Last night we went to see Avatar. I actually quite liked it. The Pandoran critters were quite believable. I once dreamed that I had been born with a tail. My mother indignantly denied it. The dream had been quite vivid, with sensations of twitching my tail. Perhaps the Kundalini energy had been overactive. The audience was mostly under 30, but well behaved, unlike my wife's party recent experienced on a weekend. I do hope that the overall message of atunement to the environment vs. the corporate view that "nature" is just dead and of unlimited exportability sinks in to their sensibilities. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
The last time I went to a movie theater I vowed I would never go to another. Kept that vow for 6 six years. Most movies I have zero interest in viewing and most of the rest I can view in the comfort of my own home, hear the soundtrack over my own sound system¹, not have someone coughing flu all over us (happened the last time) by buying/renting the DVD for 25%/1% of the cost of going to a theater.
And we don't have to watch 27 trailers of previews for films the producers would have to give me money, free sex, and drugs to sit through.
But I guess I'll end-up going to this one. I do want to see what is happening with 3D animation. If nothing else I'll get a nice 2.5 hour nap.
¹ In New Mexico the soundtrack is considered an optional externality: great if the audience can hear but, in the general scheme of things, not all that important.
3D is not a better approximation of sight, it is damned unusual. And uncomfortable. It is a new medium (in its current guise), but is as relevant as the pop-up book is to world literature. The only thing that is driving this is beating file-sharers and physical unit pirates (espec. in Asia).
I shall probably see the damn thing - though a 10.30 am press show might assuage my guilt. I may even like it. But it is really the last firework in the Lumière display. You can't be me, I'm taken
The audience in the picture looks like they are all eagerly awaiting the joys of root canal surgery.
Except for the lady third on your right who has apparently fallen asleep.
It's funny. The techniques and technology of film making are progressing at a rapid clip. Yet the process and practice of story-telling is heading ever-downward. To quote Harlan Ellison, "It's like a dead rat embedded in a Lucite block."
My standard lecture on the subject describes the 'concept editor': someone who can speak the language of many different groups, and translate visions between them. I aspire to be a concept editor. The group that is most tricky to deal with is the punters. Evolving all the time.
And the artistic question, as ever, is to what extent do you educate the punters and to what extent do you entertain them? A spoonful of tolerable medicine. And yet art, like advertising, is aimed at pointing out the inadequacies of the punter's life. You can't be me, I'm taken
By "punters" do you mean the audience or the backers of a film?
Oh, well. Nothing to do with me. I know too much, and too little, to want to get into the Film business.
But I still claim that there is no such thing as an original 'oeuvre'. Never has been. Because for an 'oeuvre' to be successful in any way, it needs to communicate through what an audience knows or thinks it knows already. What the audience already knows about a 'work' is implicit in it's ability to vibrate the audience in some way - that is, a work must always reference what has gone before, otherwise it can have no 'meaning'.
The distinction between 'reality' and fiction was easier to smudge in the days of linear presentations. But in the non-linear life which we now lead (and have always lead), it becomes more difficult to control the psychedelic experience of life, and to divide what is real from what is not real.
The drone operators in Arkansas, directing drones in Afghanistan that kill people, play a video game. An extreme and trite example perhaps. IMO the next 10 years will be spent arguing about what is real. As ever ;-) You can't be me, I'm taken
In almost the same way, an artist's -- if we want to start throwing insults around - oeuvre cannot be singular because communication require some overlap in "vocabulary." (I spare you the standard ATinNM discourse re: Piercean semiotics¹) The desperate search for "originality" by western artists -- including film makers -- is a Modern (Post-Modern?) obsession, not a necessary aspect, part, or property of Art tho' it may be a necessary aspect, part, or property of the currently existing Art business.
¹ You're welcome.
ATinNM:
such that you can jump off a bride and fly
for the uxurious amongst us, that rings so true... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
The desperate search for "originality" by western artists -- including film makers -- is a Modern (Post-Modern?) obsession, not a necessary aspect, part, or property of Art tho' it may be a necessary aspect, part, or property of the currently existing Art business.
mmm, chewy...
PNing a bit, but i see it a bit differently.
first of all, one may seek to be original in a manner that belies desperation, more of a quest for calm.
but if you sub novelty, then i agree.
just to carry a tradition on without undue embellishment, now there are many artists content with that, even making a living.
the art business makes more off of novelty, as the public rewards that more highly, as it reflects and accompanies the deconstruction of the past that is presently accelerating.
i would submit that the 'sweet spot' for a career artist is when he or she knows that the fans want something not too different from the last offering, but leaving room for evolution.
the worst would be to have to stay a step ahead of a zeitgeist that was slipping away faster than you can run, or conversely to have such a rigid fanbase that they wouldn't show up unless the artist were faithfully cloning their own pasts for them, with little or no room for growth, because that would be confusing and make them feel superannuated. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
First, a little background: I'm a professor of astrophysics who has searched for planets, worked on SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programs, and taught classes on life in the universe. Right now, I'm helping to build a global network of telescopes to search for planets and supernovae. That is a long-winded way of saying that it is part of my job description to think about the possibility of life on other worlds. So when James Cameron makes one of the most expensive movies ever made, and one that puts us right in the middle of an alien culture... in 3D.... well to say I'm interested doesn't begin to cover it.
First, a little background: I'm a professor of astrophysics who has searched for planets, worked on SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programs, and taught classes on life in the universe. Right now, I'm helping to build a global network of telescopes to search for planets and supernovae.
That is a long-winded way of saying that it is part of my job description to think about the possibility of life on other worlds. So when James Cameron makes one of the most expensive movies ever made, and one that puts us right in the middle of an alien culture... in 3D.... well to say I'm interested doesn't begin to cover it.
I wasn't that impressed...3D is not a better approximation of sight, it is damned unusual.
There's a positive, in-depth (pardon pun) by Manohla Dargis in the NYT. More important than the 3-D was the other technology:
"Mr. Cameron has said that he started thinking about the alien universe that became Pandora and its galactic environs in "Avatar" back in the 1970s. He wrote a treatment in 1996, but the technologies he needed to turn his ideas into images didn't exist until recently. New digital technologies gave him the necessary tools, including performance capture, which translates an actor's physical movements into a computer-generated image (CGI).
... In keeping with his maximalist tendencies, Mr. Cameron has shot "Avatar" in 3-D ... an experiment that serves his material beautifully. This isn't the 3-D of the 1950s or even contemporary films, those flicks that try to give you a virtual poke in the eye with flying spears. Rather Mr. Cameron uses 3-D to amplify the immersive experience of spectacle cinema. ...
After a few minutes the novelty of people and objects hovering above the row in front of you wears off, and you tend not to notice the 3-D, which speaks to the subtlety of its use and potential future applications. Mr. Cameron might like to play with high-tech gadgets, but he's an old-fashioned filmmaker at heart, and he wants us to get as lost in his fictional paradise as Jake eventually does.
... one of the pleasures of the movies is that they transport us, as Neytiri does with Jake, into imaginary realms, into Eden and over the rainbow to Oz.
If the story of a paradise found and potentially lost feels resonant, it's because "Avatar" is as much about our Earth as the universe that Mr. Cameron has invented. But the movie's truer meaning is in the audacity of its filmmaking.
... Movies rarely carry us away, few even try. They entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. Some attempt to overwhelm us, but their efforts are usually a matter of volume. What's often missing is awe, something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance. He hasn't changed cinema, but with blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder."
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/movies/18avatar.html Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
Anything by Ridley Scott needs to be seen in a theater.
The scenic shots of New Zealand in Lord of the Rings were stunning and some of the special effects shots were nice. The rest, i.e., most, of the films ... not really.
POTENTIAL SPOILER FOLLOWS
One aspect of Avatar, if my Informed Sources are correct ;-), I find intriguing is the film's use of the Yggdrasil motif. It was used in The Fountain but in such a disconnected way, and it's so unfamiliar with modern audiences, I doubt it came across.
Shades of: Tapio You can't be me, I'm taken
....this I am looking forward ro.... "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
I don't want to give the impression it was unalloyed suffering-it wasn't. And I stopped looking at my watch during the battle scenes at the end. But without the 3D, a very ordinary film.
Cold media, normally 'high-resolution', have fewer interpretation possibilities, and are thus usually more 'distant' from the audience. 3D points out that you are a consumer. You can't be me, I'm taken
But, I have found that I'm drawn deeper into films by the experience of 3D. Something to do, I think, with the more "physically" immersive experience. Even though I haven't seen a 3D film yet that's actually all that good.
You get the best kind of writing when there's a scene where no one is saying or doing much, but you know exactly what they're thinking and feeling, what motivates them, and what their plans are.
Cameron is one of the people most responsible for reducing science fiction cinema to comic book narratives, especially from Aliens onwards, which elevated the grunts vs marines trope to the cliche that it's become today, in film and in print.
Compare with 2001, where there was so much showing and so little telling, especially at the end, that a lot of people had no conscious conception of what was happening - but they still had a sense that it was moving and even profound.
But 2001 assumed that audiences were aware enough to follow. Most recent films have left that assumption behind, and assume that audiences are made up of gum chewing fools out for a roller coaster ride and some eye candy.
