Avatar 3D and Race in The Bodyguard

You know it's Christmas break when you go see Avatar 3D with the family and come home and watch Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard with commercials and all.

First, let me say something about 3D. I don't like it. And it's not really 3D. It gives a SLIGHT illusion of depth. It feels like those diorama's one makes in 3rd grade science class. It does not make the movie experience fell anymore "real." In fact, it makes it more artificial. The glasses are annoying to wear and multiple objects in the foreground and background are confusing to look at. Regular cinema at it's best immerses you the experience - not that you are ACTUALLY there - but that you are witnessing a first hand photographic account of the story in front of you. Obviously, this is a "buy," to begin with, but regular old cinema works. Attempts like 3D and smell-o-vision and other stupid gimmicks miss this point and only serve to distance the audience from the experience, making it more like a cheap amusement park ride than a movie.

3D, I imagine, works for cartoons. That's what this movement is really all about, conditioning the audience for more and more cartoons. There's something sick going on right now in the movie world, the cartoonization of filmmaking. The special effects fanboys from the most talented (Cameron and Lucas) all the way down to the least talented (Bay) line like cartoons because it gives them massive amounts of "control." It allows them to have to deal less and less with real people in real situations. I guess they one day hope the images in their mind can be transported directly to the screen and bore us all to death. The animation studios all love it because they are gobbling up marketshare. The studios - for the moment - love it because they're generally cheaper to make than real movies and they can sell toys. And the audience is going along with it because yes, I'll admit, Pixar has pretty damn good writing these days and the rest of the movies out there are suffering in the writing department. The quicker, mature audience has shifted over to cable TV, leaving the sort of middle-brow audience as the main movie audience today and I'm slightly surprised they are going along with it...but judging by the sold out theater and applause at the end of the movie last night, they seem to be.

3D doesn't work for real actors. Can you imagine Lawrence of Arabia in 3D? Or Pulp Fiction 3D? Badlands in 3D? The whole thing is making me want to barf thinking about it more.

But to the movie...not as good as Cameron's masterpieces - Terminator 1 and 2, and Aliens. It belongs in his second tier, right below Titanic and right above The Abyss. I was entertained, which is more than I can say about Invictus, but not really delighted with very much in the movie. Some of the landscape photography, or drawings, or whatever you want to call it was awesome. The mechanical weaponry, etc, was great as well (although not substantially better or different than Aliens). The Blue People and florescent plants and creatures didn't see believable to me. They fall into the same category of effects as the new Star Wars creatures. I suppose impressive if you think about it, but I don't want to think about it, I want to be absorbed into the world on first viewing and believe in it. The writing was not Cameron's best, the good people were too good, the bad people too bad, the parallels to Native Americans overused and the motivation of the corporation too simplistic. But whatever...at the end of the day, it is a movie that deserves to be seen in the theater, which is all I really hope for these days.

The Bodyguard is definitely one of my guilty pleasure films. Escape from Alcatraz, Star Wars III, and The Bodyguard were all on TV last night and I watched the Bodyguard all the way through. What that says about me...I don't know. There is damn good writing in that movie. When Tony comes into the kitchen after being ditched by Costner and tries to beat him up. Great scene, no dialog. When Costner tosses up the scarf over the samurai sword. Memorable. And let's not forget the plotting - incorporating both a weirdo stalker and the professional hired killer. Very well done. If you can get past some of Whitney's acting and the clownish white dude stalker, the movie holds up. Costner is good in this movie. I'll admit to being a Costner fan. With Patrick Swayze passing this year, people were having Swayze movie nights. Roadhouse, Red Dawn, and Point Break is a pretty damn fine evening. I suppose if it was co-ed, you could toss in Dirty Dancing in lieu of Roadhouse or Red Dawn - depending on the audience. What would it be with Costner? Bull Durham, The Untouchables, and Field of Dreams? Dances with Wolves? JFK? I would actually propose 4 separate trifeca-Costner evenings. You could go with the epic-cheese Costner - Waterworld, The Postman, and Robin Hood (admit, this would be fun), the sports trio - Bull Durham, Tin Cup, Field of Dreams (again, pretty fun), the paranoid Costner - JFK, No Way Out, The Untouchables (not bad, not bad), the Westerns - Dances with Wolves, Open Range, A Perfect World (again, not bad), or, my personal favorite the unheralded Costner - Swing Vote, 13 Days, The Bodyguard. Fine, perhaps The Bodyguard doesn't fall into unheralded. Maybe Revenge, but I can't remember that movie or if I ever saw it.

Last note on the Bodyguard and race. They handle race deftly in the Bodyguard by not even bringing it up. There isn't one single instance when a joke or comment about race in the entire film and yet here you have the central relationship between a white man and black woman. Spike Lee makes this into Jungle Fever. The Bodyguard doesn't even make a passing reference. The movie, literally, could have been cast the exact opposite, with a black man and a white woman and not a single word of the script would need changing. Can someone do this by the way? Remake the Bodyguard with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lady Gaga? I'd watch that movie. One could read into this several ways. One, celebrity trumps race. Whitney is the boss and has the power in the film and is a celebrity first and black second. Whitney and Eddie Murphy were essentially the first two stars where this became true. And then the OJ trial demonstrated the same thing. Or maybe that was about wealth. I don't know. Or two, we were within inches - in 1992 - of putting the issue of race behind us in an adult, albeit old fashioned way, by ceasing to think of it as a problem and just move on. I suppose Rodney King and OJ revealed either the impossibility of this or reopened racial wounds. I'm not sure. But it seems like even today, some sort of lame joke would be made about the race factor...but not in the Bodyguard.