AVATAR

So the story goes like this: some guy named James Cameron (who wrote/directed/produced/key gripped/catered AVATAR) said 12 years ago that 3D movies were the wave of the future and set out to make a 3D movie to jump start said future. Since he had just finished this little number called TITANIC folks let him do what he wanted -- which apparently was spending 12 years inventing the technology to make a 3D movie that was so amazing no one would ever go to a 2D movie ever again. Ever.

I just spent close to three hours sitting in a dark room with Polaroid glasses on watching the above mentioned 3D flick and...

it was pretty amazing.

I'm still searching for a way to describe it but perhaps DANCES WITH WOLVES set in a jungle/fishbowl as acted by sexy blue tigers covers it. Or perhaps I should say it's almost as good as the best Pixar movie ever made. The 3D really was perfect. Quite a few 3D films make me a bit queasy but this one took the technology to a place where one actually didn't notice it. Which is pretty exciting all by itself. Adding a perfectly, completely, beautifully imagined world to the 3D just made it that much cooler. Sure it's a simple tale based on a heavy-handed environmental message. It's full of images of skinny blue cat people who are remarkably like all the "primitive" cultures on our planet. (Basically every non-Western culture is represented somehow) Some of the hand-to-hand action is logy and Sam Worthington's American accent goes sideways quite a bit toward the end but.. so what? It was cool. I loved seeing 9-foot-tall blue folks on six-legged horses shoot arrows at battleships. I loved the jellyfish seeds, the hammerhead dinosaurs, the leather winged bird lizards, and the omnipresent phosphorescent lighting. I now want to live somewhere that looks like Hawaii in daylight and a black light velvet painting at night!

However running around in a loin cloth covered in glow-in-the-dark paint really isn't a lifestyle choice open to me right now so I suppose AVATAR is the next best thing. Is 3D the wave of the future? If they keep making 3D films this beautiful, it will be.