It’s being described as the most expensive movie ever made, a live-action 3D epic with a pricetag reported at close to $500 million. James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ premieres in Hollywood this week amid enthusiastic early reviews, with Australian actor Sam Worthington in the lead role.

Worthington’s character, Jake Sully, uses a wheelchair in the film. Not so the real-life Sam Worthington.

The film’s official site refers to Sully as “a former Marine confined to a wheelchair.” Here’s a sampling of the language journalists are using to introduce the character:

• MSNBC: “wheelchair-bound soldier”
• [UK] Times: “wheelchair-bound war hero”
• Associated Press: “a brawny former Marine who lost the power of his legs in battle on Earth”
• [Toronto] Globe and Mail blog: “a wheelchair-bound U.S. marine”
• Bloomberg.com: “a paraplegic former Marine”
• Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times: “the hero, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who is a paraplegic”
• Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune: “our hero is paraplegic ex-Marine Jake Sully”
• New York Times: “a Marine who has lost the use of his legs fighting in a war he didn’t understand”
• Variety: “wheelchair-bound former Marine”
• Fox News: “a former Marine paralyzed from the waist down”
• Chicago Tribune: “a Marine who comes home from combat in a wheelchair”
• MTV.com: “crippled ex-Marine”
• Kirk Honeycutt in the Hollywood Reporter: “a crippled former Marine”
• Michael Bodey in the Australian: “wheelchair-bound former Marine”

(Image from trailer on avatarmovie.com)

Writing in the Huffington Post, Lennard Davis takes Hollywood and Broadway to task for regularly casting actors without disabilities to portray characters with disabilities, as when Abigail Breslin (left) was selected to play Helen Keller in the upcoming revival of “The Miracle Worker.” An excerpt:

The media helps to shape and define how society at large thinks about disability. The more that television, films, theater, and other forms of performance reflect a world filled with diverse peoples and bodies live, the more egalitarian and fair our society will be.

The one way to achieve this goal is have not just characters with disabilities appear regularly in the media but to know that people with disabilities play them.

Lennard Davis is professor of English, disability studies, and medical education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Related posts here and here.

Writing the New York Times ‘Diagnosis’ column,  Dr. Lisa Sanders ponders whether Sherlock Holmes might have had Asperger’s syndrome. The fictional private eye, to be featured in an upcoming film starring Robert Downey Jr., had many symptoms of the syndrome, she says, including an obsessive focus on narrow subjects, mood swings and an apparent inability to relate to others.

Sanders says author Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes’ creator, trained as a physician and filled his stories with realistic medical description. Could he have based Holmes on patients he observed? “We may never know,” she says, “but clearly Holmes’s peculiarities have a persistent appeal.”

(Movie poster from imdb.com)

From Agence France Press:

Pablo Pineda, a Spanish actor with Down syndrome, has been  awarded the best actor prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival for his performance in the film “Yo, Tambien” (“Me Too”).

Pineda plays a 34-year-old man with Down syndrome who, like Pineda himself, earns a university degree. His character then goes on to start his first job in regional social services and fall in love with a colleague. Pineda has a university degree in special education.

To play Sanz with a range of emotions from joy to disappointment and sadness “called for a lot of introspection, I had to relive some very difficult moments,” said Pineda after the feature-length film by directors Antonio Naharro and Alvaro Pastor was screened at the festival.

See also:

Pablo Pineda: ‘Soy realista: yo no soy un actor’ – El Mundo (Spain) — An excerpt:

“El problema”, abundó Pineda, “es que hay gente que ni siquiera tiene una oportunidad en la vida como la que yo he tenido. He hecho esta película por ellos. Siempre me he considerado el portavoz, el que lleva la bandera del colectivo Down, porque no tienen voz. Alguien tiene que tenerla y me ha tocado a mí”.

Unofficial translation:

“The problem,” explained Pineda, “is that there are people who have not even had the opportunity in life like the one I have had. I have made this film on their behalf. I have always considered myself the spokesman, the one to carry the flag for the Down syndrome community, because they don’t have a voice. Somebody must have it, and it has fallen to me.”

Pablo Pineda: ‘Hoy parezco Brad Pitt’ – El Mundo

Pablo Pineda: “No habría sido lo mismo si no se lo hubieran dado a Lola” – Estrella Digital

‘Yo, también’, las personas con síndrome de Down también se enamoran – Galiciaé

(AFP photo)

On NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Neda Ulaby says the word “retarded” was once a garden-variety insult but now may be the next candidate for prime-time bleeping. She says, however, that the change won’t come about until society empathizes with people who have intellectual disabilities and comes to understand that the word was coined to describe them.

After activists protested the the use of the word “retard” in the 2008 film, “Tropic Thunder,” the DVD version of a different film, “Miss March,” dubbed out the word “retard” this summer and replaced it with “crackhead.” A few months ago, popular sex advice columnist Dan Savage renounced the word “retard”.

The word never used to bother E. Duff Wrobbel, a speech communications professor at Southern Illinois University. After his daughter was born with Down syndrome, Wrobbel joined with other activists in campaigning against the use of the word “retard” as an insult. He considers it hate speech.

Transcript here.

Earlier NPR coverage:

• Transcript of an NPR discussion on attitudes toward people with intellectual disabilities. Featured are Ann Turnbull of the Beach Center on Disability at the University of Kansas and Disability Policy Collaboration director Paul Marchand.

• Label falls short for those with mental retardation

• Is Ben Stiller still a tropic blunder? Interview with Lennard J. Davis, professor of disabilities studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
  

  “There was a time when you could make offensive jokes about minorities. That’s largely over. But with disability, it isn’t. Words like spaz, idiot, moron, imbecile, all trailing their legacy from the time of eugenics, still get a laugh. “Tropic Thunder” needs to be taken to task, not because people with disabilities don’t have a sense of humor, but because they do. They have too much respect for humor to let it cheapen itself as mere insult.”

‘Why do we like to think everyone with autism is especially gifted?’

From the BBC News Magazine:

The new film “Adam” focuses on the day-to-day life of a young man with Asperger’s syndrome. Traditionally, Hollywood movies have shown autistic characters as having savant-like qualities — a view that experts say is unrealistic, and creates barriers for real-life people and families who live with the diagnosis.

So why are autistic savants so over-represented in films? Because movies are geared toward giving the public what it wants. “”It’s a very sexy way of looking at autism,” says Jonathan Kaufman, president of Disability Works.

“It doesn’t seem to be as bad to be severely autistic if you’re also skilled at maths or music,” says Dr Stuart Murray professor of contemporary literature and film at the University of Leeds and author of the book Representing Autism. “If it seems to be that with your disability comes an extraordinary ability, it takes away the worst aspects of being disabled.”

“Everybody who is not disabled is fundamentally very scared by the possibility of becoming disabled,” says Dr Murray.

From the New York Times:

Three films revolving around Asperger’s syndrome are being released in the next year, highlighting an increased awareness of the condition in popular culture.

Their nearly simultaneous appearance … underscores how much Asperger’s and high-functioning autism have expanded in the public consciousness since Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of an autistic savant in “Rain Man” 21 years ago.

Two films are being released this summer: “Adam,” a romance between two New Yorkers, and “Mary and Max,” an animated film about an extended pen-pal relationship. An upcoming HBO film tells the story of Temple Grandin, a woman with high-functioning autism who became a professor at Colorado State University and a pioneering designer of humane livestock facilities.

“Adam” was awarded this year’s Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the Sundance festival for outstanding feature film focusing on science and technology.

There is also a growing number of books on the subject, including “Pretending to Be Normal” by Liane Holliday Willey, and the best-selling memoir “Look Me in the Eye,” by John Elder Robison.