Take Five

By George Rose

November 26, 2009

It's a message from the future saying you'll be a much bigger star than me. That can't be right!

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Dear James Cameron,

Hello, my old friend. Remember me? I'm the guy that grew up watching your movies. The special effects in Terminator 2 blew me away when I was six-years-old. I was nine-years0old the last time Arnold Schwarzenegger was in a great movie, and that was True Lies. But you knew that, because you directed him in that movie too! Oh man, isn't reminiscing fun? You know what other movie you made during my youth? I was a very impressionable 12-years-old when you released Titanic. I really liked it. It made me think things like love and your talent were real and everlasting. Do you know what I've learned since the last time I saw one of your movies? I've learned quite a bit between the ages of 12 and 24. Since we haven't spoken in over a decade, I thought I'd write to you and fill you in on a few things.

1) You don't know sh*t about love. Rose and Jack's romance in Titanic is about the most farfetched piece of horse crap I've seen since Disney musicals were relevant. The two barely knew each other before Jack dies, and I'm expected to believe that Rose would die a lifetime later and still be thinking only of some third class hobo she slept with, like, twice when she was in her 20s? You'd HAVE to be a 12-year-old to believe that nonsense. If I saw Titanic for the first time at 24-years-old, I'd say "my old friend, you've clearly never been in love." I mean, you literally start the movie with the knowledge that the old version of Rose went on to marry another sucker and reproduced for him. If she were really in love with Jack, would she ever have moved on enough to remarry and make whoopee with another dude? And if she did, am I really expected to sympathize with her when she's 80 and longing for a one night stand from 60 years prior? Rose is a hoe and deserves to be miserable. I feel terrible for the schmuck she settled for. He deserved to be with a woman who loves him the way Rose loved Jack. I'm sorry, James Cameron, but you could have saved me a lot of awkward growing up in my teenage years if you had been a bit more honest, or informed. People don't love like that, not in the liberal modern day and especially not back when the Titanic sank almost a century ago. I partially blame you for the high divorce rate. You wrongfully raised expectations for what realistic love is like in this world, and now everyone is either in a trance or bitter like me. Thanks. Thanks a lot.




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2) You're over rated. I'm going to grade you the way some of my best teachers in college graded me. I'm going to remove your best and worst test scores, which are usually flukes and offset a more accurate average. Averaging everything between is a better measure of your more consistent ability to produce quality. Lucky you, I'll remove Piranha 2 from your resume, which is the only movie I didn't see you reference in the Avatar trailers. I didn't realize you were capable of shame. Unfortunately, I'm also removing Titanic. That leaves a handful of movies that have made between $50-200 million. That's, um, impressive? You're darn right it's impressive. Most directors would kill for that career. But are you so awesome that I should blindly expect Avatar to be amazing, like so many of your mindless followers that I keep encountering? No, you're not that awesome. In fact, I hear you're quite a douche bag and, frankly, I'm a little upset at your cowardice. Did you really not make a movie for over ten years because of the post-Titanic pressure? Dude, that's so lame. Grow a pair. After Titanic, I thought you'd at least be able to afford a more confident set of balls.

3) South Park said it best already: Avatar looks like a crappy Smurfs knock-off. I was watching House, M.D. last week and was rudely interrupted by an entire commercial break being dedicated to a 2.5 minute trailer for Avatar. Is the movie really about a bunch of white people trying to kick blue people off their land because of some valuable resource beneath it? REALLY? Dressing the movie up with motion capture technology, a human-Smurf romance and IMAX 3D is almost as pathetic as your 10 year absence from Hollywood. The novelty will sell a few tickets but the story doesn't seem present enough to sustain a long box office run. And the movie is 2.5 hours long?! Most will probably be spent exploring the new world, which will be visually stimulating but critically irrelevant. If I want to see something pretty, I'll intoxicate myself and watch the X-Box 360 visualizer to the sounds of Owl City. Or I'll watch Planet Earth. I just don't see how you can create an epic STORY about greedy humans taking over some helpless blue aliens without offending viewers. Did you not read the reviews for Pixar's WALL-E? That movie is brilliant, yet people strained to find the flaw in the form of how the final message seemed to comment on the state of society's laziness. Guess what, humans are lazy. I'm lazy. You're lazy, and if you say you're not you're probably a liar. You can always do more than you're doing, and a civilization of fat people on a completely automated spaceship isn't the farthest thing from the imagination. In fact, it's quite funny they took it to that level. People wanted to find a flaw in WALL-E, and because the message hit a little too close to home people started complaining. Hey James, FYI: based on the trailer alone, it appears you're going to spend an entire 2.5 hours telling the audience how greedy and war-hungry they are. You seem to think your audience would slaughter an entire race of aliens (which at least one human deems lovable) for some valuable gold or oil or whatever. The nerve! Ok, fine, whatever, we do that here on our own planet, but we're also lazy here too. We don't like to be reminded of our shortcomings and that's all you seem to want to rub in our faces. I wish I could blindly sit back and pretend your movies are Hollywood's Holy Grail, but I'm not 12-years-old anymore. And I'm personally offended by Avatar. You already owe me my $15 back.


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