Is Avatar racist/anti-American/anti-monotheist?
And, perhaps most importantly, do the Na’vi eat quiche?
All topics tackled in this roundtable interview on Warren Olney’s KCRW show To The Point featuring conservative film critic Michael Medved, io9 editor Annalee Newitz, Otis College of Art & Design Film Studies Senior Lecturer Scarlet Cheng, Columbia College Professor of Philosophy Stephen Asma and yours truly.
The Times‘ Dave Itzkoff has a cool front page piece on the controversies swirling around Avatar in which I hold forth on, among other things, the use of allegory in Cameron’s films:
Ms. Keegan said that it was possible to read “The Terminator,” his breakthrough 1984 movie, as an anti-technology polemic, an anti-war film or a modern gloss on the birth of Jesus.
“Or,” she said, “ you could just watch it as a movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger stomps around like a robot.”
The also story quotes sci fi site io9’s editor, Annalee Newitz, who wrote one of the sharpest cultural critiques of Avatar I’ve read yet.
I first stumbled onto Slashfilm a year or two ago, and found it smarter than your average film fan web site, and homier than your average film snob web site. In other words, like talking to your cool friend who actually knows something about movies, but doesn’t make you feel like a tool for never having seen Rashomon. If you haven’t already checked out Slashfilm, and in particular David Chen’s podcast, do. In this episode, David and I talk about The Futurist and I recount a story from early on in the book, when Cameron was filming his first movie, Piranha 2, in a morgue in Jamaica.
In this Vanity Fair piece, I tackle the issue of Oscar-worthy CG performances….
When John Hurt played the title character in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man in 1980, it took a gifted makeup artist seven hours each day to sculpt Hurt’s bulbous forehead and twisted mouth. The actor was utterly unrecognizable under the heavy, Quasimodo-like prosthetics, but he managed to communicate sadness, grace and humanity in the role, and garner an Oscar nomination for his performance.
Thirty years later, computer-generated special effects are replacing the dying art of prosthetics, but an actor has yet to earn a nod from the Academy for a purely virtual performance. One who could break the digital barrier this year is Zoe Saldana, for her work as Avatar’s alien heroine, Neytiri. To win a nomination for best actress, Saldana would have to overcome Hollywood’s skepticism about the motion-capture process director James Cameron used to make Avatar, a technique that relies on animators to enhance an actor’s work.
Another dispatch for Vanity Fair, this one on how to tally Avatar’s budget…
In Hollywood, the saying goes, the really creative folks are the accountants. Certainly the number-crunchers at 20th Century Fox, the studio distributing James Cameron’s costly and complex epic Avatar, will be kept busy over the coming months as box office grosses pour in and profit participators line up for their share. As ticket sales are tallied, and investors are repaid, the question will be, Was Avatar worth it?
Determining the final cost of this film is a trick in itself. Wildly different reports have been published, ranging from $230 million (The New Yorker) to nearly $500 million (The New York Times). Avatar’s official budget lies somewhere in between, probably closest to the figure the Los Angeles Times’s John Horn and Claudia Eller cited earlier this month—$280 million for the production, plus marketing costs. “It is the most expensive film we’ve made, but now, having the luxury of hindsight, it is money well spent, so I’m not concerned about it,” James Gianopulos, co-chairman and C.E.O. of Fox Filmed Entertainment, told CNN in early December.