The number of film critics who have indelibly shaped my understanding of the cinema is relatively small, perhaps a half dozen, maybe a dozen at the most. Susan Sontag is chief among them, although I’ve never thought of her as a critic per se. During a youth spent at academic institutions in Berkeley, Chicago, Cambridge […]
A review of James Cameron’s new film AVATAR that explores the historical and theological ideas of the film.
By stripping down his camerawork to such bare elements, he also undoes a lot of the patterns and conventions we usually expect from science fiction. Whether it is intentional or not, Canary makes a lot of the same points as Sontag, who criticized her era of science fiction filmmaking as a fantasy that we use to cope with the terrors of the technological age.