Each of them is driven by a particular type of business thinking that in short order leads to disaster.

Let’s start by looking at Giovanni Ribisi’s character in Avatar, Parker Selfridge, a businessman.

Selfridge.

Sounds like James Cameron had the word “selfish” in mind when he came up with that name, doesn’t it?

Yeah, well, Cameron just made a movie that’s about to earn a couple of billion dollars — what does he know about being selfish?

But selfishness is not what leads Parker Selfridge on the wrong path.

Look. I see where James Cameron was coming from. You take Christopher Columbus. He’s all over popular culture as an explorer, but really what he was looking for was a new trade route to Asia, where he could bring back opium and spices. Columbus gets to America instead — off all his maps — and he’s so narrowly focused on one idea that he doesn’t even notice that he’s discovered a new world. So he tries to make lemonade out of this lemon and brings back slaves and eventually sets himself up as a brutal dictator on the island of Hispaniola — that’s where Haiti is, if you’re watching the news these days. When Chris gets back to Spain he’s regarded as a criminal for his atrocities and thrown in prison.

In Avatar Parker Selfridge looks out on a whole new world — Pandora, a planet of wonders — and says, “This is why we’re here; because this little gray rock sells for twenty million a kilo.”

Exqueeze me?

Has Parker Selfridge never opened up a history book? Or a comic? Or studied any science? Or attended a business school? How the fuck did he get this job?

How can he not be aware that a new planet would have untold riches in the pharmaceuticals that could be made from its indigenous plantlife?

How can he not know that simply going around and recording native music can make him the king of earth’s music industry?

How can he not know that the stories the natives tell will be made into entertainments that can earn — well — a couple of billion a pop?

What, isn’t there a single Pocahontas or Sitting Bull on Pandora who’d like to make a tour of earth as a feasted celebrity?

Which brings us to NBC’s late night problems.

Half a dozen years ago — when Jay Leno was the King of Late Night — an NBC programming executive went to Jay and asked him to hand over The Tonight Show to Late Night host Conan O’Brien, because O’Brien was younger, hipper, and did better in the 18 to 35 demographic. “We don’t think you can sustain your ratings,” quoth the maven.

Five years later, when Jay did his last Tonight Show, he was still top of the ratings, so NBC decided to try him in a new time-slot — 10:00 PM — prime time. Jay didn’t think it would work but took the gig because the NBC management team admitted that his ratings would start slow but convinced him they’d give him two years for his audience to find him again.

But the NBC affiliate stations panicked and panic doesn’t look good when Comcast is buying the network.

So NBC broke their word to Jay and canceled him after four months, and promised to move him to his old time slot for a half-hour show.

This put NBC into breach of contract also with Conan O’Brien, who’d moved his entire Late Night cast and crew from New York to take over Tonight. He balked at starting his new gig halfway back to his old time slot.

So you have two pissed off stars … and more importantly, an 18-to-35 audience in rebellion, picketing NBC for showing Conan the door. As it turns out, it’s not all that easy to take candy from a baby. They wail. They wail on the Internet.

And the viral wailing pumped up Conan’s viewing audience to the point where, like Jay, Conan is now King of Late Night.

So if he goes, and Jay takes over, Jay will have to start with the handicap of the show being boycotted by the prime demographic.

By the way, the solution is simple. Two stars, one time slot — split the show days between the two of them. Jay Leno got his big mojo by filling in as permanent guest host for Johnny Carson — back when the show was 90 minutes long — so we know the time slot is big enough for two hosts.

But what’s the big-picture lesson here?

It’s this: a Board of Directors can’t give a top management job to a short-sighted, tunnel-visioned, unimaginative drone and expect to give the investors steady dividends.

Businessmen win when they have vision and understanding.

Sensitivity and an ability to communicate are preconditions to successful business.

If you play only zero-sum games you will lose money. If you play positive sum games you can make money.

You do better as a businessman reading Gandhi than reading Sun Tzu.

A saying attributed to Winston Churchill is “The problem with socialism is socialism. The problem with capitalism is capitalists.”

Capitalists who never think beyond the next quarter are unfit to wear the three-piece suit. They are disgraces to their country clubs. If they don’t have a clue what high character it takes to be a Capitalist they might as well just inherit their money. But if it’s not safely in trust — out of reach of their stupid little hands — their grandchildren will be eating at McDonalds.

Why, if you have a country that’s run short of real businessmen, anything could happen. You might have entire industries — investment banking, manufacturing, real estate — driven into crisis.

A country with stupid businessmen could even decide to give socialism a try. Then you end up in a country where rich people get that way not because they’re smart, but because they’re connected.

And you’re back to a country of aristocrats and peasants.

That’s not the country I was born in and that’s not the country I want to die in.

Stupid businessmen are the enemy of the people.

And this is a lesson only a greedy capitalist looking out for his own bottom line is smart enough to teach.

You know. Like that self-made billionaire, James Cameron.

I just saw Avatar in IMAX 3D. If you haven’t seen Avatar in IMAX 3D you haven’t seen Avatar.

It’s hard for me to find a reason not to call Avatar the best science-fiction movie I’ve ever seen.

It’s almost hard for me to find a reason not to call Avatar the first movie I’ve ever seen.

The IMAX process has a 48 frame-per-second refresh rate, double that of ordinary movies. Add a film-frame ten times the area of a standard 35 millimeter frame, and a huge screen to project all that extra clarity onto. Then make it 3D as well. You now have a visual experience that would be indistinguishable from real-world eyesight except that it’s edited like a movie with changing viewpoints.

Now add in unlimited technical genius and unlimited money and the only word for what you’re sitting through for 162 minutes is breathtaking.

I giggled through the first twenty minutes of the movie just because of how real it looked.

When I saw the Na’vi — the alien race — in TV promos for the movie they looked like cartoon characters to me. They don’t look like cartoon characters in IMAX 3D.

I had two feelings while spending time visually immersed in the planet Pandora and its native people.

The first feeling was that I was really on an alien planet.

The second was that this was a very good representation of Paradise. It reminded me of the feelings I got from reading C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, which portrays aliens species that — unlike on Earth — never fell from grace.

The Na’vi are, in every way can think of, a race of supermen. They are naturally — physically and mentally — superior to our own species.

But because we are naturally inferior we have been clever enough to compensate with superior technology. That makes the human species dangerous to the Na’vi.

All of the above makes Avatar a must-see movie … and judging from the billion dollars it’s already earned at the box office, it’s must seen.

But one of the ways this movie has gathered such a large audience is by being inarticulately anti-business, inarticulately anti-American, and articulately misanthropic.

Avatar — possibly the technically best movie ever made — is also a clear example of what in a previous column I called “the human holocaust movement” — the idea that “the human race is doomed … and must be doomed.”

To Avatar’s writer/director/producer, James Cameron — who is the only capitalist ever to make two movies that have earned over a billion dollars, and the only capitalist ever to make a movie to earn over two billion dollars — the profit motive as represented by “the Company” in both Aliens and now Avatar means a willingness to commit mass murder in order to have a profitable enterprise.

Show me a counter-example, please, in a movie by billions-earning James Cameron. Please show me a single person in a James Cameron movie who makes a profit in an honorable way.

These “Company” men in James Cameron movies always have American accents.

The American military personnel in James Cameron movies are always morons.

The Nazis in James Cameron movies never have German accents like the historical Nazis. They are Americans.

And the aliens in James Cameron movies are always superior to the human race.

The problem is, all the virtues James Cameron gives to the Na’vi are human virtues and historically often enough American virtues: independence, courage, and decency. They have to be because James Cameron doesn’t know any actual aliens. All his alien characters are human beings figuratively dressed in costumes.

Yes, there are heroic human beings in James Cameron movies. We are told they are the exceptions.

We are told in Avatar that human beings have doomed planet earth.

How did we do that. Mr. Cameron? Global warming? Please take your billion dollars and shove it down your windpipe so you don’t exhale any more carbon dioxide.

Yet by identifying virtues with aliens as an indictment against the human race, James Cameron makes his living by insulting his audience and making them pay him for the abuse.

James Cameron makes his living as a prostitute operating a dungeon in which masochists come to be whipped.

And with his immense skill, Cameron leaves the Marquis de Sade in his dust.

I wondered how a movie could be so anti-American and anti-business without a word about that on Fox News.

When I heard the Twentieth Century Fox anthem at the beginning of Avatar, I had my answer.

Please pay James Cameron the money he’s earned by making a fabulous movie. But when you walk out of the theater, please understand that you’ve paid to be insulted by a man who hates your guts.

Kalifornistan

Alexandrian Films

Starring
Govindini Murty … The Girl
Nick Nyon … The Terrorist
John Barrett … The Bounty Hunter
and The Voice of Isfahan Jones

Produced, written and directed by Jason Apuzzo

Executive Produced by
Govindini Murty

Photographed by
Jason Apuzzo

Music by
Stephen Greaves

Edited by
Frank Bay

Sound Design by
Tak Fujimora & Jason Apuzzo

Art Direction & Costume Design by
Isabella Conti

Line Producer
Kurt Needleman

I received the DVD I ordered of Kalifornistan Tuesday and watched it Tuesday night.

I’ve met Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty at the Liberty Film festival, as an indie filmmaker, myself. I’ve had conversations about the esthetics of film with Jason.

I’m also fairly familiar with Jason and Govindini’s writings and interviews, and saw Govindini when she was doing guest appearances on Fox News.

I’ve also watched Jason’s previous feature — Terminal Island — and a short student film he made, San Pedro.

Here’s the thing about Kalifornistan. Regardless of Jason’s political intents, he is too much of an artist first and an ideologue second for Kalifornistan to have much utility as a propaganda piece.

It is, first and foremost, an art house film.

It is, secondly, a live-action comic monologue narrated in the voice of a manic cartoon character.

It is, thirdly — as was Jason Apuzzo’s first feature, Terminal Island – an homage to noir films.

And it is, fourthly, as much of a love letter to Jason’s favorite shooting location — the harbor area around San Pedro, California, where he also shot Terminal Island and San Pedro — as Manhattan has been for Woody Allen.

The film’s story, such as it is, follows a largely-offscreen deranged Islamic terrorist as he plots the nuking of Los Angeles, is sent to then escapes from Gitmo, and overall is stalked by a bounty hunter while he stalks and unsuccessfully tries to rape an exotic dancer. Hijinks and violence ensue.

Oddly, this was close to being the story, such as it was, for Jason Apuzzo’s first feature, Terminal Island. Kalifornistan comes close to being a remake.

I don’t think I can emphasize enough how incredibly weird this movie is. It’s Taxi Driver meets Bugs Bunny. It’s Fellini meets Kubrick.

Kalifornistan is so bizarre you really should be required to drop acid before seeing it — or at least blow some chronic while watching it.

You take the classic gonzo movies — Freaks, Reefer Madness, Plan 9 From Outer Space — and it’s right up there on the “Oh my God I can’t believe this” meter. It overloads the senses, got me to laugh, and despite her lack of nudity Govindini is still smoking hot.

If not for Jason’s neocon politics blacklisting him, I can’t imagine this film not becoming a film-festival favorite. But of course he’s shot himself in the foot for that. Believe me, I know all about doing that from my own experience. The ideologues who program the major film festivals won’t notice that by choosing an insane Jihadi as its viewpoint character, Kalifornistan is vastly more a biting satire on American culture than it is a dramatization of a Michelle Malkin rant. Using the terrorist in this film as a representative of Islamic Jihad makes about as much sense as using Heath Ledger’s Joker or Jack Nicholson’s R.P. McMurphy as representatives of American imperialism.

It is so self-consciously art house that it astounds me formerly conservative and now neocon publications like Human Events and National Review are even noticing it. I assume it’s because of Jason and Govindini’s past credentials. But I almost can’t believe they watched the movie before writing about it. It is thoroughly useless in making any sort of coherent political point.

Film is a presentational, rather than a literary, medium. What a filmmaker’s personal beliefs are, and what a film presents, are often a disconnect. Of course Deconstructionism of what a fictional story — filmed or written — presents would require me, as a reviewer, to eliminate whatever Jason Apuzzo’s intent might be from my viewing of his film.

But as a storyteller, myself, who struggles hard to make what I write and what my audience perceives as consonant as possible, I’ve always been hostile to the Deconstructionism philosophy. This, then, creates the danger C.S. Lewis warns about in An Experiment in Criticism, that instead of doing my job as a reviewer of a film or book I may instead attempt to psychoanalyze its author.

I’ll take that chance.

Kalifornistan identifies so thoroughly with the viewpoint of its anti-American comic narrator that I wonder if this is Jason Apuzzo’s passive-aggressive way of telling the neocons to piss off without them even realizing it.

And maybe he doesn’t even realize it, himself.

For one thing, the movie doesn’t have any sort of traditional narrative structure. It’s non-linear. It has a series of false climaxes before ending on an anti-climax. I can’t find an ounce of suspense in it.

For another thing, it doesn’t have a lead actor. The viewpoint character — the from-Toontown narrator — is off-screen for the first part of the movie then when we finally see him, it’s beside the point.

Kalifornistan is not a studio-budget movie. It’s more than likely that some of its narrative faults and limitations were a result of lack of money.

Jason Apuzzo is, first and foremost, an excellent cinematographer. For all its budget challenges the movie is beautifully shot.

But I’m not about to suggest Jason for an Oscar as either a screenwriter or director. Jason has expressed admiration for many classic films with traditional narrative structures. That in abandoning narrative structure he also abandons suspense is, for me, an enigma.

Is this film worth the nineteen bucks including shipping I paid for it and the 90 minutes I spent watching it?

It was for me, or I wouldn’t be telling you about it.

You can buy the DVD at http://www.kalifornistan.com/.

First of all, it’s got a wonderfully clever plot device that never gets old: twins separated at birth discover each other’s existence and switch places in a conspiracy to reunite their estranged parents.

Second, it’s the movie that proves –despite all of her highly publicized problems — that Lindsay Lohan, who plays both twin roles, is a first-rate actor.

The rest of the cast is stellar. Both the comedy and the pathos work. It’s just a really, really well-crafted and enjoyable movie — on my short list — with movies like Back to the Future, My Cousin Vinny, Groundhog Day, and Defending Your Life — that I can rewatch endlessly.

But one part of the movie has always bothered the hell out of me.

Theodore Dreiser wrote An American Tragedy, a classic novel published in 1925 of a man who murders a former but nonetheless pregnant girlfriend by taking her out in a canoe and knocking her into a lake, drowning her. It was twice made into a movie — in 1931 and a 1951 remake retitled A Place in the Sun.

So when on a camping trip near the end of The Parent Trap, the twins — who see their father’s blonde bombshell fiancee Meredith Blake as an impediment to their plans — wait until she’s asleep in a sleeping bag on an air mattress after taking “one large sleeping pill,” and set her adrift on a lake, it never struck me as a cute practical joke suitable for a Disney movie.

In the movie Meredith just wakes up, stands on the air mattress, falls into the lake, and swims safely to shore. It struck me that the plot points of her drugging herself with a sleeping pill, a sleeping bag, and never establishing her as a strong swimmer, could easily have been turned by a cynical screenwriter like me into An American Tragedy.

So I did.

Back on October 11th, I went onto the IMDb message board for The Parent Trap and wrote a little cautionary tale of how the movie might have really ended:

AP (Napa Valley, August 31, 1998) — Two eleven-year-old twins were arrested by Napa County sheriff’s deputies today, charged with First Degree Murder for the premeditated drowning death of their prospective step-mother, Meredith Blake, 27, a Bay area publicist and runner up for Miss California in the Miss USA pageant.

The identical twins — Hallie Parker and Annie James — had recently been reunited after separation shortly after their birth, and conceived of the murder as part of their plan to reunite their long-estranged parents. On a camping trip with Blake and their father, Nicholas Parker, 44, a local vintner, they pushed the sleeping Blake’s air mattress into a lake. Blake, drowsy from a sleeping pill, fell off the air mattress trapped in her sleeping bag, and drowned. Her body was recovered by divers this afternoon.

The twins are currently in the custody of Child Protective Services awaiting psychiatric evaluations to determine their fitness to stand trial as adults.

AP (Chowchilla, October 9, 2009) — The notorious Parker Twins failed to make appearances again at their parole hearing held today at Valley State Prison for Women, where they are each serving life sentences for the 1998 murder of their prospective stepmother, lingerie model Meredith Blake.

Blake’s mother, Vicki, was once again present to present the parole board with a victim’s impact statement.

The twins’ parents, Nicholas and Elizabeth Parker, again flew in from their home in London to argue for their daughters’ release.

Parole was denied for the third time.

Comments from IMDb users on my little satire have been mixed. One comment was “That is so pathetic.” Another was “You really are a pathetic idiot. It was a movie so get over it. Grow up for heavens sake if that is possible for you to do. Which I highly doubt it is.”

On December 3rd I got my first IMDb compliment: “lol I thought it was pretty funny”

That was enough for me to decide to move the debate here.

Yes, I know it’s just a movie. The movie isn’t a crime against humanity. It just has one sequence that I think sends a bad message to kids.

We’re living in an era when the innocent practical jokes of Candid Camera have given way to the life-invasions of Borat.

Somewhere between politically correct intimidation of “That’s not funny!” and elaborate schemes designed actually to humiliate people to the extent of possible suicides, there needs to be some thinking about what’s a joke protected by the rights of free expression and what’s a crime that damages people for life.

I don’t think anything said by Michael Richards or Don Imus deserved punishment. It was just words. They were the ones who got punked by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

However, Sacha Baron Cohen might well have crossed the line.

Now go and rent (don’t watch it on The Disney Channel — they censor the hell out of it!) one of my favorite movies, The Parent Trap.

“The decision to release Lady Magdalene’s for Video on Demand wasn’t an easy one,” said Lady Magdalene’s writer/producer/director, J. Neil Schulman. “I still feel Lady Magdalene’s has theatrical box-office potential, and after the $11,000-unknown-actors thriller Paranormal Activity’s gross of over $100 million at the box office I don’t think any quality indie feature should be written off as unreleasable, no matter how low its budget or its lack of so-called A-list stars. But I need to build audience-support for our movie and along with film festival play I see Video on Demand as another way of doing that so distributors can recognize our broad commercial potential both in theatrical release and later on DVD/Blu-Ray.”

Lady Magdalene’s tells the story of Jack Goldwater, a federal agent who gets in trouble when, on a jetliner, he searches the violin case of a young Arab-American he suspects is an al Qaeda operative, and as punishment for racial profiling is assigned to be the federal receiver in charge of running a Nevada brothel in tax default. There he meets the brothel’s colorful owner, Lady Magdalene — played by the iconic Nichelle Nichols — and his assignment takes a left turn when, with her help, they discover that one of the working girls is part of a domestic al Qaeda cell with plans to smuggle in a crate from Mexico that’s supposed to be unloaded at Hoover Dam. It’s a plot-driven suspense thriller with lots of comic relief and strong character interplay.

Why hasn’t Lady Magdalene’s found a commercial distributor to put it into brick-and-mortar venues yet?

“Some studios won’t even look at an indie film not headlined by stars on their white-list,” said Schulman. “Other studios won’t consider distributing indie films anymore, period. I think the problem is that a lot of indie films are made for specialized audiences, whereas — even with our budget limitations — I wrote, directed, and cut Lady Magdalene’s to entertain as wide an audience as we could get in front of. But studios have gotten into the mindset of thinking that if they don’t have an above the line of $20 million and a special-effects budget of $40 million then audiences won’t buy tickets. Steven Spielberg — by releasing Paranormal Activity — has once again proved why he knows more than all the rest of Hollywood’s heads put together. I’m just hoping that we’ll catch the attention of some studio execs who want to prove themselves as smart as Spielberg.”

“Then again,” Schulman says, “these days, any time you make a movie that has al Qaeda characters in it, you’re accused of being either left-wing anti-American or a right-wing NeoCon. It’s hard for a filmmaker like me to convince the studios that I was just trying to tell a good story with contemporary topics that are in the news every day.”

“Reviewers have called Lady Magdalene’s a comedy,” Schulman continues, “but it’s really more in the genre of a 50’s Hitchcock movie like North by Northwest where you have a straight suspense plot with frequent comic relief. This formula was continued in the 60’s with the Bond films. Of course I was shooting a movie for a half million instead of studio-level budgets, so I had to be particularly creative in how to give audiences the impression they’re seeing lots of action. I’ve been telling people that I made a Jerry Bruckheimer tent pole on an Ed Wood budget. It helped a lot that I had access to great Nevada locations. The point is, despite my low budget, I was trying to tell the best story I could with the best actors I could get, and use every trick in the book to make the audience forget that I couldn’t afford to crash or blow something up every five minutes. But in addition to some great performances I also think we have a kick-ass musical soundtrack — with original songs and performances, including three by Nichelle Nichols — that can rival movies made for fifty times what ours cost.”

Full information on Lady Magdalene’s — including trailer, buzz, reviews, photos, and music videos — are on the movie’s official website at http://www.ladymagdalenes.com.

Lady Magdalene’s can be found on Amazon.com Video on Demand as either a sale or rental.