by Joe Murray

Created on: December 29, 2009   Last Updated: January 06, 2010

There are three kinds of people who attend movie matinees around UCLA: Pods of mothers pre-screening new films for their kids, single dads pre-screening the movies for their kids, and stoned college students.  So bear this in mind if you contemplate taking your toddler to see "Avatar."

What a teen or adult would find cool, visionary or spectacular, a tender mind not desensitized by the intimate perils or hellish imagery of a "Deliverance" or "Alien" could keep their parents up with nightmares till puberty, 'cuz "Avatar's” protagonist quickly finds that the jungles of Pandora are teaming with one toothy pissed-off monster worse than the last - one, a giant piranha morphed with a giant black cockroach, would have the Alien in the "Alien" franchise covering its eyes, if it had any.

This is a PG-13 movie, parents.  Muffled curse words and science-fiction type violence aside, there are spectacular aerial shots - one follows Pandora's indigenous young hunters in a dizzying climb up massive vines dangling from Pandora's gigantic floating mountains for a rite of passage involving catching and saddle-breaking toothy pissed-off dragons (think Harry Potter's hippogriff, only not as cuddly) - in a sequence that had this 55-year-old reeling with vertigo, and is probably part of the reason for the traumatized looks on the faces of the very small boys leaving the cinema with their fathers.  Still, at a whopping 2 hours 42 minutes, this picture empirically tested as too long for most 5-year-old bladders anyway.  But I was impressed.

And despite James Cameron's stock two-dimensional villains (re: the irredeemably evil Col. Quaritch played by Stephen Lang), his fetish for firearms of all types, his propensity to overindulge his visual FX department (a small army, no fewer than 1832 people on this flick), and despite his penchant for allowing his heroes to succeed on a diet of dumb luck alone, this might well be Cameron's best work,  better perhaps than his Oscar winning "Titanic," and though "Precious" and "Brothers" both carry the monster Oscar buzz for best picture, "Avatar" might just possibly be the best event picture of the decade not to grab a best picture statue on Oscar night.

And like an "event picture" - like "Gandhi," like "Ben Hur" - "Avatar" is just that, rapidly becoming part of our collective memory, part of the lingua franca that forms part of how we perceive our world and express our connection to it.

So for the five Amish people

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