Re: crappy movies – just entertainment?
This is in response to a post on a mailing list where someone said (to no one in specific, unbidden) for everyone to lighten up about movie flaws, because movies are just entertainment.
As a video editor, I am both more and less concerned about major flaws in movies.
I am less concerned, I think, because I have painful personal experience with how complicated and difficult it is to get everything right, and it is so much worse when you have so many people and it costs hundreds of thousands to reshoot a continuity problem. And worse, of course, is that before anything is edited, the movie is shot with a full story in mind. Then producers get their fingers in and what’s left on the cutting room floor (as it were) are the tendons – not delicious, but vital for holding things together. Sometimes the Director’s job comes down to just wrestling competing interests into a finished product before it gets axed.
I am -more- concerned because it is an art form I believe in, and it is just as much entertainment as a painting or a fine musical piece is. It embarrasses me when someone makes a Dances With Blue Wolves (3D!), because the director and writer don’t have any historical perspective, the story they’re trying to tell has been done over and over (and better), and they basically threw a shitload of money to create a piece of gilded crap. It’s definitely beautiful, absolutely! But I might as well be watching a high-definition screensaver. It embarrasses me, as a story teller, to see that get greenlit. Did he even realize that he was producing the same bullshit “white man saves the helpless savages and becomes a better native than the natives” that we’ve been telling for a hundred years?
Of course, it was greenlit because we’ll buy anything sensational, and everyone knows it. As consumers, we don’t really care. I’m sure you could find at least a half-dozen movies (and probably plenty more) in my library that are just as bad.
I don’t expect light fare to be anything more than light fare – but I want to see the same damned integrity to what they’re doing that I see in, at minimum, Spaceballs. I mean, really, at least Mel Brooks does his research.
I’m not a particularly big fan of Avatar, but if all you took away from it was “Dances With Blue Wolves” you weren’t paying very close attention.
The film displays some of the surface appearance of the “Mighty Whitey” genre tropes, but subverts most of them in the process of displaying them. Sully is a terrible alien, and does nothing but make the situation worse for the Na’Vi. He’s a failure as a warleader, leads an awful lot of natives to their doom, and has to be rescued repeatedly by his native friends.
The one who actually saves the day is the little-respected anthropologist who actually bothered to pay attention to native societal structures, and she only manages that by dying and appealing directly to the native deity that none of the other humans considered to be anything more than native superstition.
Not that there aren’t a bunch of terrible movies out there, I’m not disputing your main point.It just bothers me that a large portion of the geek Internet missed the point of Avatar so badly.
While I haven’t seen it since it came out, so I could be mistaken, I seem to recall that Sully was considered a hero by the Na’VI, including their greatest warrior, with the greatest steed, winning the best woman, besting their previous great warrior. His actual plan may have been folly, but so was Costner’s in DwW.
That all stems from one particular event: Sully hears the story of the guy that previously unified the tribes taming and riding whatever the big scary mount is called. He clearly thinks, “Hey, I can exploit this stupid native legend for my own benefit!” and proceeds to ignore the part of the story where the mount chose its rider and wrestles it into submission through stubbornness and dumb (protagonist) luck.
That’s the only reason that the Na’Vi and whats-his-name consider Sully a hero, he ruthlessly exploits one of their sacred legends and makes himself out to be a hero that he’s not. The gathering of the tribes sequence shows him being used as a figurehead, other than Sully giving intel about the colonists’ capabilities all the actual war planning is carried out by whats-his-name the great warrior.
I can’t excuse the romance bit, other than with “protagonist mojo”, that bugged me as well.
That all stems from one particular event: Sully hears the story of the guy that previously unified the tribes taming and riding whatever the big scary mount is called. He clearly thinks, “Hey, I can exploit this stupid native legend for my own benefit!” and proceeds to ignore the part of the story where the mount chose its rider and wrestles it into submission through stubbornness and dumb (protagonist) luck.
That’s the only reason that the Na’Vi and whats-his-name consider Sully a hero, he ruthlessly exploits one of their sacred legends and makes himself out to be a hero that he’s not. The gathering of the tribes sequence shows him being used as a figurehead, other than Sully giving intel about the colonists’ capabilities all the actual war planning is carried out by whats-his-name the great warrior.
I can’t excuse the romance bit, other than with “protagonist mojo”, that bugged me as well.
While I haven’t seen it since it came out, so I could be mistaken, I seem to recall that Sully was considered a hero by the Na’VI, including their greatest warrior, with the greatest steed, winning the best woman, besting their previous great warrior. His actual plan may have been folly, but so was Costner’s in DwW.
I’m not a particularly big fan of Avatar, but if all you took away from it was “Dances With Blue Wolves” you weren’t paying very close attention.
The film displays some of the surface appearance of the “Mighty Whitey” genre tropes, but subverts most of them in the process of displaying them. Sully is a terrible alien, and does nothing but make the situation worse for the Na’Vi. He’s a failure as a warleader, leads an awful lot of natives to their doom, and has to be rescued repeatedly by his native friends.
The one who actually saves the day is the little-respected anthropologist who actually bothered to pay attention to native societal structures, and she only manages that by dying and appealing directly to the native deity that none of the other humans considered to be anything more than native superstition.
Not that there aren’t a bunch of terrible movies out there, I’m not disputing your main point.It just bothers me that a large portion of the geek Internet missed the point of Avatar so badly.