I have friends who won't go see the movie Avatar because they think it's "too political." But they will go see The Step Brothers or Paul Blart: Mall Cop. What do I take away from this? It's okay if a movie is painfully stupid, unfunny or physically repulsive, but if the movie has the slightest whiff of a political message, it's to be shunned. (Honest to God, has Will Farrell no self-respect at all? I think he deserves to suffer for that scene where he scrubs his butt in the bathroom sink with the bath mat. I'm sure his legion of apologists and fanboys think it was the funniest thing ever, but if Will Farrell is your hero, you may need to think about your life just a little bit.)

I didn't think Avatar was that political anyway. It isn't anything like an examination of US involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan. It's more like another installment in the long series of "noble savage" movies like Little Big Man and Dances With Wolves. Worthwhile? It's fun to watch. Life-changing? Not so much.

Did you watch the finale of Lost? I didn't. I started out a pretty big fan of Lost, but somewhere in the third or fourth season I lost the faith. I got tired of wishy-washy Kate. I got tired of Jack, who when he wasnt being wooden was being sanctimonious. I got tired of the way every time I started to like a character, death was soon to follow (Mr. Eko, Libby, Anna Lucia, Charlie, all morted out apparently just because I liked them). I got tired of the growing irrelevance of the flash-sidewayses and flash-forwardses and flash-diagonalses. And I'm really up to here with alternate timeline plots, which increasingly seem to be the plot device of choice these days, but seem desperately convenient to me.

I never hated Lost. It just stopped being interesting, and I stopped watching. The last episode I watched was the one where Juliet detonated the core of Jughead by beating it on a rock. I am so sure. I wasn't even really tempted to watch the finale. And now it turns out that the whole thing was, basically, a doctored version of Jacob's Ladder - and Jacob's Ladder pulled it off in about 100 minutes, and with a healthy dose of groovy horror. And instead of watching Hurley steadily gain weight from one season to the next, we got to see Elizabeth Pena's breasts. A lot.

Case closed.