It’s hard to have a decade’s perspective on a picture I saw twice, just two weeks ago, and didn’t feel strongly about on first viewing. But if Avatar has the liberating impact on movie technology that I suspect it will, it richly deserves the last spot on this list. Neither a fantasy rendition of Disney World’s Animal Kingdom nor a megabudget version of Ferngully, the film creates a total environmental experience. It’s as totally fabricated a landscape as the Speed Racer ovals, and much more enticing for viewers. They don’t just visit the Pandora rainforest; like the movie’s paraplegic hero Jake, they find their legs and are quickly at home there. Conservatives may decry the tree-hugger sentiments in a war movie where U.S. soldiers are the enemy; liberals may wonder why a white American should be the savior of the physically and ethically superior blue Pandorans. But for a sensational, seductive movie immersion, Avatar has it all over James Cameron’s last blockbuster. This one really is titanic.
It’s a truism that the right wing owns talk radio and TV, and the left wing has documentaries — those film essays designed to convince liberal audiences of what they already believe. Michael Moore is a doctrinaire Leftie, and his movies hammer home familiar points: Iraq war, bad; U.S. medical care, dangerous to your health; capitalism, the curse of the working class. But Moore’s propagandistic brio and his central place in his films’ limelight assure that many people who agree with his policies condemn his methods. That said, Fahrenheit 9/11, his screed against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, is rare among documentaries for being crucial to a U.S. Presidential election. Not that it earned the Democrats any close states, or many votes. On the contrary: the film’s popularity — $119 million at the domestic box office, or more than three times the take of any documentaries not starring penguins — indicated that antiwar sentiment was broad and strong enough that year that John Kerry might have won if he’d articulated his opposition to the occupation as forcefully as Moore did. Then again, Kerry was never the passionate orator, showman-entertainer or, for that matter, savvy politician that Moore is.
In light of the Material Girl performing at Super Bowl XLVI, TIME takes a look at her life and career, both of which have been lived firmly in the public eye.
