Category: Things I’ve Seen

I will remember the opening moments of Avatar as one of the greatest cinema experiences of my life. Seeing Jake Sully emerge from cryo-sleep and move in a zero-gravity space, with a deep well disappearing far beneath him, astonished and delighted me. It was my first experience of the new 3D tech (if you don’t count the Alice in Wonderland trailer that immediately preceded it) and the visual shock lived up to the billing. That and Cameron’s customarily polished production design, and some very efficient early storytelling, started the film on a tremendous high.
The rest of the film was a steady roll downhill. By the end I was completely disengaged from everything that was happening in front of me, and occasionally resenting it. Even the lush natural world, surely an incredible accomplishment, wore out its welcome – too many spectacular lava lamp plants, not enough moments of genuine wonder.
It’s a film with its heart in the right place, but all the subtlety of a Captain Planet episode. The storytelling was perfunctory at best, often laughably so – Our Hero meets the natives, and they establish in two lines that the hot girl he met is the chief’s daughter, and the tough warrior is betrothed to the hot girl. The chief tells the hot girl to train Our Hero in the native ways, but she better not fall in love with him! We’ve all seen this movie before, right? We all knew that was going to be the case, why waste any extra words on it?
And it had all the clumsy you would expect from a tech-fetishist’s attempt to depict a holistic/shamanic worldview – they can measure the web of consciousness with their scanners because it’s made of electricity!
But mostly, the film annoyed me for buying in so thoroughly to the White Man Saves The Natives fantasy. I knew it was coming, but I didn’t expect just how egregious it was going to be.
It isn’t just a white man learning to become a high-functioning highly-respected member of the tribe in a spectacularly short time – no, Our Hero actually proves to be the awesomest native in history, not only becoming one of the few people ever to do the most difficult thing (apparently because of a tactical insight any ten-year-old could replicate), but also being the only one ever to do this other amazing thing that, um, why does it work for him again? No justification is presented. He’s just awesome is why.
And he’s a tool. Seriously, the hero of this movie is not a nice or charming guy, and Sam Worthington is not the actor to convince you otherwise.
Lets not get into the roles of the non-blue people of colour in this film.
Jim Cameron, this is the one that tips you over. I was with you through Titanic, which I really enjoyed and (though I haven’t seen it for a decade) am confident I’d still like. I stand up for you when people point at that and laugh at its cartoonish storytelling and grand excess. But Avatar, I cannot defend. (Still, it keeps getting four-star and five-star reviews. So what the hell do I know?)
Good points: the opening sequence, everything with Sigourney Weaver, all those Maori men and women in space.
I genuinely recommend watching this in a foreign language, untranslated. That isn’t sarcasm, I think it’d improve the experience tenfold.

A week ago news broke that Dollhouse was cancelled. This was greeted with much wailing (and also some dancing on its grave) but creator Joss Whedon didn’t seem too stunned.
And rightly so. Dollhouse is incredibly strange television. It’s an ensemble series populated with characters who are defined either by their blankness or their overwhelming moral flaws – you don’t see that too much. It has a fitful mission-of-the-week structure that conceals its deeply troubling premise, except when it takes a 90-degree turn right into horrific territory. Sometimes it seems to really want you to feel dirty for watching it.
It’s easily the most unusual piece of television I’ve ever seen, and it’s incredible that it got made at all. I am still dumbfounded that a second season was approved, but I’m thankful, because Dollhouse as a whole is challenging and fascinating TV, even if (and sometimes because) it fails at some core broadcast-TV responsibilities.
So there’s no wailing from me. Fox did right by Dollhouse, renewing it against all odds. They showed unusual faith.
The series will play better on DVD than on TV. It’ll make it much easier getting through the opening five episodes, which were heavily messed with by the studio and feel like a completely different show to what came after. The subtle character beats will be a lot stronger in a watching binge than strung out over months. Even the weird and claustrophobic setting should feel a lot homelier when you adjust to it in one hit. So that’s good.
And also: Dollhouse revealed the genius that is Enver Gjokaj. Guy can do anything. Someone give him his own TV show already!

NZ political life continues to be ridiculous (media training protip for Hone Harawira: when you are giving an apology, do not issue the opinion that another politician should be shot), global climate change progress continues to flounder in a commons dilemma, the US right wing continues to devour itself, and the Breakers continue to suffer without Kirk Penney. So I don’t have much to say about any of that.
Instead, I get to write a 25-year-anniversary reconsideration of Neuromancer, because I read it by the pool in Thailand. Here’s the review:
Yep, still good, and I understand it much better now.
Not that I read it when it first came out, of course, I was only eight. Neuromancer is about a dude who wants to live in cyberspace, but he got kicked out because he screwed over the wrong person. The first chunk of the book is straight-up Noir, then it switches seamlessly into a Caper story. It seems an odd sort of book to have changed the world; coming back to it, its narrative seems more contained than ever, smaller and more of an inward spiral. But its a smart and pleasing read. It’ll still be in circulation in a hundred years, and William Gibson will no doubt be bemused by that, but why not?
The two 25-anniversary articles to read are these:
Mark Sullivan writes about what it got right (e.g. the web), what it got wrong (e.g. AIs).
Joe McNeilly at GamesRadar gives an interesting overview of the book in its context and its legacy.
And this site is a good hub for more info.

Yesterday attended the inaugural Professorial lecture of Maryanne Garry.
Maryanne started at Victoria University in 1996, which was when I met her, taking her 3rd year class on memory. It was a revelation. Maryanne studied under Beth Loftus and brought with her an extremely lucid presentation of memory issues, namely the unreliability of memory. Much of her research has a focus on false and incorrect memories and what it means to say “I remember”. She quickly got a reputation as a great teacher and a fierce driver of student research. (Stuck to her door at the moment is a bit of student feedback saying something like “Dr Garry is the best lecturer I’ve ever had, she is funny and her lectures are interesting and she also terrifies me so I always pay attention”.)
Inaugural lectures are great. They’re a chance for the new Professor to give a good summary of their work, an overview suitable for a non-specialist audience. The scope of them is really appealing to me. Academic research is always bogged down in detail, because it has to be – the details are crucial. But in an inaugural, there’s the space to zoom out a bit and deliver some solid hits in the clearest way possible. The tone is also always positive and celebratory and a reflection of the academic’s personality. (I remember with fondness the excellently-titled inaugural by David Finkelstein, “I played frisbee with Jesus”. This title was not a metaphor, either, he meant it literally.)
Maryanne’s was neat. Interspersed with lots of digs at the Republican party and George W. Bush (she may have been here for over a decade but her passion for her nation’s politics is undimmed) was a swift trip through three fascinating areas of research.
First was the imagination inflation research (a lot of which was done with Stef Sharman – Maryanne went to a lot of trouble in her address to call out and thank her students). This line of research was just getting underway when I was kicking around Vic doing honours, and it’s since become a pretty solid line of work. Basic message: when you imagine something that might have happened to you, you become more confident that it actually did happen to you. That’s powerful stuff.
The second area she called “the dangers of photoshop”. This research, largely with Kim Wade (known to some around these parts as “wife of Alastair Galloway” – yes, that Kim you guys), found that if you show people a fake photo of kid-them doing something, they very quickly become confident that it did indeed happen, and their accounts become very detailed and convincing. Apparently a common response to being debriefed that it wasn’t real was “whoa, how did you do that? I remember it so clearly!”
The third area is with lots of people and still in early stages, and it’s something quite startling – I’m going to describe it like this: people become more confident about statements if there’s a photo with the statement, even if the photo shouldn’t matter. Like, “the Pope rode a camel” – people are more likely to agree that the Pope did indeed ride a camel if there’s a picture of the Pope not riding a camel. I’m over-simplifying a complex set of data to the point of parody, but if you walk away thinking “photos have an influence over our judgments that they shouldn’t rationally have” then you’ve got the main point.
It was good stuff, with a lovely conclusion about how memory is really about reducing the space between people, about social connectivity. She got a lot of laughs and she got to show off some important research and, yeah, it was good times. So, congrats Professor! Readers who know Maryanne should take this as an excuse to take a wee dram in her honour. I did.

Local TV warhorse Outrageous Fortune ran its season 5 finale last night, and it was a corker. After some traditional end-of-season antics it delivered a change-up in literally the last few seconds, going out on a serious game-changer of a cliffhanger, hands-over-mouth stuff that smartly built on everything we’d seen before. Outstanding work – Outrageous was wheelspinning in the first third of this season but really got moving after that, and this was a great capper.
Interesting too to see #outrageous as a trending topic on Twitter, which means that it was one of the most tweeted-about subjects globally. (It helped that America was asleep.) In Twitters self-devouring world, the moment it showed up in the “trending topics” list it started getting noticed and grabbed up. It continues to trend as I write, now as a general tag for writers to talk about what outrages them. What the heck, it’s another Kiwi contribution to the global pop culture conversation – like those lets-make-a-pop-band shows. Er.
Ahhh, gotta go catch a bus.