Category: Untidy Heap

No, I haven’t seen the movie. No, I won’t see it. (Well, I will, but not until I’m in NYC on “movie mocking” night.)

Anyway, my point, briefly, so I don’t spend all day at the group gathering explaining it and reexplaining this point to people.

In a Google Buzz conversation, I said:

Frankly, the original iteration of the story always felt like ‘enough’ to me — even when I first heard about the movie, before all the racial hullabaloo and drama, my first thought was “what will this really add?”

I mean, with Lord of the Rings, a movie presented a whole new visual medium that had never been explored (okay, yeah, Bakshi, but it was (a) not great and (b) not finished); I could see the POINT, and Jackson delivered on that point — excellent visuals of stuff I’d only ever seen on the page and in my head up to that point.

We’ve SEEN a visual representation of the Avatar story already — it’s probably in my top ten TV shows all-time, and easily in my top five animated shows — and more to the point we’ve seen it in far more depth and detail and with more nuance than any movie series could ever manage, even a great one.

I guess I just never saw the point. The fact that that the final product sucks perhaps bothers me less, since I was never that excited about it to begin with.

Here’s the thing: this movie was doomed to disappoint. Didn’t matter who was in it, who directed, or anything. Doomed.

Why? Because the show was Great. Sometimes it was even Fantastic and, in my memory, it’s damn near perfect.

At it’s VERY BEST, a movie adaptation of the show could only be a Great movie, right? It’s not going to add anything: you won’t finally be able to see what Appa looks like, or finally see how cool the Fire Nation tanks are, or finally watch cool earth bending — you’ve always been able to see all that. To hear the words spoken by good actors. To et cetera et cetera.

Put another way, the very best a movie adaptation of the show could manage is to not make anything worse.

It won’t add anything. It’s like painting a copy of Starry Night — your ultimate goal in that endeavor — your overarching thought is: try not to fuck anything up.

Say you make a Buffy movie. Just pretend. Then you get enough interest in the movie to make a TV show. You don’t retell the movie again. You go to the sophomore year in a new school. You move on. If you ever do a movie after the show is done, you do something after the end of the show, you don’t make a “Season One, the Movie” movie. I mean… just look at that idea: it’s clearly stupid.

If your space western gets canceled, but you have enough fan support to make a movie with the same cast and setting, you tell the next thing.

If you make a show called LOST, you… well, you don’t make a movie after you’re done with the show, because the story is done, and the only thing you could do with a movie is go back and retell it again, and hope you don’t fuck anything up.

I’m not saying anything particularly insightful here, am I? This is obvious, or at least it feels obvious to me: if the best you can hope for with a ‘new’ creative offering (in essentially the same medium (visual)) is to maintain the status quo with regards to that creative property, you are working on the wrong thing.

No matter how much money it might make.

Last weekend, we’re at one of those pottery painting shops. We’re almost done, and I’ve got Kaylee picked up so we can look at some of the painted pieces up on the higher shelves.

She points at a big coffee mug and says “That says ‘Dad’.”

“The bottom part does,” I agree. “The last word.”

I wander off. She looks back at it. “What’s the rest say?”

I go back so we can sound out “World’s Best Dad.”

She gasps and her eyes go wide. “They painted that for you!”

She’s like to break my heart, sometimes.

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Later today, me and my wife and my daughter and her mom will all go out to brunch together. Partly because it’s become this thing that we usually do; maybe because it’s a little different and a little different is – in this case – a pretty good thing.

Then me and my two best girls will pick up the pottery we painted last week, go to the park, and maybe even see a movie (if I can talk Kaylee into it) or go for a bike ride (if I can’t).

Kaylee and I will have some cold, leftover pizza for supper, because we like it that way. She’ll make up songs for half an hour while she plays in the tub before bedtime. Kate will read her some more of Cricket in Time Square, then it’s kisses goodnight and do-you-want-your-music-on and lights out.

Like always.

She’ll find me in the office in the morning and stand and watch until I finish the line, then crawl in my lap while we discuss how she slept, and what’s on the docket for the coming day, and what’s in the story I’m writing.

Then clothes and breakfast and off to school; hugs and kisses at the classroom door. Every day, the person who asks for just-one-more is different, or maybe we take turns.

On the way out the door I’ll be smiling because I know I’m picking her up that afternoon.

That’s my life, pretty much. A big part of it.

Daddy.

Long time coming. No other now I’d rather be.