We’re not blue down here, though.

This particular take on the true-life story focuses on the power of maternal love (at least for me), and so the main character is the mother. It’s a star vehicle for Sandra Bullock, and that’s what it is and I don’t think the movie makes apologies for that. There’s not a ton of focus on the father either (though if you read the real stories, he was far more integrally involved than what we see here). So in a story about the effect of nurturing, a choice was made to focus on the mother rather than the son. But I don’t think there was a choice to focus on white people rather that black people. There are just more white people in the environment being depicted.

It would be false to give Michael bunches of eloquent dialogue to make him fully drawn, because that’s not the way the character would express himself. His expression is physical not verbal, and that bodily expression is manifest not only in athletics, but just in the way he holds himself, the way he moves in the world. I think you need to give the actor more credit for all that he communicates through his posture, his walk, the look in his eyes. A writer and a dancer are both expressive, but in different languages.

But yes, fine, it’s Sandra Bullock’s movie because it’s a Sandra Bullock movie, but I don’t feel like I don’t know this kid.

And finally, I think it still needs to be sussed out whether the movie embraces Republican politics just because it embraces a Republican.

Thinking about Miyazaki’s originality and general obscurity, and then thinking about Avatar and James Cameron… it just makes me sigh a little louder.

Didn’t see the movie, don’t expect to spend any money to see it, so obviously my take on the movie is necessarily third-hand. But I have heard that, in the movie, Sandra Bullock has to teach him about how his position is all about protecting people — like the Tuohys! — when, in the book, it is made explicit that Michael never needed any such intervention and had in fact scored off the charts on his protective instincts since he was a child.

As to “Avatar,” I have to admit that I got none of that and in fact never managed to get past the one-dimensional characters, and the hamfisted dialogue, and the tribal swaying, and so forth, so my reaction to that movie can fairly be characterized as: “Oooh, pretty. Hee. Hee hee. Heeeeeeeeeeee hee hee — oh, pretty — hee hee HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.” (That last part being the moment when the giant robot exoskeleton proved to be equipped with a giant knife in a giant hip-holster. A KNIFE. For giant-robot-exoskeleton street-fighting, one presumes.)

Nonetheless, I can’t deny that this film was built on some universal, genuinely positive messages about the momentum of hatred and xenophobia and the need for strong, open-minded people (like Sully, Neytiri, etc.) to stand up to it. In a way, I’m falling into a trap that I’ve always struggled to avoid: I’m judging the movie by external standards, asking it to deliver a certain socially-informed complexity that it never promised.

Also, I’m not sure I’ve ever read a defense of white/human/etc guilt as a motif. It was an interesting angle, perhaps underrepresented in discussions of race relations.