It’s your sub for the day, Fran Hoepfner from Vulture! I’m here with an impassioned plea for you to see the newest Avatar movie (seriously) and reconsider TSITP, just like I did.
WEEKEND ASSIGNMENT
The New Avatar Movie Is Awesome.
And I say this as a lifelong hater.
My memories of James Cameron’s first Avatar movie are practically nonexistent. I saw it with my family in Elk Grove, Illinois (shout-out) and basically remember only the part where the Na’vi touched tails to have sex. I tried, in good faith, to watch the long-awaited 2022 sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, a fair and equal chance, but that film did nothing for me except give me a migraine. I like the idea that acclaimed actors like Kate Winslet are getting into a big tank of water and pretending to be aliens, but that doesn’t mean I have to get onboard. It was with this extremely bad attitude that I went to go see the third film in the series, Avatar: Fire and Ash, and to my profound surprise and shock, I liked it. Actually, you know what, I didn’t just like it –– I loved it. What the hell is going on?
I had a little conversation with Vulture’s film critic Bilge Ebiri, who is one of Fire and Ash’s biggest champions. While he’s not a doctor, I felt as though he might be best-equipped professional to figure out why this is the Avatar movie that finally won me over.
For whatever reason, Fire and Ash totally works for me in a way I can’t exactly explain. Do you think there’s something about this third film specifically that might appeal to skeptics?
This is the one where the world he’s created is the most fully imagined and the most detailed. It’s also the most absorbing of the three — even if it’s maybe also the messiest. And while some people have claimed that it’s got the same plot as the second movie, the story in this one is actually more intricate, better developed. And there’s a lot more character work in this film than in any of the others.
I love and really agree with the part of your review where you say Cameron really let his freak flag fly. Is there an aspect of the film in which you think he’s really upped the ante?
Definitely: the trial of Payakan. If you just say those words out loud, it sounds like the most ridiculous idea ever. But he’s so thoroughly established the attitudes and texture of this world that he can stage that scene and we totally buy it as a plot development. I mean they are putting a whale on trial.
Last but not least: Varang. She’s the villain of this film, played by Oona Chaplin, and she has got to be one of the most memorable characters Cameron has ever dreamed up. She’s hot, she’s scary, she’s kind of funny — she’s got it all.
The first Avatar had a bit of this, but people forget. Neytiri was hot, and maybe because Jake was such a newbie, their relationship felt more wholesome and spiritual. Now Cameron is like, “Hey, remember when we all thought the Na’vi were hot?”
There’s also something very “last ten minutes of Babylon” about Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter being in an Avatar movie.
It’s kind of perfect because Avatar is a lot like a silent film — very broad strokes, themes, performances. The movie that explains a lot of Cameron’s whole deal is Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which he riffs on, like, endlessly. As modern and tech-heavy as he is, his real roots are in silent cinema, and Chaplin’s work also had that running theme of the heart versus the machine.
JUNK TV
Did I Also Just Become a TSITP Convert?
Allison P. Davis makes me reconsider my biggest streaming blind spot.
Did you know there were watch parties for The Summer I Turned Pretty this past year? There are few writers I read more voraciously than Allison P. Davis, who has worked overtime to explore the sweeping agony that’s come to define the romances of today.
Over the years, there’s been some top-tier content that’s brought viewers to their yearning knees: Hot Priest considering giving up God for Fleabag, that season of Bridgerton where Jonathan Bailey craved Simone Ashley so fervently he couldn’t help but inhale the air as she walked by. Netflix’s romantic drama One Day delivered the ugly-cry emotional devastation of always-the-right-person, never-the-right-time, and Mara Brock Akil’s TV reimagining of Judy Blume’s Forever reminded us of the precise longing of first love. But none of these have inspired the same chemical reaction in adult women as season three of TSITP. And the feelings it provoked weren’t just a fling. The show ignited a sustained fire in our collective loins: 2025 became the year adults started yearning to yearn again.
Davis is right in noting that none of what’s on-air is especially new, but it still does feel refreshing after a decade and change of situationship romances and psychoanalytical will-they-won’t-they-should-theys. Things like Twilight and various CW shows (I’m still pining for whatever Veronica and Logan had in Veronica Mars) gave way to shows like Girls and Love and Easy — what’s with the one-word titles? — in which relationships were mostly about having sex and behaving insanely toward one another. Everyone on TV nowadays is still acting insane toward one another, but they’re doing it with the utmost affection. It’s escapism at its finest, imagining relationships or crushes that transcend having to explain the deal to your friend. As Davis writes, “Nobody is narcissistic or avoidant or insecurely attached — they are simply truly in love or not. And if they are truly in love, they merely have to wait out or defeat all the practical obstacles.” Sounds pretty nice to me.
BUMMER NEWS
Scenes from a Lockdown
Inside the chaos and confusion at Brown during last weekend’s tragic shooting.
The most harrowing part of Nia Prater and Maura Friedman’s reporting on the 12 hours at Brown University following Saturday’s shooting is not a moment of confusion or incoherence, but a scene of rescue. After spending several hours locked down in the Rockefeller Library, students are eventually liberated one floor at a time. “In the basement, students jolt at the sound of police throwing open doors. Officers arrive on their level with guns drawn and yell out, ‘Hands!’” they write. This is, to some extent, a matter or protocol — a shooter could be hiding anywhere — but the notion of waiting a mass shooting out in a basement with little to no information, only to be bailed out by cops with guns drawn, only highlights what a violent and scary time it is — to be a student, a teacher, a person anywhere in the world. “Nobody was having a panic attack or breaking down, which was definitely helpful for the situation,” one of the students says. “But there was kind of a sense that the next person that we see is either going to be a police officer and we’re going to be okay or it’s going to be a shooter and we are all gonna die.”
I come from a generation that grew up with active shooter drills. I remember being a single-digit age and hiding under my desk on the floor of a classroom, just in case. I also remember supervising something similar later during my short-lived career as a teacher. It feels like a cliché at this point to say that we’ve become numb to these stories, but Prater and Friedman find something stirring and remarkable in their collection of scenes of students and faculty working to protect and take care of one another in the face of unspeakable horror.
Click Your Way Out
I can’t get enough of the Look Book’s Night at the Museum. The biggest cat is a tiger — that’s so true!
Amy Schumer sold the Moonstruck house (and then got divorced … but the first one stings more, maybe?).
George Civeris’s subway take is the funniest one all year.
Character-actor Moneyball: Go see The Secret Agent so we can drive up Wagner Moura’s rate!
Okay, yes, I promise I’m doing my job, but I’m also currently making these brownie cookies to bring to my chocolate-obsessed niece this weekend.