a n d r e w's c h r is t a s r
........e i x

There's been a lot of bit ching (Chinese discussions on new media film) the last few days among those lucky enough to attend one of the tiny handful of Avatar preview screenings. And one wishes many things about the film - that the story was more intricate, that the music score was weirder, wacky and wouldn't so resemble, oftentimes, a certain 'hug the world' airline ad. But to see Avatar 3D in an IMAX cinema is truly awesome. One can be cynical about spending $230 million on 'just' a movie but if in so doing that can help the world see itself just that tiny bit more differently then just perhaps it surpasses the criticisms of 'just' pure entertainment. Director James Cameron has many friends (including family) in the US Marines. And Cameron's vision of the world/universe is probably one that will be shared by many who've survived war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a wheelchair bound Marine war casualty from 2154. "Fresh meat...meals on wheels" colleagues taunt as he disembarks onto the planet Pandora - a luscious earth-like moon 4.4 light years from a beleaguered earth rich in unobtainium (if you think that name's the nadir of originality check out the Extremely Large Telescopes, ELTs) - a mineral this mining outpost hopes will save Earth. If that weren't enough woes for Jake, he's even despised by the Avatar Program scientists led by Grace (Sigourney Weaver) who only want him because he shares the DNA of his dead twin brother. If Jake's avatar (his mind linked to a test tube body) succeeds in intelligence gathering on Pandora's indigenous Na’vi tribe (11-foot and blue), head of the moon's private military Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) promises his legs back on earth (social welfare obviously hasn't changed in 144 years).

Forget the cynics. Avatar is a film full of beautiful things. At times one wishes for more of the human warmth of Where the Wild Things Are but their world is a Utopia, and as Max learns, as flawed as the Fourier vision. Avatar is a Darwinian world where only the strongest strains survive. And though that's something very distasteful it's the way the world is. Or as James Cameron would have us believe the way any world would be. To be an athlete one must train. To be a writer one must write. To be a warrior sometimes one must kill. To truly love sometimes one must die. The film resonates with the ideas of John Boorman's The Emerald Forest released around the time that Al Gore's warnings about climate change were unheeded echoes in empty cathedrals. Humans linking their minds to an avatar are a corollary for Pandora's organic neural network where tree roots are synaptic electro-magnetism: Deleuze's rhizome ideas and his book Le Pli (The Fold). Kids will love this movie - it's both scary and adventurous (6 legged horses, a flying creature called the Ikran where reins and stirrups are the folding and twining of animal and Na’vi hair) and a world that (certainly in IMAX) seduces you to inhabit and dares one to escape. On a regular 3D screen the forest scenes can tend to remind us of a florescent UV nightclub. This is far less so in IMAX where Pandora's animals and vegetation pulsate into our eyes (The Lord of the Rings WETA animators) just as James Cameron's Fusion Camera System (a single camera that shoots live action in stereoscopic 3D) and a head-rig captures the actors including their eye movement. Tomboy girls will love the kick-ass female characters.
Interview (10 min) with Sigourney Weaver on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour (Dec 14)

Decode: Digital Design Sensations at the Victoria and Albert Museum:
"The exhibition will be centred in the Porter Gallery with a series of interventions throughout the Museum and garden as well as a number of specially commissioned one-off performances. For the first time, the V&A is also commissioning a digital work for its website and will provide remote access to some of the works on display."
Tim Gardner has a solo show at the 303 Gallery, New York. "As man continues to exist amidst a constantly shifting landscape, Gardner's watercolors imply a quiet resignation to the impossibility of a harmonious existence between man and his current surroundings."
In 2007, Gardner participated in a residency and had a solo exhibition at London's National Gallery.
Gladstone Gallery presents a new body of work by Sharon Lockhart:
"the workers of Bath Ironworks in Bath, Maine: consider both the plastic and psychological terrain bound up in structures of labor. The soundtrack to the film Lunch Break is designed in collaboration with composer Becky Allen and filmmaker James Benning."
Fred Holland Recent Works: 2007-2009 (Tilton Gallery, New York thru Dec 24) - part of the NY art scene for decades- explores the frailty of our human existence.
Krysten Cunningham's (a former Los Angeles physics lab techie for 8 years) Tangental just closed at the tiny Dispatch gallery in New York.

"You are an alien, you're an extra-terrestrial, you are captured by another planet, you are no longer a member of the human race: you're not breathing earth's air, not subject to earth's gravity - you have divorced yourself from what you can relate to as your own human existence. On the moon time takes on a totally new meaning," says Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan on the audio commentary for For All Mankind (Eureka's Masters of Cinema 88 DVD). Most of the material is the same as Criterion's Region 1 US release (the commentary from 1999). Director Al Reinert: "What we've seen for years and years as the public are copies of copies of copies of copies of copies. What we wanted to do was go back to the original film magazine...unfreeze it (3 days) and blow that up from the 16mm original to big screen 35. That [NASA] film gets the care that no film ever gotten [on the earth]...It was taken not because it was beautiful...but to diagnose problems." Much of this footage has never been seen before and amazing to remember that this picture quality came from film stock that survived Earth re-entry in its heat shield capsule, plucked from the Pacific and then developed.
"Going to the moon on that Saturn V - one world stops and another begins...not just an extension of normal aviation...Most of us didn't know how to react, quite frankly. Some took it to heart and hung a sign around their neck saying 'hey world I went to the moon'. And others of us sort of backed off and said gee, we were pretty lucky to be able to do something unique and special. There was so much competition in the programme among and between us for flights and so forth that none of us ever wanted to let our guard down. Even after it was over. "They've never objected to the fact that we don't treat the astronauts as individuals, we treat them as one group of people wearing space suits," says the director. "Part of the 'right stuff' is not being full of yourself," says Mike Gentry (NASA Lead Librarian).

"We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained and new rights to be won. and they must be won and used for the progress of all mankind," President Kennedy's address. Eugene Cernan: "The important thing is that we need to put a goal out there for the future in the country to grab a hold of and then build the infrastructure and the education system that it's gonna take to get [to Mars]. In order to give kids ownership of space we need to get them in space. If we can send a 77 year old into space why can't we send a 17 year old into space." Paintings from the Moon is a fascinating 45 min DVD extra on the photo-realist paintings of Apollo 12's Alan Bean in which he incorporates remnants of his space mission. There's a Blu-ray version as well - hard to go wrong with this as a Christmas gift.

On Boxing Day, Guy Ritchie's fans won't be disappointed by the release of Sherlock Holmes, and those who weren't may re-consider him in light of his latest film that returns Arthur Conan Doyle back to his "action novel" roots. London 1890 and "There's a growing engagement in technologies of the near future, and this sense of wonderment," says Robert Downey Jr (Holmes). "Using moral theory I have created order out of chaos," says Holmes after playing violin to a tube of fireflies and observing that music changes their direction. Original story author Lionel Wigram likens Watson (Jude Law) to "a war veteran": "just back from the Afghan war; he's been wounded and has been through hardship. He’s a strong, physical man and he knows how to handle himself. Although he's not a mad genius like Holmes, he's a very clever man." With its Knight Templar plot line Sherlock Holmes is Dan Brown for those who don't particularly want to like Dan Brown - Robert Downey Jr's eyes burning and thirsting for truth.

Ealing Studios'low-budget 1949 B/W adaptation of Pushkin's The Queen of Spades directed by Thorold Dickinson (Gaslight) has The Red Shoes' Anton Walbrook as Herman Suvorin who dreams of one day "grabbing life by the collar and making it give him what he wants". Similarly to The Red Shoes, Martin Scorsese has loved the film so much over the years "a masterpiece" that he's recorded an introduction to the short cinema release before Optimum 's DVD on Jan 18 along with Secret People. Dickinson's High Command follows later in 2010. The gnarling reality of Russian winter is amazingly crafted in studio and Suvorin's gnashing avarice through the director's cinematic melodramatic conjuring in order to belie a truth. As in Avatar, the film likes to believe that there is a better world. At least for some.
Screenwriter Rodney Ackland's plays are highly recommended.
Thorold Dickinson: A World of Film, article in The Guardian
The darkness of Disney's A Christmas Carol in 3D would make a curious double-bill with Sherlock Holmes. Released early in November to coincide with the powering up of Regent Street's Christmas lights it's still fairly luminous in the memory and it's scary Dickensian take on social reality may well dwell in the minds of kids.
At West London's Riverside Studios, actor Simon Callow performs 2 little one-person Dickens plays that haven't been seen for 150 years, Dr. Marigold & Mr. Chops - "they exhausted him, in fact they killed him".

Up is also fairly impressive (though one wishes that the 3D would let the balloon swoop into our eyes as they tried to do with the chandelier in the stage musical Phantom of the Opera). And a good moral for kids in making them think about false idols and what being a hero is all about. Chris Atkins's doco Starsuckers dishes the dirt on just about every dodgy practice in entertainment. To his credit Atkins is quite fair handed (if not downright infuriating to his subjects) but the director couldn't resist being part of the Matrix and having his film included in The Times BFI London Film Festival, part funded of course by his bête noire News International. Perhaps even Atkins wanted a bit of glamour and acknowledgement of his talents. Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paridiso) made a great overlooked film The Star Maker (L'uomo delle stelle) (1995) in which this conman travels round the Sicilian countryside pretending to be a talent scout for Cinecittà and stealing people's dreams on camera. The sadness of the film is that he was actually talented enough not to have had to lie in the first place.

For some, Alvin And The Chipmunks 2: The Squeakquel might be akin to Alex in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange physically restrained and being force fed his beloved Beethoven. In this case the chipmunks chanson squeak might equate to that guy who kept falsetto-ing the "you're beautiful" song on the radio. No dys-family-functionality here. "There's no 'I' in the word team, but there is in Alvin." Meow! I guess the 'save our music department' is a good Christmas message. Can't say i hated this film as much as everyone else seemed to. Dare I say it was possibly more fun than Brit artist darling Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy - essentially a biopic of the dysfunctional Liverpudlian childhood of Beatle John Lennon. But in fairness, many will relate to the earnestness of this film. Taylor-Wood's White Cube video installation Sigh of classical musicians miming (using muscle memory) a specially commissioned score from film composer Anne Dudley was intriguing, though. (Interestingly, Chipmunks cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond worked his way up through the industry to lens some of Britain's most seminal films including those of Nicolas Roeg, the Rolling Stones Sympathy for the Devil and The Beatles Let it Be).

Given added resonance by last week's Copenhagen climate change conference, Earth: Art of a Changing World at the rear of the Royal Academy presents the response of 35 of the world's leading artists. None of the work is new except for United Visual Artists (the guys from the Wellcome's Identity show) Burlington Arcade light-based intervention Onward, and Tracey Emin's embroidered calico I Loved You Like the Sky. Seen in the context of this show, the work's naivity casts a strange spell amongst the show's mostly deliberate pieces. Semiconductor: Ruth Jarmen and Joe Gerhardt's fascinating Black Rain uses HD video from NASA's raw visual data of solar winds and coronal flares but lacks the human power of Bill Viola's video work on the same scale. There's an Iceland Sophie Calle piece, the vagabond chilling simplicity of Cornelia Parker's burnt Floridian forest remnants in Heart of Darkness (2004), Bill Woodrow's alluring cloth map palimpsests, Chris Jordan's 1.14 million brown paper bags (used every hour by American supermarkets), Keith Tyson's unwitting alchemy, Daren Almond's hypnotic 567 digital wall clocks Tide and the thousands of clay figurines in Antony Gormley's 1992 Amazonian Field. Are they praying, lemmings, secretly sprouting in that room? Are the Beuys Acorns alive in the London winter on the gallery's balcony? Tracey Moffat's Doomed (2007 in collaboration with Gary Hillberg) - is a 10 minute edit moments of impending disaster movie destruction and one of the most astute exhibits in the show. If all that proves just too much Sketch restaurant's designer Mark Lawson Bell has designed a downstairs cafe based on the idea that there is just too much knowledge in the world. Replacing it with chi chi food I guess alleviates the pain before Soylent Green sets in.
Peter Campus' video work on at the BFI gallery with a couple of screenings of his other work in January.
Microcosmos in special edition out on Second Sight Blu-ray

"Camouflage is the last form of classical landscape painting. It represents not this tree or that field but Fields and Trees," said deceased Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay whose sculptures and prints Camouflage just closed at the David Nolan Gallery.
Mrs.Delany and Her Circle is at the Yale Center for British Art (thru Jan. 3) - 18th-century English botanist and friend of Handel, and Jonathan Swift.
Seraphine review and a few more to come before the magic Christmas pudding runs away with us all....or at least some. Thankfully.