what's wrong with percy jackson

It seems I have been posting a lot of movie reviews of late...maybe because I'm back to putting the political part of my brain into my writing (particularly my TV pilot about war reporters, which I'm really excited about) which is where it clearly belongs. I swear I do have several "serious" posts in the works, but for now, you are going to hear about Percy Jackson & the Olympians, and why it sucked.

The full title of the film is Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Rarely are you in a good place when your movie title contains both an ampersand and a colon. Percy Jackson is Hollywood's latest effort to find the next pre-awareness*-loaded young adult fantasy franchise megahit, as the decade of Harry Potter ticks rapidly to an end. The film is based on a series of books about a young boy who discovers the ancient Greek gods are real (and live above the Empire State Building, natch) and his mysterious deadbeat dad is actually Poseidon.

If this is starting to sound a bit familiar to you, you're not alone. A quick Google search will reveal there are plenty of similarities between Percy (short for Perseus, get it?) and a certain boy wizard. Troubled pre-teen boy named Harry/Percy with an abusive aunt and uncle/stepfather discovers he is actually a wizard/demigod, is whisked off to a magical school/upstate New York summer camp, and with his two best friends (one girl, one boy), goes on lots of adventures involving magic/Greek mythology. (In the books Percy begins his quest at age twelve; in the film he's been updated to about sixteen, unfortunately without the trade-off of better acting.)

To qualify as anything better than a glorified fanfic, Percy Jackson would have to bring something genuinely fresh to the crowded YA fantasy arena. I confess I have not read any of the books. But if there was anything fresh to be found in them, it has certainly been sucked out of this toothless, Disneyfied, paint-by-numbers piece of schlock. The film could have been salvaged from condemnation as a vapid Harry Potter rip-off by at least one of the following: a decent script, decent acting or decent directing. Unfortunately, epic fail on all counts.

After watching the bonus features on the first two Harry Potter Ultimate Edition DVDs, I have a little more respect for Chris Columbus as a director who is actually competent, if not particularly imaginative. Hence I must conclude that here he was just being lazy. Veteran actors deliver terrible performances. It's impossible to tell whether any of the young actors are any good, since they're all weighed down with dialogue that sounds like it was written by a childless forty-year-old who watched a few episodes of Hannah Montana. And as if the film didn't need any more strikes against it, it suffers from several of the crassest cases of product placement (and politician placement--listen for a lame Obama shoutout early in the film) in recent history.

But there are also deeper structural problems at work here. Percy's mom bites the dust early in the film, to which Percy has...no reaction at all. Come on! He never knew his dad, and his mom just got killed by a minotaur! (One review I read mentioned that the film never uses the word "dead" to refer to what happened to her, just "gone.") When it's revealed soon after that Percy's mom is not, in fact, dead, but a prisoner of Hades in the Underworld, Percy goes on a quest to save her. This video-gamey adventure plot could work just fine if the film had spent even one scene establishing any kind of genuine, loving relationship between Percy and his mother, but it does not. This leaves us with zero emotional connection to our hero and his goal. That's Screenwriting 101, folks! Even watching a guy fight a CGI hydra is boring when you don't care about what he's fighting for.

(For contrast, watch how masterfully the Harry/Sirius relationship is set up, cemented and then destroyed in just three scenes in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Good writing, good directing, good acting.)

The filmmakers also have to contend with the unfortunate reality that Greek gods do not make very sympathetic characters. They were, after all, the ancient Greeks' way of explaining a world that often seemed capricious and cruel. They fight with each other over trivial things and leave humans in the middle of it. They send mortals on pointless, impossible, obstacle-course quests for their own amusement. They fuck humans when they feel like it (often under circumstances of, let's just say, questionable consent, but you can bet that's been excised from the story) and leave the world littered with their abandoned children. In a time when single-parent families aren't the unmentionable disgraces they were once perceived to be, one can't help thinking that the demigods aren't really missing out on that much not being part of a nuclear family with these jerks.

We might not care so much about this if Percy himself was a compelling character. But he's a cardboard cutout of a teenager with all the emotional depth and complexity of a bit part from High School Musical 3. As a protagonist, Percy is utterly lacking in any of the qualities that make Harry both a likable hero and a believable teenager. Harry's stubbornness, his rage, his impulsiveness, his perpetual resentment of unearned authority, the intensity of the emotional landscape he and his classmates inhabit--these are all the things that make Harry Potter feel engaging and real.

One of JK Rowling's greatest gifts is that she understands children and teens on their own terms and takes their heightened and volatile emotional world just as seriously as they do. Maybe some of you out there had peaceful, serene, Ministry-approved childhoods, but for many of us, childhood was an intense, scary, confusing and sometimes traumatic time. Rowling takes that teenage feeling that the whole world is out to get you and projects it onto a universe where the whole world really is out to get you, and it works gangbusters.

I keep coming back to something Mel Brooks said when he spoke on campus last semester. (Yes, he was hilarious.) He talked about how good comedy is like bouncing a ball--to make something funny, you need to have something hard, serious, to bounce it against. I think good fantasy is like that too--you need to have a solid foundation of real stakes and real emotions to build it on. The best fantasy franchises to come out in recent years, series like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, have, at their heart, real struggles, real danger, real fear, and real, flawed, human characters we can identify with and root for. Anyone who wants to learn from Harry Potter's success should take this lesson to heart, instead of merely casting around for available fantasy elements that are still in the public domain.

*Pre-awareness: a Hollywood term for the opposite of original content. An already-existing brand that can be turned into a movie. This can be a remake, a book, a TV show, a video game, a comic book, a toy, even a board game. Seriously. Google "Monopoly movie."

war on film: avatar

Before going to see Avatar, I read Annalee Newitz's heavily circulated io9 article, "When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?" in which she skewers the all-too-common scenario in which "a white guy manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member." I found the article pretty funny and insightful, but then I read responses from a few people whose judgment I trust saying that Newitz was being too harsh and Avatar was awesome and maybe the most politically radical blockbuster of all time. So I decided to approach the film with an open mind.

And I have to say, it was kickass. James Cameron has made an anti-colonial popcorn movie, and damn is it fun. If you are going to the movies to watch shit get blowed up real good, having it be some colonizer's shit for a change is really, really awesome. I saw Avatar on Christmas Eve, two days before flying to Cairo for the Gaza Freedom March, and I won't deny that it felt like a perfect sendoff.

Avatar is clearly a technicolor sci-fi re-imagining of the colonization of the Americas, complete with environmentally rapacious extraction of raw materials and displacement and massacre of the indigenous population. But Cameron mixes in plenty of neo-colonial imagery along the way. American audiences will instantly recognize visual echoes of Vietnam in Avatar's lush jungles and helicopter gunships. The phrase "Shock and Awe" is dropped into the dialogue at a key moment, and the squad of corporate-funded contract killers hired to conquer Pandora seems to be what a hybrid of the East India Company and Blackwater might look like if it were run by Colonel Kurtz.

Cameron has never been known for his subtle and delicate touch--but then, neither has colonialism. I never thought the colonizers, who are after a valuable metal called...wait for it...unobtainium, were too crude or violent or racist. Colonialism is crude and violent and racist. Aliens are often a metaphor for the other in science fiction, and these colonizers regard the other with an utter contempt that is thoroughly believable. They build schools and use anthropologists to manipulate the population into trusting them. When that doesn't work, they use spies like the film's protagonist, Jake Sully. And when Sully and his Scooby gang decide the natives aren't so bad and turn against the colonial masters, the colonizers are perfectly willing to switch tactics to full-scale genocide.

There are plenty of cliches in Avatar. Yes, the Na'vi dress like stereotypical Hollywood Native Americans for no apparent reason. (In one of my sci-fi pet peeves, lots of things also happen to have extra legs and grow to enormous size for no apparent reason. Why does a galloping animal need six legs? That makes no anatomical sense.) Yes, of course the white guy main character falls in love with the tribal chief's svelte blue cat-daughter Neytiri. Come on, did you really think there wasn't going to be a love story to write a ballad about for the closing credits? Might as well go ahead and just call her Pocah'ontas.

But none of these cliches were terribly unexpected, and I was having enough fun enjoying the ride that none of them would have been a fatal flaw and Avatar could have been an exceptionally well-made popcorn action flick with a solidly anti-colonial message.

Except.

Except for the part when the white guy flies in on a giant pterodactyl (I swear I'm not making this up) and saves the day. And magically sweeps away all the indigenous leadership and unites the Na'vi tribes in a way no Na'vi has ever been able to do and then leads them in battle (where, conveniently, both of his two male rivals for leadership, Neytiri's father and betrothed, are killed.)

And then I started to see the point of Newitz's article.

Here's the thing. I have absolutely no problem with a movie in which some of the oppressors switch sides and decide they're willing to fight and die on the side of oppressed. I think that's quite awesome. In theory, I would not have a problem with a scenario where these race traitors provided a crucial bit of information that led to victory. That's exactly why double agents and collaborators are so dangerous--they know the other side. But, because it's a Hollywood movie, the white guy (and ex-Marine!) who switches sides to stand in solidarity with the blue people can't just be part of the struggle--he has to lead the struggle. And he has to lead it way better than any of the blue people ever could. Because clearly they weren't capable of winning their own liberation; they needed some white dude to roll in and convince them he deserved to be their leader because he could ride some giant bird like one of their ancestors could. And because they're simple native people, they believed him. And because it's Hollywood, he was right.

All of this, in turn, begs the question: why is there a white guy as the protagonist at all? Why isn't badass fighter and hunter Neytiri the protagonist? Or, if a blue catwoman is too radical for Hollywood, what about her father? Or Tsu'tey, a gutsy warrior whose role in the two hours of the film before the final battle is mostly to cock-block Jake?

I don't buy that it's because audiences can't identify with a blue-cat-person protagonist. The creators of Wall-e made us identify with a toaster.

There's a white male protagonist in Avatar for the same reason there's a white male protagonist in Dances with Wolves, or The Last Samurai, or Blood Diamond, or Glory. (You can play this game with so many Ed Zwick movies!) Because the missing element that the oppressed need to win their liberation is clearly Kevin Costner. And because the presumed mainstream movie audience is white, and male for anything involving action, and the Hollywood studio presumption is that people can't identify with a protagonist who doesn't look like them.

Turns out, there are a few people who've had no trouble at all identifying with the Na'vi. A tribe in eastern India is appealing to James Cameron to help them stop mining company Vedanta from drilling into a mountain they consider sacred. (Think he will?) And last Friday's weekly protest against Israel's apartheid wall in the West Bank village of Bil'in featured an Avatar re-enactment by Palestinians and Israeli supporters. The Israeli soldiers standing by seemed not to get the joke, and fired tear gas and sound grenades per usual.

The Bil'in Na'vi pictures zipped around the interwebs and reached such diverse sources as the New York Times, AP, the Telegraph (UK) and AOL News. I don't know if I think this is a brilliant PR move, completely silly, or a bit sad that these demonstrators--who've been protesting nonviolently for nearly five years against the wall that's cutting their village lands in half--had to dress up as fictional characters to get the point across about their real-world struggle. But then, maybe when you've been protesting every week for the past five years, you just need to do something different every once in a while to spice things up.

hunger games 3

Is Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy the best YA book series since Harry Potter? It's certainly the one I've gotten the most excited about. (Don't know why The Hunger Games is awesome? Read this.) And Scholastic has just released the title and cover art for the eagerly awaited third and final book:

I thought The Victors was a pretty great title for the final book, but apparently that was a rumor. The mockingjay, as fans of the books know, is a symbol of rebellion and of things being out of the dictatorial Capitol's control, despite its superior technology. This is most definitely the situation at the end of Catching Fire, the second book in the trilogy.

Catching Fire ended on a jaw-dropper of a cliffhanger. Collins is setting us up for a grand slam of a third act here, and she had better deliver. What Panem needs is a revolution, and I so so so hope that's what's coming in the last book. The free-flying bird and shattered rings on the book's cover look like good signs to me.

Mockingjay comes out August 24, 2010. Beyond the obvious (like a resolution of the romantic storyline) here are my predictions for what has to be paid off in the final book.

1. We'll see District 13 and it will not have those rumored nuclear weapons. That would be way too easy a fix. I'd like to think Collins knows better than that.

2. We'll see other districts in more detail--I think District 4, Finnick's home, is a good bet.

3. We won't be going back into any arenas; that's been played out. The "games" of the last book will take place entirely in the real world and the fight will be for the future of Panem.

4. And Katniss, who hates being underground, will have to sneak through that train tunnel that runs under the Rockies to get into the Capitol. Preferably to rescue Peeta.

ways in which usc is a microcosm of los angeles

1. It's huge, sprawling, and mostly flat.

2. It's full of diversity, but everyone is ghettoized in their separate schools, classes, programs, and buildings, so the chances of meeting someone from outside your academic neighborhood/ghetto are rare. If your department is at the north end of campus, you probably never go to the south end. You might not even know what the south end looks like, and if you venture there it will seem confusing and alien.

3. There's no central gathering place, and in the normal place where you might meet someone new--campus walkways and plazas--everyone's too busy zipping to where they're going on their (a) skateboards or (b) beach cruiser bikes (probably while balancing a coffee in one hand and a cell phone in the other while wearing an outfit you'd think would be highly inappropriate for biking) that they're too preoccupied to notice anyone else.

4. In some areas, extremely rich people have paid to build huge, expensive and obscenely ugly buildings that combine the spiffiest state-of-the-art technology with dozens of pointless, minor stupidities like switching which side the men's and women's bathrooms are on on different floors.

5. A large percentage of the public gathering/hanging out space is outside, a fact you don't think about until that one day when it rains.

6. The palm trees are imported. The only difference is at USC, you can pay to have your name put on them.