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….feckin’ Avatards….

Original photos here.

Immediately after finishing Jeff Noon’s Falling Out Of Cars, I started on this novel by the brothers Strugatsky. You may have heard their names mentioned in relation to Avatar lately, as some wags have suggested James Cameron ripped off a sequence of novels titled the Noon Universe by the two Soviet era sf authors.

Leaving aside the surname of the previous book’s other making for a neat piece of synchronicity with the Strugatsky’s work, I was also struck that both books are not so much post-apocalypse as much as transapocalyptic – the catastrophes at the centre of both novels are ongoing and humankind has adapted.

Roadside Picnic introduces us to a group of characters who live and work in the town of Harmont, the site of an inexplicable alien ‘Visitation’. The location itself is subject to many strange phenomena, including possible changes to the laws of physics, freak gravitational pressures and the rumoured existence of mutants. Called by locals and the professionals scientists alike The Zone, it is only one of several such places dotting the surface of the Earth. It is theorised that the various Zones resemble the scaring left by bullets striking the edge of a revolving globe.

‘Red’ Schuhart is a Stalker, an illegal smuggler of people and artifacts to and from the Zone. The novel drops in on him at various points of his life detailing his career as one of a dwindling number of old hands willing to risk their lives entering the strange site of the Visitation. Dogged by regrets as to the risks he has run, the danger he has placed clients who have entrusted their lives to him and the potential effects of exposure to any future offspring, Schuhart is a guilt-wracked figure. He is pushed onwards by the need to make a living from his work as a Stalker despite the risks, and also excited by his undeniable talent at surviving the excesses of the Zone.

A rival Stalker known as Buzzard (named for his habit of exiting the Zone alone, with his companions dead or lost) is rumoured to possess an alien artifact known as the Golden Sphere. This eventual McGuffin serves as the object that takes Schuhart on ‘one last job’, in the finest tradition of novels based around criminal activities. The sphere itself is rumoured to grant the wishes of whomever possesses it, which could easily have led to a cop-out ending (”I wish none of this ever happened…”), but thankfully does not. The Strugatskys are aware of the balance that needs to be maintained between the vagueness required for describing the unknowable (the Zone itself being mundane in appearance, but filled with hidden dangers) and an emotional connection to the lives of those affected by these events.

Falling Out Of Cars had its magick mirror and Roadside Picnic its alien artifact that grants wishes. Both serve to motivate the protagonists to keep moving, despite their world becoming too strange to comprehend.  The central mystery of the Visitation remains unclear to the very end, but the Strugatskys hint at a possible cause in the title of the story.

For, as one scientist at the Harmont Research Institute suggests, what if the Zone itself is meaningless? Not the site for an invasion of Earth, or even a staging area for negotiations with a benevolent race that seeks to make humans accustomed to their existence. What if the aliens were merely passing through, like a family on a daytrip on their way to the countryside, who stopped at the side of the road for a picnic and then left plastic wrappers, tin cans, oil leakage and gum in their wake to the confusion of the native animals that eventually came to investigate?

What if life itself is equally unknowable, without meaning or purpose and human civilization has no grand destiny awaiting in the stars, but instead needs to simply look after itself, raise families and strong communities that can withstand the quotidien tragedies and difficulties that make up living?

The Strugatskys’ novel was of course most famously adapted for the screen by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker, profoundly moving much like his other sf picture Solaris. Tarkovsky largely abandons the text of Roadside Picnic, focusing instead on the nature of the Zone and the relationship of the Stalker to it. He guides two men, each with a hidden agenda, to the heart of the Zone where there is said to be a room that can grant a man’s most deeply held wish. Stripping out most of the novel’s content allows Tarkovsky to concentrate on what he feels is most striking about the novel, using long, unbroken takes to suggest the strangeness of the landscape in the Zone. The three men are unnamed, the Stalker addressing them by their professional roles. They joke, confide and argue just to remind each other why they are risking their lives, or even to hide from what their life to date has amounted to. It’s a strangely beautiful and striking film, that teases with hints of the paranormal, achieving a sense of wonder in a slow, creeping shot of  a pool stagnant water.

No motion-captured, CGI blue people required.

Actor in a Leading Role – Jeff Bridges

Actor in a Supporting Role – Christopher Plummer/ Christoph Waltz(It’s the Battle of the Christophers!)

Actress in a Leading Role – Sandra Bullock

Actress in a Supporting Role – Mo’Nique (in the bag – see Robert Downey’s speech from Tropic Thunder)

Animated Feature Film – Up

Art Direction/ Cinematography/ Sound Editing/ Sound Mixing/ Visual Effects – Avatar (sfx extravaganzas sweep the techies)

Costume Design – Coco Before Chanel (It’s Chanel!!)

Directing – Kathryn Bigelow (Cameron’s too much of an ego, Reitman’s too callow, Tarantino’s too much….no one knows who Lee Daniels was and we don’t wanna go give a social realist director a big head. That’s not what the Oscars are about)

Documentary (Feature) – The Cove (those poor widdle dolphins! Plus it replaces the need for liberal America to actually *do* something about Japanese animal cruelty that could lead to an international incident)

Film Editing – Inglourious Basterds

  Foreign Language Film - “The White Ribbon” – Germany (Hollywood pretends it ‘gets’ Haneke)

Makeup - “Star Trek” (see Avatar and ‘techie’, principle)

Music (Original Score)  “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (Which I want to win – but it won’t)

Music (Original Song) - “The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)” from “Crazy Heart” Music and Lyric by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett

Best Picture  “The Hurt Locker”/“Up in the Air” Daniel Dubiecki, Ivan Reitman and Jason Reitman, Producers (too close for me to call)

Short Film (Animated)  “A Matter of Loaf and Death” Nick Park (darker than previous entries, but still excellent)

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)  “In the Loop” Screenplay by Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche (Iannucci is the voicepiece for Liberal British guilt vis a vis the war atm)

Writing (Original Screenplay) - “The Hurt Locker” Written by Mark Boal (it comes as a shock to everyone that films are ‘written’!)

Throwing aside everything I’ve said…the Oscars are not about merit, or what are the ‘best’ films. They’re about promoting cinema. No film this year has done more to promote the idea of visiting the cinema than Avatar. It’ll make a killing, there can be no doubt.

Marissa Tomei won an Oscar. ‘cough’.

Avatar Traileraddicts exclusive here

Why oh why does James Cameron’s ‘latest masterpiece’, insist on being so underwhelming? What exactly is it that resists audience enthusiasm so effortlessly?

Is it the Smurfs? A lot of people think it’s the Smurfs. Ferngully is another point of comparison.

The media coverage reminds me of the distinct atmosphere of critical knives being sharpened that preceded the release of Titanic. That didn’t pan out though for the poison pen brigade. So a critical drubbing, it may be felt, is overdue. The revelation in this New Yorker profile that Cameron likes to sign post-it instructions with ‘Jim Out!’ didn’t help.

Yet I don’t accept either of these conclusions. Watching the trailer above it is clear that Cameron is revisiting past glories, to diminished returns.

Avatar is a day-glo version of Aliens. The presence of Sigourney Weaver was, I assumed, meant to be a cameo. Instead the trailer indicates an ongoing role for her in the movie, perhaps even an action sequence or two. Michelle Rodriguez features in the film, ticking the requisite ‘masculine female’, aspect of Cameroonian films (see also Vasquez in Aliens, Sarah Connor in T2…..Jaimie Lee Curtis in True Lies……who has been the subject of numerous chinese whispers that she was born dual-sexed). In fact the Cameron’s euphemistically described ‘interest in strong women’, has always struck me as an odd fetishization of women, or men with tits. See also his odd reply to a question at this year’s Comic-Con regarding the progress on filming and future projects:

“You know, it’s not a great time to ask a woman if she wants to have other kids when she’s crowning.”

What really bugs me though is the run-through of the military as unwitting tools of cynical business conglomerates and blinkered command. Giovinni Ribisi’s character is a rethread of Burke, the slimy suit who tricks Ripley into returning to the doomed planet in Aliens. The grunts themselves are once again basically decent sorts who find themselves over their heads on unfamiliar terrain against a species that can overcome their advanced technology and fire-power through sheer numbers.

Aliens borrowed imagery from America’s nightmarish war in Vietnam to dress up its gritty space antics. This was commended over the years as a welcome degree of subversion, with Cameron as the wily Canadian plumbing the US collective consciousness for trauma, much like his fellow countryman David Cronenberg (although in a more ham-fisted manner).

Yet while we are living through ongoing wars on two fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Cameron returns to the same fixtures as before, despite the horrors of this conflict being displayed each evening on the news. Meanwhile this day-glo farce has been preceded by an actual contemporary Iraq war film, The Hurt Locker, by Cameron’s ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow. Why any man would attempt to allegorise the illegal conflict in the Middle-East with a cartoon that owes more to World of Warcraft than bodies returning to Dover Air Force base I do not understand. It is a failure of resolve, a disgraceful retreat into spectacle and the techno-fetishism of immersive CGI.

This is the future of cinema? More like its castration.

Anyway, this is an Avatar I much prefer.