Far and away the best thing about Anaconda

When we were at the cinema yesterday to see Avatar: Fire and Ash, we almost became material supporters of the last movie we'd seen at the cinema, which I truly did not like. My son liked it more than I did, so I could have justified it on those grounds.

However, the only grounds on which I needed to justify it is that a good piece of movie merchandise is a good piece of movie merchandise, no further discussion needed.

And that good piece of movie merchandise is what you see here, a popcorn bucket with a snake mouth at the top in support of Anaconda. 

At first I thought it might have been a drinking vessel, despite its enormous girth, the type you usually only see in the case of popcorn containers. I thought that otherwise, the venmous jaws might be too hard to reach your arm around to get to the popcorn, whereas a straw would just slip comfortably by. 

But then I remembered we weren't in America, the only place in the civilized world that has drinking vessels the size of popcorn tubs.

My 12-year-old would not have asked me to buy this. He's too good of a kid, not the kind who whines until he gets something. No, it was me myself who was going to be the driver of this purchase, especially since I knew he wanted that large popcorn. 

When we asked the price, though, the gentleman behind the counter asked if we were Village Rewards members. I told him we were not. 

He said it was $55 without membership, $27 with. 

Now, he probably would have allowed me to sign up right then and there and get the $27 price, which would have been a totally reasonable price to pay for such a thing. But neither my son nor I considered that, in part, probably, because it was time to get in and take our seats, and any additional admin might have endangered the start of Avatar. (Of course there were still approximately 27 minutes worth of ads after we took our seats.) 

I made a point of thanking my son for being such a good kid and not whining until he got it. I don't think he's every done that once, actually. 

Besides, as great as it is in the moment, a thing like that just goes home and gets thrown in a box and has to be thrown away at some point.

Probably the best thing to do would have been to buy it when we saw Anaconda, before we (or at least I) knew that it was terrible, but it wasn't a Village cinema where we saw the movie. They had only the normal popcorn tubs at that cinema. 

As a bit of a joke I asked the man if it cost anything for me to take a picture of it. Fortunately he knew I was joking, got a big grin and told me to go for it. 

So here's also one with the mouth closed:

I lost all hope several times during Avatar

We went horseback riding on my honeymoon back in 2008. I'm not a huge horseback riding guy, so any amount of horseback riding might have been more than I wanted, but we got a lot more than we bargained for on this particular outing in the jungles of Belize. I had the horse that liked to gallop, while my wife, the more trained rider, had the equine version of Eeyore, trudging through the woods at a snail's pace. There was one moment when I could be heard yelling, helplessly, "Too fast! Too fast! Too fast!" Fortunately, I was never thrown -- which could have been a disaster, since the guy at our eco resort told us about one thrown rider who had to spend the whole afternoon having the spikes of a local plant removed from her arm.

There arrived a time in the day when, after waiting as long as I possibly could, I ventured to ask the guide how far away we were from the resort. I expected him to say "Oh it's just around the next bend" or "Just another ten minutes, sir." Instead he revealed to me that we still had a full hour left to go. 

This is how I felt when I first checked the time during Avatar: Fire and Ash with my sons.

Now, I don't usually have my phone on at all during a movie. They only tell you to silence your phones these days, but I always turn mine all the way off. But with this particular film -- this particular three hour and 17-minute film -- I thought it would be a good idea to know how close we were to the end, because I was worried about one of my two viewing companions.

Although it was two-and-a-half years ago now, and he would have only been nine at the time, my memory is still fresh of how my younger son couldn't handle The Flash, and required us to leave after less than 15 minutes. It wasn't that the subject matter itself was so assaultive to him, but that he couldn't handle the loudness of the film and some of its overwhelming visuals. 

So Avatar -- a loud, visually overwhelming film, especially when watched in 3D -- could have been a recipe for disaster for him, even though he has subsequently survived plenty of loud and visually oppressive films on a slightly smaller scale. Never mind the fact that he also feels a bit embarrassed about forcing me to leave The Flash and would not likely let a similar thing happen again. (Have I held it over him? I hope not, but I suspect I have let some comments drop here and there that could be interpreted as passive aggressive.)

I thought, if I were able to determine how much time was left, I'd know whether I could push him through to the end, or if it was too far off to do that. Which, actually, was sort of a faulty idea from the start, since any Flash-style reaction to the stimuli would have happened in those first few minutes of the movie, not the last few. 

Turns out, it was me who needed to check the time -- though I wished I hadn't. 

I had made the argument that I thought the movie would never be boring, and would not seem like more than 180 minutes. I didn't know if I believed my own argument, but it was an attempt to try to set the kids at ease. Not that either of them needed the encouragement. They were both keen to see the movie. 

Well, due to the problematic narrative structure of the film -- it reaches a point partway through when a non-James Cameron filmmaker might have split it in two -- there did indeed come a storytelling lull, which you will probably remember if you've seen it. It was around here that I dared to check my phone, thinking we were at least halfway through the running time. 

Nope. We still had two hours to go.

Two hours!

I knew our 10:45 showing was scheduled to get out around 2:25, so I was under no delusions about the length of this experience. I just couldn't imagine we were only around an hour and 20 minutes into that experience. 

Fortunately I had the good sense not to tell either of my kids about how long we had left. Though this did set off a flurry of me checking every 20 minutes or so for the rest of the movie. I did occasionally get caught up in what was happening, and sometimes when I checked, more time had passed since I last checked than I feared had passed. Though sometimes it was way, way less.

Say what you will about either of the previous two Avatar films, but at least in both cases they felt like single stories -- single very long stories, but single stories nonetheless. Checking their times just now, I'm surprised I didn't remember that Avatar: The Way of Water was only five minutes shorter than this, because indeed, the time did pass faster in that one. The original Avatar seems like a model of restraint by comparison, clocking in at a modest 162 minutes. 

But by the third film in the series, Cameron has accumulated so many characters who need to have their own story arcs -- there are about four "chosen one" characters in this story alone -- that it's just way too much story for one movie. At the same time, it feels underdeveloped in the way Cameron stories often do. 

For their part, my kids did pretty well with it, though I could tell they were also exhausted. For my younger son, he had his 3D glasses removed at some points, his shoes removed at others. He did a lot of wriggling around, which is funny because he was the best equipped of the three of us to handle the cramped seating. My older son wasn't fidgety like that, but he engaged in the single most symbolic act of despair during the whole movie, at one point crossing his arms on the seat in front of them and burying his head in them, as if fully defeated. Fortunately, this only lasted about two to three minutes.

Despite all this, and despite the fact that I had to take an hour-long nap when I got home, we all enjoyed the movie to varying degrees. In a situation like this, I am likely to award the film "achievement points," which basically comes down to a half-star higher than the movie is really worth, based just on the difficulty of making it. I mean no doubt, all these movies are very impressive achievements, meaning I'm ultimately giving it 3.5 stars even though it's probably only a three-star movie.

As for the fourth and fifth movies in the series, maybe -- just maybe -- Cameron will have storied himself out on these three, and can show comparitive judiciousness by bringing the next two in around that 2:40 mark. I mean probably not, but a girl can hope at least?