[mousepod]

After seeing Avatar, I joined the large group of movie fans who thought that the effects were brilliant but the story was lacking and derivative. Now, a couple of weeks later, I've rethought my position a bit, based on an unrelated request from my sister last week. Right before we moved to LA, I took some Disney/Ghibli animation DVDs and reburned them for my then two-year-old niece with all of the non-movie stuff removed, so she could just pop it into a DVD player and go straight to the flick. When we visited her in San Francisco last week, my sister asked me if I could burn a copy of the theatrical version of Star Wars for Ella, now four. It occurred to me that part of the reason that I loved Star Wars so much when it first came out was that it was an exciting sci-fi adventure with characters that I liked. For an eleven-year-old me, it didn't matter that the story was derivative or that there were shortcomings in the logic or production. Had I been a forty-something with a sophisticated knowledge of cinema, I would have been able to intellectually block my visceral enjoyment of the film. And that would have been a shame. I hope that my nieces and nephews (all 13 and younger) get a chance to see Avatar in its initial run. When they're in their thirties and Cameron produces a crappy movie set in the "Avatar Universe", they'll get all huffy about how he betrayed his original, unique vision. And I'll quietly smile.