Conservatives bash "Avatar" as "Avatarocious"

Patrick Goldstein at the Los Angeles Times has a provocative piece on why some conservative commentators like John Podhoretz at The Weekly Standard are going to the mattresses against James Cameron's eco-parable Avatar.

In Podhoretz's  review titled "Avatarocious," the writer calls the Cameron epic "an undigested mass of clichés nearly three hours in length taken directly from the revisionist westerns of the 1960s-the ones in which the Indians became the good guys and the Americans the bad guys." (Some readers have also noted that Avatar shares themes with The Emerald Forest and Ferngully, but that's a subject for another post.)

Podhoretz doesn't mention that the films Avatar most recalls is Dances With Wolves, the revisionist 1991 Western that conservative columnist Richard Grenier (writing at the time in Commentary) called "a sumptuous new work of romantic Arcadianism."  Other observers from the right, such as Big Hollywood's John Nolte, love Dances With Wolves but disdain Avatar.

Your thoughts about the politics of this movie distributed by Rupert Murdoch's 20th Century Fox Studios? For me, it's a primal American tale that's comparable with Terence Malick's The New World,  about John Smith's fateful encounter with Pocahontas.