The movie isn't pro-america nonsense?I was under the impression that it was self-indulgent liberal American guilt nonsense, but YMMV.
So basically, it's anti-war, pro-Green®, pro-indigenous, anti-corporate story about a native population that just needs a white boy to get their act together and fight back? And more to the point, a native population explicitly designed to ensure that the ingenue is though alien still fuckable?More or less, but you've also forgotten the important bit where the native population teaches the white boy important lessons about sharing and nature and shit, thereby allowing us to resolve our anxiety about our society's greed, environmental destructiveness, militarism and whatnot.
Everything else is a source of endless snark and bitternessWell, everyone needs hobbies.
AND the website name pretty much tells you the agenda of the "reviewer" before you even read the piece.I don't understand this criticism, to be honest. It's a website about feminism and disability. It's not like they're hiding the agenda. If you don't care about feminist disability rights analysis, you can discount what they're saying. Is the argument that people shouldn't engage in agenda-driven analysis of pop culture? What if some of us enjoy reading agenda-driven analysis of pop culture?
“Hollywood metonymy for female characters is ‘handbags,’ also known as ‘girlfriend parts’—in other words, incidental sidekicks. Gale Anne Hurd, Cameron’s second wife, and the producer of his first three films, says that Cameron always found women more interesting than men as protagonists. ‘He felt that they were underutilized in sci-fi, action, and fantasy,’ she said. ‘And that just about everything you could explore in a male action hero could be explored better with a woman.’posted by ericb at 2:56 PM on December 12, 2009
….As a young writer, Cameron borrowed a trick from Walter Hill, who, working on the outer-space horror movie ‘Alien,’ took a character (a young ensign named Ripley) that was originally male and, with minimal revision, made the character female. (Sigourney Weaver played the role, Ellen Ripley.) As Cameron described the technique, ‘You write dialogue for a guy and then change the name.’” *
“Ten years ago, with Vince Pace, who had worked on ‘The Abyss,’ Cameron started to develop a 3-D camera. He wanted to use it to shoot a dramatic, gritty, realistic Mars movie that would present a compelling case for planetary exploration. At the time, stereoscopic cameras weighed four hundred and fifty pounds and were the size of washing machines—so cumbersome that when Cameron shot a 3-D short for a ‘Terminator’ ride at the Universal theme park the stuntmen had to run at half speed for the camera to keep up with them. Cameron challenged Pace to come up with what he called a ‘holy-grail camera’: lightweight, quiet, and capable of shooting in 2-D and 3-D simultaneously.posted by ericb at 3:08 PM on December 12, 2009 [2 favorites]
While researching his Mars movie, Cameron made friends with a number of astronauts. In 2000, he went to Russia to train for a flight aboard the Soviet-era spacecraft Soyuz; the idea was that he would spend thirty days at the International Space Station, do a space walk, and film the whole thing in 3-D. He’d catch a ride home on the NASA space shuttle. It would be like living inside Kubrick’s ‘2001.’
But, before bringing a camera into space, Cameron had to prove it safe. He decided that the best way to test the camera’s worthiness was ‘combat at sea,’ and he took it to the site of the Titanic wreck. His brother Mike, an engineer (and once his fort-building and rocket-launching accomplice), designed two remote-operated vehicles, each equipped with an early prototype of the 3-D camera that Cameron and Pace were developing, and nimble enough to explore the ship’s interior. Late in the summer of 2001, with Vince Pace as D.P., Jim and Mike spent several weeks diving the wreck in submersibles launched from a Russian research vessel, recording images of places that only the ship’s passengers had ever seen. In the middle of the expedition, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, and the trip was cut short. The mission to the space station was put on hold, but the footage from the dive was released as ‘Ghosts of the Abyss,’ a 3-D documentary.
…The camera that Cameron and Pace developed allows a director to more finely control the aesthetics of the stereo-space, and, to a great extent, the expectations of the 3-D industry ride on ‘Avatar.’ ‘When you look at the history of film, there have been to date two great revolutions—sound and color,’ Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Dreamworks Animation and a tireless promoter of 3-D, told me. ‘This will be the third great revolution. People are still somewhat skeptical and wonder if it’s a gimmick and if it is better suited to cartoons. I don’t believe that for a second. I think the day after Jim Cameron’s movie comes out, it’s a new world.’ Michael Lewis, the C.E.O. of RealD, the leading 3-D projection company, says, ‘The industry is looking for its ‘Citizen Kane,’ its definitive work of 3-D, and ‘Avatar’ may be that film.’” *
Now, in that context, think about movies where heteronormative love stories don't even make logical narrative sense, and have to be forcibly imposed.I find that a large number of movies have a "love story" shoehorned into the narrative, regardless of whether the narrative requires one. On the other hand, I'm not particularly offended by it and consider it part of the cinematic landscape. Movies are very, very simple: you have a single theme/"big idea" and in it you have a simple plot device that holds the movie together, and usually some kind of love/tension developing between the protagonists wraps things up for the viewers. That Avatar apparently has one, too, doesn't seem surprising. Since it's not a movie that's about the arbitrary nature of gender roles and exploring the possibility of life forms that don't conform to our earth-bound conceptions (heh!) of sexuality, I don't see why one would expect anything other than a standard "love interest" one would expect in a big budget movie.
What movies would that be?
A short story by Iain Banks about a transsexual alien is to be the first of his sciencefiction works to be adapted for the big screen.This could be totally awesome!
...
The movie will have a budget of about £13m and is expected to begin shooting in South Africa next year. It is the first film to be made out of the Fife-born writer’s series of novels about the Culture, a utopian, socialist alien society.
...
The plot centres on a character called Wrobik, a member of the Culture in exile on another planet, who has undergone a female-to-male transformation but is still attracted to men. He is offered the chance to save his male lover from kid-nappers and pay off gambling debts by committing an act of terrorism.
The story, which was originally published in the science fiction magazine Interzone, runs to only 20 pages in a short story collection by Banks called The State of the Art.
Mike Downey, producer of the film and co-owner of Film & Music Entertainment, said: (...)
“We have been toying with doing a sci-fi film for a long time but we wanted to do something that played with the idea of gender and its role in a future society — but in a society that wasn’t a million miles away from where we are now.
"Although 'blockbusters' were initially created by the audience, after a while the term came to mean a high-budget production aimed at mass markets, with associated merchandising, on which the financial fortunes of film studio or distributor depended. It was defined by its production budget and marketing effort rather than its success and popularity, and was essentially a tag which a film's marketing gave itself."Yeah, thats what I meant.
gur zbivr qbrfag ernyyl fcryy vg bhg, ohg vg uvagf rneyvre ba gung Rnegu vf va qrrc fuvg naq Habognvavhz vf fb inyhnoyr orpnhfr vgf urycvat gb fbyir gung ceboyrz ....V'z abg ernyyl fher vs V jbhyq tb gung sne. Gb zr vg whfg frrzrq yvxr gurl jnagrq guvf fghss orpnhfr vg jnf hfrshy, abg orpnhfr gurl jbhyq qvr jvgubhg vg.
Va gur svany pbasebagngvba jvgu Dhnevgpu, jura ur fnlf "Ubj qbrf vg srry gb or n genvgbe gb lbhe enpr, Fhyyl?", Dhnevgpu vf yvgrenyyl evtug. Vgf abg whfg gung ur frrf guvatf qvssreragyl sebz Wnxr, n cbyvgvpny qvfnterrzrag nobhg gur orfg jnl sbejneq sbe gur uhzna enpr. Vg vf yvgrenyyl gehr - Wnxr'f npgvbaf, va trggvat gur cynarg gb havgr ntnvafg gur uhznaf, znl jryy yrnq gb gur qrfgehpgvba bs uvf (sbezre) enpr.
Space popes. Lol."Of course, that sounds outlandish and absurd, but that's the point, isn't it? We live in an age in which it's the norm to speak glowingly of spirituality but derisively of traditional religion. If the Na'Vi were Roman Catholics, there would be boycotts and protests. Make the oversized Smurfs Rousseauian noble savages and everyone nods along, save for a few cranky right-wingers."Yes. Why aren't these aliens from another planet Roman Catholics, somehow? Why can't James Cameron make this movie about some epic battle between interplanetary Space Popes?
Some might protest: But what about Avatar's anti-imperialism and anti-corporate attitudinizing? They're red herrings, in my opinion, planted by Cameron with the cynical intention of distracting the viewer from the movie's more serious ideological work: convincing you to love your simulation—convincing you to surrender your queasiness. The audacity of Cameron's movie is to make believe that the artificial world of computer-generated graphics offers a truer realm of nature than our own. The compromised, damaged world we live in—the one with wars, wounds, and price-benefit calculations—can and should be abandoned. All you need is a big heart, like Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the movie's war-veteran hero, and the luck of being given a chance to fall in love.Via Andrew Sullivan's blog.
« Older Starlight... | Lobster: The Journal of Parapo... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by Oxydude at 1:02 AM on December 12, 2009 [2 favorites]