The Culture Beat

(Above: Some audience members are blue because they can’t live on Pandora)

I was interviewed this week by a Palm Beach Post reporter about my reactions to Avatar. The James Cameron film, on course to becoming the top grossing film of all time, is one of those cinematic cultural phenomenons that hasn’t happened maybe since, well, Cameron’s last film, Titanic over ten years ago. The article tries to find out just why the film has such broad appeal. My remarks were used for indicating there’s a contingent of the audience who didn’t like it the film so if you follow the link to the article, I’m in the second half.

Amidst all the film’s buzz, there’s even discussion now of what you could call “post-Avatar depression,” reported by people who are, well, bluer than a Pandoran native after seeing the film’s immersive fantasy world. This sounds rather sad since the best fantasy is parabolic; first it draws us into a convincing evocation of an imagined world, and then sends us back into the real world encouraged to appreciate the wonder of creation and to better understand life. The words of some of the people quoted here makes it sound as if Cameron’s art is so good in simulating its wondrous jungle planet that these audiences members are disgusted by humanity and their own mundane existence. After all, the film tells us that humans will destroy the earth with our high energy use and then proceed to to exploit other planets–especially to an adolescent mind, this is a despairing vision. My views on the film were stated earlier here and http://theculturebeat.com/2010/01/01/avatar-vs-district-9/, so I won’t dig into that again. I’m just more perplexed than depressed at the film’s success.

Writer-Director Judd Apatow’s third film fared poorly at the box office and with many critics but I hope he won’t be discouraged for this anomaly; the film is a risky effort at engaging the psyche of entertainers, specifically comedians who have a love-hate relationship with their audience and the people around them.

I am especially interested in Apatow whose first two films, The 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up were unique mixtures of foul-mouthed comedy and moral parables. Both concern men who are challenged to grow up and take on the responsibility of adults when they’d rather stay adolescents either out of fear or convenience. Though the films feature dope smoking, fornication and amazingly colorful profanity, Apatow’s vision is deeply conservative in his insistence on the superiority of sex within marriage and taking responsibility for seeing an out-of-wedlock pregnancy through to term. I feel a small debt of gratitude for Apatow’s unique sensibility; I wrote about the first two films for Breakpoint a few years ago and the article was later reprinted in a textbook collection of article on writing about popular culture. Thus I was interested in Apatow’s most recent film.

Adam Sandler plays George Simmons, an Adam-Sandler type comedian who learns he has a form of lymphoma that will probably kill him soon. The millionaire entertainer grow despondent at his fate but has no one to confide in. One night at a comedy club, he sees a young new comedian, Ira Wright, played by Seth Rogan, trying out his stand-up act and hires him to write some jokes for him. Soon, Simmons makes Wright his all-purpose assistant, but it quickly becomes apparent, that George has actually hired Ira to be his friend. He asks Ira to sit by his bed while George talks until he is able to sleep. At the same time Ira can see that George uses his talent to express a thinly concealed hostility, his insult jokes have the bite of passive aggression. Apatow and Sandler have been friends for many years and are drawing from their experience in the comedy business where one may have many colleagues but few close friends. Apatow says in the special features production diary that he made the film to express the importance of not letting one’s work overwhelm one’s relationships with family and friends, a problem he acknowledges that he wrestles with.

Because of the nature of George’s plight, the plot isn’t as rollicking in its humor–in fact it’s as much drama as comedy and this may explain the film’s lack of success–audiences primed for more of the same got a reality check when they encountered Apatow’s hero coming to terms with the prospect of his death and the limitations life imposes on us. The ending is not hopeless but wise and sober. Like his earlier films, Funny People is peppered with profanity and two brief sex scenes that are deliberately non-sensual. If you can handle that kind of content, you might check it out.

I had heard good things about one of the year’s biggest sci-fi movies of 2009 and finally saw it this week. A bunch of aliens is oppressed by human corporate military forces who seek to move the weird-looking aliens from their home to another location. The special effects were amazing, like nothing I’d ever seen and the inventiveness of the filmmakers was endless. And after watching it, I was reminded of another film with a very similar plot that I’d seen last week, Avatar, which wasn’t nearly as good. You see, I finally watched District 9 on Blu-Ray DVD.

I’d avoided District 9 because I’d heard it was awfully violent and figured I’d prefer to see it on home video. Yes, it was extremely bloody in ways I’d never seen in a movie but man, did it out-create Avatar. As my review here discussed, James Cameron’s film portrays the security forces of a big mean corporation using advanced military technology to violently drive out the blue-skinned natives of a forested planet (sort of like the Imperial forces tried to do to the little Ewoks in Return of the Jedi with the same disastrous results.) But watching District 9 was the far richer cinematic experience.

In both films we have a private corporation seeking to oppress aliens. In District 9, the bug-like “prawns” are apparently refugees from some giant otherworldly transport ship that floats stalled over Johannesburg, South Africa. The thousands of aliens within were relocated to a slum outside the city and now, MNU (Multi-National United) the mega-corporation charged with removing the prawns are led by Wikus Van De Merwe, a nerdy bureaucrat who knows just how to smile patronizingly as he tells the shanty town occupants they must sign a form acknowledging they must move. When he’s accidentally exposed to an alien fluid, he begins to slowly transform into a prawn and becomes wanted my MNU to be dissected for alien tissue that can be used to exploit the prawn’s advanced technology. Wikus undergoes more than one kind of transformation as he is forced to see the huge injustice he’s been a big part of.

The first part of the movie is shot partly in documentary style so that we follow the story as outsiders being introduced to the tender mercies of humans quite prepared to violently punish these repellent outsiders and many have recognized director Neill Blomkamp’s referencing of South Africa’s apartheid history in the plot. But every character in the film, so unlike Cameron’s, seems fully fleshed out as characters rather than stereotypes. Avatar’s Na Vi are standard issue noble savages. The prawn apparently have a class system and most of the ones in the ghetto are not only not noble, they are repulsive in their behavior. Nevertheless, we feel both the revulsion of the humans and the cruel victimization of the prawn.

Whereas Cameron has long been heralded as king of the world of special effects and action scenes, other than the beauty of the moon Pandora, almost everything in Avatar felt entirely conventional in staging and presentation as if the director hadn’t had a new idea in 10 years. Blomcamp’s vision is startlingly fresh and all the more intense and scary for it as the 30-year old former digital effects director uses his background to create some of the best interaction between human and “painted-in” digital aliens in film history. After an hour of Avatar, one pretty much gets used to the alien world and the effects don’t feel as special. I never got used to the surprise and innovation flowing from District 9 and the drama of poor Wikus as he fights his transformation holds you till the end. Empty spectacle versus brilliant use of effects to undergird a gripping parable of new found empathy–there’s no contest.

As I had noted in my preview last month, Avatar looked like it was cobbled together from the plots of various older movies like Dances With Wolves, Return of the Jedi(primitive tribes overcome evil, more advanced oppressors), and Cameron’s own Aliens(arrogant and cocky Marines get more than they bargained from resourceful aliens). And folks, that’s exactly what happens. No surprises whatsoever.

And yes, the director does give us spectacle rarely seen in less ambitious films–Cameron knows how to fill up the screen with giant bulldozers and soaring mega-trees. There are moments of visual beauty in his evocation of the alien world Pandora and knowing that the Na Vi, the 12-foot blue-skinned dragon-riding natives are achieved through the greatest advance yet in motion capture technology is indeed a wondrous technical achievement.

But it goes back to the story–Jake Sully, the paraplegic Marine arrives on Pandora to join the Avatar program wherein his brain will be connected to a cloned body of a native, his titular avatar.,From the time we learn that this will allow him to infiltrate and win the hearts and minds of the tribe to sell them on the need to move away from a prized deposit of a rare mineral, we know who the good guys really are.

When Jake gains the confidence of the tribe through a coming of age training and initiation process, we know it’s only a matter of time after he starts walking in another alien’s moccasins that his heart and mind will be with the natives. Thus it is that Jake becomes the race’s leader against the armored might of the invaders. The last third of the movie is the final confrontation between the Na Vi led by Jake and the Marines led by the malevolent Col. Quaritch( below left).

Yes, the soldiers are supposed to be former Marines who now serve as security for yet another evil corporation, but the military bearing, dress and ethos of the boys in green clearly presents itself as the American military, the liberal stereotype of rabid baby killers dominant since the Vietnam war.

Of course as long as you are pitting stereotypical noble savages against stereotypical bad soldiers you have to have a hidden advantage for the natives that will give them a way to achieve what has never happened in history when a larger and more powerful force has invaded the land of a primitive people–the Na Vi hold to a pantheistic belief that connects them–literally–to nature. The blue-skinned aliens have braided hair which conceals fine tendrils which bond with the counterparts on their six-legged horse and dragon creatures. The people worship a nature goddess Ewya, which is basically Mother Earth, er, Pandora the spirit that connects all life on the planet. (Possible spoiler alert:) Their sacred trees are large willows with glowing white noodle-like branches and leaves that contain the memories and voices of their ancestors. When you die, your energy returns to the earth and is taken up by the trees in a Circle of Life recycling process. Let’s just say that you don’t want to make Momma angry.

Colonel Quaritch and his corporate superior plan a “shock and awe” campaign on the native in order to fight “terror with terror.” I tried but couldn’t find a relevant subtext of the story with anything going on today. Nobody can with intellectual coherence present current US military efforts in Iraq or Afghanistan as remotely resembling the assault on Pandora. Of course there’s the environmental sermon: Earth is a ecologically devastated brown husk, apparently so because the nations didn’t sign the Kyoto treaty or act in Copenhagen, or do anything to stop global warming back in the 21st century, we’ve now gone on to destroying other planets. Being a big Hollywood director means being able to visualize your most exaggerated fears for profit.

The film is bound to stir controversy on any of these fronts. The spiritual one has already begun with Ross Douthat’s New York Times essay on Hollywood pantheism. It got a sharp retort from blogger David Disalvo. Another blogger is bugged by the long time pattern of Hollywood films featuring white guys who go native and wind up leading the people of color against their enemies.

With a record-breaking December opening, it remains to be seen whether the film with all the aforementioned elements, will have anything like the sustained box office of his last film, Titanic. My hunch, probably not close, at least in the US. The international market, for whom this film, with its nasty take on the American military and New Age feel, should eat this right up and it’s oversees take is already significantly larger than the domestic by more than double. Avatar should be seen if only for its technical achievement as long as you don’t connect with any of the more questionable elements of its ideas.

Now that the trailer for James Cameron’s Avatar is out, we can get a better idea of its plot. Cameron has said he had the idea for the 3-D film (due out Dec. 18) many years ago but waited until digital technology caught up with his vision. However, based on what the trailer tells us, that vision now looks pretty stale. Watching it, I couldn’t help feeling how very familiar it seems to both Cameron’s and other films of various genres.

Take for instance its story of the paraplegic marine whose consciousness is placed into genetically bred body of a race of indigenous humanoid inhabitants of a planet rich in ore. Earth corporations (that is, according to the accents, Americans companies) send their military to eradicate the blue skinned creatures standing between them and the valuable metal. The young marine, now undercover among the “aliens,” grasps how this low-tech culture is doomed by human greed and decides to go native and join the resistance, sort of like Dances with Aliens. And of course we see the military evil incaranated in the officer with the southern accent, Stephen Lang, who probably loves the smell of napalm in the morning. And we see the aliens fight back against a supposedly superior force, drawn from every movie from The Return of the Jedi‘s cuddly Ewoks to Cameron’s own Aliens. This is Cameron’s first directing of a fiction film since Titanic, 12 years ago and I’m getting the idea that this will be no more original than the recent films of another once cutting edge director, George Lucas, who gave us so much empty eye candy spectacle in the Star Wars prequels. In fact, like those bloated CGI behemoths, Avatar’s battle scenes look a lot like video games, smooth and pristine but lacking the feel of real. With his long record of success, Cameron should not be underestimated but based on the trailer that’s supposed to entice viewers, it offers little we haven’t seen before.

The double feature–maybe you’ve heard of them but have you ever been to one? I can think back to my boyhood when there were still double bills but they weren’t the same as were the standard fare of Hollywood’s classic era. Then the major studios had A-units who produced the quality products with stars, beautiful sets and stories we remember so well, but they also had the B-units, where everything was cheaper, the actors weren’t stars (although these films helped the studio discover their talent and develop them into stars) and the stories were more formulaic. The B-picture helped round out the bill of a normal theater that, along with the studios’ short features like travelogues, cartoons, and trailers, could make a typical trip to the movies last for four or five hours and offer a greater value for your 25 cent admission. After the classic era ended in the late 40s and studios sold off their theater chains, the studios got rid of their B-units as they sought to survive by making more expensive films that attracted a dwindling audience.

By the 1960′s, the double-feature, like the animated short, was almost extinct, but a few appeared whenever the rare blockbuster appeared, such as Clint Eastwood’s star-making spaghetti westerns, like A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I saw the latter film, paired with Clint’s American western, Hang ‘Em High one night as a teen. My other memorable double feature was my introduction to James Bond, when Dr. No and Goldfinger were re-released to Bond-crazy fans to see again.

Although the term has endured, the experience of a double feature is likely one not known for generations by most who, in the age of home video, can watch triple features of the Star Wars films, or Star Trek, or the Terminator installments anytime they like. So when Pixar set aside two weeks, starting last Friday, to screen their modern classics Toy Story and Toy Story 2 in Disney Digital 3-D, it’s a real cultural event. I went today with my fifteen year old son who recalled seeing the sequel film in theaters as one of his first movies at around 6 years old. We watched the clear, clean digitally projected image as films we’d seen several times came alive in a fresh way with the marvelous digital 3-D images that, though not originally designed for the process, of course, still looked very good in conversion to it.

The process does, as has been noted, darken the image somewhat in exchange for the three-dimensional illusion. A few times I lifted the special glasses I’d gotten with my ticket to notice how bright (and blurred with the stereoscopic effect) the screen was. A theater manager told me afterward that it was a digitally projected image, not a film reel that was being shown and it was fed from a hard-drive system which made each screening as pristine as the first. This, or something like it, is the future of theatrical film as exhibitors add digital projectors in the next few years.

Part of the growth of 3-D in theaters is the search for something that will attract audiences to theaters that they can’t get elsewhere–and though this was tried in the fifties, it meant wearing the famous green and red lensed cardboard glasses which strained eye muscles as it fooled them into the three-dimensional illusion, but it became associated with gimmicky onscreen actions aimed at the camera. It wasn’t worth the trouble and studios stopped soon stopped.

Historically, this is part of the ongoing imperative to make the film experience ever more realistic–starting with fuzzy black and white and improving the image with better technology, then sound, color and so on, what French critic Andre Bazin called “the myth of total cinema,” the idealistic notion of a perfected moving image. 3-D of course adds the third dimension of depth but everyone knows that a good film doesn’t really require it if you care about the characters and story. It’s just a little something extra to add value to the theatrical experience. But with the coming of new digital projectors which will eliminate reels of film, 3-D is an added bonus and it’s a better process than the old days-for certain mainstream audience-leasers, like Disney’s upcoming CGI version of A Christmas Carol with (shudder) Jim Carrey, it should prove a nice addition, but most other films won’t need or benefit by it.

I don’t know how long it will be before the new 3-D either loses its novelty, or on the other hand, some smart director figures out how to actually incorporate it into an artistic element of the story that truly deepens the aesthetic experience beyond the declining thrill of objects flying at the audience. But I’ll take anything by Pixar in two or three dimensions because story and character are core and anything else is icing.