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Choices, Choices

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 21, 2009 at 4:32 pm

So, Ethan Hawke’s new vampire-action movie, Daybreakers, looks a little mordant and silly, and I’m not sure it has any of the stylishness that made the Blade movies so much fun:

That said, I’m quite fond of movies, TV shows, etc., that grapple meaningfully with vampirism as a choice. Not all supernatural manifestations lend themselves particularly well to discussions of the nature of evil.  If you’re a werewolf, in most narratives, you don’t have a lot of choice about whether your brain shuts off and you get all hairy and bloodthirsty once a month.  If you’re a zombie, you don’t really have a brain at all to make choices with.  Vampirism used to be the same way: if you needed human blood to survive, you were going to kill people to get it.  But it’s one of the few supernatural manifestations of evil that’s changed with technological advancements.  The existence of blood donation technology means that needing human blood doesn’t require murder–the killing part of vampire identity becomes a choice.  And synthetic blood can–as it does on True Blood–take humans out of the equation entirely.  It’s true that medical advancement has more generally introduced the idea of cures to magical transformation stories.  But vampirism is the supernatural evil that’s been most directly affected by medical developments, I think.

One of the reasons I found Twilight so vexing is that it entirely walks away from these kinds of opportunities.  Carlisle Cullen (the “father” of the Cullen clan of vampires, for those of you lucky enough never have to read the damn things) is a doctor for goodness sake–they’re perfectly set up to include those medical developments in the novels, though except for a Breaking Dawn episode in which Bella drinks donated human blood, the books avoid both the medical developments that affect vampirism, and really the questions of evil and control and choice more generally.  Daybreakers may look kind of trashy and violent, and have some really doofy looking special effects.  But at least it has more moral questions going for it than Twilight does.

I’m Sorry…

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 21, 2009 at 2:01 pm

But when, in the second Clash of the Titans trailer, Liam Neeson declares “Release the Kraken!” did everyone involved in the film’s production somehow miss the Pirates of the Caribbean reference?  And if so, how?

Heavenly Creature

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 21, 2009 at 12:03 pm

Renee Russo by Peter-Duke.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy Peter-Duke.

I’ve loved Renee Russo since seeing her in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, the movie that, when I snuck into it at 14 convinced me that sex looked like a lot of fun, that being an insurance investigator could be an incredibly alluring job, and gave me a permanent crush on Dennis Leary (probably I am the only person who took that particular lesson from that particular movie, but then, I’ve never claimed to be normal).  And of course, seeing her in Get Shorty helped quite a bit as well.  So I was somewhat delighted to learn that she’s been cast as the titular god’s stepmother in Kenneth Branagh’s Thor adaptation.  I’ve always been mystified by how little Russo’s worked; in the 21 years since she made her first movie, she’s been in just 21 films, most of them clustered in the mid-90′s.  But she’s a siren, and I’m glad Branagh, who is wonderful at casting people, is giving her something to do.

Am I Blue?

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 21, 2009 at 9:48 am

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of k-ideas.
All questions of whether James Cameron’s Avatar is a good movie aside (though I’ll get to them in a moment), it’s undeniably an incredibly important one.  It’s simply the most technically impressive thing I’ve ever seen on a screen (and it’s a must-see in 3-D).  The motion-capture works, something that other than Peter Jackson’s Gollum, I don’t think I’ve ever said about a single other movie, and it works here on a vaster scale than anything Jackson contemplated.  When the main characters are in their avatar bodies, they’re both very much themselves and very much other.  The sight of Sigourney Weaver as an extremely tall, hippiesque, blue anthropologist made me very, very happy.  The biology of Pandora is a complete, convincing vision.  Cameron was smart enough to make a lot of the animals fairly ugly, which actually makes them seem more realistic.  When you think about a rhinoceros, it looks weird and a bit baggy–it makes sense that its biological counterpart would look kind of awkward, too.  If there’s a flaw in the movie, it’s that Cameron relies a bit too heavily on bioluminescence.  It’s certainly pretty when trees and plants light up on contact, but those touches are really the only things that make the movie look less than fully realistic.  But it’s a flaw in the directorial and production decision-making, rather than the technology itself.
I was too young to feel this way when Titantic came out (and too surrounded by weeping girlfriends to notice the three times I saw it in theaters–give me an advance break, I was 13), but walking out of Avatar, I was overwhelmed by the extent to which the movie is a beginning of a new era in filmmaking, not simply the end of an old one.  This hugely ambitious technology is just going to get better.  Directors are just going to keep finding better ways to use it.  As completely astonishing as Avatar looks, it’s simply a first draft and a first attempt.
Which is probably a good thing, given how absurdly cheesy it is (and sometimes-commenter here and Lawyers, Guns & Money blogger SEK has thoughts on the movie’s racial politics that are fascinating and trenchant, even if I’m not sure I entirely agree with them, here).  There was a lot I liked about the movie: watching Sigourney Weaver chew scenery is always delightful, especially when she’s demonstrating that you don’t have to be a military mercenary to cause someone a lot of trouble; I’ve loved Joel David Moore’s turn as a dour forensic anthropologist on Bones, and so I enjoyed seeing him getting a strong supporting role; Michelle Rodriguez is adorable, competent, and tough–I’d really like to see her continue to come back from being a drunken mess in bad movies, and hope Avatar will help her to do that; and I love me some CCH Pounder. As for my concerns about the movie’s take on disability (SPOILER ALERT), I think I’m ultimately okay with how Cameron addressed it: the movie’s very upfront about the joys of mobility and sensation.  The most romantic scene in the entire film comes when Neytiri, the Na’Vi princess played by Zoe Saldana, finds the human–and crippled–body of the man she’s come to love in his avatar form, saves his life, and calls him “mine” for the first time in the movie.  And when Jake permanently moves from his human body to his avatar one at the end of the film, the action comes as a form of radical cultural identification as much as an act of escape. (SPOILER ALERT OVER.)
But in the end, the analogies are kind of glaringly heavy-handed.  The hippie-chanting-in-the-forest-and-communing-with-nature stuff came across as a bit more embarrassing than profound.  Sam Worthington’s kind of a blank slate, even if he’s a blank slate with very nice eyes.  The dialogue frequently lands with the thud of rocks in a wet canvas bag.  But the power of the movie’s visuals is such that it doesn’t entirely matter.  For the long stretches of the film where you’re just figuring out the world, Avatar is glorious.  And it’s a herald of such good things to come.

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