Zoë in Paris with some guy

Lainey has been giving Zoë Saldaña her flowers recently for pioneering high fashion on press tours. She’s currently on the Avatar: Fire & Ash press tour, which stopped in Paris today.  Following a strong start at the LA premiere earlier this week, Zoë showed up in futuristic leather in Paris. It’s a strong look, structured, even sculptural. It has a futuristic bent that suits a sci-fi movie’s promotional obligations. I wish the head styling was a little sharper—I feel like she either needs a bold lip or more dramatic eye—but this is a daytime photo call. Zoë usually knows when to go big and when to conserve her energy.

She was joined by Sigourney Weaver—whose voice remains entirely unconvincing as a teenaged girl—and Oona Chaplin, who plays one of the new fire Na’vi characters. I know I complain a lot about these movies, but the credit I will give James Cameron, beyond all the technical stuff he’s doing with these films, he has consistently cast great women to star in Avatar. Has he written well for them? No, not even once. But he CASTS great women to star in these movies, women who pull his narrative kicking and screaming into something resembling thematic consistency. Without them, Avatar would be a total loss, no matter how good the films look.

Case in point, franchise star Sam Worthington is also in Paris, but like…is he? Is he, really? If I asked you who the star of Avatar is, would you say Sam Worthington, or would you say Zoë Saldaña? Or maybe Sigourney Weaver, at this point? Sam Worthington has become “some guy in Avatar”. The women are keeping that franchise afloat.

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What else happened today…

Check out the women of L’Oreal’s Women of Worth party. Because you’re worth it! (Go Fug Yourself)

Information on those Prime Video subscription add-ons. Sure, it is unquestionably easier to keep track of everything in one place, but what jumped out at me is that Amazon is keeping up to 30% of the revenue, including from the PBS add-on. Yikes! I want 100% of that money going to PBS! So basically, at least for PBS, maybe separate your subscriptions or else Amazon just ends up with everything. Again. Always. Eternally. (Pajiba)

This essay articulates something I’ve been thinking about regarding Tom Cruise’s oeuvre. Aled Maclean-Jones at The Metropolitan Review posits that all of Cruise’s characters are useful. Not only that, the Mission: Impossible franchise is built on the entire good-guy crew being useful. I’ve been thinking about the uniting themes of Cruise’s body of work—masculinity, sexless romance, running—but this gets at the real unifying theory of Tom Cruise. His work is the cinema of the useful.

I like thinking about films in terms of “cinema of this or that” because I like making lists, but it also helps me think about films in context with each other. Cinema is always in dialogue with itself, no film exists in a vacuum, and now that I am thinking about “cinema of the useful”, I see connections to hockey comedy Slapstick, college comedy Real Genius, and the works of Michael Mann, which always center on competent protagonists. This goes to the supreme satisfaction of Collateral, which is directed by Mann and stars Cruise giving the best performance of his career. Mann and Cruise are both engaged in making cinema of the useful. However strange their partnership seems on paper, in practice, they share a narrative goal. (The Metropolitan Review)