Saw James Cameron’s “Avatar” (2009) yesterday afternoon in 3D at the Shepherd’s Bush VUE Cinemas in London. Went with my Dad who has seen more movies than I am ever likely to see, including the 3D masterpiece, “Bwana Devil” (1952).
One of my first thoughts was: Now I know what the Act III of “Return Of The Jedi” (1983) should have looked like.
“Avatar” isn’t Jim Cameron’s best movie. That honour still goes to “Aliens” (1986), as beautifully plotted an action movie as there has ever been. A respectable horror movie too, but it is primarily an action movie. Still, I really found “Avatar” exquisitely beautiful in its design and execution.
Already I’m getting flack from Film World Colleagues, who found the movie to be ham-fisted. Where I saw delightful design choices, they saw lipstick on a pig.
The fact that there is nothing new in its premise – that “Avatar” is “Dances With Wolves” (1990) / “Little Big Man” (1970) / “Lawrence Of Arabia” ?? (1962) / “Fill In The Blank” In Space – seems a weak criticism of the movie, though it’s been trotted out a lot over the past couple weeks.
Vietnam vet Wes Studi (far left) played the leader of a Pawnee raiding party in "Dances With Wolves" before playing Eytukan in "Avatar"
Cameron has deliberately kept the story simple, obvious even, to provide a solid framework on which he can hang all his beautiful decoration. To get clever with both design and story at the same time could invite Unmanageability – the bane of Cameron’s existence. Cameron has always kept his plots and characters very simple, virtually mechanical in their efficiency. When he has tried to reach for more complex and subtle (relatively) themes and plotting, the movies have suffered. And, recalling the tales told about the production of Cameron’s two “wettest” movies, “The Abyss” and “Titanic”, his crews have suffered too. For Cameron, “Keep it simple” is a mantra that leads to success.
The story structure in “Avatar” is really quite adroit – solid and simple. As any good writer will tell you, “solid and simple” is actually hard to pull off, because false notes – and there are some in “Avatar” – stick out like signalling antennae on an alien lifeform.
The movie has a skeleton of very simple, rock-solid sequences – like its cousin “Dances With Wolves”. “Dances”, one of the longest movies to ever win a Best Picture Academy Award, flies by for most people because it is constructed of straightforward, firmly constructed sequences. Knowing where the story is going – having “seen it before” – carries the audience along. We are always anticipating the next beat. We know what is supposed to happen next, more or less, but we don’t know exactly how it will be presented. And that is the way expert storytellers do it – just ask Hitchcock.
Oh, and Cameron stole the entire “Avatar” idea from me. I wrote, in high school, a story of a race of simple blue-skinned aliens who lived on a jungle world. A human male is drawn into defending them from a highly technological man-machine who wants to take the blue-skinned guys’ precious, sacred mineral.
Naturally, I plan to sue.
Of course, I ripped off – and still do – all the other sci-fi writers I knew and loved. “Avatar” is a conservatively plotted, “classic sci-fi” story, in the vein of one of the Heinlein or Asimov books. It absorbs all the flavours and styles that those great 20th century sci-fi authors – and their hundreds of imitators – spun and then sings it back in Cameron’s voice. Just as I did in my own voice via my high school “Avatar” precursor.
We are in an age of illustration in movies – and we have Peter Jackson to thank/blame for it. The goal in so many big studio movie adaptations is not to bring new insight to a story or a franchise, but to illustrate an existing property faithfully. Peter Jackson’s stunning success rested on giving audiences exactly the “Lord Of The Rings” that they had imagined – plus a bit more. A lot of people – well, myself anyway – watched the “Lord Of The Rings” movies thinking, “Wow. If I had a bit more imagination, then that is exactly how I would have imagined it.” In other movies, the source material has been so sacred that barely a word or beat is changed in the film adaptation – “300″ and “Sin City”. I think “Avatar” follows in this tradition, illustrating a sci-fi story already existing in the back of our collective imaginations. Dragon riders, floating mountains, glowing forests with trees the size of skyscrapers – we all know bits and pieces of these from books and wall calendars and dreams. It’s as if Cameron has supplied the movie to a story we had known about all along.
There’s much more to say about “Avatar”. For one, its political stance is fascinating to me. It’s a major studio movie by a major studio director that takes an aggressively anti-neocon POV. Very unusual.
But I’d like to hear your comments, then we can get into some discussion.
“A concentration camp is built like, a stadium or a big hotel. You need contractors, estimates, competitive bids. And no doubt a bribe or two. Any style will do. It’s left to the imagination – Swiss style; garage style; Japanese style; no style at all. The architects calmly plan the gates through which no one will enter more than once. Meanwhile – Burgher, a German Communist; Stern, a Jewish student from Amsterdam; Schmulszki, a merchant in Cracow; Annette, a schoolgirl in Bordeaux – all go on living their everyday lives, not knowing that there is a place, a thousand miles away, already awaiting them. ”
So you’re probably thinking: “Well this is not a very good subject for a Top 5 List! Just how many movies about Jesus (aka Iesus, aka Yeshua, aka Josh) of Nazareth are there to choose from? Heck, there can’t be more than, like … a half a dozen Jesus flicks altogether, right? I’m afraid I shall have to set your house on fire.”
But after reading the following list of Top 5 Jesus Movies, you will be begging my forgiveness. But will I give it? Will I give my forgiveness? Maybe. Maybe not. What’s in it for me?
In no particular order:
Jesus Of Nazareth (1977) – Franco Zefferelli shoots right down the middle and scores big-time with this miniseries. This is the Peter Jackson’s “Lord Of The Rings” version of the Gospels – a big-budget attempt to illustrate as faithfully as possible the traditional conception of the Jesus story. Every first-rate actor in the Western World appears in “Jesus of Nazareth” and every one gives a fine perfomance. The casting choices themselves are superb – even down to Ernest Borgnine as The Centurion who, believe it or not, works perfectly. And the Maurice Jarre score is wonderful.
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) – And on the other side of the coin … Martin Scorsese finally realized his dream project, based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis (writer of “Zorba The Greek”), on a shoestring budget, to popular outrage. Young Marty had wanted to be a priest when he was a pale asthmatic Brooklyn kid, and the inevitability of sin has been a theme in virtually every one of his films. Despite our best intentions, our personal power, wealth, prestige – and no matter how cozy our relationship with God – we will still always go astray. The experiment behind “The Last Temptation” is, in part, to put our traditional understanding of the Jesus story on the other side of the looking glass. Up is down, black is white. The film opens with the crucifixion of a familiar-looking, bearded prophet, for whom the carpenter Jesus has fashioned a cross. This Jesus even assists in the man’s execution. And we ask: “How can THIS chap be the Anointed One?” – which might lead us to another question, “How can anyone?” The Peter Gabriel score is superb.
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) – People forget what a dynamite filmmaker Norman Jewison is (“Moonstruck”, “Fiddler On The Roof”, “Rollerball”, “In The Heat Of The Night”). For my money, “Jesus Christ Superstar” manages some of the most emotionally powerful interpretations of the Jesus story in cinema. A musical – not to mention a rock musical – a rock musical by Andrew Lloyd Weber – can go places forbidden to straight drama. The relationship between Jesus and Judas is nicely drawn in the film. In fact, the performance by Carl Anderson – outraged, self-important, and at his core lost and frightened – may be my favorite Judas performance in film. The concluding rendition of the title song, with Judas and a host of sexy angels singing down to Jesus from the audience seats of a Roman amphitheatre, is terrific.
Jesus of Montreal (1989) – Denys Arcand’s film is a passion play about a group of Montreal actors putting on a passion play. The home run of the movie is the French-Canadian Lothaire Bluteau, as an actor named Daniel who, in the passion-play-within-a-passion-play acts the part of Jesus. He mesmerizes as the compassionate Christ, whose heart seems ever on the verge of breaking at what he sees in the world around him.
Ben-Hur (1959) – It’s iffy putting William Wyler’s super-epic in the Top 5. Jesus appears as a secondary character throughout the film, but His face is never shown us. It’s a simple, effective device, that engages our imaginations and keeps the character slightly beyond our understanding and experience. The story is about the spiritual awakening of a wealthy Jewish nobleman, whose life loosely intersects that of Jesus. So the Gospels are merely the scaffold on which the bulk of the plot hangs, but the movie is so solidly executed, that it stands out as one of the best screen depictions. Stories of a well-known figures are often best told through the point of view of complimentary or antagonistic characters, (i.e., the Mozart story presented as the story of Antonio Salieri in “Amadeus”). Examining the Jesus story through the eyes of one of his less renowned contemporaries is not a bad way to go about it.
Others: Of course, I bet Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “The Gospel According To St. Matthew” (1964) should be on the list. Black and white, no professional actors. Must be art. But I ain’t seen it yet.
Then there is Mel Gibson’s “The Passion Of The Christ” (2004), but it is too much a mixed bag to make the Top 5. When it is good, it is genuinely revelatory, when it is not good, it’s a little silly.
Avoid “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965) , except for the Herod scenes directed by David Lean.
Or I love what the Academy is supposedly supposed to aspire to. That, I love.
I saw, on Wednesday, for the 2nd time in my life, Jean Renoir’s coming of age story, “The River” (1951), based on the novel by Rumer Godden. Godden also wrote the novel “Black Narcissus”.
My 1st viewing of “The River” was in London, on New Year’s Day, 2005, on my honeymoon. My wife and I went to the screening of a newly restored version of the film that the National Film Theatre was introducing as part of its “India Vu Par” series. I count it as one of the fine filmgoing experiences of my life – taking my new wife to that cinema Mecca beside The Thames, where I had sat alone on my visits to the UK, in the 90’s and in the 80’s, watching “Dr. Zhivago”, watching “The Pillow Book”, watching “The Last House On The Left” (or was it “The Hills Have Eyes”?), browsing before and after the tables of used books out front, or sitting by the river writing an over-romantic letter to whoever I was dating, waiting for the screening to start, or gushing to the poor girl all about a film I just saw that she couldn’t care less about.
The print my wife and I saw – a print struck in England by the BFI, I think (if anyone knows for sure, please tell me) – was beautiful, the color remarkable, stunning. “The River” is famous for being one of the greatest examples of Technicolor photography ever, and after seeing that print on New Year’s Day, I began to understand why.
Having seen “The River” this 2nd time, I can feel the film climbing toward the upper reaches of my favorite films list.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences film restoration program, however, is plummeting toward the lower reaches of my favorite restoration program’s list.
Despite my love for the filmmaking, throughout the screening on Wednesday, a loud voice kept shouting through my head: “This looks like crap. This looks like crap. This looks like crap.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I would reply to myself.
“Oh, yes, it does,” I would reply to my reply to myself, “Utter crap …”
Mike “Pogo” Pogorzelski, director of the Academy Film Archive, introduced “The River” saying that an attempt was made to make the film appear exactly as it would have in 1951.
To me, the print – though clearly new and utterly free of scratches and tears – looked grainy, muddy, high contrast.
So what happened?
One possibility is that I don’t know what I’m talking about. But we know that this is the risk you take whenever you read the rabbit + crow blog.
The 2nd possibility is that the cinematography of “The River” is embarrassingly overrated. Critics raved about it in 1951. Critics still rave about it. Martin Scorsese raves about it. But maybe the eyes of those fanatics are color-blinded by their love of Renoir. Yes, the direction is impeccable, the shots perfectly composed, the lighting superb – but color is not something that seems remarkable to me in that movie – my opinion based solely on Wednesday night’s screening. Oh, I suppose you could sit me down and explain to me – educate me to – the merits of “The River’s” color photography. Yes, I could be convinced. My palate could be trained, I suppose. I may just be a philistine who doesn’t appreciate good color. If that’s the case, I’m willing to learn.
The 3rd possibity is that the Academy’s print was sub-par – which brings up the question of whether or not the whole 2004 restoration was flawed. This restoration was a joint effort between the Academy and the British Film Institute. The original sound elements were missing, but the sound was (and very nicely too!) restored from a complete print owned by young gotham indy helmer Martin Scorsese. The original Technicolor nitrate camera negatives were still intact however, and one of the great things about black-and-white nitrate negatives is if they don’t deteriorate, then they will stay in very good condition. It’s all-or-nothing with nitrate. Theoretically, it should be possible to make a perfect print – like new – from these original negatives. However, we do not have Technicolor labs anymore, expert in the dye-transfer process, and so no print made today is going to look like a 1951 Technicolor print made with the original dye-transfer process. For one, dye-transfer, unlike the standard optical, photographic process – produces a print free of grain. No grain. Nope. Grain, nyet. You forget that you’re looking at film. Seeing a great dye-transfer Technicolor print is like looking through a magic window into a yummy color world where flesh-tones look so real you just want to pinch the actors’ cheeks. On Wednesday, if I had the urge to pinch the actors’ cheeks, I would have paused, for fear of scraping myself on the sandpaper-like grain of the film.
But its graininess aside, the print’s color was murky. Not “muted”. I have no problem with muted. It was murky. Lots of brown. A montage of flowering trees denoting the start of spring probably elicited gasps in 1951. I’m thinking the most it got out of the crowd on Wednesday was the fleeting thought: “What gorgeous trees! I bet they would be really pretty and colorful in real life!” Technicolor uses a 3-color process, often with a 4th keytone strip of graytones to modulate the color – exactly like Photoshop’s CMYK. Each element – the C, the M, the Y, and the K – is stored on its own strip of black-and-white film, then all four are, in effect, sandwiched together (sort of), to create the final image. The Academy’s “The River” print looked as if someone at the lab had gone hog-wild with the black-and-white keytone strip – or as if some drug addict had sneaked in and said “Man, this color freaks me out! Turn down the color, maaaan!!!” It did give the print an “old-fashioned” look, so I guess that’s one plus. You know, like when you order a special sepia-tone on your family photos to make them look all antiquey? Maybe Renoir was going for an antiquey, old-fashioned look.
Or maybe India is just an antiquey, old-fashioned looking country. That’s probably it. It’s India. I’m going to blame it on India. They probably didn’t have as much color as we did back then because they were so poor.
So why was the NFT print so much better than the Academy’s print? Better labs in England than Los Angeles? Possible. Was I seeing the film through honeymoon-colored glasses? Possible. Was the NFT’s screening room much smaller than the Academy’s massive Samuel Goldwyn Theater and so able to provide a more concentrated image on the screen? Very possible.
It seems only natural to compare “The River” and “Black Narcissus”, two Technicolor masterpieces, based on books by Rumer Godden about sexual awakening and the mixing of cultures, both featuring Esmond Knight. I was similarly disappointed with the Academy’s “Black Narcissus” print. And that hurts. Yes. Like the cobra’s bite, it hurts. For I am very fond of both films. And I want them treated with reverence. Yes, reverence. Reverence.
But what I really want is to see a digital restoration of “The River” – like the recent “Singin’ in the Rain” restoration. The Academy is dedicated soley to photographic restoration of films, which is a key component of preservation of the actual film materials and is vital in keeping the films around for the long, long term, and so a great digital restoration is outside their mandate. And “The River” money has been spent. That’s it. No more restorations of “The River”. It’s had it’s turn. I am told the DVD transfer of the film is very, very good however.
Okay, here’s what I really, really want: a full-scale, completely working, manned with genius technicians, 3-strip Technicolor dye-transfer-only facility that makes perfect restorations of technicolor prints on some kind of perfect nitrate stock that doesn’t explode. Please? It will only cost a few hundred million dollars or so, and it will make me very happy. And I think it will also make Jean Renoir very happy.
I saw “Black Narcissus” (1947) last night at the Motion Picture Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater, the kick-off for a 100th birthday tribute (though he died at age 84) to British master director, Michael Powell. The tribute features a weekend of screenings of Powell’s films.
An unexpected treat were video greetings from Martin Scorsese and Michael Powell’s widow, Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s long-time editor. Expressing their regret that they couldn’t attend in person – they are cutting “The Departed” – each gave a short tribute to Powell, Schoonmaker’s concluding with obvious emotion. Schoonmaker met Michael Powell, in 1979, when Martin Scorsese invited his hero to New York during the cutting of “Raging Bull” (1980). “Raging Bull” won Schoonmaker the Oscar for Best Editing.
I have seen “Black Narcissus” dozens of times. I first saw it on a VHS tape my dad had made from a copy he borrowed from his local library. My dad sent me dozens of these pirated VHS’s in the years after I left college and it kept me immersed in movies that I, being young and of narrow taste, might not go out of my way to see. Now I am older and have broader, deeper, wider taste and there are still many movies I should see but might not go out of my way to see.
There was a discussion before the film with cinematographer / Technicolor titan, Jack Cardiff, who is over 90 and has more energy and wit and good humor than I have – or could hope to. Film historian David Thomson moderated. Thomson was a friend of Michael Powell and responsible for setting the director up as Dartmouth’s artist-in-residence in the 70’s when Powell was suffering the obligatory British Genius Backlash, in which great British directors are forgotten for a decade or two before being praised to the skies again just before they die with everyone saying “Oh, I was always a fan of his. I’m surprised you’ve never heard of him. Have you seen ‘Tales Of Hoffman’? Oh, you must. It is a masterpiece. It is exquisite. Yes, I’d like to think of him as my artistic spiritual godfather.” Then you kick that person in the groin until they stop screaming.
After Sid Ganis, the new Academy President, gave a canned “Michael Powell, Michael Powell, Michael Powell” speech, Thomson got up to tell several moving stories about his acquaintanceship with the master, but he began his speech by mentioning – for the first time in the evening – Powell’s partner, Emeric Pressburger. I was the first audience member out of the gate to applaud. The man next to me kicked me in the groin until I stopped screaming.
Because we in America love the myth of individual success, and we treasure, above all things, the integrity & triumph of the individual human ego, we tend to make a single genius responsible for the excellence we see. We chase, drooling, the top supermodel, the top grossing movie, the top sports team, the top serial killer. Everyone else is an “also-ran”. But Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were partners on the Archers films. On over a dozen movies of the 40’s and 50’s the credit reads: “Written, directed, and produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger”. We are inclined to forget that. We should not.
The first question Thomson asked Jack Cardiff was about the ins & outs of the Powell / Pressburger collaboration. Cardiff said they very much balanced each other with Michael Powell being the experimental, improvisational half of the partnership and Pressburger the down to earth, practical half. I was reminded of the David Lean / Robert Bolt collaborations. There the dividing line between director and writer was clearly drawn, but Lean was said to be the intuitive, emotional side of the partnership and Bolt the intellectual, theoretical side.
The screening was a digital projection of a digital restoration made from the “original” (I don’t know if this means camera original) 3 black-and-white Technicolor strips (for a quickie tutorial on the Technicolor process go here) and was the best version I have seen of the film to date, better than the Academy Film Archive photo-chemical restoration of a few years ago which was fine, but occasionally murky. The clarity of the image was such that one or two of the process shots showed their seams in a way that might have been disguised by a traditional print.
What I most enjoyed about seeing “Black Narcissus” on a large screen with such clear and clean projection was not that it was even more visually stunning – although that is true – but that I could enjoy the subtleties of the performances which are difficult to see on even a big-screen tv. Slight movements of the eyes describe gigantic internal character movements. A mild tightening of the lips reveals blazing internal shame. I found myself grinning widely, delighted by Deborah Kerr’s giddy girlish grin as she begins to remember the locked away passions of her past. Moments between characters seemed magnified too and the sexual tension in scenes was far more taut than many 21st century films. In fact, this time around seeing the movie, I was shocked at how filthy and sordid it all is – all that sex. Sex, sex, sex. It’s all about the sex, that picture. Digusting. And so, so wonderful. And what could be more sexy than Deborah Kerr, as a nun, trying day and night not to think about sex – trying not to even think about thinking about sex? Even better, Deborah Kerr, as a nun, trying day and night not to think about sex, while trying to get juicy Jean Simmons (who plays a convincing South Asian) to stop thinking about sex? At the same time, “Black Narcissus” is a deeply spiritual film and tackles the irreconcilable clash between desire and devotion head on.
A new Criterion Collection “Black Narcissus” DVD came out a few years ago. I think it was made from the Academy restoration. I hope they reissue the film with this new, much better digital restoration.
It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to. The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.
