I Don't See You

The pimply-faced mouth-breather at the concession stand handed over our 3D glasses and gushed unbidden, "It's the best movie I've ever seen! I've watched it ten times now! You guys are gonna love it!"

Had it not been that the comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda was on my arm, the Colonel might very well have succumbed to the overwhelming desire to set the vocal chords on "stun" and subject the errant youth to a brief, but effective, lesson on a select number of points. The comely and kind-hearted Miss Brenda's ever-so-slightly tightened grip on the Colonel's arm indicated that she had detected the tremor in the Force that often foretells a curmudgeonly blast from yours truly.

I cooled my jets.

However, after watching "Avatar" and then closing my eyes for an extended strategic planning session, the Colonel awoke this morning with jets at full military power, and the beneficiary of the resultant pedantic post will be you, gentle reader, instead of the public school product pushing concessions at the multi-plex. While the electrons comprising this missive are ordered for his consumption, I doubt the young man's ability to apply the fifth grade level reading and comprehension skills required to plow through it. But, the Colonel has always harbored a fondness for lost causes...

First, the Colonel cares not one wit about the "experience" of some adolescent whose digestive tract is still processing what his mother fed him for breakfast before pushing him out the door and pointing him toward the bus stop to join the other neighborhood punks-in-training beginning their matriculation at Che Guevara Elementary School. Just give me my bucket of stale and outrageously overpriced popcorn and my watered-down and outrageously overpriced fountain drink, and point mutely toward the Men's room so that I can prepare to sit still through a long and outrageously overpriced movie. If you must speak, restrict your vocalizations to short, intelligible utterances laden with information and respect--not necessarily in that order.

Second, the Colonel wonders to what better use the several hundred dollars you spent on repeated viewings of this movie could have been put. Oh, I don't know, maybe some suspenders to help keep the waistband of you trousers from sliding down around your thighs. Or, maybe a hat with the bill on the front. Or, maybe a haircut.

Third, the Colonel would like to know against what films you applied your cinematic comparisons to arrive at the erroneous conclusion that this is the best movie of all time. "Caddy Shack" was more original and had a better plot than this tree-hugging homage to anti-capitalism. "Avatar" has some really neat special effects, but contains little novelty--most of the movie was lifted from other films. Even with the few remaining synapses firing in the amorphous goo laying fallow in the recesses of my brain-housing group, the Colonel was able to detect and identify scenes and devices plagiarized from "Aliens," "Star Wars," "Dances with Wolves," and "Starship Troopers," to name only a few.

On a positive note, the Colonel appreciates Cameron's allusions to the evils of mercenary armies in the service of corporations. These re-United States sully the good name of our people with the allowance and employ of such mercenary outfits as Xe (aka, Blackwater).

It has always been the Colonel's position that the United States military should be used to do corporations' bidding--they pay for it.