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Avatar (2009)
Techno-banality
Avatar is a grand feast for the eyes, which is a good thing, because there's almost nothing else there to engage your sensibilities. You don't have to turn your mind off while watching this epic movie because Avatar turns it off for you.
Avatar tells a simple story: In the future, a WASP marine infiltrates a tribe of natives, called the Na'vi, on a planet called Pandora, using new technology that enables him to live inside the body of an "avatar" that looks just like the natives, so they accept him as one of their own. He's working for the scientists, who want to understand and help the natives, but he's also secretly working for the corporation and their private military, who want the Na'vi land to mine some kind of valuable mineral. As the story goes on, surprise, our hero falls in love with the Na'vi babe, turns against the corporation, and ultimately saves the native world. Who woulda thunk it? Once again a white guy saves the savages.
Ripping off A Man Called Horse, Little Big Man, The Mission, and so on and so on, at times its almost like a remake - a hodge-podge remake - of every "white man among the natives" movie that's ever been made. Cameron is absolutely shameless, he practically lifts scenes whole from these other films, there's even the bit where our hero hunts a beast for food and "mercifully" kills it, thanking it for its sacrifice and giving its soul to the spirit of the earth. Or some such nonsense. There's all kinds of hokey mumbo-jumbo about "the deep connection the natives have with the forest" and "a network of energy that flows through all living things" and other such blah-blah. Cameron doesn't do any of these stolen scenes justice, they feel perfunctory, he's just wants to score his "green" points and move on to the next really cool CGI shot.
And they're certainly cool, no one could argue that Avatar isn't visually spectacular. But I started to get really bored about an hour into this almost 3 hour show. Cameron knows his audience though, just when one might start to nod off from all the banality, he gives us amazing effects like the massive floating mountains or soaring flights on winged beasts. Personally, as far as the FX, I preferred the military hardware - the fighting robot gizmos with men inside wearing them like clunky suits of armor, or the helicopters with their double rotors soaring around their ginormous mothership - to the glowing phosphorus jungle and all its "natural" beauty.
Even in this big video game of a movie, there are some nice performances that transcend the banality of the roles. Sigourney Weaver has a scene where she pleads with the bad guys not to destroy the forest, some kind of babble about how the jungle is one big living entity (this movie should have opened on Earth Day) and she's so impassioned that her eyes light up, she's so damn good she almost sells it. As Colonel Quaritch, the leader of the corporate private army, the mostly unknown but great actor Stephen Lang does a parody of every movie gung-ho military leader that ever went gleefully and ignorantly to his Little Big Horn. Lang's over-the-top macho zeal is so dead-on perfect that one can only feel sorry for the idiotic critics that thought he was playing it straight (he's not, he's not). As the Na'vi alien "Neytiri", Zoe Saldana somehow manages to give a believable, charming, unique performance within the confines of her strictly CGI character. When her father is killed she's very touching as she wails and thrashes about in grief; later, when she faces off with the Colonel in battle, she turns and hisses at him like an enraged, cornered beast and we really do feel her primal connection with the jungle world in which she exists. And drop-dead gorgeous Michelle Rodriguez continues to be one of the sexiest women currently working in TV and film, and she just happens to be a darn fine actress. She always has that likable toughness about her, but not at the expense of being a total babe.
But the story and the theme of Avatar is just so much crap. It's pure corn, pitting the pure-hearted scientists against the evil military industrial complex. Much has been made of its political bent, but you don't have to be a conservative to hate the whole setup. As a liberal I resented it just on the basis of its manipulative superficiality. And as a movie-lover, I hated it for the same reason.
Avatar is not just a movie anymore, it's success has made it a phenomenon. In the 60's and 70's, when American film really came into its own, the big hits had titles like Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, Jaws, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Movies that registered with youth culture were stuff like The Graduate, MASH, Shampoo. Even hits like Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back had a real quality to them, even if they were just candy, they were great candy, full of the joy of real film-making. These weren't just cool movies, they were really good, even great movies. Today, Avatar, in all its bland, boring, pretentious grandiosity, is both mega-blockbuster and hip strictly on the basis of being a techno-marvel. Cool just ain't what it used to be.
Da hong denglong gaogao gua (1991)
A Beautiful Film
**SPOILERS**
Set in 1920's China, RTRL begins w/a close-up of 19 yr old former student Songlian (Gong Li) as she tells her mother of her intention to marry a rich man. Songlian has had to quit college, as her father has died and the family can no longer afford tuition. Her mother warns her that to marry into wealth is to become a concubine, to which Songlian replies bitterly, cynically, "Is that not our fate?" Li has kept her face impassive during this scene, then just before it closes, a single tear slowly emerges from each eye, dropping one after the other. It's a beautiful piece of extraordinarily controlled acting.
This scene sets much of the style of the rest of the film, as well as introducing the predominant theme of women's subservient, almost invisible role in that society. The mother is never seen, the camera stays static on Songlian, just as she is at the center of rest of the movie. Li is in almost every scene, everything happens from Songlian's pov, and in those few sequences in which she is not on screen the action is influenced by her character and they almost might be occurring just as she would imagine them.
The opening also sets the emotional tone of the movie. RTRL reminded me somewhat of Scorcese's "The Age of Innocence" in that both are about deeply repressed, "mini-societies" built on social classes. The characters rarely express themselves directly or honestly, everything is below the surface, and tensions run deep. Periodically emotions and conflicts boil over to the surface and are quickly repressed again, w/o resolution. In this way the tension builds and builds w/o any substantive release.
I won't go into the plot much, it's fairly simple: Songlian lives in a bizarre world, the fourth mistress, the newest and youngest, to the master of the household she joins. There are 3 other mistresses, each progressively older, each receiving less and less attention from the master as they age. The plot is essentially about how the mistresses vie for their master's attention while they attempt to out-manipulate each other for that precious recognition.
RTRL has complex themes, but I think the film is mainly about the emptiness and pointlessness of these women's lives in a society that sees them as having no worth, and how they destroy themselves and each other because of their insecurities and lack of self-respect, in an attempt to achieve (what they regard as) some kind of self-worth. At one point Songlian refers to them all as "living ghosts". The women scheme and play petty games to one-up one another, they humiliate and degrade themselves and each other, all in an effort to be the Queen of their little world, a world no one cares anything about except themselves. The master couldn't care less, he laments that the women can't get along but he plays them one against the other and they all go along w/it, even though they know they're being manipulated and degraded.
The women do not see themselves as having any significance on their own, it is only when the master "lights the lantern" in their house, when he favors them as sexual partners, that they become in any way of value in their own eyes and in the eyes of each other and the rest of the household. The master has an ongoing affair w/the servant Yan'er, who had hoped to become the 4th mistress. When Songlian barges into Yan'er's room she finds it full of red lanterns, a travesty that breaks the "tradition" of the household. Yan'er imagines herself a mistress, and this gives her self-worth, but of course it's false, just a fantasy. Yet her fantasy is just as real and meaningful as the actual mistresses w/the actual red lanterns - which is to say it has no real meaning at all.
In the microcosm that is the society of RTRL women are barely acknowledged as human beings, they are sex toys and baby vessels. The mistress that has a son gains stature, while the one who has a "worthless girl" is ashamed and humiliated by it. At the end of the film, in a scene of chilling beauty set against the falling snow on the rooftops of the estate, the 3rd mistress is taken away and murdered. Nothing comes of it, no one seems to really notice or acknowledges it even happened. It's as if they had disposed of some garbage. Except to Songlian. In an act of rebellious despair, Songlian lights the lanterns in the house of the 3rd mistress and plays a record of her singing opera. It is as if to say: "She was here. She was a person. She had worth." In a final, great irony, the rest of the household thinks it is the ghost of the 3rd mistress singing and lighting the lanterns. Such are the lives of women in the world of RTRL: Ghosts in death as they are ghosts in life.
In the end Songlian sinks into desperation and depression so deep that she is incapacitated, regarded as "mad" by the rest of the household. In the final shot she wanders aimlessly among the red lanterns around her courtyard, a trapped and helpless spirit in a world where she feels she might as well not even exist.
Harold