Revisit: Ninja III: The Domination

When your ol' pal Carl Eusebius was but a wee tot, he loved him some Japan. My age being in but single digits (my IQ of course was already immeasurable due to my godlike intellect), I loved four things: He-Man, Godzilla, Voltron, and ninjas.

Now you may have noticed that three of those things are Japanese, and all of them are completely fictional. Yes, in the early '80s Japan was still a mystical wonderland full of inscrutable little folk and their quirky habits, like taking their shoes off indoors and brutally subjugating neighboring countries. It was a more innocent time, before hentai, weeaboos, Pikachu and DESU. Ninjas were kind of like Batman before regular people liked Batman. They dressed in cool costumes, moved in the shadows, carried all kinds of gadgets like grappling hooks and caltrops, and kung fu-ed the shit out of guys. And they had fake-ass mythical weaponry that looked awesome despite having not a chance in hell of being actually effective in combat. Xena: Warrior Princess had her chakram, Batman had his batarangs, and ninjas had shuriken. That's a fancy Japanese word for a star-shaped knife ninjas threw at people to one-shot one-kill them. That's right, no matter where the "ninja star" hit you and penetrated up to one-quarter of an inch through your skin, you immediately keeled over dead. And if the ninja felt like getting closer, he had the ninja-to (that's Japanese for "ninja sword" desu), a shittier version of the katana that was cheaper to make since ninjas historically probably weren't magical superhuman assassins but were peasant bandits who resisted samurai rule by murdering samurai in ambushes, at least when they weren't waylaying and robbing upper-class people.

But we're talking movie ninjas here. The ones who could throw ninja stars and disappear in a cloud of smoke and scale walls barehanded and take off their masks and breathe fucking fire out of their fleshless undead skulls. And in the early '80s, your movie ninja was Sho Kosugi. For those few years that ninjas were king of young white boys' screens, Sho made a half dozen kickass ninja movies. Enter the Ninja. Revenge of the Ninja. Pray for Death. Nine Deaths of the Ninja. Rage of Honor. In the pre-Jackie Chan Rumble in the Bronx years, this was the best martial arts you were gonna get. While mainstream America had its Chuck Norrises and its Jean-Claude Van Dammes, we young lads who could actually find Japan on a map had Sho. He may not have been any better an actor than The Non-Presence That Kicks or the Muscles from Brussels, but as a martial arts performer, he was the best thing the Empire had until we discovered a little known place called Hong Kong....

But all good things must come to an end, and the ninja craze ended quickly indeed. By 1984, the genre was already played out, and so of course schlock auteurs Golan and Globus chose this moment to ensure its final destruction by making a ninja movie of their very own. Take ninjas, mix in some aerobics, garnish with a dash of The Exorcist, and you have the death knell of the ninja film, or as I call it, Ninja III: The Domination.

What can you say about a movie that begins with, to quote a random IMDb person, "the greatest golf course ninja motorcycle helicopter massacre ever put on film." Yes, this movie begins with Evil Ninja murdering, uh, someone, in the middle of a public golf course in broad daylight. (You can see why these cunning assassins were so feared.) Our Evil Ninja proceeds to slaughter approximately 7000 cops who attempt to arrest him, using all of his ninja skills: throwing stars, swords, punching through steel, and editing the film so that motorcycle cops who have already been killed magically appear back on their bikes just in time to crash spectacularly into a river. Two cops in a helicopter, seeing about a dozen cops wiped out by this guy, radio their buddies to "proceed with caution". Proceed with caution?! How about calling in "Officer down!", ya mooks. These two guys politely ignore Evil Ninja as he climbs up a tree directly in front of them and then even more kindly fly very close to the top of the tree so he can climb up the skids and kill them.

Evil Ninja kills a few more guys until the script finally says the cops can tag him with their guns. They shoot him about 900 times but then foolishly creep slowly up on him to see if he's dead, causing him to immediately pop up and kill another dozen of them. The cops then shoot him approximately 185,000 more times, and this time, finally, he...throws a smoke ball and disappears. I don't know why he bothered to leave, really, since he's proven as vulnerable to gunfire as fucking Superman. While the voices of guys saying things like "Where'd he go?" are dubbed over the scene, the cops disperse to find Our Ninja, whereupon he pops up out of the ground(!). The cops being several entire yards away at this point, he slips away unnoticed.

Thus ends, ladies and gentlemen, one of the dumbest and most inept action scenes in film history. It's right up there with Future War's epic battle between Not Jean-Claude Van Damme and Cyborg Ron Jeremy, as they push empty cardboard boxes at each other.

It turns out Our Ninja is indeed kacked, though sadly not before he happens upon telephone linewoman and aerobics instructor Lucinda Dickey, a true thespian and star of both Breakin' AND Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. He makes her grab his sword (his ninja sword, you pervs) while he mutters in Japanese, and so our Flashdance-Exorcist-Nine Deaths of the Ninja "plot" begins.

Every time Lucinda sees one of the cops who shot Evil Ninja to death, we see a flashback of Evil Ninja being shot over 9000 times, and in the next scene Possessed Lucinda murders said cop in some baroque ninja way. Somehow no one ever notices Lucinda's presence at each murder scene shortly before someone turns up dead, nor does anyone see her vehicle (a huge fucking telephone van, mind you) speeding either toward or away from the murder scene. At no point do the police make any connection between the guys getting kacked and the shooting of Evil Ninja, including a cop with moar body hair than fucking Sasquatch who stalks and harasses Lucinda until she agrees to become his mistress and seduces him by pouring V8 all over her breasts. Hairy Cop doesn't bat an eye when Lucinda complains of lost memories, missing time, and unexplained injuries even as his friends on the police force are being systematically murdered by what is clearly a professional assassin. He doesn't think it might be suspicious that she suddenly has a ninja sword that she really doesn't want him to examine. It isn't until he takes her to a Chinese Japanese medium (played by consummate professional Hannibal Chew), who causes her to talk all reverb-y and then transform into one of the worst dummies you've ever seen, that he finally gets a clue. Now convinced (I guess?) she's possessed, Lucinda tries to aerobics her way out of Evil Ninja's next possession attempt, crying "No, not again!" even though she earlier claimed not to remember the possession episodes, but Evil Ninja's sword-wobbling-on-a-string-in-a-laughable-attempt-to-appear-to-be-floating will not be denied, and Lucinda is possessed again in a scene that is absolutely not a complete rip-off of Sigourney Weaver's possession in Ghostbusters. (God, even mentioning that film on this blog gives me the heebie-jeebies.)

Fortunately, Sho, looking rather badass in his eyepatch, has been tracking Evil Ninja, who is revealed in a flashback to be the guy who killed Sho's daddy and took his eye. Being rather faster on the uptake than Hairy Cop, Sho realizes that Evil Ninja's spirit is loose and figures out where he'll strike next. Sho intercepts Possessed Lucinda--decked out in the Evil Ninja's spare set of ninja duds that he apparently kept in his secret cave and luckily fit her perfectly--after she caps another of the cops. Sho kung fus her into submission, but of course lets her go when he finds out she's, like, a girl. The cops arrive and arrest Sho as the culprit, even though he's currently nowhere near the crime scene and is dressed nothing like Possessed Lucinda and is wearing a large eyepatch that Lucinda clearly wasn't wearing and he has no weapons and is much taller and proportionally bigger than Lucinda. Other than that, though, it's an airtight case. Hairy Cop gets in the back of the police cruiser with Sho, who tells him to bring Lucinda and Evil Ninja's sword to "the old temple on the hill" (you know the one). Having seen this man exactly twice, one of which is when he's being arrested by his fellow officers, Hairy Cop immediately agrees to do this. He goes home and points his gun at his new squeeze, ordering her to go to the temple. You know, the old one. On the hill. That one.

Everyone arrives at the climax of the movie. Sho has Evil Ninja's body, so that way the white people can step aside while the Asian guys show their stuff. The last ten minutes of the movie are nonstop fighting, pretty decent ninja fighting for the time, as Sho fights first the monks of the temple (mind-mojoed by the Evil Ninja) and then duels with the Evil Ninja himself. Sho ends up sticking a knife through the top of EN's head (ew!), and Hairy Cop and Lucinda love each other, and the movie just sort of stops.

Ninja III: The Domination is unquestionably the dumbest movie combining aerobics and ninjas ever made. Fortunately, Sho went on to make Pray for Death, probably the best of the ninja movies. And, the year after Ninja III came out, the Schengen Agreement was signed, creating a passport-free zone in the precursor to the European Union. At least this movie did nothing to prevent that.

EJO Review: Miami Vice Episode 2.8 "Bushido"

I've maintained an utter loathing of the television program Miami Vice, sight unseen, since its inception. The music, the clothes, the Don Johnsons...it just screamed crap, and I've spent decades pretending it doesn't exist. Then I saw that godawful Miami Vice film. I should've known better, but it teamed director Michael Mann and actor Jaime Foxx, and we know how great their last collaboration was. (Collateral, for those heathens who don't immediately know what I'm talking about. Yes, Virginia, there are films even Tom Cruise can't ruin.) Being one of the few human beings who doesn't loathe Colin Farrell with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, I dutifully handed over a few bucks to watch Miami Vice. I mean, Gong Li, amirite? It's got Ciaran Hinds; how bad could it be? Pretty goddamned bad, it turned out, and that only reinforced my conviction that Miami Vice the television show should remain as it had been: forgotten, ignored, and shitty.

But I'm doing a series on Edward James Olmos's body of work, so I can't really ignore arguably his best-known role: Lt. Martin Castillo on *sigh* Miami Vice. Yes, Olmos is probably better known for his second banana role on a mediocre '80s cop drama than for Blade Runner, probably the greatest artistic work to come out of that entire godforsaken decade. So I did some Stephenie Meyer-level research (I read parts of Miami Vice's Wikipedia page) and found an episode focussing on Castillo and guest starring Dean Stockwell(!). Nothing's ever been made worse by having Dean Stockwell in it, so I plopped down to watch two of my favourite actors go head to head. Maybe Miami Vice wouldn't suck so bad after all.

And you know what? It didn't, though I'm not convinced that isn't because I cherry-picked an episode all but guaranteed to not be terrible. It wasn't great--being Carl Eusebius, I found plenty to bitch about--but still, it wasn't awful. This was also probably helped by Olmos's direction of this episode since as I noted in my review of American Me, Olmos is a competent, confident director, if an unexceptional one. Even better, the main characters, Detectives Crockett and Tubbs (one's black, one's white--they're the original odd couple!), are hardly even in the episode at all. If crappy cop shows have one thing in common--from the '80s to the '00s--it's that when you have a talented guest star, you shove your shitty lead players aside and let the guest star strut her stuff.

Except that doesn't really happen, either. Instead, the episode focusses almost entirely on Castillo and gives Stockwell exactly one scene in the entire 50 minutes of this episode.* That's right, one. He's the top-billed guest star (coming as he was off his turn in the hugely and unjustly popular Blue Velvet), and he's on screen for four minutes, tops. That's the top-billed guest star. He has one scene with Olmos, and then he's out of the episode entirely. Could they not afford his salary, or what? I just can't believe you would get an actor of Stockwell's calibre and then do with him not a damn thing. I have issues with the last season of Battlestar Galactica--the primary issue being that it sucked--but I never begrudged the excessive Dean Stockwell screentime. Showrunner Ron Moore said Stockwell was so good in his role that the writers kept wanting to write for the character, which is why he basically takes over the last season, and I can't say I blame them there.

Yet Miami Vice films him for one scene and goes, "Eh, just have Eddie Olmos recite some bullshit story about samurai honour to a half-Russian kid, call it 'Bushido', play some faux-Japanese music, and that's a wrap."

The episode begins with a surprisingly decent cold open, despite the show's essential '80s-ness and the writers' determination to ruin whatever atmosphere they've accidentally created. Olmos has the camera follow a hooker in a hideous ensemble on quad roller skates (the '80s!) to a beach toilet. Then we cut to Crockett (Don Johnson) and Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas). Crockett is scanning the beach with a pair of night-vision binoculars while the camera lingers on Don Johnson's sweaty face and body, presumably a little something for the ladies whose husbands/boyfriends forced them to watch this crap. The highly '80s music is so loud that it occasionally drowns out the dialogue, a problem that continues throughout the episode. Crockett declares it's "snowing on the beach", cluing us hepcats in that the cocaine smuggler they're staking out has arrived. Smuggler and an obvious cop go into the toilet together in a way that totally doesn't make them look like two guys nipping off for quickie gay sex. At this point, a bunch of undercover vice cops reveal themselves--one of whom is, to absolutely no-one's surprise, the "hooker" from the opening shot--to neutralise Smuggler's supporting goons, including one cop completely buried under the sand(!!). Fortunately for Buried Guy, the goon he arrests doesn't resist, since Buried Guy's pistol would be as likely to blow up in his hand as fire, what with the barrel being full of sand and all. Each cop--including Buried Guy!--just happens to be about two feet from a goon when the order comes to neutralise them. Good thing the goons didn't mind someone conspicuously hovering around them until Crockett finally gave the signal to bust 'em all! But when Crockett and Tubbs rush into the toilet to make the main bust, their man on the inside has been rendered helpless, Smuggler is dead, and the money is gone.

Cue the signature Miami Vice theme, which I can't deny is catchy, despite being more '80s than Jennifer Beals in a gigantic perm doing aerobics while wearing legwarmers and crooning a Bangles tune. It's a pretty effective cold open, and I was intrigued about what happened. But I've been fooled before (I'm looking at you, every episode of CSI ever), so I remained cautious. Olmos's Castillo has a verbal sparring match with the cop who was rendered helpless (who turns out to be DEA) in which he implyies that the DEA agent had to have been in on the theft of the money. Immediately, though, the episode reveals that he wasn't in on it, and so all of this means nothing. It turns out that Stockwell's character Jack Gretsky stole the money, and he's just so good that he was able to kill the Smuggler, tie up and render helpless a trained DEA agent, and disappear with the drug money without anyone noticing him.

Castillo says that none of the vice cops (by which he means Crockett and Tubbs) are to approach Gretsky because he's so dangerous. Now, I love Dean Stockwell as much as any man can without turning into a ghey, yet when he appears on screen, he hardly looks like a monstrous killing machine. Stockwell is such an effective actor (and, to give credit where it's due, the writers wrote some decent dialogue for him) that he actually manages to carry off being a badass, explaining that he was able to detect every cop on the beach despite their being undercover, which is how he was able to avoid them. Still, I can't help but wonder how awesome the episode would've been if the roles were reversed. It's impossible, since Olmos was a series regular, but he's much more credible as a badass you'd better not approach, and Stockwell is more believable as the nebbishy lawman determined to bring him in despite the risks.

Gretsky, we learn, is an example of that well-worn hack writer trope, the CIA agent gone rogue. Castillo just happens to know that a local store is actually a CIA front, so he goes there and confronts two sp00ks about The Great One's being in Miami. The episode never explains why Castillo knows this. Is the CIA in the habit of informing local city cops about their front companies? The sp00ks threaten to have his badge (y'know, because the CIA can do that) and generally just behave like jerks, but they do reveal that Gretsky betrayed Edmonton both them and the KGB, so Castillo had better help the CIA get to him before the dirty Commies do. Castillo surprises me by asking the sensible question, "Why would he be any better off with you?", and the sp00ks surprise me even more by giving a decent answer: "He knows a lot of things we want to know. He can take years telling us stories."

Eventually we get the scene in which Castillo and Gretsky confront each other in a Japanese-style Buddhist temple with the faux-Japanese music occasionally making it impossible to hear the actors. Castillo and Gretsky exposit that they, again to the surprise of no-one (at least, no-one familiar with '80s cop cliches), served together in the Vietnam War, in which they apparently once fended off the North Vietnamese Army with swords. Vietnam turns out to be one of those Japanese countries, as Castillo lives in an imitation Tokugawa-era Japanese-style house and has his katana left over from the war. Gretsky reveals that he's dying, that he stole the money to help his wife and son escape from the CIA-KGB after his death, and, worst of all, that he's being traded to the Kings. He pulls a gun on Castillo and fires, plainly trying not to hit him, while Castillo defends himself. Exit Stockwell. The rest of the episode has Castillo finding the wife and kid, taking them somewhere the Russians can't find them, the Russians immediately finding them, and Castillo wiping out the Russian sp00ks with his katana. There are some hilariously inept sequences, including a truck's lightly tapping a police car causing both vehicles to massively explode (I guess the truck was filled with Atomic Gasoline), wifey being unable to find the pistol she dropped in 'the dark' despite the pistol's clearly lying in a ray of light on the floor directly in front of her, and people being shot without showing any sign of injury other than a small circle of red on their white collared shirts. The episode occasionally cuts to Crockett and Tubbs on Castillo's trail, and they show up at the end to save him, but they have even less dialogue and screentime than Stockwell.

And that's all to the good. Despite the clunky writing, the incredibly annoying and overbearing music, and the hokey Japanese references, it was a decent hour of '80s television, certainly more serious and realistic than any given episode of Knight Rider. (Okay, bad example.) Olmos's solid acting anchors the absurd premise; because he takes it seriously, so does the audience. The set-up is effective, even if the payoff isn't, and anything that puts money into Dean Stockwell's pocket can't really go wrong by me.

I can even sorta tolerate Blue Velvet, for Christ's sake.

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* Watching this episode, I was struck by how short an "hour-long" television show is these days. In 1966, the original Star Trek was 51 minutes. Twenty years later, Miami Vice was 50 minutes. Twenty years after that, Battlestar Galactica was 42 minutes. It's like a premodern tax system: Over time, the ever-shrinking base of people who still watch TV shows on, well, TV has to bear more and more of the burden of paying for them (in the form of an ever-increasing number of commercials). How long before the lengths of the content and the advertisements reach parity?

The Last Airbender

So. I saw The Last Airbender last night. Is it as bad as they say ('they' being every sentient being in the universe)? Well, yes, it's as awful as you'd expect from the man responsible for The Happening.

Is it as bad as Southland Tales? Well, of course not, since nothing can be as bad as Southland Tales. Despite Kim Ki-duk's repeated attempts to make the shittiest movie ever made by a human, his odes to misogyny remain outclassed by the titanic suckitude of Richard Kelly. M. Night Shameamalan's latest pile of crap can't compare to the awesome badness that is Richard Kelly's latest attempt to destroy all life as we know it through artistic incompetence, but it's in some ways more depressing because M. Night did make one decent film and one great film, whereas the films of Kim Ki-suck and Dick Kelly have the combined artistic merit of a Kesha single. At least M. Night doesn't loathe women with such a passion that he feels compelled to portray them as devious imps who delight in using their feminine wiles to corrupt any man unfortunate enough to blunder into their web of lies, but M. Night does seem to loathe Indians. More on that later.

"But Carl Eusebius," I hear you saying, "M. Night Failamalan made The Happening, a movie that makes the wind a force of evil and features scenes of Marky Mark Wahlberg attempting to emote. Surely The Last Airbender (2010) will have some comedic value!" Okay, there's no denying that The Happening is a serious contender for the best comedy of the last ten years, its ostensibly being a horror film notwithstanding. Any time Wahlberg or that guppy-faced woman tried to act, I dissolved into a puddle of derisive laughter. Every instance of wind-induced suicide was funnier than the last, until that joker driving the hatchback full of people carefully stopped in the middle of the street and then zoomed headlong into a streetlight. Nothing could top that one. I don't think I've ever seen a scene so funny that wasn't in Dr. Strangelove.

At no point did I understand anything that was happening in The Last Airbender. I would say it was edited by a blind person with advanced Parkinson's disease, except such a person would be more professional and would have turned in a better piece of work than whoever assembled this mess. Characters teleport from one scene to the next. Entire reels seem to be missing. I've never seen a film that explains so much yet remains so incoherent. Scenes happen, and then characters tell us what happened in the scene we just saw. That's if they don't flash back to the scene we watched five seconds ago. At least when they flash back, there's a voiceover to explain the action we're watching for the second time in ten seconds. Excuse me, did I say action? I meant, characters telling us about action. Characters declare what they are going to do. Then, after doing it--off-screen--they tell us what they did. Then, in case we missed it the first two times, the next scene inevitably begins with another character telling us again. And it still never makes any sense. I'll give you the gist I pieced together:

As near as I can figure, the world of Generic Earth-type Planet (it doesn't get a name that I caught) is divided into tribes that color-coordinate their wardrobe with one of the four traditional Greek elements. (Why no, a world that consists mostly of Asians isn't based on a traditional way of conceiving the universe from an Asian society, such as the Chinese Five Processes. I mean, why would it?) These tribes are earth (East/Southeast Asians), water (Inuit), fire (South Asians), and air (dead). Into these tribes are born people known as benders, who can be trained to mentally control the element of their tribe. Aang (Noah Ringer) is the last airbender and is also the avatar, a superbeing reborn every generation who can be trained in the bending of all four elements and is charged with keeping the tribes from going to war. He has been inexplicably absent for a century, until he is busted out of some sort of orb prison by two members of the Water Tribe, Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Harpo from *sigh* Twilight). He finds that the Fire Tribe is making war on the others, having already subjugated some of them.

What is this prison, and how did Aang become trapped in it? Has the war been going on for the entire century of his absence? Why did the Fire Tribe launch this war? What happened to the other airbenders, so that Aang is the last? Why does Aang need to learn how to bend all the elements when he is virtually unstoppable simply with his air powers? Why is he captured only to escape later in the same scene three times? How can grown human beings, some of whom are partially educated, keep giving Shyamalan money to make films? These and many other questions will remain unanswered by The Last Airbender.

This is filmmaking at its most inept. I recall Ken Begg's review of Jaws, a classic film that gets almost everything right. In that review, Begg discusses the importance of blocking and how often it goes unnoticed. After all, when it's done well, you aren't supposed to notice. The Last Airbender can't even get the basics right. There's a scene in which the Fire King(?) is talking to General Daily Show Guy. They are walking down a corridor in conversation, when the king suddenly stops and turns his back to the camera. At this point, the general is to the king's left, and as he talks he moves over to the king's right, momentarily blocking our sight of him behind the king's head. If this doesn't sound so bad in text, try watching it onscreen. Even if you know nothing about blocking, you'll know that something's off; the actors should be blocked to move so that our view of them is not obstructed, because when that happens we become aware of the camera and, by extension, of the fact that we're watching a movie. It's the kind of error a film student would lose points for on his final project, and Shyamalan, who had directed eight professional films at this point, let this shot into his movie. Then it gets worse, as the king suddenly resumes walking, only to stop and turn his back to the camera again seconds later, at which point they repeat the same blocking mistake that obstructs the speaking actor's face behind something in the foreground (namely, the other actor's head).

Well, at least the incompetent cinematography distracted from the dreadful acting.

Oh M. Night, how did you go from casting Haley Joel Osmont in 1999 to casting the human-tree hybrid who plays the titular The Last Airbender? I haven't seen this much wood in a film since I watched the 78-hour cut of The Return of the King. This kid is as appealing as Rosie O'Donnell is to any human being with a modicum of decency or self-respect. His delivery of the dialogue in this flick was so lifeless I leaped from my chair shouting "The power of Christ compels you!" until I remembered vampires aren't scared of Jesus anymore. Of course, even Tony Todd couldn't have made the dialogue in this film work. Borat's English sounded more natural.

If you thought Marky Mark's attempts to show emotion were awful in The Happening, then you have taste and a sense of artistry. But you haven't seen anything until you see living fossil Noah Ringer giving a speech to the earthbenders to rise up against their Fire Tribe oppressors: "Earth benders! There is dirt under your feet!" That's it. That's the speech, and, hilariously, that's all it takes to start the rebellion. I'm serious. Aang says there is dirt all around them, so why aren't they using it to fight, and they get a "Luke turning off his targeting computer" look of Zen enlightenment and overthrow their oppressors in a brief, poorly-choreographed fight scene mostly consisting of guys whipping their arms around like they're making fun of Bruce Lee and tossing poorly-animated CGI flames into walls of dirt. Apparently dirt is invisible to East Asian-looking people. Good thing the Master Race--represented by Aang, Sokka, and Katara--is here to enlighten the coloreds. Yes, I did say that the Water Tribe is Inuit, and no, the film doesn't explain or even acknowledge that Sokka and Katara are white.

Poor Noah isn't alone in the terrible acting department, though, as no-one in this film gives a good performance. In fact, I hesitate to call what anyone put forth in this film "a performance". Everyone is lifeless and dull. If your movie has Harpo giving the best performance, you may want to consider taking that job at Wendy's your uncle offered you. And if you remember how bad he was in Twilight...then I'm terribly sorry you saw Twilight.

Here's where I get academic, Oh My Brothers. I'm no fan of Edward Said. For all the good his seminal work Orientalism did, the vast majority of those who came after him largely missed his point and took his thought in insane directions that sullied his original insight (see also Foucault, Michel and Nietzsche, Friedrich). But really, if you ever needed an example of self-Orientalism (and God help you if you do), look no further than M. Night Flopamalan.

In this movie, the heroes are white. They have pseudo-Japanese and Chinese names, but they are Newt Gingrich white. Donnie Osmond white. Mayonnaise-eating, soft rock-listening, Third World-exploiting white people. Oh they might be named Aang, Sokka, and Katara...but they don't mean it. This is the sort of film you can show your racist great-grandmother. There are colored people, sure, but they don't, like, do stuff. Good clean-cut folk take the lead in all things good and pure.

But every good Matrix rip-off faux-wushu film needs good villains. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had the legendary Cheng Pei-pei. Fist of Legend had Kurata Yasuaki. The Last Airbender has Dev Patel. If I learned one thing from M. Night Pleasegodnomoreamalan, it's that Indians are evil.

Folks, white people have truly won. I'm not much for making PC movies in which actors are cast to appeal to every ethnic group. (I'm looking at you, George Lucas.) Star Trek was dead to me when the creators cast a black Vulcan for no other reason than to say they had done so. I thought the whole point of that show was that diversity was a human strength. Shows what I know. The creators knew that what we unwashed stupid masses wanted to see was a terrible non-actor do a bad Nimoy impression, solely so those same creators could impress the rest of the Hollywood intelligentsia with their progressive cred. 'Well, you know,' we can picture them saying to another fat white tub of crap in a suit, 'I cast the first black Vulcan.'

But really, the nation of evil people, struggling to extinguish the flame of civilization carried by the morally perfect white people --who, after all, are only struggling to protect the East/Southeast Asian and Inuit people, backward primitives that can't protect themselves--are all Indians? This is why I say white people have truly won: An artist of Indian descent with total creative control over a multi-hundred-million-dollar project painstakingly crafts a story in which the noble master Aryan race is opposed by dastardly brown people.

Glenn Beck must love this movie.

I haven't said much about the special effects because, well, they suck, but not in a remarkable way. What's remarkable is that the film fails on every level. The acting is atrocious, the characters are flat and uninteresting, the world is fuzzy and indistinct, the story is nonsensical, the dialogue is stilted and unnatural, and the film is permeated with a weird sense of self-loathing and discomforting racism.

It'll be huge in France.