His World And Welcome to It

Avatard (2009)

Starring: Siggy Weaver, Sam Worthingham Directed by: James "Jim" Cameron Rating: PG-13 Genre: Sci-Fi Other

Review Just as the Mighty One bestowed upon apes the knowledge of how to bash each other's heads in with their own bones, He seemingly has given James "Jim" Cameron the power to change the way music videos and infomercials will be made until the end of days. What once was Darwin's crazy folly has jumped into Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's hyper-driven super-egg and warped us all into a future where Jar-Jar Binks can seemingly read our minds from the other side of the looking glass, even when we're thinking about something as trivial as the shiny gloss of a really fresh Junior Mint, or loved ones far away, then Junior Mints again. After Einstein's annus mirabilis, we all slapped our collective foreheads when we realized how we'd all fallen for Newton's "apple" scam - the Earth was indeed as round as The Frizzled One's predictions had predicted. Crowds of infuriated Londoners dug up Newton's body and shipped it to France where it probably belonged in the first place, right next to Liebniz' dog-faced boy. In the same way, Mr. Cameron's theory that we live in a "3-D" dimensional world now seems as obvious (for instance, why is it only you notice that your toilet swirl counter-clockwise?). Putting the technical flash aside, Cameron has warped the weft of Sid Field's screenplay rulebook whole cloth, abandoing entire chunks of Platonic "wisdom" for something I have a feeling Mr. Cameron would call "Life." Well what is it, then? Imagine that you had given the Wachowski brothers permission to harvest your skull and hook it up to a giant movie machine housed in a theater shaped like a starship made of M&Ms. Does that help? Yes, there are still actors in Mr. Cameron's brave new world. But don't fall in love with them too much, because I suspect they will not be with us for long. Instead I foresee virtual "harvest farms" where plasmids are raised on the sloughed off cells of hair harvested from the combs of the greats (think Orson Wellies, Jeanette McDonald or, say, a young Wings Hauser). You'll be able to carry the entire Actor's Studio in a small snuff box! I recognize that I may be riding the giddy afterglow of movie magic, but, as this holiday season reminds us, don't look a gift mitzvah in the mouth.