I'm going to begin by saying 'The Hurt Locker' is indeed a fantastic movie and an incredible testament to the hardships faced by our selfless troops, but that is the extent of our points of agreement. For someone who is always and forever enamored with technology stocks (especially at points when they are grossly overvalued) and at every opportunity espouses the greatness of American innovation, you of all people should appreciate the technological feat that is Avatar. The technology used to create the movie had to literally be invented just so the vision of the movie could become a reality. Regarding your notion that a movie should never cost a quarter billion dollars to make, what in fact should be the cutoff? You apparently have no ceiling on what a bailout of a pitifully broken financial institution should cost to taxpayers or the bonuses paid out by the same firms that would no longer exist without help from taxpayers. If the movie is sufficiently profitable, which this one without a doubt was, why should it matter how much it cost to create? In fact, the bigger the budget, the more individuals who probably had good paying jobs as a result of it. Another point, what is so terrible about a message that encourages conservation of the environment? It is our responsibility as the species that resides at the very tip of the evolutionary spearhead to be good stewards of the planet. You state that Avatar obscures the element of having characters you can care about. Personally, I don’t find it difficult to feel compassion toward a tribe of peaceful individuals living in harmony with their surroundings who are forcibly removed by a far more technologically advanced race (think underdogs) for the pursuit of fossil fuels. I'm assuming that if you read a bit of history about Native Americans and their removal/eradication you would be obscured from caring about them as well, because, “Hey, progress happens.” I’m a bigger proponent of change and progress than you can imagine, but unlike you I don’t believe it has to come at the expense of someone else. It's quite a pity that one of your key points of focus in this article was the distraught nature of James Cameron’s love life (you might want to consider column writing for People, better yet, STAR); however, my biggest disappointment is that greenfaucet seems to have drastically lowered the bar for who it allows to contribute.