morphizm

Riding on the back of nine minutes of unseen footage, the special edition of James Cameron’s pioneering 3-D masterpiece Avatar returns to theaters Friday. But billions of dollars and path-breaking cinematic innovations later, it’s hard to ignore the part of Avatar’s comeback that tastes like unadulterated robbery.

Those still defending The Hurt Locker’s upset Oscar for Best Picture, which belonged to Cameron’s film using any sensible criteria, are howling into the cold winds of history. Because that’s where defenders of films like the misogynistic My Fair Lady or neurotic Annie Hall hang out, convinced that the short list below of genre films that also became Best Picture losers deserved their fate. They didn’t, and here’s why.

Continue reading Five Shamless Sci-Fi Oscar Robberies, Spearheaded By Avatar

[Matt Pascarella]
Four years ago, on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I sat with Patricia Thomas. Greg Palast and I had just helped her break into her home in the Lafitte Projects. She had been locked out for a year. She showed us her former home, her belongings scattered everywhere, and wrestled out endless stories of post-Katrina life: how she struggled to find shelter over the last year, how they came and put bars on her doors and windows and locked her out, how it was “man made.”

I picked up a photo of her at Mardi Gras, taken a few years earlier, and compared it to what she looked like now. In the picture her hair was longer, her face younger, her smile deeper. Now her arms were wasted and thin, her eyes sunken into her face, and her bottom front teeth were gone. On most days, she told me, she wore her dead mother’s dentures, but today she had forgotten to put them in. Her own teeth broke off when escaping the rising waters. She had fallen face first onto the concrete slab that was her front porch. The very spot where we were sitting was where it had happened. Over my left shoulder, running the length of the building, was a scar, a stain from the water line.

Continue reading No Home Sweet Home: Five Years After Katrina

It wasn’t easy writing this piece, because the reality of John Lennon’s assassination is a heavier load than hyperreality of his simulations. After all, hyperreality’s job is to suck the bleeding life out of reality. Which is why simulations of John Lennon’s assassinations are proliferating across media, from films to comics to tabloid TV and the dark beyond of conspiracy theory. The truth buried beneath Mark David Chapman’s intertextual madness and murder is that one of history’s most revolutionary artists was erased from truth and history. And we’ve have been trying to rewrite both since his media-fueled death, with more ever more spiraling cultural texts stripped of context.

Continue reading Geek The Beatles: John Lennon Assassination Simulations (Abridged)

I asked Jared Leto’s serious brain some questions for Metromix about online crowdsourcing, 30 Seconds to Mars’ new American tour, playing John Lennon’s assassin Mark David Chapman on film, Kanye West’s bad rap and more, But he decided to only answer some of them. MORE @ METROMIX

I had a hard time the night before rapping with visionary author Alan Moore. I wanted to talk mostly about Unearthing, his new multimedia box set with Mitch Jenkins, Doseone, Fog, Stuart from Mogwai, Mike Patton, Zach from Hella and other fine talents. Politics, technology, poetry, deep thoughts. But usually most people want to hear about his legendary comics. I slipped in one question about Comic-Con and then the hate mail arrived.

Continue reading Alan Moore Gives Watchmen the Gas Face

So my excellent AlterNet editor and SoCal pal Jan Frel has been asking me to start muckraking rackets, and it’s been a hoot. I’ve already rooted out Red Bull and the stingy-ass telcos, so now it’s Sealy’s turn.

The mundanity of mattresses belies their insane cost and hyperreal price-jacking. Plus, everyone needs one, and most all of them have zero good memories of buying one. Are you lying down for this?

Continue reading Rackets! Or, Mattresses Are Lame

Remember when the plan was to pour a percentage of your hard-earned salary into a retirement account, usually supplied by your employer? Who then invested your money with the company’s into a series of funds, stocks and economic stratagems? Which were engineered for failure by rapacious banks, secretive hedge funds and other financial assholes gaming the econopocalypse from either side of the class-war divide? Yeah, that plan failed. The new plan? Retirement benefits have no future. I explored the cold economic reality for AlterNet.

Continue reading Welcome to the Retirement Nightmare

Stars Wars is no longer the haven of geeks who like to pretend they’re space-faring saviors. It’s gone viral for decades as a pop-culture cipher begging to be filled in by its fans, and their varied sensibilities. Which is why The Vader Project kicks so much ass, and why I built a gallery about it for Wired. What other franchise could command the arty attention of both hotshots like Marc Ecko and underground legends like Winston Smith, Robbie Conal, The Melvin and more? When that caliber of artistry revises Darth Vader’s head for public auction, that public embraces the dark side of the Force.

Continue reading Darth Vader Feeds Your Head