AVATAR

March 8th 2010

The Academy Awards are taking place right now. I mean Right Now in this Space-Time Continuum. I know, because I heard some prizes being given on the radio this morning. James Cameron did not get Best Director nor did Avatar get Best Film. Katie Bigelow got best film for “Hurt Locker”, and I for one am delighted that a woman director finally got recognized in Hollywood.

But I kind of hoped Avatar would win.

It’s a good thing that when I went to see Avatar a couple of weeks ago, I had heard a lot of scathing reviews. That way, I had no expectations. A friend of mine, a fellow graduate from film school, told me that Avatar actually made her angry.
“ Three hours of techno 3-D garbage and not a single redeeming thing about the script”, she snapped. Hmm.

We people who went to film school can be pretty snotty about films. When we go to the cinema we tend to look for things like, er, content.
So I wasn’t actually considering going to see Avatar. Or if I went, I would go in disguise so none of my film school friends could see me there.

The 3-D thing was a particular turn-off. I mean duh, the whole point of cinema is that it’s a two dimensional medium. The script, the directing, the acting and the cinematography have to be so good that viewers are completely sucked into this 2-D world. 2-D is the language of cinema and it’s a language that viewing audiences first began to learn about 200 years ago, when the Lumiere brothers traveled the world showing the first moving pictures on screen. When those audiences in the 1820’s first saw a train coming towards them on film, they ran out of the cinema thinking that it was going to burst through the screen and into the auditorium.

Nowadays, we’ve all internalized the film language of 2-D. We don’t run out of the cinema because that creature in Alien 2 might sneak around the back of the screen and hide in the toilets. And we certainly don’t need stupid 3-D glasses to go see a film. Or perhaps we do. Perhaps we did all sit through Sophie’s Choice and Godfather saying: “Man, this film would have been so much better in 3-D”.

Probably my prejudice against 3-D is that I see it as part of the overall process of the dumbing down of cinema. So much of what we see coming out of Hollywood is lowest common denominator stuff, the kind of thing that 14 years olds enjoy. Not that I’m knocking 14 year olds. I respect them totally. It’s just that their minds and souls are not, er, fully developed.

My son, Yonatan, who was once 14 but is now Thank G-d 22, has no patience with my film school snobbery.
“C’mon Mom.” he says. “You’re going to judge Avatar without even seeing it? You know better than that.”

I squirm uncomfortably, because I always taught the kids never to judge a film without seeing it. That sounds pretty obvious, but debates often rage over films that the people debating them have never seen. Life is Beautiful and Waltz with Bashir come to mind.
That’s why I made myself go and see “Titanic” even when something in my bones told me it was going to be terrible. And it was. It was truly terrible. Hail me. The only human on the planet who thinks that Titanic was lowest-common-denominator teenage garbage. Not the ship, that was for adults, but the movie.

So I’m sitting in the movie theater with Aryeh before Avatar begins, dressed in a penguin outfit so none of my film school friends will see me. You can tell by the set of my shoulders that I’m not going to enjoy this film. Certainly not wearing these ridiculous glasses.

Well – here’s my take on Avatar. It’s absolutely wonderful. Mostly because the sheer visual beauty of it is breathtaking. And yes – the 3D is sensational. It’s perfect for this genre. It’s true that you wouldn’t want to see Cabaret or The English Patient in 3-D, but 3-D would have been great for Star Wars, or The Maitrix.

It’s not the 3-D that won me over though. It’s the sheer genius level of human creativity that went into it. Avatar is about Other Beings on a faraway planet. The planet has flora and fauna which are completely different to ours. Along come the human invaders, who for some reason all look like George Bush and all have a southern accent. They say things like: “We have to fight terror with terror”. The humans exploit and destroy and uproot in order to get at a valuable mineral which is located under the tree village where the natives live. Bad, bad humans. Good, good natives. Who hates the human race? I do. Because They’re Blindly Destroying Their Own Planet Without Thinking About The Future.

Okay, so the script isn’t super original. America hates itself over the invasion of Iraq, and once you get over that, (which Aryeh couldn’t, for the entire film), you can settle down and enjoy the movie. And like I said, it’s the sheer visual beauty of it that’s breathtaking. It’s as if the director and animators are inviting you to take a magic carpet ride, and you do. You’re like a child watching animaton for the first time, and you’re filled with the wonder of it.

Every single beautiful piece of art and originality I saw in this film made me think about the ordinary humans sitting at their computers who just made the whole thing up. It's my opinion that that’s harder to do in cinema than in written literature, because every single idea you have has to be brought to full visual reality. In Avatar, all the gorgeous hi tech science fiction sequences about the technical world we might one day live in, and all the birds and flowers and monsters and trees in the movie, so lovingly crafted, are just people’s imagination. We wouldn't be able to see into their imagination unless they were capable of carving out into reality, those hazy shapes and colors and movements.

The script does have its predictable moments, and I enjoy driving Aryeh crazy by guessing what the end of each sentence in the dialogue will be. When the hero kneels by the Mother Nature Tree, he prays for victory over the invading human army. I turn to Aryeh and say: “…Tree, I’m gonna need your help.” The hero sighs and says: “Tree, I’m gonna need your help”. Aryeh has usually moved to a different row in the movie theater by the end of any film that we see together.

Here’s what’s the most moving about Avatar. If you forget the whole Iraq thing, it’s a love story, and the love in it is completely convincing. I’m not giving away the end of the movie, but it says some powerful things about how we love the soul of a person (or alien).

So please, do go and see Avatar. If you see people dressed up in various disguises, it’ll be my friends from film school. Just pretend you haven’t seen them.

PS I don’t really want to go and see “Hurt Locker”, which will be more Iraq breast- beating. But I can already hear Yonatan frowning down the phone. “Mom?” he’ll ask. “Are you really going to judge “Hurt Locker” before you’ve even seen it?”