Life on Queen Street

Someone should write an essay about The Bang Bang Club and District 9 - both movies made by white South African-Canadians, both deal explicitly with Apartheid and township violence and implicitly with the problem of addressing Apartheid as a white South African (male).

It's significant that both films are made by expatriots and that both films deal with Apartheid at a double remove - The Bang Bang Club follows the photographers who documented the township violence in the years between Nelson Mandela's release from prison to the 1994 elections; we see the violence both through the dramatization of their experience and through the narrative device of reproducing their photographs. In District 9 the remove is both allegorical - real world problems of poverty, violence and transient underclasses placed into the science fiction frame of an alien landing - and the faux-documentary narrative device recurring throughout the movie.

Both films portray horrific acts of casual violence but rarely place the audience in the position of empathizing with either victim or perpetrator. We, along with the protagonists, are instead bystanders, as complicit as we are impotent, unable to either share in the suffering or end it.

I have a feeling it's going to be love it or hate it with AVATAR reactions but I don't really care because I loved it.

For those who are wondering, the film is neither Starship Troopers meets Fern Gully nor Dances with Smurfs. If you need a convenient comparison to hang you hat on, I'd say it was more along the lines of DUNE meets PRINCESS MONONOKE. Rap AVATAR for having a simple and predictable storyline if you want but it's in a large and varied company in that regard.

In terms of Cameron's oeuvre, AVATAR is most like THE ABYSS and like that film, I expect very few people to respond neutrally to the movie. You'll either sign onto the story or you won't. And like THE ABYSS, AVATAR represents such a huge technological step forward that the audience's wonder at the ability to create the images you are seeing overwhelms the impact of the story.

AVATAR is the most realistically rendered CGI I've ever seen, which also makes Avatar the most fully-realized fantasy environment I've ever seen. The jungles of Pandora are a delight to behold and the landscapes, while alien, worked together in a way that felt internally consistent. I believed in Pandora - at least as much as I believed in the Death Star.

As for the story itself, AVATAR isn't the best of Cameron's work. Zoe Saldana will likely not get the recognition she deserves for a performance that is fierce and carries beyond the technological mask laid over it. Sam Worthington provides an adequate hero-type and Sigourney Weaver shows up to be badass. But Saldana's performance should be career-making and hopefully AVATAR will serve as sharp prod to JJ Abrams to give this talented, sharp, intelligent young actor more to do in the next STAR TREK movie.

Depending on how you construe values of objective "good" and "bad" , AVATAR is not a good movie. The storyline lacks a depth - you could wish that Jake's motivations and interactions were a little less straightforward - that the fully-imagined and visually rich landscapes and cultures of Pandora do not quite make up for. The flip side of this is that AVATAR works best (and this movie does work) as a straight-up adventure story straight from your fourth-grade reader tales of Leatherstocking*. AVATAR is a cinematic Mustang, a big-engine hunk of Hollywood filmmaking that handles best on the straights but responsive enough that it won't spin out on the curves. AVATAR may not be a good movie but it's the most freaking awesome film I've ever seen.

ETA: *yes, this means exactly what you think it does, good and bad - I loved those stories as a kid. As an adult, I still love those stories I wish the hero had been native rather than white (and also a different story but I'm digressing). In the long term, that would have been cooler. But rather than knocking AVATAR for its painfully LAST OF THE MOHICANS/DUNE 'white boy goes native' story, I'm far more disappointed by how White the future is - I expect more from Cameron (shooting in New Zealand or not and, hello, last time I checked NZ was a multi-ethnic nation) than a near uniform blotting paper background cast.

So, am I the only one seeing the potential for absolutely massive racefail in Disney's The Princess and the Frog.

I mean, it's possible that I've come down with a case of well-meaning white-girl-itis but... well, watch the trailer. You'll see what I mean.

That plot twist might be... ah, awkward.

I mean, it's a Disney movie, so I'm already expecting to feel disrespected for my gender but... yeah.

PS - so Jake Gyllenhaal's supposed to be the Prince of Persia, right? Hmmm. Yeah, that movie hasn't been Airbender'd at all.

I've been wanting to write up my thoughts on the new TV season for a while and it's always been the last thing on a list of six things I needed/wanted to do, which is why I never got around to it. Today, I put it at the top of the list and Shazam! here I am, writing up my thoughts on the new TV season.

Last year this time I was in Ireland and consuming all my TV via the miracle of Flash Video, including new shows like CHUCK, PUSHING DAISIES, LIFE, PRIVATE PRACTICE, BIONIC WOMAN and BURN NOTICE; and old standbys like GREY'S ANATOMY, UGLY BETTY, DEXTER and FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS.

I was greatly enjoying CHUCK, PD and LIFE. BIONIC WOMAN was cancelled for lo, it was bad and the new show-runner wrote Katee Sackhoff's bad/anti-hero cyborg Sarah Corvus out of the show, which removed any sane person's reason for watching. GA was deep in the suck – the characters unrecognizable from the show's second-season high-water mark, the plots stupid beyond words as the show drifted from its "life and times of surgeon trainees" into bad melodrama land – UB was starting to flounder – really, who wants to watch their eponymous heroine torn between her conscience and her soon-to-be-someone else'-baby-daddy boyfriend? – and FNL was showing everyone why you don't mess with what works. But 30R was a solid weekly half-hour of glee, DEXTER was giving a seminar on anti-heroes and how to write them and L&O: SVU, while not groundbreaking in anyway, was reliably entertaining, if grim.

Then November and the writer's strike (fomented by the AMPTP in a deliberate attempt at union-breaking, which may end up backfiring on the producers in the long-run as the abrupt implosion of the US economy this fall chokes off the supply of hedge-fund money that was paying for a large chunk of studio excesses at a point when Hollywood, still arguing with SAG, has very little product in the pipeline), which lasted four months and shut down production on all series TV on the US networks as the productions ran out of scripts.

TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES started in January. By March, I had totally lost my mind for it. Then it came back and… I'm all suspicious and unsure that it can/will tell the story I want it to again, which is a problem that's entirely about my expectations and not the show itself, which is good (which is a post of it own).

The writer's strike ended (yay!), I moved back to Canada (boo!) and Fall TV started up in September, just in time for my post-MA brain slump (uh, Brain, please come back, I need you).

So, of the shows I was watching last fall, I've kicked CHUCK and PUSHING DAISIES to the curb. ( Pushing Daisies - dropped )

CHUCK, ( kicked to the curb )

PRIVATE PRACTIVE ( a sign I should be doing something else )

Of all the shows I watched last season, I loved LIFE most after TSCC. It had so much going for it – unique concept, interesting writing, awesome production values (let's hear it for the music supervisor), a brilliant performances from Damian Lewis (who should be cloned so we could all have one) and strong supporting work from Sarah Shahi, Adam Arkin and Robin Weigert. ( so why have I broken up with Life, then? )

As for BURN NOTICE, ( on hold (again) )

( Returning shows: GA, UB, FNL & DEXTER )

Meanwhile, there's not much new this season that I've really liked: FRINGE lost me after the pilot – dude, if characters don't care about the planeful of DEAD people, there's really no reason for me to invest in the diagesis either. Status: kill it with fire.

I did check out THE MENTALIST and while it's not bad, Simon Baker's character verges on awash in emo-manpain for which I have no patience. OTOH, the supporting cast is interesting. But I remember almost nothing from the episode I saw on Tuesday except for Simon Baker's pretty eyes and Robin Tunney's wan irritation with Baker's character. Status: seriously, dude, I should read a book instead.

Finally, I've been watching MAD MEN, mostly because there's not a lot on Sunday nights that I watch. I think New York Magazine's Vulture blog nails the secret of MAD MEN's appeal (and ultimately, why it's most popular with TV critics): At times, Mad Men has seemed like a walking catalogue of mid-century American fears: women in the workplace, media manipulation, alcoholism, rape, abortion, race, and homosexuality, for starters. As such, it's depicted a culture that suffers from a kind of panophobia — a fear of all things — probably because everyone has become so unmoored from any traditional sense of security.

Which also describes the current undercurrent of North American culture, if you hadn't gotten that already. Like FNL (and, in a way, TSCC), shows that most accurately pinpoint America's insecurities tend to be most widely rejected by American audiences.

SpoilerTV has a video with MAD MEN's cast.

( Stuff I read online today - more on TV, comics, movies and Remembrance Day in Ireland )

I have the 'flu, which is like my eighth flue this year.

Dear Ireland, pls. send back my immune system. kthxbye!

I love The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Twilight is quite possibly the worst book I've read since I stopped reading the white-cover Harlequin Romances when I was 17.

However, Twilight makes Laurell K. Hamilton look like freaking Austen (porny, porny Austen - why Mr. Darcy, I can never look at you the same way ever again) in comparison.

LKH still hasn't learned how to structure a narrative but someone's paying her by the on-page orgasm so she doesn't care?

No, really, the Children's Aid should be allowed to intervene in cases of parents allowing their teen daughters to read Twilight - mmm, yes, abusive, controlling relationships for $500, Alex.

Did I mention that I have the 'flu.

*drags sorry self to bed*

From the Queen's copious notes:

p.74) The windows on the bus don't open, which is the only reason I don't heave [the book] out onto the [Queen Elizabeth Expressway]. It would be worth the $500 fine for littering on the highway.

My highlighter ran out of ink and I ran out tape flags to note moments of "especial evil/Oh, FUCK NO - you didn't just go there, oh, you did - Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesus" in the text (current count 47) on page 122.

No page has fewer than two adverbs. I think I've only counted two instances where dialogue was not attributed and dialogue (except for Edward, who speaks like a constipated version of Mr.Rochester) is generally so undifferentiated that I had trouble following who was speaking on both occasions.

This book, only, God help me, one quarter of the way in, is a steaming pile of dogshite. Fortunately, I had a copy of my mate's short-story* on the bus with me, which I rationed out at 500 words a time, every 25 pages of Twishite or so to keep from losing my mind. Good writing, y'all - Twishite isn't it.

What Twishite is, however, is extremely glib and pretentious. Meyer never uses one word where two will do or a short word if she can plumb the depths of her thesaurus to find a polysyllabic synonym to use instead. If it obfuscates rather than clarifies the action of her narrative the better.

Frankly, I'd get more pleasure out of running the book through a shredder, putting the results in the litter box and watching Tully take a dump on it.

*Writing of the one day I'll be telling you I went to school with her before she was short-listed for the PP kind. Also, soon to be published in a major lit journal. Watch me glow in the reflected glory.

I would like to take this opportunity to go on record as saying that the argument "X movie or Y TV show was so good I missed it on first viewing" is bullshit.

It's a movie. It's a TV show. It's filmed performance. Its only job is to capture your attention as you watch. If you need to watch something three or four times to realize that you actually like it, it has failed in its primary job, which is to engage your attention and emotions and entertain you.

If you see a play or a movie or a TV show and you like it enough to see it again. It has worked.
If you see a play or a movie or a TV show and it intrigues you enough to see it again. It has worked.
If you see a play or a movie or a TV show and you hate it but keep watching it because everyone else thinks it's fucking awesome until you buckle to peer pressure and admit that, on the fourth viewing, you have seen the error of your ways, hallelujah and come to Jesus! It. Has. Failed.

This is not a book. We are not reading. Our brains are not actively engaged. We are watching. We are passive. You, the performer/writer/director are meant to be engaging us, not the other way around. AND YOU'VE GOT ONE SHOT.

If you fuck it up, you lose.