Two days ago Deadline posted on the war of words between Jim Cameron and Piranha 3D producer Mark Canton. After accusing Piranha 3D of cheapening the medium, Cameron went further to say:
When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3-D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip. And that’s now what’s happening now with 3D. It is a renaissance. Right now the biggest and best films are being made in 3D. Martin Scorsese is making a film in 3D [Hugo Cabret]. Disney’s biggest film of the year – Tron: Legacy — is coming out in 3D.
Doesn’t this sound like kind of a classic feud of high culture kicking and fighting being appropriated by the lowly masses?!
Okay, so while Mark Canton’s response was probably overly verbose and defensive, two of the better points he makes (amidst rants of Piranha 3D’s Rotten Tomatoes score) are 1) that Jim Cameron did not invent 3D and 2) “Shame on you for thinking that genre movies and the real maestros like Roger Corman and his collaborators are any less auteur or impactful in the history of cinema than you. …Who are you to impugn any genre film or its creators?”
Piranha 3D is pretty polar opposite of the spectrum from high art or respected film. And I don’t actually believe it’s transgressional enough to merit cult status the way a Roger Corman film would, either Nevertheless, it’s Cameron’s assertion that only “real” movies by goddamn Disney or Martin Scorcese are WORTHY of the technology that just bugs me. Does that not sound completely insane to anyone else? As if Avatar was some bourgeois movie. For all of its blah blah blah environmentalism and Oscars, Avatar is really just a popcorn flick to me and many others.
It’s a democratic medium and anyone can do whatever the hell they please with it. If Piranha 3D wants 3D severed dicks and 8 minute long underwater dance sequences of naked chicks, fuck, there’s plenty of room in the world for that. I love the idea that it disgusts James Cameron so much – like every one of those 3D boobie shots in Piranha 3D was A PERSONAL AFFRONT to his carefully censored and painlessly unsexy scene of blue naked cat people making love with their ponytails.
And anyway, what’s more interesting? A technically proficient and great (based on, you know, standard barometers) film? Or some strange cult film with legs, that morphs into something much more meaningful over time – with room for interpretation from the audience. I can’t honestly believe that Cameron thinks only auteurs should make film, and that there shouldn’t be room for the audience to play, but that’s more or less what he’s implying to me. As he says in his quote, “biggest and best.” For him, the two have to go hand in hand.
I can’t wait to see what he’ll think of Jackass 3D.
Tags: Piranha 3D
