Skip to main content

Stephanie Zacharek, and the news of Avatar 2, 3 and 4


Stephanie Zacharek's review of the film, we note, was very harsh.  It's always great to have her take, but it'd be nice if she'd accord some of her assertions, particularly this one -- "But if you're out to change the face of filmmaking, you have to work much harder at a lot of the thigs Cameron just shrugs off" -- and perhaps also this one -- "In Avatar, the technology is everything" -- and also this one -- "'Avatar isn't about actors or characters or even about story; it's about special effects, which is fine as far as it goes" -- with what actually ended up happening.  Cameron didn't leapfrog off this project; the world, the people in it, mattered to him -- and do we doubt that audiences haven't either?  And this, his sticking to the Avatar universe, isn't because he's old, or because Avatar is ideal ground for his special effects fetish, or because the aquatic's hold on its lifeforms doubles nicely its recent long hold on him; but rather because despite his early errancy -- i.e., Titanic's "Goodbye, mother!" - he means to spend the rest of his life in the lap of his mother deity, Eywa; it really does come down to that. 
Stephanie was astray from the life in this film as she was from the life in Avengers.   This line from her review of Avatar, "It's a remote-control movie experience, a high-tech 'wish you were here' scribbled on a very expensive postcard," just like this one from her review of the Avengers, "all a filmmaker really needs to do is put them all into a big stock pot filled with elaborate set pieces and some knowing dialogue and he's golden," shows she's been sending up movies that it turned out audiences have bought into -- and brother, have they!
Or, audiences these days are such that they fall head over heels for movies that really are all about special effects and already-cultivated prejudices, with tedious characters, no meaningful story development, and removed directors (Armond White thinks so).  It'd be nice to see her take a momentary break from movie reviews and write an account of what it's like to draw back from an appraisal of a film to situate oneself amongst what-turn-out-to-be zombies, who clearly accepted as hearty feasts what you had established as cold film corpses.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his  discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Salon discussion of "Almost Famous" gang-rape scene

Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape scene? Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity? Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy Benfer). Sawmonkey: Lucky boy Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post, “Films of the decade: ‘Amost Famous’, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec. 2009) Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further presump...
3 comments
Read more

The Conjuring

The Conjuring 
I don't know if contemporary filmmakers are aware of it, but if they decide to set their films in the '70s, some of the affordments of that time are going to make them have to work harder to simply get a good scare from us. Who would you expect to have a more tenacious hold on that house, for example? The ghosts from Salem, or us from 2013, who've just been shown a New England home just a notch or two downscaled from being a Jeffersonian estate, that a single-income truck driver with some savings can afford? Seriously, though it's easy to credit that the father — Roger Perron—would get his family out of that house as fast as he could when trouble really stirs, we'd be more apt to still be wagering our losses—one dead dog, a wife accumulating bruises, some good scares to our kids—against what we might yet have full claim to. The losses will get their nursing—even the heavy traumas, maybe—if out of this we've still got a house—really,...
2 comments
Read more