The unconscionable length of Avatar 2 is galling

I'm going to Avatar: The Way of Water on Wednesday in order to have a review up before the weekend, and because a friend suggested we go see it, and I suggested $35 seats at the IMAX cinema at the museum because might as well.

I had no idea, though, that I might need to clear my schedule for the whole day.

This movie is an absurd 192 minutes long. That's only two minutes shorter than Titanic.

Insert joke here about Titanic definitely not needing to be that length, but I will shoot that joke down if you try to. I value every single moment of Titanic, and there are many others out there who agree with me.

Avatar is a completely different story.

If James Cameron's idea were to fit every last bit of Pandora and Na'avi and Unobtanium that's floating around in his head into one movie, I get the three hours and 12 minutes. But Cameron has potentially three more Avatar movies still rolling around up there, though he's acknowledged it will only be one if The Way of Water flops.

Which, I've got to be honest, I think it will. 

As strange as it may seem to say this, Cameron has actually been a filmmaker of some restraint throughout his career. He hasn't pushed every success he's had to its breaking point. Only once before has he directed a sequel to one of his own movies, and it was actually arguably his best movie in Terminator 2. He made a dynamite sequel to someone else's movie in Aliens, but then disembarked the franchise at that point. He never pushed for a sequel to The Abyss, to True Lies, or, it may be obvious to say, to Titanic. 

The length of Avatar: The Way of Water in itself may not be out of character for Cameron, but its length, combined with its visit to a world we stopped caring about as soon as we left the theater in 2009, is. In the past, Cameron has always known what we've wanted and given it to us. Now, he thinks we want four more Avatar movies when there is no conceivable way that we do.

Maybe we'd want four more movies if this one were a reasonable length, meaning Cameron was planning to tell discrete, distinct stories, almost like episodes of a long-running TV series. A 100-minute Avatar movie? Sign me up.

But The Way of Water is 17 minutes longer than the longest 2022 movie I had been aware of to this point, that being The Batman. And that's part of a series that has proven time and again that we are willing to back to the well for more material.

Making any sequels to Avatar always felt like a gamble. So what if Jake Sully awakened in fully realized Na'avi mode at the end of that movie, ready for more Na'avi adventures. Just because he wanted them didn't mean we did.

The really silly thing about this is that this has the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cameron took the unusual proactive approach of acknowledging that the world might have moved on from Avatar and that he may only be able to justify one more movie financially. At three hours and 12 minutes, he's made it a virtual certainty that the movie won't garner the sort of repeat viewings that made Titanic and Avatar (a modest 162 minutes) such gargantuan hits. Without making bank from people going a second and third and fourth time, is there even a path to viewing this movie as a hit?

But maybe it's a picture that becomes clearer the more we look at it. Maybe Cameron already knows he's not making Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 and has front-loaded the story he wanted to end up with into the second and third movies, the latter of which must already be a fait accompli. How else to justify three and a quarter hours with characters we never even liked that much to begin with?

The other issue with the future Avatar movies is that too little time will elapse between them for each to represent a big technological jump forward from the previous one, the sort of technological jump we implicitly crave as viewers. Clearly we are thrilled by the possibilities of how the technology has advanced, in ways we might not have even imagined, in the 13 years since Avatar. When there's only two years elapsing between releases, and they are being made simultaneously with presumably similar technology, that part completely drops out of the equation.

And yet I have ponied up $35 to see it on the largest screen possible on Wednesday.

I don't want to root against Avatar: The Way of Water. I think cinema is a better place when there are wunderkinds willing to push the technology to its breaking point to give us breathtaking escapism. 

But I've already decided that if I have to leave in the middle of The Way of Water to go to the bathroom, so be it. I wouldn't have done that during Avengers: Infinity War, which was 12 minutes shorter, but I'm going to assume that the sea of Avatar blue will not miss me for five minutes at some point in the middle of this behemoth. 

COVID Film Festival: Days Two and Three

I've kept up the pace of four movies per day on each of my past two days in COVID isolation in my garage, though I guess yesterday I did not feel up for writing a separate post to recap day two.

Actually, if I'm being honest, I think I was just having too much fun between watching baseball and watching movies to take a writing break.

Yes, my health has improved with each day, and in fact, I'm going to try to work today. I say "try" because my boss has already told me to work as long as I can and then stop. Since I can control exactly how much I work -- I have no meetings today that I'm aware of, and no one usually calls me -- I can probably work a full day as long as it's sort of a slack day.

But no matter what happens, I will probably continue my isolation in the garage for at least a day or two longer. My wife has a big thing she has to do on Sunday and needs to keep testing negative until then, even if I have probably now passed the point where I'm still contagious.

I've chosen the poster for Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, which I am reviewing, as a good way to encapsulate the eight movies I've watched in the past two days, three of which were new to me and five of which were revisits. It has indeed felt a bit like spinning the wheel to see what comes up next, even though there has been a clear reason behind more than half the movies I chose. Hamaguchi's follow-up to Drive My Car -- which was actually released before that movie in most parts of the world -- is an anthology of three 40-minute stories, and indeed, that's a good metaphor for any film festival, whether it's one of a person's own choosing or one that has been thrust upon that person by illness.

I won't go on at length about these films but I will give you a little taste of my thoughts on all eight.

All the Avatar I ever needed

For the number of times I have tagged Avatar on this blog -- this is now the 11th time overall, making it one of my most tagged movies -- you'd think I'd have seen the movie more than once. 

But no, Tuesday afternoon's viewing of the James Cameron magnum opus -- my second straight day leading off with a Cameron movie -- was the first time I'd gone back to it since I saw it on one of the world's largest IMAX screens in Sydney in December of 2009. Australia wasn't my country of residence then, but rather, a travel destination.

And it confirmed that I only needed to see it that one time, plus do not need the half-dozen sequels it sounds like they are planning to make.

It made a good contrast with Titanic, which kicked off the festival. Even at 30 minutes longer than Avatar, Titanic breezed by in comparison. The things I expected to do for Titanic -- pause it for breaks, only half-watch while I did other things on my computer -- were the things I did for Avatar instead. I guess that's the difference between caring about the characters and the story and not caring about those things. 

Avatar still looked cool, but with 12+ years more of digital innovation since then, it no longer seems like a unicorn. Fantasy worlds are credibly conjured for us all the time now, so much so that they have left us feeling blase. 

I reckon I missed the immersiveness of the 3D, which was certainly a big part of the positive things I took away from the movie the first time. Left with altogether too much time to think about only its story, you're not left with all that much.

One funny thing I did want to point out. I started watching Avatar on my work computer, with my personal computer serving as my distraction from the movie. (I did have my attention on most of it, for those thinking I didn't get it a proper chance.) Weirdly, the on-screen subtitles -- as in, embedded into the movie -- were not in English. I couldn't say for sure what language they were, but my best guess was Dutch. It didn't matter all that much because a) it's never too hard to figure out what the Na'vi are saying in the context of what's occurring on screen, b) it's interesting to have it feel additionally foreign, as a non-speaker would, and c) who cares anyway. But I did find it funny.

Halfway through, I had to switch which computer was playing which role, and now, for some reason, the subtitles corrected themselves to English. No idea what the difference is between Disney+ on those two computers, and a little light googling got me nowhere so I just moved on.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi is here to stay

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy was first introduced to me when a film podcaster I listen to, Scott Tobias, placed it in his top ten of last year, even though it seems as though many/most other critics didn't see it. Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's other 2021 movie, was his #1, but Wheel came in somewhere around a very respectable #6.

Even though it's an hour shorter than Car, I was still viewing it as something of a chore to tackle while sick. But I made a commitment to review it in time for its Australian release date, which is today, long before I knew I would get COVID. And my screener was only good until Saturday anyway, so I'd have to watch it at some point while I still called these garage walls my home.

Well, the nice thing about Hamaguchi movies is that they are straightforward. Not emotionally, mind you -- the emotions in a Hamaguchi movie are perplexing even though always truthful -- but in terms of story, he's not hard to follow. You could argue that just reading subtitles while sick is something that takes too much effort, but I obviously don't think that as I have now done it three times in this festival, including Kin-dza-dza on Monday and one you are about to read about in a minute.

And damn if this guy doesn't have a unique perspective on the human heart and all the unexpected ways it will react to any stimulus out there. 

Because I've got a review going up today -- look to the right within the next few hours if you want to see it -- I won't go on too much more about the movie here. But let's just say that it's a worthy companion to Drive My Car. Like that movie, it increases in emotional intensity as it goes -- not in this case because a single narrative is becoming more and more touching, but because the three narratives are organized in a sequence to accomplish the same thing. 

Especially since his own work has been in a little bit of decline, Hirokazu Kore-eda is going to have to make some room for Hamaguchi among my favorite working Japanese filmmakers.

Tucker and Dale vs. COVID

Eli Craig's Tucker and Dale vs. Evil was my first attempt to use laughter as the best medicine. It was my third time overall watching the horror comedy, first since 2013.

I still appreciated the movie that cracked my top ten of the year it was released, but let's just say there were not any belly laughs forthcoming -- probably just as well as they could have led to coughing fits.

I don't suppose you generally do laugh very hard on subsequent viewings of comedies, though you are definitely supposed to get that knowing dopey grin that takes the place of laughter when that element of surprise is gone. I didn't have that as much, though I did still chuckle over some of the absurd deaths of the college kids trying to attack the titular hicks that they think are attacking them.

Because I've still got five more of these to go, I'll just keep going.

Exploring the elephant in the room for gay people

Because Tuesday was also time for another documentary alternate Tuesday -- I've been watching a documentary every two weeks since last August -- I had lined up Baraka, the spiritual sequel to Koyaanisqatsi, for a viewing to finish off the night. Or thought I had. Turns out it's not streaming on any of my services, nor even rentable via iTunes -- which doesn't matter anyway since iTunes rentals don't play on my projector. 

So instead I went for a movie whose existence I had only just been reminded of while browsing through my streaming service Stan earlier that day: Do I Sound Gay?

The movie is exactly what the title would suggest. It explores the little-discussed -- among polite company anyway -- phenomenon of the "gay voice," which identifies male gays to heterosexuals and other gay people just by the inflections of their voice. The filmmaker, David Thorpe, has decided he loathes his own "gay voice," and while studying the history of this and interviewing gay icons such as George Takei and David Sedaris, he also undergoes speech therapy to try to sound more straight. 

As you would expect, the film is oozing with self-loathing -- the very sort of self-loathing that has prevented many homosexuals from acknowledging their sexuality to the world in the first place. Fortunately, that doesn't make it downbeat either. Thorpe has fun with the topic while also going in depth with his research, all while bringing the thing in at only 80-some minutes. An absolute must watch for people who enjoy documentaries that focus on something specific that is actually important and provocative -- not something specific like which chicken is the best chicken at the chicken show.

My most unconventional #1 movie?

I started off bright and early Wednesday morning, the first day when I didn't have a baseball or basketball game dictating my early morning viewing. So at a little after 7, I was already watching Toni Erdmann with my eggs, toast and coffee.

As you will recall, I'm rewatching my #1 movies in 2022 with the aim toward ranking them at the end of the year. I'd been spacing them out at about two-week intervals, but watched my #1 of 2016 only two days after my #1 of 1997 (Titanic). Since Toni Erdmann is another long one, I decided I couldn't pass up the opportunity of being a captive audience in my garage and not trying to squeeze in all two hours and 40 minutes one night before bed. Besides, if I get a bit ahead on my pace, I can take three weeks off in July and August when I'm in America.

As with Titanic, I thought I might kind of half-watch this, since it would be my third time overall and I probably didn't need to catch every moment. As it turned out, as with Titanic, I wanted to catch every moment. I care about Ines and Winifred the way I care about Jack and Rose, and the way I don't care about Jake Sully.

Even as I was really enjoying the movie -- more than on my second viewing, I think -- it occurred to me how unusual it is for a person who is usually a believer in the three-act structure and other narrative conventions of particular genres. This is a comedy -- for the most part -- and yet it runs closer to three hours than two. And I suppose that it is a collection of set pieces perhaps more than a straight narrative, maybe it's own Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy within one movie. That doesn't prevent it from building in emotional power until that big hug at the end, which gets me every time.

The other screenwriting rule Toni Erdmann breaks is the one that says that every scene must clearly contribute to the thrust of the story. There should be no fat you can lift out. Maren Ade's film arguably has quite a lot of fat -- the hotel tryst between Ines and Tim, for example -- but it all sort of contributes to our overall perspective of the characters. Maybe then this is not fat, because maybe Toni Erdmann is the sort of story for which the idea of narrative fat is a non-starter. And maybe that's why I like it so much. 

Metal turds

I decided I didn't want to fully fall behind on 2022 movies, so I watched the most recent higher-profile Netflix movie I hadn't seen, Metal Lords.

Because it stars teenagers who are into heavy metal, I imagined it would skew too much on the kiddie side of things, with the metal theme being fairly quaint and more an aspirational element for younger viewers.

Nope. This thing is laden with profanity throughout. As just one example, the band's name is Skullfucker.

Glad I didn't start watching with my younger son when he made a mummy-approved visit just before I was planning to start watching.

It's also laden with bad filmmaking and overall lameness. I didn't like the actors, the story is all over the place, and the conclusions it reaches are pretty specious.

On to the next one.

Too many times down the same Road

If having seen Avatar only once qualified as mildly surprising, it's probably much more surprising that I'd only seen Mad Max: Fury Road once. It's something I'd been meaning to correct for some time now, but it was never "the right night." A random number generator ensured that this would finally be the right night, as it beat out two other choices, which may come up as this festival continues, it if does: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Sin City, which would be the second time for both of those as well.

The reason I'd seen it only once is more similar to the reason I'd see Avatar only once than I'd like to admit. I liked it, but not nearly as much as most people seemed to.

Like Avatar, it's really cool to look at it and I'm really impressed by the achievement. Don't get it twisted -- this is a better movie than Avatar.

But like Avatar, the story doesn't really do it for me, and I can trace that back to one fatal narrative decision: Having gotten to an end point they were expecting to reach and not found it there, the characters just turn back around and go back the way they came. This makes the series of vehicle chases through the desert seem even more monotonous than they already seemed. 

If you don't find this narrative choice to be a problem for you, let me put it to you this way. What if Dorothy and company got to Oz, and instead of clicking her heels to get back to Kansas, she had to reverse her order through the gauntlet of challenges she'd faced along the yellow brick road? Would that be satisfying?

It would not be, and this is one of the reasons -- in addition to some bad dialogue -- why Mad Max: Fury Road is not nearly as satisfying as it should be.

And also, you know what? I don't care that much about either Max or Furiosa. 

There, I said it. 

(Don't stress, it still gets four stars from me just for degree of difficulty.)

Re-watching something old

The final "obligation" of these past two days was to re-watch something older. I watch favorite movies from the last 30 years all the time, but it seems a lot more rare that I dig back older than that. 

So I purposefully set out to find something on my Kanopy account that would qualify, and Herk Harvey's cult classic from 1962, Carnival of Souls, was the winner. (Its 77-minute running time helped that decision.)

Carnival of Souls beat out Wild Strawberries, The Great Dictator and The Wages of Fear for the honor, the latter largely because it's more than twice the length. This search gave me some targets for future options in the festival, except watching Carnival of Souls expended my April credits on Kanopy -- which I think is the first time that has ever happened.

Well, I was really happy with this choice. 

I first watched this low-budget horror in 2013 when I was doing my Flickchart Road Trip series on the Flickchart blog, watching one movie set in each of the 50 states. This was the option for Utah and it lined right up with Halloween.

Well, it really stuck with me and I enjoyed the hell out of watching it last night. It's super creepy and the central performance by Candace Hilligoss is indelible. She's just got such an interesting face.

And since my own credits are expended after writing about eight movies, I'll stop there.

Although I'm working today, I plan to start watching movies again after the end of the workday, though I will certainly decrease by at least one movie per day -- and possibly two, depending on length.

And one day, I will actually leave this garage for reasons other than slinking out for urgent food, toilet and personal hygiene needs.

Cirque du Soleil: the one ideal incarnation for Avatar

While at the movies Wednesday night I saw an advertisement for Toruk, the upcoming Cirque du Soleil show inspired by Avatar. Whether it fits into the narrative of Avatar, or even has any narrative to speak of, is not certain. What is certain is that the acrobats are dressed up like Na’avi, and they do their leaps, twirls and somersaults through a stage manifestation of the Pandora forest.

What’s also certain is that this is a great way to use the world of Avatar.

In less than five seconds of this ad, I went from rolling my eyes about the concept (which I’d heard of only a few days before) to saying “Hell yeah, what a good idea.” I’d probably see Toruk, and not only because I’m overdue for my first Cirque show since the early 2000s, when I saw two in fairly close succession. One of those was the Las Vegas show called O, which involves a swimming pool built into the stage floor. It left an impression on me, and I still have a soft spot for the troupe despite the persistent suspicion that they might be sort of lame.

What’s also certain is that this is a far better way to use the world of Avatar than to have 11 more sequels coming out by the year 2030.

That’s only a slight exaggeration of how many more Avatar movies are on the horizon. Officially, it’s four. One would certainly hope James Cameron will have said everything he needs to say about this world after four more, but if the fourth still makes good money, who knows how much longer it could go.

And if the fourth still makes good money, I suppose we won’t have a problem. But that’s what I’m considering highly unlikely at this point.

You might logically say that Cameron had said everything that needed to be said after one Avatar movie. Some would argue that everything that needed to be said about Avatar had been said in Dances with Wolves or Pocahontas, calling into question the need for even a single Avatar. Though since the movie became the biggest box office hit of all time and stayed that way for six years (until Star Wars: The Force Awakens), it’s reasonable to conclude that there was a legitimate hunger for Avatar’s offerings, at least at some point.

But as I may have discussed on this blog before – and if not, I’m overdue – Avatar has endured poorly in our popular consciousness. Many of us (including me) only saw it that one time, and even those who loved it at the time do not really go to bat for it these days. You don’t hear anyone with an obsessive ongoing relationship with Avatar, like they have with something like Star Wars, for example. And while that’s an impossible standard for anything, it seems reasonable that a film that had made more money than any other movie, and has four sequels planned, would be one of the most capable of meeting it. In fact, would need to come close to meeting it to justify the expenditure on four more expensive sequels.

Part of the reason no one talks much about Avatar could be that the Na’avi themselves seem like a short-sighted creation. There are a couple reasons for this. One is the unfortunate white savior/exotic savage dynamic that’s intrinsic to their conception, with Cameron trying to cast Jake Sully (or himself) as the outsider who can come in and rescue a bunch of noble natives who are being abused by big corporations/military institutions. Even if it’s the good fight from a liberal perspective, it has bad optics. Then there’s the idea that the Na’avi just seem goofy, with their blue skin and big eyes. Maybe we got into bed with them only because they were part of a mind-blowing, sumptuous 3D experience, and we always would have preferred characters who were a bit less like humanoid lizards with mystical tendencies.

But what makes “us” want to disassociate ourselves with the Na’avi also makes them perfect for Cirque du Soleil. When we go to the circus, or the ballet, or any other art form that celebrates the physical movements of the human body, we want a world that’s a bit mystical and fanciful, where blue skin and lizard-like movements are a help rather than a hindrance. We want to see majesty on display, and we’re a little less beholden to the narrative utility of the majesty we’re seeing. It’s not important that the characters seem adaptable to other environments, as, for example, the Star Wars characters have been repurposed for umpteen other uses that have enabled the ubiquity that supports umpteen sequels.

So while I’m not at all sure the Avatar sequels will make their money back, I feel fairly confident Cirque du Soleil will do just fine. And they may be smart with their timing as well. It’s still a few years before we get Avatar 2, so in one sense this seems to be coming out of nowhere (out of the blue, har har). But it might be better now than after the movies come out, because it’s very possible we’ll become saturated with Avatar and may not respond well to that. There definitely won’t be any hunger for a Cirque du Soleil incarnation of Avatar if we’ve roundly rejected the cinematic version.

I like Avatar enough that I want it to endure as an institution, something that maintains a certain level of cultural cache rather than being consigned to the dustbin of cinematic history. But the way to do this is not by sequeling us to death, by releasing a bunch of merchandise of blue Na’avis who look enough like each other that we can’t really tell the difference between the girl one or the boy one, and our kids don’t want to play with either of them. The best way to do it is through something like Cirque du Soleil, which will encapsulate some of the things we liked about Avatar while excising some of its more problematic elements.

But there aren’t billions of dollars bound up in a traveling circus show, so fat chance of that. 

Forty-eight reasons to see The Hobbit

It seems that nearly everyone has some angle of wariness related to The Hobbit.

A friend of mine phrased one of these angles of wariness very succinctly earlier this week on Facebook:

"Just bought our tickets for The Hobbit. I'm excited to see it (and the other movies), but I'm pretty unconvinced that you need 2 hours and 45 minutes to tell 1/3 of a 300-page novel."

I've also heard that the credits alone run for 16 minutes. So even though I usually like sitting through as many of the credits as time will allow, at least I know I can get out of there in 2:29 for this one, if need be.

However, my own greatest source of wariness about the movie has now become the biggest reason I'm interested in seeing it.

Yep, the infamous 48 frames per second projection rate.

I won't rehash the flogged-nearly-to-death discussion of the strengths (few?) and weaknesses (many?) of this gambit by Peter Jackson, but in case you don't know what I'm talking about at all: Almost every movie you've ever seen was shot at 24 frames per second. With twice as many frames per second, the image is far more crisp and there's less blurring. Most people don't notice the blurring of 24 fps, in part because it's been the standard practice throughout history. But 24 fps is part of the reason why some people don't like 3D -- they find the image darker, and it leaves them feeling queasy. The faster projection rate is supposed to fix those problems, but it has a side effect that some people hate and some people embrace: The images look hyper-real, to the extent that it sometimes makes them look cheap, like they were shot on video, or (as I have often referred to it) belong on some bad BBC show from the 1970s.

I'm wary about having my own experience of The Hobbit ruined if I find this technique distracting, as I always have in the past when my TV has been on a setting that mimics 48 fps (or actually uses 48 fps -- I don't pretend to understand all the technical details). But I've decided that I owe it to myself to see it this way, in 3D, for one simple reason:

How often do you go to the movies and see something new? I'm not talking about new in terms of plot, subject matter or narrative structure -- but something new in terms of technique?

Even if my viewing of The Hobbit is destined to be a failure, I want to expose myself to this new paradigm, which some people have said will be the future of how movies are made, and others say will go the way of the dodo bird once these three movies have come and gone. 

After all, wouldn't you have wanted to go see The Jazz Singer in the theater, if you had been there in 1927 when it came out? Wouldn't you have been so exhilarated by hearing Al Jolson's voice that you would have nearly wept? Or what about nine years before that (I'm just now learning this bit of trivia, mid-way through this paragraph, whose order I am nonetheless not going to restructure to be chronological), when a silent film called Cupid Angling was the first color feature? You could say the same thing about the first animated movie, the first 3D movie, even the first movie where you saw nudity, depending on how far you want to stretch the notion of what constitutes something truly "new." There was even a thing called Smell-O-Vision once. If I'd been around then, I would have been the first one in line. (It would have been the 1960 movie Scent of Mystery, the only film ever to use this obviously unsuccessful and impractical gimmick.)

I'm not saying The Hobbit is going to represent this kind of sea change, but I'm also not saying it isn't. And since all of the techniques listed above predate 1960, that just tells you how rare it is to get something truly "new" -- and therefore, how important it is, as serious film fans, to embrace our opportunities to experience these new things when we do get the chance.

In fact, in trying to find examples from my own life as a film fan, I'm forced to choose viewing experiences that contained far less revolutionary changes in what we experience with films. Unsurprisingly, most relate directly to visual effects. I'm thinking of the T-1000 in Terminator 2, with its unprecedented (to me) use of digital technology. I'm thinking of the first time I saw a Pixar movie, Toy Story; I was so impressed that I saw it again the next day. I'm thinking of the first movie I saw on an IMAX screen. I'm thinking of Avatar, which was clearly an evolutionary step forward in how realistic and immersive 3D can be.

What these viewings all have in common, though, is that the change I was witnessing was undoubtedly a positive thing. Even though Avatar left me a little disappointed overall, that's primarily because I couldn't separate my experience of its visuals from my experience of its story. A movie like The Hobbit threatens to make that separation all the harder to achieve, except this time it would probably the story that's good and the visuals that aren't so. 

Still, I'm not so in love with Middle Earth that I can't take this risk. Because another concern I have about The Hobbit is not just its bloated length, but the fact that it's a prequel to events that I think most people would argue are far more dramatic and have far greater stakes -- if only because there are certain characters you just know will survive. If you think Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf or Gollum might die in these movies, you obviously haven't seen the LOTR trilogy. And there are a half-dozen other characters who appear in these new films who also appear in the trilogy that comes later in Tokien's chronology. (Let's just hope they do a convincing job making the actors look younger, which is already an early problem I've noted with Ian McKellan.) When I watched the Rankin/Bass Hobbit from the 1970s, I always remember thinking it seemed pretty light and goofy -- and that wasn't just because of the animation style. Even back when I was a kid, I sensed the story's lack of dramatic weight. There's a reason Jackson started with Lord of the Rings and not this.

So I'm the perfect candidate to seek out my local 48 fps showing of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I'm not some Tolkien nerd who has only one chance for this film to make its first impression on me, and can't afford to blow it at the risk of my geek soul. And besides, the most interesting outcome for me might be to hate the 48 fps but still like the movie. As much as anything, I'm curious to see if there is a definite correlation between the way the movie looks and the impression it has on me as a piece of narrative art. It would be a similar experiment to making yourself watch Avatar for the first time on an iphone. Okay, better example of a spectacle whose story is actually a success: It would be like making yourself watch Titanic for the first time on an iphone. 

In a way, the verdict is already in on The Hobbit, anyway. Regardless of its fps, it isn't wowing critics in terms of its quality as a film, as it's been conspicuously absent from the year-end awards that Peter Jackson made his bitch the first time around. Most conspicuously, yesterday's Golden Globe nominations didn't feature a single mention of The Hobbit, at least in the major categories I perused. That's ouch-worthy.

But however you choose to consume it, here's hoping that you get something out of The Hobbit that reminds you even in some small way of the original trilogy, which I consider to be one of the great achievements in film history, even though I'm not a Tolkien nerd. We should be glad there's an artist out there with the vision and ambition to give these films such a lavish big-screen realization -- whether he launches a new cinematic paradigm or not.

Pre-Thanksgiving 3D extravaganza

I've developed a very specific kind of tradition lately as it relates to my Wednesday-before-Thanksgiving trip to the theater.

In the past, I'd always try to go to a movie on the shortened last day before a long weekend -- Memorial Day, Labor Day, what have you. My boss tries to release us two hours early on days like this, and I'd taken advantage of those extra hours to grab a flick.

Since the birth of my son, my responsibilities have necessarily caused many of these opportunities to fall by the wayside. One that hasn't fallen is seeing a movie on my pre-Thanksgiving early release, and since my boss already told us yesterday that he might not be in today and that we could leave two hours early, I don't have to worry about a last-minute bout of Scrooginess causing him to renege. (Unless he reneges electronically, but that seems unlikely.)

And even though it originally looked like the times might not work out, it now appears likely that I'll be able to attend a 1:50 showing of Ang Lee's Life of Pi. Making this the third straight year that I will have gone to a 3D movie on the day before we eat turkey.

In 2010 it was Tangled. In fact, it was Tangled by default, because either there wasn't anything else opening that interested me, or the other things opening didn't have convenient start times. I dragged my ass to Tangled even though I didn't have high hopes for it, just to take advantage of the opportunity and my wife's blessing. As you may recall, I absolutely loved it -- so much so that I eventually ended up ranking it #2 for the year.

Then last year it was Hugo. I didn't love Hugo like I loved Tangled, but there were parts of the movie that delivered an equivalent level of exhilaration to me. In fact, the thing both films had in common was their exceptional use of a technology that is frequently fumbled by filmmakers: 3D.

Now Life of Pi is being billed as "The next Avatar." At least, on the billboard I see on my way in to work. I certainly hope that the story is better, but I think the comparison they're trying to make is a technological one. If this billboard is to be believed, Life of Pi is doing things with 3D and CGI that will make us ooh and ahh the way Avatar did.

Actually, I know the story of Life of Pi is better because I've actually read the book. I say "actually" because reading has been a particular weak spot for me in the past couple years. In fact, until I experienced a reading renaissance through audio books on my commute to work in the past six months, which has led to the consumption of about a dozen new books, it'd had been a couple years since I'd read a book from start to finish. Pathetic but true.

And so when an adaptation of one of the books I've read comes home to roost, it does give me a little sense of pride that I'm not a total philistine. For similar reasons I'm looking forward to the adaptation of Ender's Game, which is due out next year and will probably be a visual marvel in its own right.

But let's not look ahead to next November 1st. For now I'm excited about this November 21st, when I'm hoping to go three-for-three in pre-Thanksgiving 3D extravaganzas as part of this newly established tradition.

Now just knock on some wood for me that I don't have any work crises that nullify the possibility of my early release.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

I might prefer to die first

On that same trip to Barnes & Noble I discussed Thursday, I saw that they've released an updated version of the seminal movie lover's tome 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.

I understand the need to keep a volume like this fresh, since the list of movies is theoretically always changing. (Unless you're the kind of curmudgeon who thinks that all new movies are crap, but that's the kind of obstinate perspective that just shuts down discussion.)

Still, I can't help but feel like this book has been dumbed down for a generation of teenyboppers.

I can't speak to what all the changes were -- I can only judge this book by its cover. By three covers, actually. Those three covers being the front cover, the back cover and the spine.

The front cover shows a bust of Natalie Portman in her Swan Lake makeup from Black Swan, as seen above.

The back cover shows a scene of the crumbling dream city from Inception.

And the spine shows this:


It was that spine that first caught my eye, since it was that spine that peered out from the shelf. And it was that spine that pushed a guffaw up through my lungs and into my throat.

There doesn't seem much point to tell people that they "must see" a movie that almost everyone who might buy the book has already seen. I mean, with Avatar, you're talking about the movie that grossed more money at the box office than any other movie in history. That's not what I thought this book was supposed to be about.

When I've perused through the copy that we own, which was published in 2003, I've been impressed by the obscure titles I'd never heard of it. In fact, I've watched a couple movies based purely on their inclusion in the book -- and would never have known about them otherwise. The point of any guide of movies you must see is to expose you to movies it would not otherwise occur to you to see. Right?

But the real point of a book like this is to sell copies of itself. And the way to do that is to emblazon it with three of the most talked about movies of 2009 and 2010. Even if one of them, Avatar, has seriously fallen out of favor in many cinephile circles. If it was ever in favor in the first place.

To be fair, I have to ask myself what I would put on instead. After all, Black Swan is a reasonably "cool" option for the front cover. I didn't love that movie as much as some people did, but I had a very healthy respect for it. And although Portman did win the Oscar, I suspect there are some people who didn't see it because they thought it was scary and/or confronting. In any case, it's not the kind of movie you would call "easy."

Inception is a bit more of a move toward the mainstream. In fact, you could say it was as mainstream as Avatar, except that it obviously did not do the box office Avatar did.

Avatar? Well, Avatar grossed $760 million in the U.S. and $2 billion worldwide. And is highly suspect in most areas not directly related to its technical achievements.

Maybe I'd go for something like The Social Network. Yeah, this is hardly some little indie that snuck through theaters without getting its proper due. But I could get behind it as an example of vibrant filmmaking that challenged norms. (As though Inception is not. I guess I'm working myself into a corner here.) But really, it wouldn't work from a marketing perspective. There's no image from The Social Network that's as arresting as Portman's face as you see it above.

I guess what I'm really struggling with is the idea that you have to appeal to people with movies they already know and love, to get them to discover movies they don't yet know or love. I probably shouldn't be struggling with that, though. It's a fairly basic marketing strategy, and beyond that, it just makes sense. Are you really going to use images from a genuinely overlooked gem, something most people don't know about, for any of your three covers? If you do, that's simply foolish.

I guess what I'm really saying is "Wahh! Avatar is not that good!"

Yep, that works.

But more to the point I'm trying to make, I can draw a direct contrast between the marketing strategy they used this time around and the one they used in 2003. Back then, Janet Leigh screaming during the shower scene from Psycho -- a movie that came out 43 years before the book was published -- adorned the front cover. That's a movie there is no question everyone should see before they die. It has stood the test of time and earned that designation through its durability. And it certainly seems to be iconic enough and attention-getting enough to have sold copies. (It sold a copy to us, anyway.)

The back cover? A picture of Groucho Marx. You can't tell what movie it's from, but does it really matter?

To show their savvy, however, the editors also included something current. The spine showed a picture of Catherine Zeta-Jones from the then-current best picture winner, Chicago. Will Chicago always belong in the list of 1001 films? I'm not sure, but I hope so. If they were committing themselves to some sense of permanence within movie history, at least they were only gambling on one movie, not three.

So couldn't they have at least given us one classic of the three this time around?

Here's something else interesting to consider: Since the number of movies in the book must always remain at 1001, what movies do they kick out with each new installment? And who decides that? What poor movie is Avatar sending to the showers?

You could take two different approaches to this question. On the one hand, if these movies are really considered to be required viewing, they can't be completely quirky choices. They have to have reached some level of commonly acknowledged achievement, or else it could be absurd to suggest that a cinema lover would die incomplete without watching them. So you could drop some titles that were submitted by a snobby contrarian who hasn't had any role in this book for two decades.

But then you go back to the argument that there are certain movies that are so well known, like Avatar, that they don't need to be trumpeted in a setting like this. Their reputation precedes them, whether that reputation is positive or negative. (Avatar has its share of people in both camps.) At what point does a best picture like Gladiator, which certainly seems to have lost its luster over the years, continue to have residency in this book?

Maybe the real point is that the most recent entries in a book like this are always a bit of a waste. People who already love cinema, or have vowed to use a book like this to become film lovers, are the only real logical candidates to own this book. And most of them should already be aware of most of the recent entries.

Maybe the real value of Avatar in a book like this is not for the 2012 edition, but for the 2042 edition.

By 2042, most of us will have forgotten how much of a disappointment it really was.

James Cameron, environmentalist

I'm not the first person to write a blog post about the fact that James Cameron considers himself some great environmental crusader.

But what better day than Earth Day, the day Avatar comes out on DVD, to laugh at him about it all over again?

Just as Friday is the day that new theatrical releases typically come out, Tuesday is the day that new DVDs usually hit the shelves. But not Avatar. No, James Cameron's outsized idea of this film's importance caused him to release it on a Thursday, because this year, Earth Day is on a Thursday. (And let's not pretend it wasn't Cameron's idea, even though the director is the last person who would usually have a role in choosing a DVD release date.)

Why Earth Day? Because, you know, Avatar is the greatest single-source champion of environmentalism that the world has ever known.

I'm not going to dispute the fact that this film has an environmental message. What I am disputing is that there's anything remotely special about that. Quite the opposite. In fact, if you wanted to make a Hollywood film that takes a stance opposing environmentalism, it wouldn't make it out of the studio's board rooms.

What stuns me is the extent to which Cameron has embraced the idea that he's some kind of spokesperson for the trees. Of all the reasons there were to make Avatar, the fact that it would draw attention to the plight of our environment probably ranked somewhere around 53rd. And that's even with "making a buttload of money" taking up only a single slot in the rankings.

Come on, James. Let's be real. What you made was a conventional Hollywood story with a high probability of being embraced by audiences. What you made was a movie that you, quite correctly, predicted would make a kajillion dollars. The fact that it takes the oh-so-controversial position that giant helicopters shouldn't shoot missiles into trees was just gravy.

A real environmentalist would take a personal stance. A real environmentalist would donate his own time, money and energy to making a difference with a non-profit that seeks to make our world greener. A real environmentalist would not retroactively recognize the PR potential of a movie, and use that to champion the same cause that Al Gore has been tirelessly pursuing for over 20 years. (And let me just say I'm only assuming Cameron hasn't done any of these things, based on my impression of the man -- remember that I'm on a business trip, with only limited time available for fact checking.)

So if you're going to buy Avatar on DVD, don't do it today. Wait one day, at least. If you're going to do something to recognize Earth Day, plant a tree. And try not to think about the fact that this tree may one day be razed to print the money that will stuff James Cameron's wallet.

Titanic

Has anyone had a bigger first year in the movies than Sam Worthington?

I'm cheating a little here -- Worthington has actually been around a couple years in Australia, even in movies with Hollywood actors, such as Rogue with Radha Mitchell (a fellow Aussie) and Michael Vartan. But a year ago, no one here knew who he was, except for maybe a little distant buzz that he was a guy to watch in James Cameron's Avatar.

As of today, with the opening of Clash of the Titans, he's now appeared in three major tentpole movies in the last year: Terminator Salvation, Avatar, and now Titans. That's a pretty titanic year indeed.

And Worthington should probably enjoy it while it lasts. There's nothing to say he can't have a decent career, but he seems somewhat limited in his dramatic range. Probably the most obvious recent model for the way his career might play out is Gerard Butler, though we haven't seen a sense of humor yet from Worthington, and it's hard to know if there is one, lurking in there. That rules out romantic comedies, and he doesn't really seem to have the chops to go the route of fellow Aussie Russell Crowe. And there are only so many gigantically budgeted, digitally innovative epics a person can be in.

Maybe he can settle in as kind of a Jason Statham, but I don't know if he has the charisma.

Still, you've got to be pretty impressed with this first year in Hollywood. It's a pretty famous story that Worthington was living in his car prior to all this hoopla. Even if he never makes another movie -- and I'm sure I'd find a half-dozen in the pipeline if I checked on IMDB, including Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 -- he'd probably never have to go back to the car lifestyle. This first year has assured that.

And I think the really interesting thing about this phenomenon is that it demonstrates how fast Hollywood moves, how much more it needs to rely on buzz than on proven results. I'm not going to sort out all the timelines here -- there are probably famous stories here as well, and you can look them up elsewhere -- but to be in three such huge movies in the same year means that Worthington was cast on hope and promise alone. When Worthington received the part of Perseus in Clash of the Titans, they couldn't have known that Terminator Salvation and Avatar would be hits, and in fact, Terminator Salvation really wasn't. (I do think Worthington was the best part of that movie, and his role was supposed to be bigger until Christian Bale's ego stepped in.) But it was a safe assumption that these movies would at least be seen by lots of people, and that Clash of the Titans would benefit from Worthington's instant A-list status.

You see this happen all the time. An actor has his/her breakout, and then suddenly, he/she is in six movies in the next calendar year. It's really the only way to go. With the long production schedules of most movies, you have to be seeing who else is casting these people, and what the pedigrees of those projects are, if you want your own project to benefit from casting the same star.

In this way, movies have an oddly symbiotic relationship to each other, even while they are directly competing with each other for the available box office dollars of all movie patrons. The symbiosis wasn't so great in the past, because it used to be that actors (and directors, and other talent) would have an exclusive six-picture deal with a particular studio. The studio spent its own time and money on turning a performer into a star, or a star into a bigger star. Now, one studio says "thank you very much" to the other studio for promoting the heck out of the star of the first studio's upcoming feature. (Though it's worth noting that Terminator Salvation and Clash of the Titans are both from Warner Brothers, while Avatar was released by Fox.)

So what is next for Mr. Worthington? Well, perhaps inevitably, scaling back a bit, but not ducking out of the spotlight by any means. John Madden's The Debt (2010) is a thriller about Israeli special agents capturing a Nazi war criminal in 1965. Massy Tadjedin's Last Night (2010) is a romantic drama in which Worthington plays a spouse tempted into adultery. In Ami Canaan Mann's The Texas Killing Fields (2011), he's a homicide detective teaming up with New York City cops to investigate a string of unsolved murders. (This stuff is from IMDB, which means it's possibly wrong/subject to change, as some of you have pointed out to me before.) It's not until a project listed as in pre-production, Dracula Year Zero (2011), that Worthington looks like he might return to these titanic heights again. Then again, maybe Avatar 2 will be close to coming out by then as well.

So will I be seeing Clash of the Titans this weekend? No. I'm still catching up on last week's releases. It'll be time for me to finally see Dreamworks' Dragons on Sunday.

And though I've had kind of a dubious outlook on Titans, when you come right down to it, I want to see that Kraken released just as much as anybody. Have you seen that thing? Talk about titanic.

Beady eyes, Disney eyes, scratched eyes

I had already brainstormed my next Audient post when I got poked in the left eye playing basketball Sunday morning.

Appropriately, that post was going to be all about eyes. I was going to call it "Beady eyes, Disney eyes," and, well, you'll know what it was going to be about in a few moments because I'm actually going to write it.

However, I couldn't just write it without mentioning the irony of my own eye being damaged, delaying the post by a day or two. (And since I'd already written a post every day in February, that delay was probably something both you and I needed.) In fact, it turned out to be a scratched cornea. The optometrist fitted me with a contact lens I could wear for a day as a bandage, and I stayed home from work on Monday with my eyes closed for much of the day. No matter how rested you are, it's hard to stay awake when your eyes are closed all day. Yesterday on my follow-up visit with the optometrist, I was making good enough progress that I decided to go in to work, albeit three hours late. I'm still wearing sunglasses at my computer today, but am definitely well on the mend. Funny, I actually played great on Sunday after the eye poke, including hitting a couple three pointers. The optometrist chalked that up to adrenaline.

Okay, so here's the actual post:

I was watching Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys over the weekend, and was confronted once again with the fact that I don't like Cole Hauser. If you aren't familiar with that name, that's him above -- the one who isn't a Na'vi. He seems like he always plays someone nasty, even when he's the hero. And since Mr. Hauser hasn't had the most A-list career to this point, I don't have the pleasure of having seen many films in which he's the genuine good guy, so I don't really know if he plays that role more sympathetically. I do know that he was a nasty m'er-f'er in Paparazzi, a movie in which almost everyone was a nasty m'er-f'er, and that he was a nasty m'er-f'er in The Family That Preys.

When thinking about my distaste for Cole Hauser again over the weekend, I tried to put it into words. And the words that kept on coming up were "beady eyes." I'd say he has the beady eyes of a villain, the beady eyes of a bully. Yeah, he's got a ready sneer, and he seems to exude a constant stream of menace, but I think it all comes back to those eyes.

But is that Cole Hauser's fault? Or have I been brainwashed by Disney?

Last week after the Oscar nominations came out, a friend of mine referred me to a hilarious bit on youtube about Avatar. It's worth watching if you have two segments of 8+ minutes for the two parts of this Avatar smackdown, which is even funnier for how little it's exaggerated. And if you already read my long-winded blog, maybe you do have those two eight-minute blocks of time. It's here if you'd like to watch it.

If you'd rather have me just summarize the part that's relevant to this blog posting, the guy makes the point that the Na'vi were designed with the intention of being as sympathetic to us as possible on a core psychological level. He mentions the cat-like features, and then specifically refers to the eyes, which resemble those of a Disney character. Wide, innocent, friendly, gentle eyes. Not the beady eyes of a killer, like, say, the predator:


But is it the predator's fault he has beady eyes?

Our youtube satirist contrasted this picture of the predator with pictures from Aladdin, with the giant eyes of the Disney characters lending them endless amounts of empathy. Just as we empathize with the Na'vi in Avatar. And just as I don't empathize with Cole Hauser whenever I see him.

But maybe this is not the career Cole Hauser wanted to have. Maybe he wanted to be a genuine hero, someone who smiles a lot, someone who has a heart of gold. But maybe someone told him he was too mean. That his smiles, like the one above, looked sadistic and scheming rather than warm and welcoming. That his eyes were just too darn beady.

I guess I'm going to use this little confluence of incidents to stop judging a book by its cover, a man by his eyes. Maybe our beady-eyed friends are not really mean at their core, but just playing the role society -- a society influenced by Hollywood -- has forced them to play. Maybe if we stop telling them they're bad guys, they'll stop being bad guys.

And on a personal note, I'm just thanking my lucky stars I still have the functioning eyes to tell beady from Disney.

Slow down! You move too fast!

I take it all back!

Less than a week ago, I wrote a post called "Why I root for James Cameron" -- a post I very much regret, even if it was designed primarily as an opportunity to tell the story of my first screening of Titanic. Seeing Cameron on the Golden Globes last night -- not once, but twice -- reminded me why I shouldn't root for him, and in fact, in the space of a week, no longer do.

Two shocking Avatar-related things happened over the weekend, actually. I'll list them in order from least to most disturbing.

The first was that Avatar raked in another $41.3 million at the U.S. box office, making that five straight weekends in which it has crossed the $40 million threshold. It blew past Star Wars at the box office, now up to $492 million, and seems certain to eventually pass Titanic ($600 million) as the highest grossing film of all time. (Again, apologies for being U.S.-centric in my box office totals.)

This I can take. Accolades from the public come in famously strange forms. Witness the $146 million box office haul for Paul Blart: Mall Cop, one of the worst movies of 2009. Besides, that $492 million is, as we all know, inflated by IMAX and 3-D ticket prices. Inflation is an argument purists used to identify Gone With the Wind over Titanic as the true all-time box office champion, since it had the most individual tickets sold (rather amazing, given how many fewer theaters there were). The same logic holds true for Avatar.

No, the thing that really bothered me was the second thing that happened: Avatar won best dramatic feature at the Golden Globes. Which may just make it the frontrunner to win the Oscar for best picture.

This is a new piece of information I need to incorporate into my understanding of the phenomenon that is Avatar. Not only public acclaim, but critical acclaim.

I suppose I should put critical in quotation marks. The body that selects the Golden Globe winners, the Hollywood Foreign Press, is a famously lambasted entity. This same body gave a nomination to Bobby, Emilio Estevez' ridiculous ensemble drama about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a couple years ago. This same body also gave best musical or comedy to The Hangover last night. I like The Hangover fine, but I don't feel like it's the kind of movie that should be winning best anything, do you? The fact that the Golden Globes have a category where it would actually be a logical contender shows you a little bit about the populist standards of the Hollywood Foreign Press.

But the Hollywood Foreign Press does show some predictive ability in terms of which movie wins the Oscar. From 1996 through 2003, the Golden Globes picked the eventual Oscar winner in one of the two available categories, honoring The English Patient, Titanic, American Beauty, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King as best drama, and Shakespeare in Love and Chicago as best musical/comedy. All of those films won Oscar's best picture.

It wasn't until 2004 that the streak was finally broken, when Million Dollar Baby lost out (rightly) to The Aviator before going on to win best picture. Since then -- and this is what gives me hope -- it's been kind of a mixed bag. In 2005, eventual Oscar winner Crash wasn't even nominated for a Golden Globe -- and hallelujah to that. In 2006, Babel beat out The Departed -- and though I strenuously disagree with that, it ended up being a happy surprise to see Scorsese's film take the Oscar statue it richly deserved. Then in 2007, I applauded the Golden Globes again when the superior Atonement beat out the overrated eventual Oscar winner No Country for Old Men -- though for true justice, There Will Be Blood should have beaten them both. Last year it was back to the status quo, with Slumdog Millionaire winning both top awards.

The strange thing is that I shouldn't be too disappointed to see Avatar rise to these heights. I did like it, I just didn't love it. And of the two films I considered to be the best picture frontrunners until last night -- Up in the Air and The Hurt Locker -- I like Up in the Air only marginally better than Avatar, and I like The Hurt Locker less. Yes, I like The Hurt Locker less than almost everyone I know, a topic to which I may devote an entire post later this week.

But I guess what happens every year around this time is that I realize some of my favorite films are not going to get any Oscar love, and films that left me feeling more "meh" than I wanted to -- like Avatar -- start gaining momentum. You won't trick me into talking about those films here. I've got two weeks and one day before I post my own year-end list.

Oh, and then there's the issue of Cameron himself. During his acceptance speeches last night -- he also won the best director award -- he reminded me what an ass he can be. In an attempt at magnanimity, he asked the people in the room to applaud themselves for having "the best job in the world." (The camera cut to Leonardo DiCaprio, who was sitting on his hands.) It was the perfect example of how being an asshole is a condition that oozes through a person. Cameron wasn't even trying to aggrandize himself here, or at least not directly. But he did think he'd "have the room" by telling a bunch of highly paid entertainers -- of which he himself is implicitly one -- to pat themselves on the back. (He also went for the most tired joke line in the book, talking about how they better not start the music to hurry him off because he has stuff to say. That might have been funny the first time someone made a reference to the show's internal time management protocols, somewhere around 1983.)

Cameron's attempt to whip up a furor of self-approbation didn't really work -- the applause was half-hearted at best. Here's hoping that the voters sitting in this room, who will cast their ballots for the Oscars in the coming weeks, will remember that icky moment of self-congratulation disguised as peer generosity, when they decide whether to make Cameron "king of the world" again this year.

And maybe somehow I'll get my best picture nomination for [name withheld] after all.

Why I root for James Cameron

Avatar shattered the $400 million threshold at the U.S. box office this past weekend, having already become the all-time second-biggest international grosser at well over $1 billion.

At first I didn't think it would be such a box office force. When it made "only" $77 million in its domestic opening weekend -- a pittance compared to Twilight: New Moon's $142 million -- I thought it might end up being the kind of flop everyone thought Titanic would be.

And surprisingly, this filled me with disappointment. I actually felt bad for James Cameron, albeit very prematurely.

I should feel the need to deny that reality publicly -- or, at least, not write a blog post specifically calling attention to it. But I try to be as honest as I can with you, so I'm telling you: I had a moment's feeling of melancholy about the prospective box office failure of Avatar.

Of course, we all know what happened. Like Titanic, Avatar had legs. Where Titanic settled in and started making $25 million per weekend for ten weekends in a row, and then dropped to a still-healthy $10-$15 million for a few more weekends, Avatar has not made less than $48 million in any of its four weekends. It could actually challenge Titanic's $600 million domestic record, albeit with the help of 12 years of inflation, plus the higher cost of IMAX and 3-D tickets. (Whereas New Moon dropped off significantly after opening weekend and eventually topped off around $280 million).

I'll ask my international readers to forgive me for discussing box office in domestic terms only -- they're the terms I'm more comfortable with.

So now I've got a different problem: I have to worry about this inferior film toppling my beloved Titanic, the reason I root for Cameron in the first place.

And in order to contextualize that even more controversial statement, I suppose I should tell you about the first time I saw Titanic, which helped me embrace that movie as my own.

It was Thursday, December 18, 1997. Titanic was set to open the next day, and I was the reporter for a weekly newspaper in Rhode Island. I would later wear a second hat as their film critic, but that was a few months off, so it was in my capacity as a reporter that I was invited to the grand opening of a glistening new multiplex in nearby Seekonk, Massachusetts. Truth be told, this story would never be covered in the pages of The Barrington Times, where I worked -- we only covered issues directly related to the town. But an invitation to this gala event had fallen into my hands, so not only did I attend, I also invited a friend, who drove down from Boston for the occasion.

When we showed up at the theater, we knew it would be a big deal. There were people walking around in tuxedos, and the lobby was lined with tables full of champagne and shrimp cocktail. There were masses of important people gathering, many of them better dressed than we were. But we weren't concerned with any impression we might or might not be making. We were like kids in a candy store -- literally, more on that in a minute -- and felt kind of like we'd won Wonka's golden ticket. After my press credentials were verified, no one else would be checking in on us for the rest of the night. In fact, conveniently, I didn't know another soul there.

The dozen screens were all playing one of two movies, both scheduled for release the next day: Titanic and Tomorrow Never Dies, Pierce Brosnan's second turn as James Bond. Ordinarily we would have both been jazzed for the Bond movie, and as it turned out, that's my favorite Bond movie of the last 20 years. But Titanic at least figured to be a spectacle, and we didn't have anywhere else we needed to be for the next three hours and 14 minutes, so there was never any question which one we'd select.

But there was still plenty more consumption of free stuff before we got to that point. In addition to the flutes of champagne and endless supply of shrimp, there were various other crudities and hors d'oeuvres, some of which were actually being delivered around by those men in tuxedos. My friend and I would look at each other and laugh, like we were getting away with something. This feeling only intensified -- as did the laughter -- when it came time to stock up on concessions. And I don't choose the words "stock up" casually. The guys standing at the concession counters encouraged us to take multiple boxes of Goobers, Raisinets and Snow Caps. One wasn't enough. Two wasn't enough. They knew these were all going to the same customer, and yet they kept offering them. Still only a couple years out of our teens, my friend and I made the most of this, filling our pockets with candy and then returning to my car to empty them, to make room for more. We each came away with at least ten boxes of movie theater candy, and stomachs that hurt from laughing so hard. Popcorn and drinks had considerably less shelf life/portability, so with those, we took only what we could carry into the theater.

The capper to this gala evening was when some local politician -- a state senator, a congressman, someone like that -- gave a short speech and cut the ribbon on the new state-of-the-art complex. The room filled with applause, and with balloons, which fell from the ceiling right on cue.

Of course, the real capper was Titanic. Picture me 12 years less jaded than I am today, and you will understand why the movie hit me as hard as it did. I teared up several times and left the theater proclaiming that it was one of the best movies I'd ever seen. In fact, I emailed several friends upon arriving home, telling them to drop what they were doing and go RIGHT NOW to see it.

And because I had this highly special screening of Titanic, one night before the rest of the world had a chance to see it, I felt like Titanic was my movie -- a movie where I helped create the hype, rather than just responding to it, even if my role in the hype machine was limited to my friends and acquaintances. Because of that special night, I will always cherish my first screening of Titanic, even long after its flaws have been amply documented by people who were as jaded then as I probably am now. I like remembering that version of me, the version that was swept off his feet by James Cameron's epic. I prefer that memory to whatever hollow credibility I might gain by making snide remarks about Titanic today. And I do consider it hollow when a person goes for credibility by selling out what they honestly think and feel about a movie. I say it to people all the time: I will never throw Titanic under the bus, will never disown the memory of December 18, 1997, when I felt like I was walking on air.

As I was following Titanic's bravura box office performance from then until Oscar night and beyond, I cheered James Cameron, as I felt like his crowning achievement was being appreciated by others just as I had appreciated it. Even when he declared himself "king of the world" at the Oscars, I found it charming rather than smug.

Somehow, that feeling toward Cameron -- that desire to see him succeed beyond any shadow of a doubt -- has stuck with me. Not only did I want Avatar to be good for its own sake, but I wanted it to provide validation to James Cameron, a man who needs no validation from me or anyone else. In part because it's just one more endorsement of my enthralling experience of a little film called Titanic.

Unfortunately, I don't like Avatar as much as Titanic -- not nearly. My take on the film isn't much different from the standard one: Breathtaking visuals, totally unoriginal story. Cameron wrote both movies, so my conclusion is that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet sold that one to us better by being better actors than those in Avatar. They had something magical that grabbed the zeitgeist in just such a way. Avatar is impressive, a film I would certainly describe as "very good" -- it just didn't have that certain spark.

So given what I've told you, am I still rooting for James Cameron? Or am I rooting against a new version of James Cameron in favor of an older model? Or would Avatar outgrossing Titanic still be an endorsement of Titanic in some strange way?

Well, one thing that's always easy to do is root for quality. And even though the 24-year-old Vance may have been more naive and idealistic than the 36-year-old Vance, I think either version would have liked Titanic better. With or without being hopped up on Goobers and Raisinets.

What can I say, I've got a soft spot for sweaty palms slapped against car windows.

Avatar in Australia

I can't believe I've had this blog for almost a whole year, and I have yet to write an in-depth Avatar post.

Well, this one won't be very in-depth either. Today is my last day in the western hemisphere for two weeks, and I'm tying up a million loose ends before jetting off to Australia tonight. Writing one last blog post before I leave is one of those loose ends.

Yeah, I'm pretty excited for Avatar. Even though my first impression, upon seeing footage, was "Oh, I didn't know this is what Avatar was about." Even though I'm still not a big fan of this poster, with its way-too-earnest blue dude gazing deeply into our eyes. Even though they've done their best to saturate us with footage and remove the thrill from finally getting to see the movie.

So excited, in fact, that I have been -- successfully, it would appear -- campaigning my wife to see the movie while we spend the next three days in Sydney.

Whether we can just walk up and get tickets is another matter, especially on IMAX. I understand many of those shows have been sold out for weeks here in Los Angeles. Australia has a smaller population, but it should hardly matter in the big cities. I do like to think of them as slightly less impressed with big spectacle, in their eagerness to "take the piss" out of blowhards like James Cameron. But they are a film-loving culture that has produced numerous great film icons (as I discussed only a few days ago). Plus, the lead (Sam Worthington) is an Aussie, and I believe some of it was shot (or at least post-produced) in Australia.

So seeing Avatar in Sydney may be a pipe dream. But I really don't want to wait two weeks to get back -- longer than that, actually, since my wife doesn't return until January 5th -- to see the movie. Maybe we'll have a better chance in Hobart, Tasmania, where we will spend the five days after that. Either way, if you read this post, you'll know I'm okay with "wasting" precious travel time on a movie -- in fact, I try to do it once a trip.

I will also try to make at least one Audient post from Australia. After all, won't you want to know which five movies I watched on the 16-hour plane ride?

But if I don't, have a happy holiday season, readers, and I'll see you back here in 2010!