Avatar – And Coming Up With Stuff

So I just got back from seeing Avatar.  Spectacular.  The Star Wars of this generation.  My 10-year-old son loved it and my 65-year-old dad loved it.  I guess I could argue that it was a tad too long, but that would be my ONLY complaint, and it would be a minor one at best.  It certainly deserves all the accolades that it’s getting and so does writer, producer and director, James Cameron.

Of course what really amazes me how this guy comes up with this stuff?  From the blue Avatar people to the floating mountains to the trees and plants having the ability to connect with other living things, and so on and so on.  How does he come up with this stuff?  It’s amazing.  For that matter, how did George Lucas come up with Star Wars?  How did the two brothers come up with the Matrix (another amazing movie)?  It’s one thing to produce and direct a fiction-based movie or a great period piece it’s another thing altogether to write and produce and direct something that is totally 100% made up.  Granted movies like Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan and Schnidler’s List are fantastic movies and the producers and directors of those movies deserve all sorts of credit, but at the end of the day they didn’t have to come up with a story from scratch.  They had history to help them develop a story.  A movie like Star Wars or Avatar is made up from scratch.  It’s pure imagination.  It’s just a guy, or maybe a couple guys, sitting around and thinking of really cool shit.  I’m in awe.  I’m almost 39 years old, and frankly it makes me feel a little inadequate and unimaginative.  If I really analyze it, I’ve really only come up with pretty stupid ideas.  

Here’s just a sampling:

I came up with the idea of writing an article for my college school paper (I was the sports editor of the paper) about the similarities between baseball and sex.  The article compared getting hits (like singles and double and triples and whatnot) in both the real game of baseball and in the bedroom.  I said things like getting a single was nice, but you’re still a long way from scoring where as a double put you in scoring position.  And so on.  The local catholic deacon wrote to the paper that I should be expelled from school.  I wasn’t expelled, but I was suspended from the school paper for two weeks.  When my suspension was over I wrote an apology and suggested different sports options that women could use to relate intimate matters to.  Like swimming, and doing the “breaststroke.”  Or gymnastics, and doing a “dismount.”  I was suspended again and girls called my apartment and hung up on me for a month.  Someone egged my car. 

I came up with the idea of quitting my job during a yearly review after my boss decided not to promote me.  Just got up and walked out.  Shook his hand, grabbed my coat and left.  I was unemployed for six months.  My wife wasn’t real thrilled with that move.

I came up with the idea of buying a $7,000 bicycle (a Moots with full Dura-Ace components – it was spectacular).  A year later while riding that bicycle in the Chicago Triathlon I was passed by a 45-year old woman riding a mountain bike with knobby tires.  I sold the Moots a year later.

When I was a kid I came up with the idea of using a lighter to look under my bed for a ball that had rolled under there.  Set the bed on fire and almost burned the house down.  My mom wasn’t real thrilled with that move.

I came up with the idea of taking 100mil of Viagra on an empty stomach in an attempt to “show  the wife a really good time” and almost had to drive myself to the hospital after my erection lasted for almost six hours (that’s right, just a tad under six hours – straight – didn’t  go down – at one point I was doing jumping jacks in the nude in an attempt to get the blood flowing to a different part of my body – well it’s not like I could  do pushups).

And I came up with the idea of wrestling with my two-year-old son one night while my wife was having dinner with a friend downtown.  Now this is nothing unusual, and plenty of dads have “come up” with this same idea, but I came up with the idea of giving Chase the greatest head fake of all times (it really was, I could have faked out Ray Lewis and run for a touchdown with this head fake) as he was leaping through the air to tackle me.  Unfortunately the only thing he tackled that night was the corner of the play table in the playroom.  It took six stitches to close the gash above his eye.  Both the emergency room doctors and the police had a few questions for me that night.

So pretty much that’s what I’ve come up with in the last 38+ years.

I’m going to keep thinking of ideas, but I’m not really optimistic about the results.  So keep reading, or you can go see Avatar.

I would recommend Avatar in 3D.