Joe Klein, Enemy

"Americans were the bad guys ... "

I've had this in the hopper since last week.  But first - I despise Joe Klein.  I despise him for sandbagging his Newsweek customers, about what he learned about the Clintons in 1992.   He was their hand-picked embedded campaign  'reporter.'  Instead of letting us in on it, Klein later wrote a thinly disguised account of a smarmy con man and his distasteful, manipulative wife  in  "Primary Colors."   He ought to have been drummed out of journalism altogether. Instead he became, evidently, a J-school role model. I digress. From Matthew Contunetti's Howler of the Day (So Far!) -  Joe Klein saw Avatar the other night, and he came away pleasantly surprised: “  But that wasn't the most amazing thing about the movie: the Americans were the bad guys. They were a mercenary army working for corporate villains who wanted to strip-mine a tribe of alien, cerulean nice-guy, enviro-theists. The dialogue was awful; the characterizations were crude...and I'm sure that conservatives will dismiss this as another excretion of the Hollywood left. But still, it was something for a mainstream--indeed, a blockbuster--motion picture to have you rooting for the blue dudes flying about on birds painted like Chinese fans...and rooting against the humans, none of whom had the requisite Eastern European or Arab villain accents. ” Contunetti suggests Amerian (but not overseas) audiences overlook "James Cameron's ridiculously heavy-handed and semi-parodic political message ...in order to enjoy the revolutionary special effects. I know I did." Yeah, well I'm a lot less forgiving.  If I want to see something in 3D, I'll look at my glass of American red whiskey.