Avatar 3

Avatar 3 is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. It’s the imaginary battle you drew in your notebook in third grade. You showed your friends and they joined in. Pages and pages of epics about a giant unending war between armies of armored evil men with submarines that had crab claws against ripped warriors mounted on superbeasts smashed together out of a shark a lion and a firebreathing giraffe. You drew the visuals and you told each other the story. Every boy had this dream. A man kept that dream alive. He made other movies for 40 years. Because that’s what it took to get the money people and computers together to make the dream into this movie.

What else can you say. Take Camille Paglia’s essay about Revenge of the Sith and put it here. This is the peak of American cinema, and invites more peaks to come. American culture- great low culture- is alive.

The rest of Hollywood sounds like guests at their own funeral. We gotta browbeat people into the important work of going to movies. Nolan saying “the cinema is my church”– people hate going to church. Grandma scolds you to go to church. Cameron knows you gotta make people want it. Avatar on TV’s pretty good but on the big screen you look around at each epiphyte on the mangrove roots that someone put there by hand and it’s fluttering in the breeze perfectly. So much going on every second. They hold nothing back. Maximum movie for 3 and half hours and it’s denser than any other movie, face turns, heel turns, big stakes every minute, big emotions- fuck it, we are putting it all out there. And it’s better than the last one, and the next one will be better, because it embraces that film’s a technology. As tech gets better art can get better. It has a future.

And it’s a movie about evil money, evil industry, evil tech made with and for the most money industry and tech they can get and FUCK IT it does not matter. This is America. You’re gonna watch this movie then go to your job Monday being Giovanni Ribisi. It doesn’t matter. Your soul is liberated. You’re still human.

Cameron doesn’t see himself as some high and mighty arbiter sent to chastise the proles. He’s a working man doing his job. Which is to blow your mind for 3 hours. The biggest logistical undertaking in the history of art, decades crafting a cathedral with every brick and tile telling a story. But it feels like a guy drawing flamethrower tanks vs. flying dinosaurs in third grade. Oh yeah the water people live over here, the fire people hate them so they’re teaming up with the army guys. And the army guys have these giant hovercrafts but the water guys are friends with the whales- there’s one whale that got kicked out of his village cuz he wanted to fight… One man just going off. One man remembered.