Blue

We watched Avatar last night. Well, hubby watched Avatar and I uploaded photos to Facebook and read news stories on line and did stuff like that.

It was the first time we’d seen Avatar, we don’t see a lot of movies because of me. I can’t sit through them. I couldn’t sit through Avatar either.

Here’s the thing, and yeah, this could be a “spoiler alert” but frankly if you haven’t seen the movie yet then you’re enough like me to not really care if someone “spoils” it for you. The movie was simple and predictable. I remember when it came out there were people who no longer wanted to live if they couldn’t live as an Avatar on Pandora. Really?

And here it is, Americans (i.e. humans) want a precious natural mineral in abundance on this other planet (Pandora) which is a lovely, mostly peaceful (but fierce) bunch of elongated blue beings who got a few fashion tips from bad ‘80s videos (crop tops to be specific). Of course one of the humans gets to be made whole again both through being able to shed his broken body and also through finding love in an effort to infiltrate the peaceful blue critters.

To be honest, the flick kinda made my flesh crawl. It’s a message that has been put out there time and again in books and films. The message of, we’re kinda stupid and evil and want what isn’t ours to take and, hey, look at those cool, gentle peaceful people over there…let’s fuck THEM UP.

If we can put that message out there time and again then why oh why can’t we actually give it a go in real life?

I have a close friend who is not a John Hughes fan. I am. She takes issue with The Breakfast Club and other John Hughes flicks because of their predictability. She’s my friend, I love her, we can amicably disagree.

Because she’s smart (and my friend) I do give her the courtesy of considering her opinion on these things even if the results are the same. She’s mentioned that The Breakfast Club is rather predictable and the questions of what happens the following Monday are left unanswered but one can guess that since it’s high school those enlightened kids will slip quickly back into their comfort zone roles on Monday morning…or not, we’ll never really know. Yeah, I get that. But even the characters in the movie acknowledge that things will quite possibly be different on Monday when peer pressure hits.

Is Avatar any more or less predictable than The Breakfast Club? No.

The special effects in Avatar were all the rage when the movie hit the big screen. We have a 52” HD TV so we weren’t exactly watching it on 1960’s console TV with the tubes glowing in the cabinet, we had the home theater system blasting, it was loud. I wasn’t impressed.

The Breakfast Club’s special effects were…oh wait, there were no special effects in The Breakfast Club. It took place in a school library over the course of one day. Huh, no need to tell the story of elongated blue high school kids, I guess.

I admit that I went to bed before Avatar was over. I was sleepy and I couldn’t really do anything fun on the computer (like this) because it would’ve ruined the experience for my husband.

When he came to bed he said how much he loved the movie. I thought he was joking. I did. Hubby is usually rather cynical about most things. Not the type to be moved by elongated blue creatures (or so one would’ve thought).

I must’ve asked him four times before he fell asleep if he was joking about the movie and he assured me he thought it was brilliant. He mentioned the special effects and it made me wonder how much of that is what made the movie appeal to some people.

The New Yorker of a week or two ago had a piece about the final Harry Potter movie and how much the writer’s young son (8? 10? I could find this out easy enough by going upstairs and actually GETTING that issue of The New Yorker…but I’m lazy and this is no research paper, if the actual age of said child is bugging you find the damn article yourself) enjoyed it but he went on to speculate if children today would be able to enjoy a movie in the future if it didn’t have a lot of special effects. Clearly my husband has a bit of that in him even now.

In many ways the Harry Potter movies and books tell a similar story to that in Avatar, good vs. evil and some romance tossed into the mix. Unreal and unbelievable events happen in both movies because they are make-believe situations in parallel universes. In the case of Harry Potter the universe is so parallel as to be happening right here but in a magical realm, in Avatar the world itself is a different sphere somewhere else.

The Breakfast Club doesn’t exist in a parallel universe even though almost anyone who lived through high school in America might wish that it did. Most of us would fit into one or a hybrid of a few of the stereotypes sitting in that day-long detention; we were a brain, a jock, a princess, etc.

I’m doubting I’ll ever be an elongated blue critter in an ‘80s crop top…possible, yet highly unlikely. I’m doubting that I’ll ever wave a magic wand to fight evil, but I know for a FACT that I made it through high school and lived to tell about it.