Not Fit for Duty

Turns out to be a damaged tendon, not a break, but it still means that I have an invasive splint  in everything I try to do.  Grr!

Yesterday, we had scheduled a day off quite independent of the finger adventure, so in the morning we set off brightly for Steveston up in Greater Vancouver where they keep a series of large, linked buildings to keep us endlessly entertained.  This entertainment manifests itself primarily in about 18 movie theatres, including an Imax Theatre.  We had presented us there in the morning so that we could spend $28 in order to add to the coffers of James Cameron’s production company, or whoever is collecting those stunning profits—first movie ever to gross $1 billion on its first weekend out. That would be Avatar.

I’ve never seen a Cameron movie that I thought much of, so my being there was a dubious venture, but both the New York Times and The New Yorker produced pretty positive reviews; even more than positive.  Ed was persuaded, and I’m capable of being a good sport in such adventures, and I’ve always kind of liked Imax pics.

So there we were, at 11:30 in the morning, in a theatre with a screen about 100 feet high in an auditorium that seats 260 people in about 12 very wide rows with very little knee space, very steeply arranged.  Only seats available are singles up in the middle of the back row.  We slog over half the people in the row, settle in, and the movie starts quickly.

Big beginning.  As usual in Imax, lots of swooping around.  Normally, this swooping makes me a little woozy, but then I quickly accommodate to it. Unfortunately, with the added 3-D effect, no settling happened, and I was getting dizzy, nauseous, scared.  Here I was packed into the theatre, by myself, unable—as a practical matter--to get out in the dark through the narrow passageway available to me, and feeling sicker by the second.

The only response seemed to be to stop looking.  So, I simply closed my eyes.  Every ten minutes or so, I’d try opening my eyes, but the wooziness came right back.  After a couple of these efforts, I gave up and kept them shut, resigning myself to just sitting with my eyes closed in a dark, crowded, and astonishingly noisy space for a couple of hours.  Only later did I discover that it was a 2 ¾ hour movie.

 I could follow a lot of what was going on, of course, just by listening, and sometime during the second hour I began to be able to tell from the music whether there was going to be a lot of movement if I opened my eyes.  In that latter part of the movie, there were quite a few quiet parts, so I got to see some of the advertised techno-marvels, along with lots of profoundly sappy dialog.  But the moment big moves started again, my stomach again rose up in protest.

Eventually it was over, and I could get out, though none too steady on my feet.  And now, I have to come to grips with the fact that I am no longer able to participate in the next glorious advance in movies.  That’s what reviewers are saying about Avatar.  I spent lots of years in Los Angeles, the home of the serious moviegoer.  And now it’s gone right by me.  It’s not enough that I’m old; it’s not enough that I live in a strangely isolated place; it’s not enough that we don’t have cell phone reception.  Now I can’t even watch a movie.

One good outcome, though.  Granted, my assessment of this movie would have to come with some serious disclaimers, but I do think that, by comparison, Cameron's Titanic looks like Shakespeare at its best.  My granddaughter reviews it more concisely: “A Remake of Pocahontas.”  Although with much bigger weapons, I'd say.  And, at the end, the U.S, troops go sadly home in defeat, as in Vietnam.  And also, though said to have an antiwar message, the big fun of the movie is clearly all the shooting of stuff¸ including the ‘indians,’ as opposed to the love story between what appears to be a couple of those 60’s Walter Keene big-eyed kids, now grown up and turned blue, with subtle striping.