Do I need to see a 3D Billie Eilish concert?

When I went to see Project Hail Mary in IMAX a few months ago, there was a trailer for the new James Cameron-directed Billie Eilish concert movie, which of course was expected to use all the latest tricks in the technology-forward director's arsenal. 

Because I wanted to see what a concert looked like when given the same care as filming a Na'vi, I thought I would probably go.

Strangely, though, it isn't even playing at the IMAX theater where they advertised it, at the Melbourne Museum, which is unusual. When you see something in IMAX, usually they only show trailers for other things that are almost definitely going to play at that theater. IMAX is a different animal, where you don't get any of the filler ads for local restaurants or telecom companies, and you get straight to the movie while only seeing glimpses of other future ways you will be awed in these very seats.

Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft is indeed opening today, but is normal 3D, in normal theaters, enough of a draw for me?

Should a slight difference in size really matter that much in determining my interest in this film?

You see, I don't love Billie Eilish. Her music, to me, is a bit like Charli XCX's music, which is that I mean it is exactly adjacent to all sorts of bands that I have, historically, loved, but that this particular brand of what she does -- of what they do -- does not quite work for me. For a person who has been as popular as she's been for going on ten years now, I don't even know that many of her songs, and the one I probably know best, "Bad Guy," is probably my least favorite of the songs I know.

But still, I'm kind of interested in a 3D concert with James Cameron's imprimatur. 

But it's not like this is the first 3D concert I would have ever seen at the movies. Almost exactly 16 years ago, on May 2nd, 2010, I went to see Phish 3D with my friend Gregg, since we are both Phish fans. In fact, I wrote about it here, though you should probably only follow that link if you want to see a blog post with really ghastly formatting. 

The gist of that post was to discuss five total hours of two very long movies (the other being The Baader Meinof Complex) I saw on the same day that really knocked the wind out of me. If I lost my wind even from a band I used to, and possibly still do, consider one of my favorites, what chance do I stand listening to that much music that mildly annoys me, when I've already gotten the 3D concert experience in an inherently more favorable setting? 

(Side note: Looking up the date of my viewing of Phish 3D, which I originally tried to do on Letterboxd before having to opt for my Microsoft Word document, acquainted me with the fact that I never put in a retroactive logging on Letterboxd for this viewing. Since, at that time, I was just going down my movie list from this Word document to add my movies, I have to imagine Phish 3D wasn't available to add to Letterboxd when I first tried to do that. It is now, so I've belatedly rectified that.)

To be fair, Hit Me Hard and Soft comes in under two hours, and I know it's not only concert footage, as Phish 3D was. I know this because my younger son and I had a joke about one of the things in this trailer, which was that the big "dramatic moment" in the trailer was Eilish crying because her brother couldn't be present with her on tour. Not because he was sick or anything had happened to him, just because he wasn't present.

And just writing that last paragraph made me realize: The whole premise of this post is wrong.

It wasn't Project Hail Mary where I saw the Hit Me Hard and Soft trailer, it was Avatar: Fire and Ash. My younger son was with me for that one, not for Project Hail Mary. And we saw that in Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania, not my local IMAX theater. Which, therefore, did not actually create an implicit promise to screen this film that it did not fulfill. 

So yeah I guess I'm not going? I don't know. 

Audient Outliers: True Lies

This is the second in a 2024 bi-monthly movies reconsidering a single outlier in the career of a director whose work I otherwise champion.

I may not love every James Cameron movie I've ever seen, but they all would receive at least 3.5 stars from me on Letterboxd -- with one exception. (Emphasis on "I've ever seen," as I am not a Cameron completist. I have not seen Piranha II: The Spawning.)

That exception is True Lies, which I laughed and groaned through during my single viewing in the summer of 1994.

One of those sounds positive, but I was laughing for the wrong reasons. (Actually, there's one really legitimately funny joke in the movie, which a friend of mine and I would quote back and forth. When Bill Paxton puts Jamie Lee Curtis' head in his lap while he's driving his convertible, and a surveilling Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Arnold notice this, Tom Arnold quips "Maybe she's sleepy." For some reason we always thought his line delivery there was hilarious.)

The fact that the best joke in this movie is one about implied blow jobs really gives you an idea of how the tone is off in True Lies. And that's the problem I still have with the movie today. 

In case you need reminding, this is a film where Schwarzenegger's spy character spends the majority of the movie -- I think it's fair to say that -- spying on his own wife to see if she is cheating on him. It's pretty gross and it really goes against the good guy persona Schwarzenegger had been cultivating in his last few movies, especially the delightful Kindergarten Cop. 

The thing is, True Lies actually sees him as a good guy rather than a jealous creep, and that's part of the problem.

If he were just obsessed with the possible adultery as a result of being an insecure fool, that would be one thing. But he becomes kind of a creepy perv -- there's that word "creep" again -- when he concocts a ridiculous and logistically improbable scenario where he's going to sit in a darkened hotel room as she strips down to the sexy lingerie he asked her to wear, all while using a series of pre-recorded phrases on a tape recorder so she won't know it's him. 

Set aside for a moment that this is twisted and needlessly perverse for a mainstream movie. What I want to know is, how the hell did Harry Tasker think this would even work? Any movie that relies on someone using pre-recorded dialogue on a tape recorder strains all credibility for me -- yes, even the bit in Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- but this just takes that way over the top. You get the sense that it's really important that Helen does not identify that it's Harry there in that room, yet he takes all sorts of risks, like trailing a flower down her face after he's told her to keep her eyes closed, while relying on a highly flimsy setup with very little chance of succeeding. Given how bizarre it also is on a character level, that scene should have just been pulled altogether.

Though in 1994, I wasn't really liking True Lies even before that. The cold open is competently executed and I have fairly fond memories of Schwarzenegger riding his horse on an elevator as he pursues the Arab terrorists who are the villains in this film. (One element that dates it, as Arab terrorists as villains in a movie today would just promote unhelpful anti-Islamic sentiments.) But I remember finding the setup to be lacking, the set pieces not doing enough to make up for it, and then the whole thing being sexist and gross.

If you are considering similar sorts of filmmakers being on a continuum from prestige to hack, you'd ordinarily put James Cameron on the prestige side (maybe with Christopher Nolan even above him) and Michael Bay on the hack side, with maybe Zack Snyder in between them. In True Lies, though, it's like Cameron's inner Bay came out. (It would have to be pre-Bay, though, since Bay had not yet made his first film in 1994.) The focus on the body of Jamie Lee Curtis in this movie is fairly shameless, not only in the stripping scene, but elsewhere. You get a clear view of her cleavage for most of the last 30 minutes of the movie, and what's worse, she's acting a bit like Kate Capshaw acts in the second half of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, always complaining and screaming and requiring saving.

I feel like this movie was a misstep for both Schwarzenegger and Cameron, and yet I feel like it is basically seen as of a piece with the other star vehicles for the former and films for the latter. Sure, True Lies had stiff competition from other Cameron movies in the 1990s, as this movie was bookended by the stone-cold classics Terminator 2: Judgment Day on one side and Titanic on the other. Tough to compete with that. Most people, though, would probably consider True Lies the equal of a film like The Abyss, when I really think that's being unfair to The Abyss.

My opinion of the movie did not change this time around. I will say, however, that it has some moments that I think are pretty iconic, such as:

1) The shot of Arnold as he swims under water while there is an explosion going over him. I doubt Cameron was the first person to do that shot, but I feel like that shot gets used a lot in montages or Oscar clips. 

2) The limo falling away as Arnold grabs on to Jamie Lee's arm from the helicopter.

3) The fight atop the harrier jet. It's ridiculous, but in a good way. 

4) This exchange of dialogue while Arnold is on truth serum, which may actually qualify as the film's second good joke:

Helen: "So have you ever killed anyone?"

Harry: "Yeah but they were all bad."

True Lies is not bad. It's misguided, but it's not bad. 

I don't really think it's good either, though. 

Probably the most interesting thing about it is it's weird existence as a series of questionable choices shoved into a really expensive action movie package, and its dated gender politics and Islamophobia. 

And speaking of that Islamophobia ... one thing I discovered on this viewing, and I'm glad to have discovered it so I can stop making this mistake, is that I thought Kiwi Cliff Curtis played the lead villain, Salim Abu Aziz. I've always thought that and I've mentioned it to people on occasion.

He's actually played by Art Malik. You'll have to let me know if you think the two are similar enough for me to have made this mistake legitimately, or if I was just an idiot.

Here's Art:

And here's Cliff:

There's definitely a similarity. And the fact that Curtis appears in Avatar: The Way of Water makes me think Cameron sees the similarity too. 

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. 

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.

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.