A commenter on this otherwise pedestrian Amazon.com post makes several good observations:
True Lies was Cameron’s most important film on two fronts.
One, it was James Bond with family values. Arnold’s character loves his family and his country; was jealous for his wife, worried about his daughter and would die for his country.
The look on his daughter’s face when Arnold rescued her with the Harrier was priceless. Seeing her sudden, new respect him was a great moment. The touching and hilarious subplots of Arnold dealing with what he thought was an unfaithful wife added to the great action scenes and augmented the standard “save the country from nuclear destruction” main plot.
Two, and more importantly, True Lies was the last big movie to mock Muslim Jihadists. They were buffoons, and properly so. Mockery is a very powerful weapon.
In 1994 we laughed at Muslim nuclear terrorists and didn’t know a Sunni from a Shia. After their successful and very effective attack in 2001 on New York and Washington DC, our brave and edgy Hollywood elites now cower before the mosque and submit their scripts to CAIR for approval.
Hollywood will never cast Muslims as villains again.
Even Jack Bauer’s “24″ has Muslims as misunderstood victims of today’s only allowable Hollywood bad guys: Christians, American capitalists and the US military.
Being [made by] an approval-seeking liberal, [Cameron's] True Lies was an anomaly. Cameron definitely made a mistake to cast Muslims as he did in True Lies and will never do so again.
In 1989′s The Abyss, the bad guy was the US Military, personified by Michael Biehn. By 1997, Cameron was back to form in Titanic, showing us the poor are all innocent and good, the rich capitalists are evil and self-serving and women are held captive by rich white men.
Avatar continues to show us Cameron’s and Hollywood’s heart: America is the bad guy. America is the imperialist evil, screwing the world’s poor and, if given the chance, even the galaxy’s poor.
True Lies was pro-America and pro-family…a happy accident never to be repeated.
And as I quipped this past Wednesday, in response to Newsweek claiming that George Bush (is there nothing he couldn’t do?) caused Hollywood’s downfall in the naughts:
Of course, under Bill Clinton, Hollywood felt free enough to indulge themselves with such fare as Independence Day and Air Force One, the latter of which in particular depicted Hollywood’s ideal president as a tough on terrorists Vietnam-era vet who knew his way around the cockpit of a jet aircraft, and via George Clooney’s Three Kings, would finally do something about Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship.
Sure, like that sort of man might actually exist in real life.
In retrospect, the 1990s arguably saw the last mainstream Hollywood movies produced before political correctness (and its immediate byproduct, BDS) completely enveloped its above-the-line talent.
Avatar is a ripoff of Poul Anderson’s classic novella, “Call Me Joe.” It was written at least thirty five years ago because it was included in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol IIA, published in 1973.
Story was about a crippled man who could inhabit the body of a construct (the term avatar was not used yet in computer tech, although it was part of Hinduism) being used on Jupiter.
The story was far better than the nonsense in the movie. But expect Cameron to be nominated for “Best Original Screenplay” since Hollywood in inhabited by sleaze.
Re: ‘Avatar is a ripoff of Poul Anderson’s classic novella, “Call Me Joe,”’ it’s not like Cameron hasn’t borrowed without prior acknowledgment before: c.f. “The Terminator” story vs Harlan Ellison’s scripts for “Outer Limits” episodes “Soldier” and “Demon With a Glass Hand.” (There was also that Anderson novel “The Avatar,” but that one seems to be more closely related to Frederik Pohl’s “Gateway” than his own “Call Me Joe.” We digress.)
Re: ‘In retrospect, the 1990s arguably saw the last mainstream Hollywood movies produced before political correctness (and its immediate byproduct, BDS) completely enveloped its above-the-line talent.’ I would, of course, beg to argue a bit. I think it wasn’t so much political correctness as it was comfort and complacency among the filmmakers that sucked a lot of joy out of watching a new movie. I’m inclined to think some of the best movies were made when it was harder to make a movie. (Er, a better writer than I has touched this point recently –
http://pajamasmedia.com/eddriscoll/2009/12/19/deconstructing-jar-jar/ .) People like James Cameron came up through the B movie community under the tutelage of Roger Corman. This taught him how to entertain on a low budget, which encouraged, nay, required creativity.* I think the farther he got away from that mindset, the farther he got away from good, honest, crowd pleasing story telling with moving pictures. If that’s right, then politcal correctness is not the cause, but a related symptom.
A few years ago, Cameron gave an interview in which he enthusiastically likened alien invasion movies to whack-a-mole. His premise: Advanced aliens see Earth and think, Those upstart humans are starting to show some promise. Better put them down. Whack-whack. Imperialist countries, he added, have been doing this for centuries.
Therefore, his political correctness is nothing new; he just finally got careless and comfortable enough to indirectly tell his paying audience — who wanted nothing more than to be honestly entertained with some moving pictures — to go to hell for the sake of his own ego. Or so it seems to me.
*On the other hand, a lot of uncreative movies were also made on low budgets, but that’s another story. Either way, political correctness of one flavor or another started overshadowing entertainment value in the late seventies, ’round about the time people stopped calling them B movies and started calling them “independent film.” The decades since have been a refinement of that loss.
One a side note concerning Camerons known hostility to religion. In the movie “A night to remember” if I recall correctly, the clegyman acted with heroism when he started below decks to the men trapped below. “In heaven’s name don’t go down there. IN HEAVENS NAME I AM!” Of course in “titaniic” in the scene with the clegyman, he is dipicted as a rank coward.