this post is alienating and abrasive, and your first inclination is to unsubscribe from this blog.

With acknowledgements to Christians in Context: from orthodoxy to orthopraxy.: Top Ten Marks of a Mainline Evangelical.

The Beaker Common Prayer

Here's an interesting satire on fluffy bunny spirituality. Hat-tip to St. Aidan to Abbey Manor: Revised Prayer Book issued

The Beaker Common Prayer:

So I was looking for a form of exotic spirituality that would let me make a fortune. But which one? I had a large house with plenty of space to expand, so it had to be rooted in the Bedfordshire landscape somehow. The Celts had been done. And Buddhism’s just so Islington, don’t you think? I thought of traditional Norman spirituality – but no-one’s gonna buy sitting in a Gothic chapel mumbling unintelligibly. Apart from the Prayer Book Society. But sitting up late in my conservatory one night, reading about the mystery of the Amesbury Archer, it all fell together. Because this early Bronze-Age man, buried within the environs of Stonehenge, was a Beaker Person. My third piece was in place.

Random acts of political correctness

Yesterday I posted some thoughts about giving money to street beggars as an act of Christian charity that some people wanted to outlaw. A couple of commentators seemed to have a problem, or at least a query, about my calling this Christian. Then Notes from a Common-place Book: Those Wacko 'Love Thy Neighbor' Christians pointed me to this:
I'm Not One Of Those 'Love Thy Neighbor' Christians | The Onion - America's Finest News Source:

I'm here to tell you there are lots of Christians who aren't anything like the preconceived notions you may have. We're not all into 'turning the other cheek.' We don't spend our days committing random acts of kindness for no credit. And although we believe that the moral precepts in the Book of Leviticus are the infallible word of God, it doesn't mean we're all obsessed with extremist notions like 'righteousness' and 'justice.'

It's good to be reminded of the need to live a balanced Christian life and to avoid fanaticism and extremism. Perhaps that's what it means to be "a moderate".

Hymn parodies

PamBG's Blog: Very Entertaining has links to some amusing hymn parodies, including this one:

Let us, with an open mind,
Put the formal Church behind:
Sea of Faith, O let us sing,
For we don't believe a thing!

Cupitt's books we try to read,
But our minds he doth exceed:
Sea of Faith, O let us sing,
For we don't believe a thing!

But my favourite dates back to the Cold War days, and came from a book called Quake, quake, quake; I can't remember the author.

The day God gave Thee, Man, is ending
the darkness falls at thy behest
who spent thy little life defending
from conquest by the East, the West.

The sun that bids us live is waking
behind the cloud that bids us die,
and in the murk fresh minds are making'
new plans to blow us all sky-high.