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I have a confession to make. I have seen Avatar four times. Man, that felt good to get off my chest. Not that I'm ashamed - well, a tad - but I'm mainly just confused. At the beginning of 2009 Avatar was nowhere among my most anticipated films of the coming year, though Terminator Salvation and Watchmen were. Ouch. Even if you had asked me to categorize my excitement on a scale of one to ten in the weeks leading up to Avatar's release - one being anything starring Mark Wahlberg, ten being anything made by Pixar – I'd would have said about a six. Yet, here I am two months later having not only personally contributed almost $100 to Avatar's $2 billion pot, but also having named it #2 of my top 10 films of 2009. How did this happen?

Luckily, all throughout 2009 I have been cataloguing my movie going habits and musings – both here on BOP and on the blog I kept in the former half of 2009 before I started writing for BOP (Click here to read it. If you think my jokes aren't funny now, just wait). This archive has provided me with a unique opportunity to scroll back thru the year and see exactly where my head was as Avatar approached and how I came to find myself in the Pandora-induced daze that led to these events. It's quite an illuminating experience.

We begin back in March of 2009. I wrote a piece about 3D and its potential to jump start the box office the way Hollywood hoped it would. I had this to say:

"Personally, I find whole thing rather silly. I don't have a hatred for 3D movies, but I've never had an experience with one that was greatly enhanced by the extra dimension." I capped off the article with the unqualified zinger "Worry about the what's in the package, not how it's wrapped." I think I was waiting for a slow clap. I did, however ,acknowledge the impending Avatar, then nine months away, as a potential game-changer. However, I referred to its director as "James I'm-the-king-of the-world-for-making-a-movie-that-made teenagers-cry-and-no-one-likes-anymore Cameron." I think skeptical is an understatement.

Despite this, Cameron resurfaced in my writing again barely six weeks later in a post I wrote about the eclectic pleasures Sunday TV. I did a similar column for Selling Out in August. I had stumbled across Aliens, Terminator 2 (two of my favorite action films of all-time) and True Lies (another great ride) all in the same afternoon. Faced with three Cameron films I unabashedly loved, I was forced to acknowledge that the man knew what he was doing. But still I couldn't help getting this in:

"I love to rip on Cameron and won't stop. When you stand on a stage and say to a billion people, ‘I'm the king of the world!' after winning an award for directing Titanic, you deserve what's coming to you."

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