So, what are people doing for New Year’s Eve?

I feel like a colony of bees has taken up residence in my throat, but now they are suffering from colony collapse disorder.

Sign: “Danger, wasp nest, stay on trail!”
Chaz: “Hmmmm…”

On Wednesday, I walked down to the local AMC and met Justin. We bought tickets, a large bucket of popcorn, and a box Junior Mints. We buttered and salted the popcorn, found seats, and put on our 3-d glasses to watch the most expensive movie ever made: Avatar.

Generally, I think movie ratings systems are lame: thumbs, stars, and grades are for hitchhikers, generals, and schoolchildren. I tend to think of movies as most Americans probably do: should I go see it in theaters, should I wait for DVD/Blu-ray/Netflix, or should I just ignore it? Thus, reviews are only useful if they help people decide to see a movie, or wait, or wait indefinitely. By this system, I would say that Avatar is worth a viewing in theaters. Did I think it was a good movie? Not really. Did I enjoy it? Meh. But is it worth seeing? Yes.

A friend of mine posted thoughts of Avatar on Facebook: “Spectacular, as in, a spectacle.” Watching Avatar is like watching some YouTube video of a drugged 7-year old returning from the dentist. You should see it, and perhaps you’ll even enjoy it, but you should see it. Avatar is worth seeing because it represents the next step in fakery that will probably define cinema for the next twenty years. This road was paved in good (Lord of the Rings) and bad (Star Wars prequels) use of computer generated imagery. I’m not sure why Avatar is hailed for innovation. Certainly the CG is good, and the motion capture in particular is superior to previous attempts. But aside from a few breathtaking moments which I’ll discuss later, Avatar felt more like a really well crafted animated movie than an evolutionary leap in filmmaking.

If you’ve seen Dances With Wolves or Last Samurai, you’ve seen Avatar. Sure maybe it’s not as colorful or goofy, but the plot is exactly the same. Exactly. Western Military-Industrial Complex ™ Man fights natives, Man is captured by natives, Man integrates into native society, Western Military-Industrial Complex ™ returns to finish off natives, Man stands by natives in the fight. There’s probably a near-defeat and a triumphant victory stuffed in there somewhere, but you can guess the rest. Ultimately the plot, and the senselessly bad dialogue, stands in the way of your eyeballs. What neurons are being used to hear Sigourney Weaver talk about neurons is better used to process the pretty scenery. In that sense, Avatar could have been the first wildly-successful modern action/adventure silent film.

And Avatar does succeed in the visual realm. Things look pretty. Trees look good. So good you forget they are CG trees (and isn’t that the point?). The Na’vi (James Cameronese for “natives”) look pretty good, although in some long shots they still look cartoony. The creatures of Pandora (James Cameronese for “pre-Westernized culture) look especially good; in one of the very good CG shots, a slow pan with a circling hyena-like predator shows the glistening skin, slobber, and empty pupils. The battles explode appropriately, and foliage in particular succumbs beautifully to fire. Cameron has a knack for rich imagery and heavy-handed cuts: a Na’vi curls into a biological hammock for the night and a human crawls into a sliding coffin, a native creature sighs and a helicopter whirring to life. Why spoil all this with talking?

Avatar ultimately misses several big opportunities. For one, it could have tread new ground in mainstream science fiction’s portrayal of alien life as something other than an off-color human with funky ears (and, this time around, a tail). Even the rest of Pandora’s rich flora and fauna seem constrained. Imagine a horse, but with 6 legs. Imagine a rhinocerous, but with a hammerhead ridge. Imagine a fern, but it glows in the dark. Hell, everything glows in the dark. But what about something truly unique? The premise and namesake of the movie is fascinating: what if a man could interface and eventually integrate into a biologically foreign shell to become a totally different species. We do it already with machines; imagine becoming your cat. But here Avatar is too big to fail. Too much money was invested to try new things or explore new ground. “Mr. Cameron, here’s half a billion dollars but don’t try anything silly.” But I can’t criticize Avatar for what could have been. At most I can wish for a less mainstream director’s cut, stripped of some dialogue and the horrible soundtrack.

What about the 3d? Well, it’s a work in progress. Justin said it would have been better without the 3d, and except for scenes like the hyena-like creatures, or of some of the battle scenes, I don’t know if it made a huge difference. Often it was distracting: the depth of field was all-or-nothing. Try holding an object up half-a-foot from your eyes while watching the background; not exactly pleasing cinema. Other times the depth-of-field was so subtle as to be non-existent (still other times, it was non-existent). This lack of continuity is what hampered the 3d experience. More levels of detail and more attention to detail are needed, and even then I’m not yet convinced that this is the future of visual art. So, what to think overall? Should you watch Avatar? Yes. Go watch it, and go ahead and watch it in 3d, on IMAX if possible, to judge for yourself. It is spectacle, but it is delightful spectacle. Forgive the plot, or perhaps wear earplugs and ignore the non-visual story altogether.

You’ll still get spectacle without the plot; after all, we don’t go to fireworks for the plot.

For Christmas this year, I got a Pac Man oven mitt and a very, very tiny robotic vacuum cleaner. Better yet, though, I have victory. You see, the professionals came to look at the apartment regarding Las Pulgas. The enemy, which had somehow evaded all my warfare, had cunningly burrowed into my flesh before I left. And so I surrendered to the professional warriors of insect battles.

They came, looking around, seeing nothing out of sorts. The floors, so thoroughly chemobombed, were free of eggs or adults. The rugs were also spotless, as were the corners, shelves, and nooks. Crannies too were absent the horde; beds and sofas thankfully were clean. Wherever they looked, they could not find any remnant of my eternal foe.

They saw, though, as they left, a blue shoe rack by the front door. While the doormat and underlying rug were clean, no one had thought to check the shoe rack. The shoe rack towers three feet tall, a stronghold on an insectoid scale. Within its walls, platforms criss cross with plastic hinges like an accordion stuffed with footwear. And it was there, huddled in the dankest slits in the plastic, sheltered from the bombs and the blasts and the diatomaceous slaughter, were the fleas, flea eggs really, stacked like wine in a cellar. To our eyes, piles of fine dust, like pinches of confectioners sugar, waiting for the storm to blow by so that each could hatch and feed.

They conquered. They entered with guns that sprayed precision bursts of death. They committed premeditated murder with cell-cycle inhibitors, and they perpetrated a welcome holocaust. Not even the air left behind is safe to breathe for those wretched hoppers; their campaign is not scorched-earth but scorched-sky.

Is this victory absolute? I dare not say so. Each egg is guerrilla warfare sound asleep, and only one egg is needed to rekindle the battle. But I will rest easier with their fortress unveiled beneath our very eyes. Our shoes may now rest easy with the lair of the enemy melted into slag. Perhaps too I will finally rest, here and now on this Christmas day of the year two-thousand and nine, the year of the flea.