Avatar

Posted on April 20, 2010 at 12:00 pm

NOTE: The DVD being released this week is a stripped-down 2D version. Later this year there will be another release with many more extras.

Writer-director-producer James Cameron (“Titanic,” “Terminator”) spent a record-breaking $230 million on “Avatar,” and the good news is that he got his money’s worth on the technology — the 3D motion capture technology is stunning, many levels above anything that has ever been done before. He has literally created an entire world, the planet Pandora, so that every insect, plant, animal, waterfall, humanoid creature, and landscape and all of the physical properties that govern the way they interact has to be carefully thought through and consistently applied so that it is at the same time imaginative and credible. If it manages the second better than the first, that is still very impressive. And if it runs out of imagination and even some credibility when it comes to the plot, well, there is still enough on the screen to qualify as entertaining eye candy.

It takes place more than a hundred years in the future. Sam Worthington plays Jake, a former Marine confined to a wheelchair following an injury. His twin brother, a scientist, has been killed and Jake is given the chance to replace him on a major project for a big corporation. Jake does not have his brother’s training and experience but he has something even more important — the same DNA. Jake’s brother and his colleagues have mixed some of their DNA with that of a humanoid race on the planet Pandora to create hybrids that can be used as sort of puppets, manipulated by the humans to interact with the creatures on Pandora. Since Jake’s DNA matches, he qualifies. And he has a powerful incentive to participate. With the money he will get, he will be able to afford the surgery that will restore his ability to walk, which is not covered by his VA benefits. (Apparently, even a century from now we still won’t have that health care thing licked.) So Jake goes into a pod sort of thing and the next thing and into a sleep sort of state and the next thing you know he is digging big, blue toes into the Pandorian ground (I guess you don’t call it earth if it’s on another planet).

Those are very big, blue toes. The Pandorians are 10-foot tall, skinny, long-limbed creatures, sort of like America’s Next Top Model if they were blue and had tails. They have cat-like faces and long, braided hair that surrounds a sort of tentacled membrane that can be used like a USB cable to plug into energy sources in plants, animals, other Pandorians, and whatever they call what we here call earth. And speaking of whatever they call things, I’m just going to refer to them as people from now on.

So the Pandorians are a gentle people who commune deeply with nature. They kill animals for meat but they do it respectfully. They plug into to the special tree as though it was a cell phone recharger and reach out to each other in kumbaya circles to get in touch with their ancestors. And here is where the juggernaut of Cameron’s budget and energy outruns his imagination and it all starts to look like it was pieced together from bits of “Ferngully,” Pocahontas, National Geographic, assorted historical failures of colonialism, imperialism, and international intervention from the Indians to Viet Nam and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus “Dances With Wolves.” “When people are sitting on that you want,” explains one character, “you make them your enemies.” And, sure enough, the mercenary former Colonel calls the Na’vi “hostiles,” “aborigines,” and terrorists.

All of that work goes into designing the look of the planet and then the best name they can come up with is Pandora? As in the woman who unleashed all the troubles of the world, at least here on planet Earth? Why? And, since we know there has to be some sort of McGuffin (Alfred Hitchcock’s term for whatever it is that the hero and heroine have to get or do before the end of the movie) that must be difficult to obtain, let’s call it “unobtainium.” That sounds like something Dr. Evil would be cackling about while Basil Exposition brings Austin Powers up to date. It made me want to give Cameron an ultimatium.

Unobtainium is some very rare and precious ore underneath a tree sacred to a Pandorian tribe called the Na’vi that the evil corporation headed by Giovanni Ribisi wants to get at any cost. But for some reason, the Na’vi have resisted their efforts to cajole or bribe. When they agree to teach Jake their ways, the corporation realizes that if he gains their trust, they can use him to lead them to the tree. And then no more Mr. Nice Corporation. Bring out the bulldozers and the private army. Meanwhile, Jake is getting very close to the daughter of the Na’vi leaders (Zoe Saldana, with this and “Star Trek” now the 2009 fanboy dream girl). Apparently, another thing that is universal is kissing. And also falling for the guy your parents don’t approve of.

I am willing to believe those things occur on all planets, even the pervasiveness of the evil corporation as bad guy, too. But there are other elements in the story that just seem unoriginal and not very well thought through. The creatures seem like tweaked versions of Earth animals. Putting an extra pair of legs on a horse is, like stretching out a human form, not all that exciting, though it does add a bit more thunder to the hooves. The Na’vi wear conventional noble savage attire (skimpy, lots of beads), but the human avatars somehow fit cargo pants and t-shirts onto their Pandorian bodies (dealing with the tails must be a challenge).

But let’s face it, the unobtainium we seek in a movie like this one is not profundity. If the story is not new, the visual effects are. Even the subtitles (for when the characters speak in Na’vi language) help give the frame additional depth. The 3D is inviting and immersive, adding to the sense of vertigo or constriction. The integration of the live action and CGI footage is seamless and the performances of Worthington, Sigourney Weaver as a scientist, Michelle Rodriguez as a pilot and Stephen Lang as the Colonel provide some of the depth and grounding that the pixels and script do not deliver. And the pixels deliver the kind of fun that movies — and fangirls like me — were made for.

Botox vs. Acting

Posted on March 18, 2010 at 8:00 am

Amanda Fortini writes in New York Magazine about the impact that Botox and other beauty treatments have had on acting. What is a star to do when deciding between a face that can show emotion and one that looks younger but can’t move?

These days, to watch television or to go to the movies is to be jarred, put off, and sometimes saddened by our nonstop exposure to cosmetic interventions. We’re all familiar with the usual specimens, the Heidi Montags and Mickey Rourkes, whose many extreme surgeries and baroque physical changes are routinely dissected by blogs and tabloids. But I’m talking about a different species of performer. Less freakish yet far more abundant are the actors who, by virtue of a range of injectable substances (Botox and its cousin, Dysport; Restylane, Juvéderm, and other fillers of this ilk), are mysteriously unaffected by gravity, childbearing, or free radicals. They seem to have avoided growing old entirely or, like Benjamin Button, to be growing younger with each year. Either that or they look as if they’ve ripened abnormally, their features drifting off in odd, conflicting directions.

What I like about this article is the way it goes beyond the usual tabloid “who’s had work done?” or even “who’s had freakishly bizarre work done?” articles to talk about the way these treatments have affected the style of acting. If you watch early talkies, movies from the 1930’s-late 1940’s, you will still see remnants of early 20th century stage acting with its arch, mid-Atlantic cadences and theatrical gestures. Movie acting was still in its infancy and it really was not until the 1950’s that what we think of today as acting, the natural, intimate, style of performers who understand that the camera will pick up their smallest changes of expression.

The Method brought Freudianism to the screen. Its numerous devotees (Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Paul Newman, Jane Fonda) ushered in an era of fluid, naturalistic acting that has continued to flourish to this day….The aim of the Method has, over time, come to define the fundamental mission of dramatic acting itself: to use the face and the body to express subtle, complex, conflicting psychological and emotional states.

But by freezing the face and removing the ability to convey emotion and character with the eyebrows, the forehead, and the mouth, Botox and other treatments have led to a return to acting through more emphasis on gesture and voice, and Fortini says the result is a different kind of character.

Some actors appear to be underplaying their characters, consciously making them cool, without affect. If you can’t move your face, why not create an undemonstrative character? Others have taken the opposite approach: On two cable dramas starring actresses of a certain age, the heroines are brassy and expansive, with a tendency to shout and act out, yet somehow their placid foreheads are never called into play. Usually, when a person reenacts a stabbing or smashes a car with a baseball bat, some part of the face is going to crease or bunch up. Not so with these women. As though to compensate for their facial inertia, both perform with stagy vigor, attempting broad looks of surprise or disappointment, gesticulating and bellowing. If you can’t frown with your mouth, they seem intent on proving, you can try to frown with your voice.

The conflict is getting even more pointed as HD televisions threatens to do to less-than-perfect faces what the introduction of sound did to actors whose voices did not match their profiles. On the other hand, “Avatar” would not have been nearly as affecting without the performance of Zoe Saldana, whose stunningly expressive face was translated by computers that could never hope to replicate true the communication of true emotions, making, for that film, acting the real special effect.

More Thoughts on ‘Avatar’ (Spoiler Alerts)

Posted on January 7, 2010 at 10:20 am

Many thanks for the very thoughtful comments on my post about the commentary that “Avatar” has inspired. I was particularly glad to be directed to some thoughtful assessments of the film I had not seen.
Thanks to Sheherazahde and Cheryl Anne for suggesting John Crowley’s commentary.

As to the story — it was astonishingly standard, every element, every twist, every emotion having been seen a thousand times before. It was nearly identical to both Disney’s and Terence Malick’s Pocohantas, but more Disney — the heroine even closely resembled Disney’s. But it also took from John Ford cavalry epics and a dozen other sources. It also was a derivative of Ursula LeGuin’s The Word for World is Forest, one of her lesser and more platitudinous all-life-is-sacred-and-women-know-it stories, up to and including interconnected wise trees and brutal uncaring corporate and military types. Hilarious, actually, rather than lowering.

James led me to Carl McColman’s commentary on the film as a Christian parable.

I think it’s interesting to breathe through the obvious contours of this story and consider it as a parable of the intersection between sky-god and earth-goddess spiritualities. Here’s the key: one of the main characters is named Grace Augustine. Can you get any more heavy-handed than that?…

So in the end, wisdom proves greater than either might or avarice — and the “Christian” wisdom of grace and justice joins together with the “Pagan” wisdom of the goddess-as-the-web-of-life. And this integrated wisdom proves to be too much for the “sky people.” Quaritch dies at the hand of Neytiri, felled by the very arrows he laughed at throughout the story. Selfridge, meanwhile, is marched ingloriously onto a ship that is sent packing. Only Grace’s team is allowed to remain on Pandora, and the movie ends with Jake finally solving the problem of his paraplegic body.

Indeed, I think the fact that Jake is disabled is as central to understanding Avatar as is the symbolism of Grace Augustine (“grace pre-destined”?). Jake comes from a disabled planet. As he mournfully tells Eywa, “our home has no green on it; we’ve killed it all.” Both he and Grace experience a death-and-resurrection; but where hers is more classically Christian in tone: she, the sinner (smoker) is felled by sin (a gunshot wound) and dies, only to find new life in the post-corporeal, beatific vision of Eywa — whose name seems to be a möbius-strip inversion of “Yahweh” suggesting that she encompasses both earth goddess and sky god. Jake, on the other hand, undergoes a more explicitly Pagan death-and-rebirth, reincarnating in the healthy body of his avatar.

Sheherazahde also pointed us to this response from Druid blogger Ali, showing, as I said before, that the spareness of the story allows each of us to bring our own perspective (and bias) to it.
And I am grateful to Andy Culpepper for giving us a link to his “Avatar” commentary at The Hollywood Beat.

The electronic game and cyber worlds have given us a skewed definition of what an avatar represents, but the original meaning from the Sanskrit translates “one who crosses over….”

Not since 1999 and “The Matrix” (http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Movies/9903/31/matrix/) have I come across such an accessible major motion picture so rich in mythological, literary and Judeo-Christian references. Like “The Matrix,” “Avatar” expands expectations of what a feature film can offer an appreciative audience.

Early on, Cameron lets us know that we’re following a protagonist who represents much more than what meets the eye. The Sanskrit definition – one who crosses over – refers to a deity who comes to Earth in body form. Is his Jake a Christ figure? No – he isn’t sacrificed. Does he undergo apotheosis? Oh, yeah.

Both Jake and his dead brother, Tom, have been named with a nod to the Bible. Thomas was also known as Ditimus, the original “doubting Tom,” and Jake is short for Jacob, a second-born twin whose name translates from the Hebrew as “the foot catcher.” Jacob was born in a breach birth – his hand clasping the heel of his slightly-older brother, Esau. In “Avatar,” Jake is a metaphorical foot-catcher: Becoming an avatar allows him the chance to walk on two feet again, if only during his cross-over or dream state.

Just as Jake in the movie “crossed over” to literally connect to the wisdom of the Pandorans, it seems to me that Cameron, in releasing his film, has opened up his story to the wisdom of the audiences. This discussion has enriched the experience of the movie for me. I loved jestrfyl’s reference to the ewoks! And his very wise conclusion that “These films, like Jesus’ parables, favor the characters who have no authority and have yet to realize their own power.”
A rabbi once told me to keep in mind that the only difference between a mirror and a window is a coating of silver. Some people want movies to be a mirror, to reflect back to them what they already believe. They can feel threatened or offended by any story that does not explicitly validate or reinforce their beliefs. Others look to movies as a window, to give them a sense of something they have not seen or thought of before. They cherish other views, even those that contradict their own, as a reinforcement of their notion of freedom and humanity, and an opportunity for deeper understanding and greater connection.

Opening this Week: Avatar, Young Victoria, and Did You Hear About the Morgans?

Posted on December 14, 2009 at 3:38 pm

This week, I’ll be reviewing “Young Victoria,” with Emily Blunt as the teenager whose reign as queen of England defined an era. It is produced by Sarah Ferguson, former daughter-in-law of Queen Victoria’s great-great-great-granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II. And there’s also the romantic comedy about an estranged couple who are stuck with each other in the witness protection program, “Did You Hear About the Morgans?” with Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker. But the big news this week is “Avatar,” now officially the most expensive film of all time, from James Cameron, whose last record-breaking budget led to record-smashing box office returns: “Titanic.” “Avatar” is a 3D animated story about a world of 10-ft blue creatures with tails and the humans who interact with them via computer-generated substitutes. That review will be up late Friday; the others on Thursday night.

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Opening This Week

First Glimpse of ‘Avatar’

Posted on August 24, 2009 at 3:58 pm

James Cameron says he wanted to give the fans more than a 3-minute trailer to give them an idea of what to expect from his first non-documentary feature film in 12 years, the very-eagerly anticipated (by fanboys everywhere) “Avatar.” So on Friday he allowed audiences to get an almost-20 minute preview, IMAX screen, 3D glasses and all. And I was there.

It was not exactly what I expected, more of a fantasy CGI film than live action with special effects. At first it felt more like a top-quality game without a controller than a movie. But then I was drawn into the story, thanks in part to the detail of the graphics but more because of the voice talent — Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana. The movie opens in December and I am very much looking forward to it.

Here is the teaser trailer:

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Trailers, Previews, and Clips