No doubt that’s what Cameron meant when he talked about his movie.  Hopefully he was not talking about the story.  So, will every movie in the blockbuster/space-opera genre be in 3-D with flawless CGI? Will budgets continue to push upwards of $400 million dollars?  Seems likely.  On the other hand, will Avatar go down in our collective memory the way Star Wars did?  I find that very doubtful.  Technical advances may have had a great influence at the time Star Wars came out, but that’s not why we remember it now.  After all, as soon as it was out, everybody else set out surpassing it.  Matrix made a similar leap in visual technique, but little else about the movie has lasted.

Star Wars had something else that was special, something that even George Lucas could never find again.  Though nobody could call the acting great, the relationships between the characters were inspired.  Obi-Wan is still an archetype, and Darth Vader is synonymous with ultimate bad guy.  Princess Leia was the perfect damsel in distress, who could also kick some ass.  But the key was really the hero.  Instead of just focusing on the “chosen one”, Star Wars kept balancing Luke with Han Solo.  Han Solo was fun in a way that Luke could never be.  Neo was never fun, the hero of Avatar could never catch that magic.  Nobody in the sequels had it.  Maybe it was just Harrison Ford, but I also think the character of the co-hero lifted some of the seriousness that oppresses adventure movies when the film-maker starts thinking about making art.  Lucas could be as serious as he wanted about the Force, destiny, and the themes of good and evil and fatherhood, without drowning the old-fashioned serial-movie fun, because Han Solo was always there.

It seems odd that one movie could have given the modern standard examplar of three cultural archetypes, but Star Wars did it.  Darth Vader, Obi-Wan, and Han Solo are always with us.  You can pull out any of those names and describe someone, and you’ve covered that topic.  I can’t imagine any character from Avatar will be that memorable even a year from now.

In Piranha II, you were likely to get killed by a carnivorous flying fish if:

• You are female and naked.
• You have sex unconnected to romance.
• You’re a somewhat ridiculous older woman.
• You are an ethnic side-character.

Also, if you’re ex-military, you’re instinctively evil, even when you try to be good.  if you’re a corporate person, you’re stupidly evil.

Things have gotten a lot better for naked or semi-naked women/aliens in Avatar, and only good people have sex, which is romantic as heck.  On the other hand:

• Military is still evil.
• Corporations are stupidly evil.
• Michelle Rodriguez? Dead.
• Sigourney Weaver? Dead. (well, she does get instantly recycled into a giant tree, so that’s something)

Bad movies can be like that.  Uwe Boll really thinks he can direct.  The actors in most Sci-Fi originals are putting what they have on the table.  There’s no money for effects, the director is probably wasted, and the writers cobble their facts and plot points from other movies.  But that’s because they believe in those other movies.  Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus has everything you think you want in a bad movie:

• Bad Special Effects
• Ridiculous physics
• Know-it-all scientists quoting 5th grade knowledge as if they discovered it
• Fake accents
• Sets that don’t match exterior shots
• Plot holes and over-dramatic story elements that don’t relate to the plot
• Lorenzo Lamas

But they’re faking it.  That’s not always bad.  A lot of bad movies are made better because the people making them were just having fun.  Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is kind of awesome because Jesus teams up with a Mexican wrestler.  That’s just a genuine WTF.

Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus doesn’t have the crazy vision of JCVH, but it’s badness is guided by a conscious: “let’s do something stupid and the frat boys will laugh at this movie.”  Shark jumping 35,000 feet to take down an airliner?  No problem.  Scientists trying to solve problem by mixing colors?  Sure.  A submarine commander who got fired for running aground to avoid hitting a dolphin?  Why not?  It’s like they’re making the movie, throw in a clip of a battleship and say: “let’s call it a destroyer!”  “But it’s a battleship!”  “Yes, but the kids will laugh at us.”  Then the battleship fires guns fore and aft while the shark is attacking from the side.

We love bad movies because they make stupid mistakes, or because they try things nobody else will do, or just because that’s the best they could be.  But if someone cheats, if someone makes the movie a lot worse, because they’ve identified the market segment that likes to laugh at them, then the contract is broken.  It’s a cheat.  This movie, even with Debbie Gibson playing someone with a washed-up career, is a fake bad movie.  Which doesn’t mean it’s any good.

There’s “Snakes on a Plane” bad.  The badness is actually the genre, and the title tells us what to expect.  The genre has certain rules and expectations, and this kind of bad movie can be done well or poorly.  Snakes on a Plane hit all the right notes, so people called it bad.  By which they meant it was a very well done “bad” movie.

There’s “Crank: High Voltage” bad.  You throw plot out the window, along with a good dose of physics, probability, and narrative logic.  But what you replace it with is a bunch of crazy, unpredictable events that, somehow, fit.  The movie is considered bad because it doesn’t have the things a good movie is supposed to.  But it has so much other awesomeness stuck into every possible corner that it really doesn’t matter.

There’s Sci-Fi Channel original bad.  These movies are formulaic, yet fail to rise to the basic requirments of the formula.  Bad special effects, terrible acting, ridiculous scripting, and broken physics make you flat out angry.  Or you laugh.  But the movies are low-low budget, usually there’s at least a few actors who are trying hard.  If the bad guy/creature is evil enough, you cheer for them to get it, even though you know the whole thing sucks.

Then there’s Michael Bay.  Big-budget, crap gets blown up, plot-holes swallow whole planets.  Random stupid elements are stuck in, and CGI runs rampant.  You can sort of like Michael Bay because of that “awesome” commercial.  He’s a big kid who likes to blow things up, and he likes the piles of money we give him.  The first transformers movie, Armeggedon were pretty bad, but in a fun way.

But there are degrees of badness within the Michael Bay category.  Pearl Harbor was so bad they wrote a song about it.  And Transformers 2: ROTFL, hurt.  People say: “what did you expect?”  Well, the first movie was okay for a summer outing.  How did the second find it’s own special level?  The movie is not only rife with stolen scenes, questionable special effects, stereotyped racial robots, and random things-humping-other-things, it also laughs at us.  The viewers.  Michael Bay thinks we’re idiots.  He also thinks he can tell us he thinks we’re idiots, and we’ll still give him money.  We do.  This is a unique level of badness.  Nearly unique, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull Disaster comes close.

The thing started coming up the carpeted hall, but fortunately I realized that if I kept spraying water it would lose its footing.  But I needed to have enough water.  (By this time the carpet had disappeared).  There was another, side hall, and the polar bear/ice cream truck would switch over and try coming up that side, but I quickly doused that as well.  It seemed clear that I couldn’t keep this up for long, though.  The only thing for it was to run.  But I’d left some of my clothes in an obscure locker somewhere and couldn’t quite get there in…

Everything changed.  The polar bear/ice cream truck that I had been keeping at bay was now a mobster.  He had invited me, and I was waiting around for the party to get going.  I didn’t much like this mobster, and he knew it.  He had some nefarious end planned for me, yet I couldn’t seem to leave.  Partly because my keys and suit jacket were now wherever those other missing clothes were before.  The party kept filling up with other sort-of-bad people.  I decided I would not go along with whatever they wanted, and failed to applaud when the bad hair guy won some kind of contest that involved matching air canisters with bottles of some kind of liquor.  He cheated by substituting a broken drill, but because he was a known mobster friend/important person, everyone clapped anyway.  Except me.  I knew, then, that I would have kill him, or he would kill me.

My friends didn’t understand the direness of the situation.  Mostly because, apparently, they hadn’t lost their car keys and suit jacket and could just leave.  I was not only trapped, but I had trapped myself.  I did not have the spirit it took to simply walk away from something that was going really badly, and could only get worse.  It was this overwhelming feeling of being trapped and yet being a contributor to my own state that woke me up.

Sometimes dreams don’t mean anything.  But a lot of stressful dreams go back to real-life situations.  There were clues here:

Whatever badness was happening, I had accepted it

I was surrounded by certain friends

Much of the dream was spent keeping something at Bay

The only thing that matched this was an unfortunate decision to see Transformer 2: Return Of The Friggin’ Losers (ROTFL).  Sitting through this movie violated even my normal willingness to watch trash.  After all, Michael Bay KNOWS IT SUCKS.  But he’s counting his money and laughing at us as we sit through it anyway.

There is one argument that this is actually a great movie.  It’s a great read, but it doesn’t require anyone to see the actual movie.  There’s another argument that this movie will doom future civilizations.  (Also a great read, but it does contain an inaccuracy about why someone went to the wrong theater).  But I think there’s a worse fate in store for us now.  We have willingly given up our money for something we knew would be bad, for something that turned out to be far worse than we imagined.  Now we will wait in our little cubbyholes while vast sums are dedicated to the making of Transformers 3.

Face it, most people choose the religion they get from their parents.  And some people, naturally, try to find the exact opposite.  A few go adrift, then wander into some church led by friends or potential romance.  Nobody actually sits down and does comparison shopping, using analytic tools to ascertain the one true religion.  People who claim to have done so inevitably either decided on the church they were raised in, or the one with the prettiest girls.   Presumably God knows this is what would happen, so judging people on their failure to do this makes no sense.  Therefore, every religion that makes this claim is wrong, at least to that extent.

I also used to believe that religions had really fundamental differences.  Christianity was the “only” religion that allowed for salvation through mercy.  Islam had five pillars, including total service to God.  Buddhaism is the only religion that really understands the denial of the self.  Etc.  But now I think that any story about the relationship between God and man can be told within any religion.  The differences have more to do with temperment and culture.

Movie genres behave the same way.  You can tell a story about guilt and redemption as a romantic comedy (Wedding Crashers), an action movie (The Untouchables), a horror movie (The Exorcist), or as a Western (The Searchers).  Each genre has its own symbols, conventions, and appeals to a far different crowd, but central human themes are available in each.  And, naturally, there are some people who feel that one genre is the one, true means of expression.  Having said this, I reserve the right to bash the idea of Romantic Comedy at any point in the future.

First, manly implies toughness.  Adventure is manly.  Heroics are manly.  Horror isn’t manly.  To enjoy horror, you have to let yourself be frightened and vulnerable.  Die Hard is manly.  Braveheart is Manly.  Gladiator is Manly.

Boobies, while awesome in almost every way, are not manly.  Even Woody Allen likes boobies.  A movie with boobies is a guy move, but not necessarily manly.  Porkys is not manly.  It’s funny, it’s a guy movie, but it’s not a manly movie.  Gator is a manly movie.

Also, really bad movies are not manly, not matter how much blood and gore is involved.  The remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre just sucked.  Boondock Saints is just ludicrous.  Not manly.

• Driving through a hail of bullets hoping the thin metal of your car will protect you.
• Finding conveniently placed explosive barrels to help cover your escape.
• Taking on a guy with a handgun using your super-duper fire extinguisher.
• Recognizing a voice you heard over an international line, based on two words.
• Shooting a middle-aged woman in the arm and saying “it’s just a flesh wound”.  Could be, could hit an artery.

But none of these things upset my friend.  He’s against the torture.  I went back and forth.  I’m also against torture, and also believe that it rarely gives reliable intelligence.  In fact, I don’t like the show, 24, in part because they constantly use torture to advance the plot in a way that seems to validate it as an intelligence gathering tool.

On the other hand, it’s just a movie.  We allow ourselves to enjoy movie protagonists who commit every kind of heinous act.  Torture doesn’t stand out over, say, murder, genocide, drug-dealing, or vampirism.  I thought people who got upset about the “torture quests” in WOTLK were idiots.  Still do.  So why shouldn’t this be the same?  I think that, had they really established the character they were shooting for, the father so blinded by rage and love for his daughter that he considers nothing else, it might have worked.  But in this case, Liam Neeson’s character never rises above a sort of everyman with talents.  So we don’t really separate his morals from our own.  So his choices are those of someone who we consider “moral”.

I do think my friend was being ridiculous, but I get just as ridiculous over other things, especially the off-screen hiding spot.  The hero walks into a room, looks around, and is suddenly jumped by a bad buy who was hiding off-camera.  It’s a good hiding place, because WE CAN’T SEE THEM.  The hero, though, shouldn’t be limited by the camera frame.  Liam Neeson does this once, walking out into a hall, apparently without noticing the bad guys, who then knock him out.  So they can hang him from a pipe.  This trope drives me crazy.  I haven’t walked out, yet, but then I’d have to explain and people would probably say “it’s just a movie.”

For the first hour or so, things weren’t looking so good.  There’s nothing more overdone than the nice-smart-shy guy versus the good-looking-bully over the beautiful-but-confused girl.  This movie was definitely falling into that triangle.  Also, true love conquers all?  Seriously?  But as the story went on, I started to really like the kids.  The framing is a bit contrived, bordering on deliberately arty.  But the character was compelling enough that I didn’t feel the flaws during the movie itself.  By the end, I admit I’d had a good time.

I’ve seen far better movies this year, including The Dark Knight.  But also indepenents like Hamlet 2.  So I don’t know how this rose quite as high as it did, but it’s still an enjoyable evening.

But if I wanted to be sure, I would want to see the drop in ratings compared to all the other nominated movies.  Also, if possible, I’d like to see  the number of new ratings compared to changes in ticket sales.  What I think we’d see is that all of the nominees show some decline.  When a movie is first released, the people who see it are the ones for whom it was made.  (unless bad marketing brings in an audience who think they are seeing something different).  Milk played to people who like Sean Penn or are interested in the story of Harvey Milk.  Slumdog Millionaire played to the independent theater crowd, or people who like international films, and possible fans of the director.  But once these films are nominated, a lot of people go see them who were not part of the original crowd.  People who usually watch action movies, or romantic comedies, or whatever.  This crowd will probably be less impressed.  So ratings should fall to some extent in any case.