You Can Tell When He's Speaking Because It's All Printed in Red

I don't get to a lot of movies, but I did see Avatar. The hooded men in the windowless white van and armed with the cattle prods were very clear on our instructions when they shoved us out in front of the Galleria AMC with $22 and a voucher for a free small popcorn (with purchase of a medium or larger soda). I don't remember such a culture of compulsory viewing existing in this country since Schindler's List.

If I had to see it, I decided I was going to do it all the way, in IMAX 3D, the way God intended. And by "God," yes, I do mean Jim Cameron.

See, since I saw Jaws 2 at an altogether inappropriately young age, I have an irrational fear of boats, so if I want a debilitating case of motion sickness and a headache that lasts for four days, it's either movies in IMAX 3D or attend a NASCAR race. And since I am inclined to neither wear a "Sarah '012" button nor a frontal lobotomy, IMAX it is.

Plus, I don't know if you know this, but at NASCAR races, they can smell higher education on you like dogs smell fear. If they find out I have a master's degree, I'm instantly the star of something akin to a zombie movie set at a state fair, which is to say a lot of flannel and grasping, two-syllable vowels and mortal peril.

Just to be clear, I don't hate Jim Cameron. Loved Terminator, was happy with T2, worshipped at the feet of Aliens. True Lies was overcooked, but not unpleasant. And The Abyss... well, yes, that was a ponderous, terrible, self-important crock of watery shit. But the water people were cool.

I think we all know where the turning point was. My four-word review of Titanic, if I recall, was "JUST FUCKING SINK ALREADY!" Stupid boat. Stupid people. The only characters worth rooting for in that whole mess were Billy Zane and the iceberg.

Then there was the infamous Oscars moment of silence for people who had been dead a hundred years and I was out. It was easy to be out what with the 10-year gap for him to go off and make hippie movies about jellyfish fucking at 8,000 feet below the surface, but the point is, had our man JC been out there trying, I was totally prepared to reject him.

All that said, I did see Avatar. You know what else I've seen? Dances with Wolves. And The Last Samurai. And every other movie about cynical Westerners who go native and thus learn a Very Important Lesson, usually about the inherent evil of the society that spawned the people sitting in the theater watching the movie. Which, of course, they cheer for. Because yes, strip mining and cultural insensitivity and genocide in the name of profit, those things happen. But it's not us doing it. Not personally. Do people get blown up in the name of mineral rights in real life? Maybe. But you have to remember, where they live, they were going to die of cholera or scurvy or impetigo or sectarian violence pretty soon anyway probably. It's not the same.

Plus, everything would have been fine if it weren't for that Giovanni Ribisi being such a dick to the nice blue people. But really what do you expect from a guy named "Paul Reiser's Character From Aliens"? Any kid named that is bound to get his ass kicked once or twice on a playground. Obviously some deep-seated unresolved psychological issues there. I thought he played it really well, all hammy and twitchy like that.

All this, I guess, is just to express shock and dismay at Avatar's win for Best Picture at the Golden Globes last night. With 10 movies in at the Oscars this year, it's sure to at least be nominated (and if it draws a record number of Oscar viewers like Titanic did, meh, happy coincidence). But I will be damned if I'm observing a moment of silence for CGI blue people and their glowy brain tree. Unless they are represented by Zoe Saldana. Then yeah, OK, I can see the logic there.