This was originally posted on chud.com. Thanks to Saoirse for the reference.
In the initial stages, Avatar was called Project 880. The author of this piece compares the Project 880 script with Avatar. Typically scripts are not filmed as written but go through changes which are affected by, among other things, budgeting, length, pacing, plot continuity, perceived audience reaction. Although the piece does not offer Cameron’s explanations for the changes that were made, it’s still worth considering how the distance from draft to final product reflects the relationship between culture and commerce, ideas and material relations.
Project 880: The Avatar That Almost Was
By Devin Faraci
This summer I wrote an article about the development process of Terminator Salvation and how it led to a movie that, in the end, didn’t go as far as it could have. While I still think Salvation is a more or less okay entry in the franchise – much better thanRise of the Machines – the decisions made along the way still intrigue me. For that column I had access to original scripts and some insider info; when it comes to Avatar I don’t have that. All I have is the 114 page scriptment that Cameron wrote after Titanic, a scriptment known at the time as Project 880. This scriptment is very similar to the final movie in broad strokes, but in the details it’s quite different. Much has been lost from the original scriptment, and much of what has been kept was abridged. I don’t have much behind the scenes info on this – I don’t know why Cameron made the changes that he made – but I think a film closer to the original scriptment would have been noticeably different and, in my opinion, much, much better. Some of this would be added depth of the world – a friend who read the scriptment compared it to seeing a Harry Potter movie and then reading the book upon which it was based; all of a sudden things are richer and make more sense – but some of it would have added depth of character and emotion.
This first appeared on the FIRE collective’s blog under the title “Avatar: Condescending Racism or a Story of Transformation and Struggle?”
By Eric Ribellarsi
A debate has recently broken out about the new science fiction film Avatar. A popular review appeared on io9 by Annalee Newitz titled When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar? I’d like to try to respond to some of the points in that review and give a different view that defends that movie.
I have to strongly disagree with Annalee Newitz’s review.
Annalee Newitz wrote:
“Jake is so enchanted that he gives up on carrying out his mission, which is to persuade the Na’vi to relocate from their “home tree,” where the humans want to mine the unobtanium. Instead, he focuses on becoming a great warrior who rides giant birds and falls in love with the chief’s daughter. When the inevitable happens and the marines arrive to burn down the Na’vi’s home tree, Jake switches sides. With the help of a few human renegades, he maintains a link with his avatar body in order to lead the Na’vi against the human invaders. Not only has he been assimilated into the native people’s culture, but he has become their leader.”
This review misses key aspects of the story, and even distorts the storyline of the movie to make it fit into a rather dogmatic framework. I found the movie to be a nuanced and beautiful film that told the story of an elitist white soldier for imperialism who goes to exploit and oppress an indigenous nation of aliens (the Na’vi), but is instead transformed by them and won to take up armed struggle against imperialism alongside them.
On Friday, December 18th, James Cameron’s movie, Avatar was released. Set 145 years in the future, the basic plot is that huge corporate interests seek to rape a forest planet for minerals, and send an army of mercenaries to suppress the indigenous humanoid people. An ex-Marine Jake Sully goes among the Na’vi to learn more about them — and comes to appreciate the value of their culture and connection to nature. As the machinery of distruction nears, he finds himself forced to switch sides — he (and several others) desert the side of the invaders and join the war of resistance. Clearly the film is rooted in many analagous experiences on earth, including the genocide against Native peoples all over the world, and colonial invasions from the Philippines to today’s Afghanistan. And it echoes the legacy of soldiers speaking out against unjust wars — from Vietnam veterans in the 1960-70s to U.S. veterans of the Iraq war today
Kasama will post commentaries on the film starting with the following which insists that there is a racist paternalism defining the Avatar plot line. (Thanks to Rawthentic for suggesting the posting of this article which originally appeared on io9.com.)
When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like “Avatar”?
by Annalee Newitz
Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it’s about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy.
Spoilers…
Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it’s undeniable that the film – like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year – is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it’s a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?
As of September 2009, Twilighthas grossed nearly $400 million worldwide. The sequel, New Moon, has already grossed $570 million. It’s become a cultural phenomenon on the scale of Harry Potter. Based on the popular Twilight novels by Stephanie Meyer, the movies trace the relationship between teen vampire Edward Cullen and Bella Swan. Cullen is portrayed as a callous, brooding yet seductive figure, and Swan is passive figure whose role is to be desired by a man. Apparently vampires may be hard to kill, but oppressive gender relations are even harder to kill.
Below, we’re re-posting a blog entry which takes this on in a sharp way.
We went to see New Moon this afternoon. Lord help me.
It was cheese-tastic. You can visit thefreak to read the blow by hilarious blow, but suffice it to say, there was much laughter, we were loudly shushed by some Twi-hards, and when wolf boy took his shirt off, I think 100 women ovulated all at once.
But there was something else.. something kind of screwy happening. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it while I was in the theater, but once I got out, it hit me.
We have posted two reviews on Kasama regarding the new science fiction film District 9. Here is another.
By Mike Ely
Like many others here, we rushed to see District 9, the first night it was available. And as is often the case our whole ride home was a sharp back and forth of comparing notes…. first arguing and then agreeing about the film.
Let me start here:
This is a well-made and gripping film. It is clever. Parts are obviously derivative (Transformers? Independence Day? Alien Nation?), but even then the creative sparks made this movie feel like a new whole. And it was pretty well acted.
The intentions of the movie seem good: This is a pretty straight-up political parable on racism, corruption and intolerance. A million aliens arrive, desperate and lost, and are treated like shit — herded into a huge Soweto like camp, neglected, exploited, experimented upon, targetted for racist names (“prawns”), generally disrespected and misunderstood, and seen as competitors for land and jobs.
This review was originally posted on Prometheus Brown. Geologic is a revolutionary and a member of Blue Scholars. (Thanks to OSP suggesting this.)
“A worthwhile, if guilt-ridden, statement on race and intolerance gets muddled in the film’s depictions of its black African characters.”
District 9 (2009) | dir. Neill Blomkamp | 112 min | South Africa/New Zealand
by Geologic
Nothing unites the human race like an alien invasion.
That’s lesson number one for any 80s baby who grew up either watching them threaten our existence (Alien, V-the TV mini-series) or play misunderstood, benevolent beings who can teach us how to truly be human (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Enemy Mine). Alas, the alien’s place in pop culture seemed to have its victory lap in the 90s with Independence Day and The X-Files and rappers talking ’bout Elohim and such. After the fall of the Soviet Union, what was once a thinly-veiled Cold War metaphor no longer captivated our hearts and minds (and fears). Subsequently, more recent Alien Invasion films like War of the Worlds, Signs and, especially, the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, all ate shit.
But, what if, instead of coming to Earth as hostiles, they came as refugees of a war torn planet and we became their oppressor? Not a new idea, either (see Alien Nation). So what makes District 9 (2009) distinct from its lineage? Perhaps nothing much, but it still blows away any of the over-exploding big-studio garbage coming from Hollywood these days. Plus its filmed better, doesn’t have an annoying score, darkly humorous, and most of all, devoid of quasi-pro-military shit.
One of the most talked and highly anticipated sci-fi films of the year, the South African made District 9 produced by Peter Jackson, and directed by first time filmmaker native South African Neill Blomkamp,is definitely not the revolutionary game changer that the advance word has been buzzing that it is. (Though Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds could be, despite the fact it’s an undisciplined, problematic film that’s never less than fascinating to its bizarre twisted end. But that’s another story for another time.)
Equal parts Cloverfield and War of the Worlds, you know by now that it tells the story of an 20 year alien invasion in Johannesburg and what happens when an alien evacuation bureaucrat (played by Sharlto Copley) gets inflected with some alien goo loaded with their DNA, and starts to become one of them, setting off a race for his life, when he’s coveted by several factions.
The film starts off great and makes some clever social and political commentary, but about a third in, it basically becomes nothing more than one long chase movie with fancy alien weapons, and lots of exploding bodies, with some Transformer-like robot thrown in towards the big final battle scene. But as last week’s Variety review pointed out, the depiction of Black Africans left a lot to be desired.
“The great ignored question raised by events depicted in “The Hurt Locker” is simple: who makes the IEDs, and why? The bombs materialize and must be disarmed. A “hadji” with a cell phone may lurk among onlookers, ready to detonate the device, but we are given nothing but a sea of Iraqi faces to confront.”
by Jay Rothermel
“The Hurt Locker” is marketed as 2009’s Best Picture. Limited release and a blockbuster media campaign are creating an atmosphere of inevitability: This is the movie we must all see. Reviewers love a serious (i.e. responsible and “non-partisan”) war movie they can bloviate about, patting themselves and the movie’s producers on the back for tackling the Big Issues. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will take its own turn at the job in February 2010.
A few notes on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
“This tailbone-torturing 2.5 hour holding-action promises much, and delivers little.”
By Jay Rothermel
Public School stories by UK authors have a long tradition. The most traditional was Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes (1857). In the Twentieth Century we had Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1933) by James Hilton and To Serve them All My Days (1972) by R.F. Delderfield. Old School Tie values were, after World War One, ripe for satire. Evelyn Waugh wrote Decline and Fall in 1928. Public School boys were later sent-up by Monty Python, too.
The Harry Potter movies take their public school, Hogwarts, very seriously and without irony, thank you. The producers employ the finest actors and technical workers available. After all, these movies are a source of revenue on the order of the Comstock Lode. Some hit, and some misfire. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) had their strengths and weaknesses, but no one leaving the theater could deny they had seen a movie. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) offered some piquant political commentary on the New Labour of Blair, Brown, and ASBOs [anti social behavior orders].
Let’s create “A Revolutionaries’ Pocket Guide to Blockbuster” — step by step.
First, we’ll start with this list of “communist films.” The question naturally comes up “What defines a communist film?” But without yet settling that question… we do have the beginnings of a list.
Second, we also need to add films that are just loved by revolutionaries — and are worth checking out for various reasons….
Third, we will need a simple two-or-three sentence review of each film — what’s it about, why is it worth seeing, what else is worth knowing about the film or its filmmakers.
Question: How should we eventually organize such a pocket guide? Chronologically? By “topic”? Alphabetically?
The following were submitted to Kasama. The authors Craig Bourne and Jay Rothermel both live in Cleveland. Craig Bourne be read on Twitter: http://twitter.com/tovX
Public Enemies: A Review
Reviewed by Craig Bourne
Today I saw the film Public Enemies, most of which was banged out on a Chicago Typewriter.
The film condenses a bit of raw 1930s history to a simple clash of three personalities, the bank robber John Dillinger, the excrescence that was J. Edgar Hoover, and Hoover’s FBI henchman Melvin Purvis. The principal character is, you should pardon the expression, fleshed out by the presence of Dillinger’s companion Billie Frechette. Various other names, names associated with Dillinger when he went about his Depression Era business of unorganized crime (as opposed to the organized crime of the bankers and bosses of the period), are dropped and then, just about that quickly, their movie character is dropped with the next sweep of the Trench Broom.
The film has a pleasant aspect. Much of this in the person of Marion Cotillard who portrays Ms Frechette. The Academy should have a special award for enduring a badly written role just to make a damned living. Cotillard’s every appearance in this film should be preserved in a special shrine to such moments.
This review is by Louis Proyect, moderator of the Marxmail list, and first appeared on his blog, the Unrepentant Marxist.
(Mike E’s personal note for the record: I ‘m a big fan of Slumdog Millionaire — its ingenious portrayal of the unexpected knowledge among the poor, its window into a world made generally invisible, and its homage to Bollywood. I like cultural fusion and crossover. And I am suspicious of cranky left attempts to impose a template of necessary portrayal on a work of art, without considering their sweep and context. And I’m suspicious of the protests that portrayal of poverty is somehow colonialist, and not appreciative enough of the rise of Indian development and middle classes. Meanwhile this is a time in the U.S. when people talk about the faceless third world ”stealing our jobs” (even people who should know better)– and in such a chauvinist climate, isn’t the impact of a film like this to illuminate the common connections and aspirations between people internationally? Could there be other, better, more politically scathing and subversive works? Yes, of course. And while that is worth imagining and pursuing — it is also worth appreciating what we have been given.” )
by Louis Proyect
Not long after I posted my rave review of Slumdog Millionaire, an old friend from Bard College whose politics can be described as a shade to the left of the Nation Magazine, informed that he did not care for the movie at all.
“Gotham’s latest menace, the Joker, is especially dangerous because he so clearly perceives and cannily exploits the moral rot creeping into both law enforcement and the larger society. . . otham City is a fun-house-mirror image of America, its democratic institutions crumbling and its people perched between anarchy and totalitarianism.“
As the Bush era drags on, I seem to be developing an irrational hatred of summer blockbusters, those gas-guzzling, road-hogging, radio-blasting Hummers of the entertainment business. The fact that they get worse and worse and still make tons of money doesn’t say much for the national character.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich recently conjured up an image of Americans flocking to the movies this summer to escape their woes, as if we were all dust bowl farmers hoping to banish the Great Depression from our thoughts with flickering images of Clark Gable and Mickey Mouse. But while our leaders are waging preemptive wars, torturing innocent people to death, tossing out habeas corpus, and gutting the Fourth Amendment, we probably don’t need to escape as much as the rest of the world needs to escape from us.
23 June 2008. A World to Win News Service. The Kite Runner, a novel by the Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini, has proved to be one of the world’s most popular works of fiction since it was first published in 2003. It was a bestseller in the U.S for several years, reaching many millions of people, and later was published in about 50 other countries in most major languages. Readers from Iceland to Brazil and from China to Iran, and of course many Afghans, have written to the author to describe their heart-wrenching experience in reading the book and the effect it has had on their perceptions of the world (see khaledhosseini.com).A film made from the book was released in 2007, the same year as the publication of the author’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, also slated to become a film. The following review is by a reader from Afghanistan.
By Stanley W. Rogouski
I was going to write a review of “Taxi to the Dark Side,” Alex Gibney’s new documentary about the American military’s use of torture in the “war on terror.” But then I realized that it would be a waste of time.
First of all, the definitive review of the film has already been written. The Discovery Channel, which purchased the exclusive rights to “Taxi to the Dark Side” from Gibney last month, has declared that due to its “controversial nature” they would not be showing it as they had originally planned. Furthermore, it’s unlikely that they’ll be selling it to another network. That’s all you need to know. There’s not really much I could add to the Discovery Channel’s 4 star endorsement. You’re never going to see this film on cable television so go out and see it before it disappears from the theaters.
I also realized that “Taxi to the Dark Side” would be tricky to write about, not so much because it is disturbing, but because it would be so difficult to convey its impact.
Normally when I write about a film, I like to keep myself in the background, to let the story tell itself with as little commentary possible. “Taxi to the Dark Side” certainly has a compelling story at its core. Dilawar, a 22-year-old taxi driver in Afghanistan was accused of participating in a rocket attack on US troops and taken to Bagram Air Force Base for interrogation. Four days later he was dead, so badly beaten that his legs had been pulpified. As the medical examiner who later declared his death to have been a “homicide” tells us, Dilawar’s legs would have had to have been amputated had he lived. Even if Dilawar had been the worst of the worst, what happened to him would still have been a war crime. Ted Bundy wasn’t tortured. Tim McVeigh wasn’t tortured. Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer weren’t tortured in US custody.
But Dilawar was not the worst of the worst. In fact, he wasn’t even an insurgent or a guerilla fighter, not even a rank and file foot soldier in the Taliban, just a frail, 5’9” and 122 pound, young man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Read the rest of this entry »
This was originally posted on chud.com. Thanks to Saoirse for the reference.
