Friday 25 December 2009

xmas present

(Incorporating Christmasses Past and Future.)*

I have a new jumper. I bet I'm not the only one. It feels like years ago that I first promised you another photo essay, and you are probably wild with rage that you are still waiting, but that is the way the cookie crumbles. My laptop is a PC; my desktop is a Mac. I meant to do it on my laptop from Little Hallingbury, but Macs are quicker and easier, it transpires, by enough that you are just going to have to hold your horses.

I saw Avatar a couple of days from, it seemed, inside a crisp packet. I am not that susceptible to vacuous action movies, but I enjoyed it. I am still slightly surprised at myself, because it pushed various bugbear-buttons (they're a thing, in case you hadn't heard) hanging over from my increasingly distant academic past: noble savages and ethereal spiritualism, that sort of thing.

Thoughts I had:
- is there any film anywhere of any real predator mid-chase snapping its jaws constantly on thin air (at best) or twigs, trees and anything else in the way?
- did the marine character really say at the start that the local fauna would eat your eyes for jujubIEs (instead of prouncing it jujubes)? I hope so
- how come the fauna of Pandora evolved consistently six-legged apart from the humanoids? Surely even a vestigial pair of limbs would be nice to signal that James Cameron had consulted a top international biologist such as myself (I recommend, on this front, that you read Your Inner Fish)
- I think films whose drama depends on positions of power and general decision-making being held by obvious morons are living on thin ice

However, as I say, to my surprise, I enjoyed Avatar.

* Not really. I am not a wizard.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I should hope he said 'jujuBEES' because that is how the word is pronounced, assuming the character was not referring to the Chinese fruits but to the dentally perilous American candy I love so much,

Robert Hudson said...

He said that. I have investigated. Your pronunciation is correct for your brand-name sweet which I had never heard of. I love the word when used for a generic sweetie, like it is everywhere else, where it is two-syllable. And not subject to intellectual property laws.

Similarly, I like the word juju.