Things That Are Blue and Stupid

1. Eastern Washington University has decided to build a stadium with red turf. This, of course, brings to mind Boise State and their ridiculous blue turf.

Ridiculous is probably not the right word because I actually don't hate the idea of colored turf. It does make Boise's field unique, and you can't help but stop and watch whenever their stadium is shown on TV. My problem with the turf is that Boise fans are so damned proud of it, and I'm not a hundred percent sure why. It's a novelty act. A sideshow. Something meant to distract the eye for a minute. It's like the world's biggest plate of cornbread or an alligator farm.

If you're close, have a few minutes to spare, and are interested in such a thing...you might stop by. Otherwise, you're not going to drive or fly to Boise, Idaho to see them.

It's probably part of the reason why teams won't play Boise. First of all, no one wants to go to Boise. But you also feel stupid playing on a field that is blue. It feels like the XFL or Arena league. It just doesn't feel or look legitimate. It's one of the reasons why I felt like Boise will never (or should never) be considered legitimate.

But, like the drawings of the red field, I think it looks pretty cool. Because of it, I read that any school can use colored turf, which was interesting because I believed in the rumor that Boise State was grandfathered into a rule that forbade colored turf. Apparently that's not the case.

So I think that other D-1 schools should follow suit. I think black turf would look really cool, and I think a team should give that a shot. Maybe somewhere like Southern Mississippi, which is already a relatively scary place to play. I also would like to see what TCU's stadium would look like with a dark purple field. Light purple would look ridiculous, but TCU's darker purple might look interesting.

(I'm, of course, not suggesting that they switch full time...because I would like TCU to be legitimate and not a Boise-like sideshow).

And I think all teams in the WAC should follow Boise's lead and get blue fields. Because it would take away from the uniqueness of Boise, who would play 11 of their 12 games on blue turf (because they play almost all of their non-conference games at home). And maybe they wouldn't be so f-ing proud of blue turf.

2. Speaking of things that are blue and stupid, Avatar is now the highest grossing film of all time. That is, of course, without taking inflation into account. And considering that most tickets for the movie are well above $10, that's not a huge surprise (with inflation, the movie is still a huge success, but it's in the mid-20s of all time).

And, honestly, I don't get it. I saw the movie the second week it came out, and it's just nothing to write home about. The story is basically Dances with Wolves...with a little bit of Ferngully and Surrogates mixed in. A superior-feeling person comes into contact with a race of inferior beings who have this unique connection with nature (they basically have sex with everything that lives), and he comes to learn that their way of life is important using a nine-foot tall blue Surrogate. He even decides to fight against his own people when that way of life is endangered.

The plot is not unique, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You never really come to the point where you see him realize why he loves the aliens...one second he's referring to their customs as "hippie" BS, and the next, he's trying to communicate with their God. His motivations are very unclear, and I never really identified with him...despite the fact that the movie was well over two hours long.

All the stuff you've read about the movie is true, and you don't really hear James Cameron arguing about it. The movie is anti-American and a very vaguely veiled story of the Iraqi war. And in the sense that American soldiers are the villains of the movie. In fact, the movie is borderline anti-human, since the last third of the movie is basically a war between the loveable aliens and evil, heartless humans.

And that's the part of the movie that really turned me off. They never really establish that the humans are evil...they're simply people who signed up for a mission on this planet. We learn that the humans are interested in mining some mineral (that is never explained), and we know that the two bad guys (one military and one civilian) are evil (one motivated by pride and the other by money).

But the rest of the soldiers? We only meet two, but they both seem like pretty good people. We hear they're mercenaries getting paid well for this, but there's not enough there for me to cheer them to see them slaughtered.

So you don't know why he's helping them, and you don't like that he's helping them kill a bunch of humans. In other words, the plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Is the film pretty? Yes. I saw the movie in IMAX 3-D, and it was nice to look at. But it's a CGI world like many of the other CGI worlds. With a few exceptions, the film could've simply been filmed in a real rainforest, and it would've looked just as nice. So if you're going to see a movie in IMAX 3-D, go see a movie made for IMAX 3-D. It's going to be just as pretty, and it will actually be real.

It might even have a plot.

It might sound like I hated this movie, but I didn't. I probably got caught up in a problem that I usually have...in that I hear a lot about something and set up expectations accordingly. I tend to dislike movies that are over-hyped before I see them. And this movie is about as over-hyped as you can get.

And I guess I just don't get it. It's an okay film...I'd probably put it in line with Surrogates as far as a movie that is nice to look at. But Oscar-worthy? Absolutely not. Give it a CGI Oscar, but that's about it. The acting was average (at best), the story was boring at parts, completely unoriginal, and typically nonsensical, and I thought the directing was just okay.

It's a movie that thinks it's more important than it is, and people simply took it at its word. And there will, of course be sequels, and Cameron is already talking about them.

But here's the thing. I'll write you a sequel right now. If you haven't seen the movie, I'm about to spoil the ending and the sequels.

So the movie ends with the humans getting kicked off the planet, and the main character (whose name I forgot) was able to enter his alien surrogate full-time. So the humans are going to go back to Earth, and this conversation will take place.

Human 1 - "So we got kicked off the planet."
Human 2 - "The native aliens were able to overwhelm you, despite overwhelmingly superior military technology?"
Human 1 - "Yes."
Human 2 - "Well, we still need the mineral. So let's go back."
Human 1 - "Well what about the native population."
Human 2 - "They slaughtered most of our people, and we're obviously at war with them. Let's simply park our ships in orbit around their planet and lay waste to every living creature on their planet. They have absolutely no way of fighting back, and we only care about the mineral. We could even nuke the planet completely, and we'd be able to easily and safely get the mineral we want. We can't live on the planet so the mineral is all the planet can give us."
Human 1 - "So you just want us to lay waste to the planet, kill everything, and take all the mineral."
Human 2 - "Yes."
Human 1 - "Done and done."

And if the humans are as evil as Cameron tried to paint them in the movie, that's exactly what they'd do. And there's absolutely nothing the aliens could do about it. Genocide or not, killing all the aliens was already part of the humans' plan...so they'd simply go back to the planet with more firepower and get it done with.

The movie ends in ten minutes, and all the aliens are killed. The people get their mineral, and they move on to the next planet. End of story.