Review: Avatar
By D Jason Cooper
Genre: Big Stuff
Avatar follows its genre fairly closely. Like Star Wars before it and King Kong before that, Avatar succeeds because it adds a new element to movie-making. Star Wars had its X-wing fighters with scenes from in the cockpit during the dogfight in the sky. For its time, Star Wars was top-heavy with special effects which were on screen some 90% of the time. Like Avatar, Star Wars was badly acted and won no academy awards for acting, but it did get a swag of technical awards. And it was the technical side that was at the center of everybody's interest in the movie.
King King was the first feature film with successful close interaction of a special effect (King Kong) and live action characters (biplanes, the Empire State Building, the ticklish Fay Wray). Avatar succeeds because it follows this pattern, so don't listen to comparisons with Pocahontis and other tales of the princess falling for the outsider: Big Stuff is Avatar's genre.
Avatar's Big Stuff is the world in which it takes place and how well that world is put together. Once we've seen somebody touch the plants that suck themselves up into themselves, we don't need to see them again. The whole point is not that this world and its inhabitants make biological sense (they don't) it's that it's a lavish tale.
And what a lavish tale it is, full of messages for the current world. Avatar shows just how important it is to be a member of a right-wing master race. OK, the Na'vi are blue, which might make them look like a minority of some kind, but make no mistake, they are the master race.
Without technology they still manage to not suffer chronic illness. There's no indication of toothaches or chronic back pain. Even old age is dignified rather than painful: nobody has dementia, brittle bones, glaucoma, arthritis or any of the illness so associated with old age in the inferior races like us.
After all, examination of bodies from the stone age to ancient Egypt to the medieval period show all manner of incurable illnesses. People just dealt with it, survived it, but the Na'vi (being superior) avoid it.
This is a remarkable achievement, particularly considering the unrelentingly dangerous nature of the planet Pandora. Creatures that are bulletproof; packs of carnivorous hunters; flying beasts big enough to ride (and hence big enough to snatch you up for dinner) and yet the Na'vi seem to never have anybody die from this. They also don't get mutilated or scarred even when undertaking the dangerous task of going to the flying mountains. In fact, Neytiri (daughter of the chief and chief squeeze of Sully, the male lead) finishes off a pack of carnivores and says only that it shouldn't have been necessary to kill them. She doesn't mention she was in any danger, and let's not forget, Jake Sully was in immense danger. Obviously it wasn't the problem of carnivores, it was just he wasn't one of the master race.
Of course, Sully has to learn the way of the Na'vi. They're the master race and there's no such thing as cultures blending or borrowing from one another. They do not adapt or grow. One culture imposes its will on the other.
Anybody who wants to immigrate better assimilate. And if, like Sully, you don't learn everything perfectly on your first try, it's OK for a member of the dominant culture to call you a moron. When's the last time anybody heard a member of an immigrant minority being called a moron because they haven't assimilated?
You might as well. As Sully's mission shows, they're only here because they're in it for themselves. Infiltrate, divide, and loot. Really, what if the military-international-corporation people in Avatar became, say, illegal immigrants in the U.S.? Ever see a television program where an illegal immigrant is shown in that light at any time in the story?
And what about the immigrants who won't (or can't) assimilate? The Na'vi have the answer for that one, too. Lock them up in a compound or ship them out.
Of course, there is a warning in Avatar: if you do not maintain the will of your culture you will be destroyed. When the Na'vi listen to outside voices like the school set up for them, they find themselves weakened. Their arrows can't go through the windows of the human attack craft. But when the Na'vi will is strong, when they are united, their arrows penetrate the windows of the helicopters.
Sure, Na'vi die in the biggest battle we see them in, but then, the Na'vi have proved what us inferior races haven't: they can prove the oneness of nature and survival after death. They just plug their pony tails into their ponies and become one. No messy training, no hard work taming an animal, just plug in and when you're done, let them loose. And when the Na'vi die: their friends can plug their pony tails into the wise and ancient tree and still have contact with them. No mediums or ouija boards required, the racial memory is there for the asking and it will answer.
And what the racial memory will tell you is to be pure and call on all nature to defeat foreign invaders. Yes, the Na'vi start out believing you 'can't use it like that,' but when push comes to shove the racial tree will shove the foreign out. The Na'vi are the master race and as blue as a deity in a traditional Indian painting.
I do not understand why some people have condemned Avatar as a tree-hugger movie. It endorses belittling, excluding, and deporting immigrants in a way no tree-hugger would admit to doing (they reserve that for the rest of the population). So polish your jackboots and give Avatar a watch, you know you want to and, even if you don't want to, eventually you will be forced to.
***
Review: The Damned United
By David Whitehouse
For non-Brits living in a modern sporting world where finance is everything and genuine surprises get rarer every year, the story of Brian Clough takes a little explaining. As an English soccer manager in the 1970s and 1980s, Clough achieved the subversion of the established pecking order, not once, but twice. He took two unfashionable provincial teams from the second tier of the professional game and achieved a total of three English championships, and two European championships. This was done at a heavy financial disadvantage to many rival teams, and also without any documented interest on Clough's part in tactical systems, or methodical preparation of any kind. For Clough was that rarest of rare creatures: the motivational genius.
The retelling of his story in The Damned United demonstrates the limits and dangers of historical fiction. Clough's two periods of success, with Derby County and Nottingham Forest, were punctuated by a brief, unsuccessful interlude when he became manager of Leeds United. This odd incident forms the subject matter of David Peace's book, and the film directed by Tom Hooper. Leeds were reigning English champions and publicly despised by Clough. He hated their playing style, which was often violent, and he hated their manager, Don Revie, who achieved his success with methods that were diametrically opposed to those of Clough: dossiers on the opposition, preparation, attention to detail. The stuff of modern scientific management.
Yet for some reason, when Revie left Leeds to manage England, Clough, being available, accepted the job of managing a team that he loathed as cheats and worthless champions. He explained this view to the faces of the Leeds players, as well as anyone else who would listen via every possible media outlet. For good measure, he undertook the project without Peter Taylor, his long-term assistant - the one who knew which players to get and where to put them on the pitch.
The result of the appointment is easy enough to predict in hindsight - the players refused to accept him and Clough was sacked after a few weeks. His hatred for Revie no doubt intensified as a result of the failure. This is the main problem of the film. It relies on a one size fits all formula of story-telling that focuses and builds on conflict and tension between the main protagonists. So, in the name of historical fiction, the feud with Revie is exaggerated. Yet there was much more to Clough and the frustrations that drove him. He was the clever boy who failed his school exams, the son of a factory manager who cut a distinctive, detached figure in his working-class environment. As a player he was a truly brilliant striker who career was ended in its prime by a horrible injury. But none of that concerns Don Revie, so it isn't mentioned in the film.
The acting is better than the film deserves - I was sceptical that anyone could really do Clough the Big Head, with whom Mohammed Ali in his prime jousted on television as a fellow champion. Michael Sheen captures him superbly, as when giving a team talk before a big game limited to two shouted words, a celebratory, self-fulfiling prophecy that punctures a tense silence; then hiding alone in the changing room, smoking rather than watching a match he could no longer affect. Timothy Spall as the weary, worldly-wise assistant Taylor is likewise excellent.
Fictionalising history brings a variety of pitfalls. Surviving players from the Leeds and Derby teams of the 1970s have won legal damages for portrayals of unflattering incidents that were either altered, or never happened. Perhaps the film-makers saw that coming and understood the risks and the cost. More serious is that the film obscures rather than illuminates Clough. He is portrayed as driven by his Revie obsession and nothing else. This simply can't be true. Feuds between sporting rivals are hardly unusual. Usually they peter out if the protagonists stay in their jobs for a while. But Revie was out of Clough's direct line of fire once he took over as England manager, and off the radar entirely once he left to manage the United Arab Emirates in 1977.
So the feud never died a natural death, but was left hanging in mid-air until someone decided to use it as a story-telling device. It turned out to be David Peace, who in his book portrayed the old green goalkeeper's top that Clough wore for large chunks of the 1980s as a dig at the Revie's superstitions. What could be better? A visible manifestation of the never-forgotten conflict. It was nothing of the kind. The item was worn as a reprimand and warning to Clough's own goalkeeper Peter Shilton. The green shirt isn't included in the film, so the theme of conflict has to find sustenance elsewhere. Had Clough and Revie not chanced to both come from Middlesborough, it's hard to see what could have kept the idea alive.
In reality, Clough was a man who fell out permanently with his assistant Taylor and drank himself into serious ill-health, after his own complete vindication at Nottingham Forest and the humiliations that awaited the discredited Revie. His demons and the roots of his genius lay deeper than the The Damned United begins to tell.
*
The real life Brian Clough tells the BBC's John Motson to stop pretending he understands football.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqAZsoF-ghw
*
By D Jason Cooper
Genre: Big Stuff
Avatar follows its genre fairly closely. Like Star Wars before it and King Kong before that, Avatar succeeds because it adds a new element to movie-making. Star Wars had its X-wing fighters with scenes from in the cockpit during the dogfight in the sky. For its time, Star Wars was top-heavy with special effects which were on screen some 90% of the time. Like Avatar, Star Wars was badly acted and won no academy awards for acting, but it did get a swag of technical awards. And it was the technical side that was at the center of everybody's interest in the movie.
King King was the first feature film with successful close interaction of a special effect (King Kong) and live action characters (biplanes, the Empire State Building, the ticklish Fay Wray). Avatar succeeds because it follows this pattern, so don't listen to comparisons with Pocahontis and other tales of the princess falling for the outsider: Big Stuff is Avatar's genre.
Avatar's Big Stuff is the world in which it takes place and how well that world is put together. Once we've seen somebody touch the plants that suck themselves up into themselves, we don't need to see them again. The whole point is not that this world and its inhabitants make biological sense (they don't) it's that it's a lavish tale.
And what a lavish tale it is, full of messages for the current world. Avatar shows just how important it is to be a member of a right-wing master race. OK, the Na'vi are blue, which might make them look like a minority of some kind, but make no mistake, they are the master race.
Without technology they still manage to not suffer chronic illness. There's no indication of toothaches or chronic back pain. Even old age is dignified rather than painful: nobody has dementia, brittle bones, glaucoma, arthritis or any of the illness so associated with old age in the inferior races like us.
After all, examination of bodies from the stone age to ancient Egypt to the medieval period show all manner of incurable illnesses. People just dealt with it, survived it, but the Na'vi (being superior) avoid it.
This is a remarkable achievement, particularly considering the unrelentingly dangerous nature of the planet Pandora. Creatures that are bulletproof; packs of carnivorous hunters; flying beasts big enough to ride (and hence big enough to snatch you up for dinner) and yet the Na'vi seem to never have anybody die from this. They also don't get mutilated or scarred even when undertaking the dangerous task of going to the flying mountains. In fact, Neytiri (daughter of the chief and chief squeeze of Sully, the male lead) finishes off a pack of carnivores and says only that it shouldn't have been necessary to kill them. She doesn't mention she was in any danger, and let's not forget, Jake Sully was in immense danger. Obviously it wasn't the problem of carnivores, it was just he wasn't one of the master race.
Of course, Sully has to learn the way of the Na'vi. They're the master race and there's no such thing as cultures blending or borrowing from one another. They do not adapt or grow. One culture imposes its will on the other.
Anybody who wants to immigrate better assimilate. And if, like Sully, you don't learn everything perfectly on your first try, it's OK for a member of the dominant culture to call you a moron. When's the last time anybody heard a member of an immigrant minority being called a moron because they haven't assimilated?
You might as well. As Sully's mission shows, they're only here because they're in it for themselves. Infiltrate, divide, and loot. Really, what if the military-international-corporation people in Avatar became, say, illegal immigrants in the U.S.? Ever see a television program where an illegal immigrant is shown in that light at any time in the story?
And what about the immigrants who won't (or can't) assimilate? The Na'vi have the answer for that one, too. Lock them up in a compound or ship them out.
Of course, there is a warning in Avatar: if you do not maintain the will of your culture you will be destroyed. When the Na'vi listen to outside voices like the school set up for them, they find themselves weakened. Their arrows can't go through the windows of the human attack craft. But when the Na'vi will is strong, when they are united, their arrows penetrate the windows of the helicopters.
Sure, Na'vi die in the biggest battle we see them in, but then, the Na'vi have proved what us inferior races haven't: they can prove the oneness of nature and survival after death. They just plug their pony tails into their ponies and become one. No messy training, no hard work taming an animal, just plug in and when you're done, let them loose. And when the Na'vi die: their friends can plug their pony tails into the wise and ancient tree and still have contact with them. No mediums or ouija boards required, the racial memory is there for the asking and it will answer.
And what the racial memory will tell you is to be pure and call on all nature to defeat foreign invaders. Yes, the Na'vi start out believing you 'can't use it like that,' but when push comes to shove the racial tree will shove the foreign out. The Na'vi are the master race and as blue as a deity in a traditional Indian painting.
I do not understand why some people have condemned Avatar as a tree-hugger movie. It endorses belittling, excluding, and deporting immigrants in a way no tree-hugger would admit to doing (they reserve that for the rest of the population). So polish your jackboots and give Avatar a watch, you know you want to and, even if you don't want to, eventually you will be forced to.
***
Review: The Damned United
By David Whitehouse
For non-Brits living in a modern sporting world where finance is everything and genuine surprises get rarer every year, the story of Brian Clough takes a little explaining. As an English soccer manager in the 1970s and 1980s, Clough achieved the subversion of the established pecking order, not once, but twice. He took two unfashionable provincial teams from the second tier of the professional game and achieved a total of three English championships, and two European championships. This was done at a heavy financial disadvantage to many rival teams, and also without any documented interest on Clough's part in tactical systems, or methodical preparation of any kind. For Clough was that rarest of rare creatures: the motivational genius.
The retelling of his story in The Damned United demonstrates the limits and dangers of historical fiction. Clough's two periods of success, with Derby County and Nottingham Forest, were punctuated by a brief, unsuccessful interlude when he became manager of Leeds United. This odd incident forms the subject matter of David Peace's book, and the film directed by Tom Hooper. Leeds were reigning English champions and publicly despised by Clough. He hated their playing style, which was often violent, and he hated their manager, Don Revie, who achieved his success with methods that were diametrically opposed to those of Clough: dossiers on the opposition, preparation, attention to detail. The stuff of modern scientific management.
Yet for some reason, when Revie left Leeds to manage England, Clough, being available, accepted the job of managing a team that he loathed as cheats and worthless champions. He explained this view to the faces of the Leeds players, as well as anyone else who would listen via every possible media outlet. For good measure, he undertook the project without Peter Taylor, his long-term assistant - the one who knew which players to get and where to put them on the pitch.
The result of the appointment is easy enough to predict in hindsight - the players refused to accept him and Clough was sacked after a few weeks. His hatred for Revie no doubt intensified as a result of the failure. This is the main problem of the film. It relies on a one size fits all formula of story-telling that focuses and builds on conflict and tension between the main protagonists. So, in the name of historical fiction, the feud with Revie is exaggerated. Yet there was much more to Clough and the frustrations that drove him. He was the clever boy who failed his school exams, the son of a factory manager who cut a distinctive, detached figure in his working-class environment. As a player he was a truly brilliant striker who career was ended in its prime by a horrible injury. But none of that concerns Don Revie, so it isn't mentioned in the film.
The acting is better than the film deserves - I was sceptical that anyone could really do Clough the Big Head, with whom Mohammed Ali in his prime jousted on television as a fellow champion. Michael Sheen captures him superbly, as when giving a team talk before a big game limited to two shouted words, a celebratory, self-fulfiling prophecy that punctures a tense silence; then hiding alone in the changing room, smoking rather than watching a match he could no longer affect. Timothy Spall as the weary, worldly-wise assistant Taylor is likewise excellent.
Fictionalising history brings a variety of pitfalls. Surviving players from the Leeds and Derby teams of the 1970s have won legal damages for portrayals of unflattering incidents that were either altered, or never happened. Perhaps the film-makers saw that coming and understood the risks and the cost. More serious is that the film obscures rather than illuminates Clough. He is portrayed as driven by his Revie obsession and nothing else. This simply can't be true. Feuds between sporting rivals are hardly unusual. Usually they peter out if the protagonists stay in their jobs for a while. But Revie was out of Clough's direct line of fire once he took over as England manager, and off the radar entirely once he left to manage the United Arab Emirates in 1977.
So the feud never died a natural death, but was left hanging in mid-air until someone decided to use it as a story-telling device. It turned out to be David Peace, who in his book portrayed the old green goalkeeper's top that Clough wore for large chunks of the 1980s as a dig at the Revie's superstitions. What could be better? A visible manifestation of the never-forgotten conflict. It was nothing of the kind. The item was worn as a reprimand and warning to Clough's own goalkeeper Peter Shilton. The green shirt isn't included in the film, so the theme of conflict has to find sustenance elsewhere. Had Clough and Revie not chanced to both come from Middlesborough, it's hard to see what could have kept the idea alive.
In reality, Clough was a man who fell out permanently with his assistant Taylor and drank himself into serious ill-health, after his own complete vindication at Nottingham Forest and the humiliations that awaited the discredited Revie. His demons and the roots of his genius lay deeper than the The Damned United begins to tell.
*
The real life Brian Clough tells the BBC's John Motson to stop pretending he understands football.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqAZsoF-ghw
*