Avatar: Fire and Ash

Posted on December 18, 2025 at 5:43 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 intense violence, bloody images, strong language, thematic elements, and suggestive material
Profanity:	MIld language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drugs
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended peril and violence, guns, fire, bombs, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	December 19, 2025

A quick recap: long blue people mostly good, human people mostly not good. Humans from Earth want the resources of the blue people’s planet. The blue people (Na’vi) want to keep it peaceful and pristine. And sometimes the blue people fight with each other. And it takes 3 hours and 15 minutes.

You don’t need to remember every detail of the earlier films; if you have a vague recollection that you liked them, you will be fine because, like its predecessors, the visuals are stunning, the action is dynamic, the story is thin, and the dialogue is painfully basic, just barely enough to let you know who you’re supposed to root for. Cameron, who has said that he makes movies to finance his ocean adventures, loves water, and the water in this movie is simply gorgeous. The long blue people are, too. They all look like supermodels crossed with Mr. Fantastic. So if you did enjoy the earlier films, you will enjoy this one, too.

Next to the visual splendor, the other reason to watch the film is the villain. James Cameron emphasizes that the technique is not motion capture, but performance capture. Every actor playing one of the blue creatures performs every minute on screen, each one’s face covered with dots to guide the CGI. So, all credit to Oona Chaplin, the grand-daughter of Charlie Chaplin and great granddaughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, for playing Varang, a ruthless bandit queen with magnetically sinuous menace. And with a head like a frilled-neck lizard. She wants to destroy the peaceful community where the hero of the first movie, human turned Na’vi Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is settled with his wife, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and children, sons Neteyam (killed in the second film) and Lo’ak and a daughter called Tuk. They also adopted Kiri, mysteriously born from a human in an avatar body (the laws of biology as we know it don’t apply here), and they care for a loyal and limber human teenager called Spider (Jack Champion), the son of one of Jake’s most important foes, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang).

Like Jake, Spider is completely at home in the world of the Na’vi, though he has to use a mask to enable him to breathe on the planet. He has no relationship with his biological father. Both of those elements will change over the course of the film, as Jake, Neytiri, and their family have to find a way to defend their community, even after Varang forms an alliance with Quaritch, meaning access to guns.

As this movie begins, Lo’ak and Neteyam are swimming together, at least in a dream of repeated goodbyes. Lo’ak is still suffering from survivor guilt and has a strained relationship with Jake beyond the typical teenage push for independence. Everyone in the family feels guilt along with grief.

There are some powerful emotional themes but they are explored in a not very powerful way. The issue of an outsider giving more powerful weapons to shift the balance of a conflict was explored with more insight in its episodes about the prime directive. Before the next one comes out, maybe they could spend some of the zillion dollar budget on dialogue better than “All this time and you still don’t get it. The world is much deeper than you imagine.” This film is less deep than it imagines. But very beautiful.

Parents should know that this film has extended peril and violence, including arrows, knives, guns, and explosives. Characters are injured and killed. There is a lot of intense family drama, with issues of biological and adoptive families. The military-industrial complex from Earth is represented by rapacious, murderous business employees and soldiers. Scientists are more compassionate. There is a non-explicit sexual situation and some sensual touching.

Family discussion: What are the options for a community being attacked by enemies with vastly superior weapons? What makes Spider feel accepted and what makes him feel like an outsider?

If you like this, try: the previous “Avatar” movies

The Famous Families of the Longest Ride Cast

Posted on April 10, 2015 at 3:55 pm

The cast of this week’s big release, the Nicholas Sparks movie “The Longest Ride,” includes three actors with some of Hollywood’s biggest stars in their family trees. It’s a good reminder to check out some of their best films.

Scott Eastwood plays Luke, the rodeo rider. It is obvious from his face as well as his name that his father is Oscar-winning actor/producer/director Clint Eastwood. Here are three samples from Eastwood’s long and varied career.

Jack Huston plays Ira as a young man in the 1940’s. Houston comes from Hollywood royalty. His grandfather, great-grandfather, and aunt have all won Oscars. What’s really nice is that his grandfather, John Huston, was the director of both the Oscar-winning performances of his father, Walter Huston (in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”) and his daughter, Anjelica Huston (in “Prizzi’s Honor”).

Walter Huston won his Oscar for “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

But my favorite Walter Huston performance is in “Dodsworth.” The look on his face in the last scene is unforgettable.

John Huston directed some of the greatest films of all time, including “The Maltese Falcon,” “Key Largo,” and “The African Queen.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wjIAM0ixzY

He had some memorable acting roles, too, especially in “Chinatown.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPfrCIKhEoA

Jack’s aunt Anjelica starred in many films including “The Witches,” “The Addams Family” and its sequel, “The Grifters,” “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” and “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

And his uncle Danny starred in television’s “Magic City” and “American Horror Story” and played a key role in Tim Burton’s “Big Eyes.”

Ira’s wife is played by Oona Chaplin, whose grandfather and great-grandfather were two of the greatest talents of the 20th century. Her grandfather was Charlie Chaplin.

She is named for her grandmother, Oona O’Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill.

And her mother is Geraldine Chaplin, who appeared in several films, including “Doctor Zhivago.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2EVab2FgLg

Ira as an old man is played by Alan Alda, who is also the son of a well-known performer, Robert Alda, who originated the role of Skye Masterson in the Broadway musical “Guys and Dolls.” Here he is doing a duet on an old television show.

You can see the progeny of these stars in “The Longest Ride” trailer.

And watch out for more next-generation performers coming soon!

The Longest Ride

Posted on April 9, 2015 at 5:53 pm

Another spring, another Nicholas Sparks movie.

I don’t mind (much) that they are so rigidly formulaic. Every one of them centers on (1) water, (2) letters, and (3) somebody dying. All genre films follow some sort of formula, and we buy tickets because we want to see what we expect to see.

I don’t mind (much) the paper-thin characters and corny dialog. I don’t mind the preposterous plot turns. Much. Or the soft-focus romp on the beach and the cinematography that looks like the camera lens was dipped in honey. And okay, yes, I had to pull out my handkerchief.

Here’s what I do mind: the unrelenting generic blandness of “The Longest Ride.” And what I really mind: the unrelenting length of “The Longest Ride,” which makes its title unfortunately apt.

The most interesting part of the film is that four of its stars come from legendary show business families. The movie I’d like to see is them sitting around off camera talking to each other.

Scott Eastwood, the look-alike but even handsomer son of Clint Eastwood, plays Luke, a 21st century cowboy who grew up on a ranch is making a return to a career of competitive bull-riding, following serious injuries a year before. Britt Robertson (who is pretty much the only one in the cast with no famous relatives) is Sophia, the studious art student with a prestigious internship at a New York art gallery starting in two months. They meet sorta cute when her sorority sister drags her away from her books to see the bull-riding and Luke’s hat falls more or less into her lap. Later, when he asks her on a date, she is all but unfamiliar with this quaint custom. What, you mean he wants to pick her up? And have plans? And not just text here “Wanna hang out?” Ladies, he even arrives with flowers, to the collective sighs of the entire sorority house.

But the dream date gets even better after that. Not only is the dinner another wildly romantic gesture (yes, involving a body of water — this is a very wet movie, even by Sparks standards), but Luke actually rescues an old guy from a car wreck just before it explodes in flames, thus completing the trifecta of movie-boyfriend perfection. The ladies in the audience sighed even more happily than the sorority girls. The guy he rescues turns out to be Ira (Alan Alda, son of Broadway legend Robert Alda). And, ding, ding, ding, there are letters! Sophia rescues a basket of old letters from the car just before it blows up, and when Ira starts to recover she begins to read them to him. These are letters he wrote to his beloved late wife, Ruth, even when they were actually together. Sparks really, really, really likes to get letters into the story, even if it does not make much sense. Cue the flashbacks. Sparks loooves parallel love stories.

Ira (now Jack Huston, of the multiply-Oscared Huston family) falls for Viennese immigrant Ruth (Oona Chaplin, who wins the gene pool lottery with both Charlie Chaplin and Eugene O’Neill in her family tree). The conflict they face is that she wants to have a lot of children and he is wounded in WWII risking his life to save another soldier and cannot father children. (Sparks finds a way to let us know that the problem relates to fertility only, not the Jake Barnes/Sun Also Rises problem.)

This section is mildly interesting though too reminiscent of the vastly better portrayal of the life of a marriage in the first ten minutes of “Up.”

Listening to Ira’s letters helps Sophia think about what it takes to make a relationship work, blah blah. Blah.

Oh, it’s okay. It does the job. It doesn’t kill off the wrong person like some Sparks stories or Gothika rule the ending like “Safe Haven.” It is good to see Sparks include characters who are not imaginarily typical middle-class white Christians — there’s even a consultant in Jewish culture listed in the credits. There are no obvious mistakes, but unsurprisingly the portrayal feels no more authentic than the rest of the film.

But as it drags on, it is impossible to overlook the fact that there is more of interest outside the frame than inside. Sophia’s friend Marcia (Melissa Benoist, “Whiplash,” “Danny Collins,” and the soon-to-be Supergirl) would have been much better as the lead than Robertson, whose most frequent response is a cute little laugh, with a couple of slight brow wrinkles thrown in to show concern or confusion. The briefly referenced story of Black Mountain College’s famous experiment in art is much more intriguing than Ruth’s purchases of paintings and the twist at the end, while it will not surprise most people, requires some unjustifiable misdirection.

Sparks has a formula that is safe in its predictability. There’s always a place for movies about pretty people kissing. But it is time for Sparks to try something new, and maybe time for audiences to try something new, too.

Parents should know that this film has some strong language, a WWII battle, bull-riding peril, characters injured, sad deaths, nudity and sexual situations.

Family discussion: Were you surprised at what Ira said to Ruth when she left? Was Luke’s mother right about the reasons he would not quit?

If you like this, try: “Dear John,” “The Notebook,” and “Nights in Rodanthe”

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Based on a book Romance