A romantic comedy about a divorced woman who finds herself in an affair with a married man – her ex-husband! Meryl Streep is Jane, the divorced woman, and Alec Baldwin, Jake, the womanizing ex who’s married to a new younger woman. Alec plays the part of many men’s fantasy of being able to start over again with a younger woman, but as only Nancy Meyers can do, this story shows that typical fantasy as a fraud. As Alec’s beautiful young wife is actually high maintenance and a be-yatch, not at all the romantic fantasy of the unhappy middle aged married man.

So he starts an affair with Jane, who for once, actually experiences the passion that was so lacking in their marriage. Is this how it is? Passion can only come through “naughtiness?” And it is a sweet revenge against the woman who stole her man, by stealing him back. But is it justice? Well, Jane also meets a good man, an architect, Adam played by Steve Martin, who gives her respect and becomes her triangle of choice. Should she continue the passionate affair or should she go for the good man who isn’t so “exciting” but is mature and responsible?

Well, eventually Jake becomes obsessed with Jane and even leaves his new wife with hopes of remarrying Jane. So Jane considers, is this the opportunity to rekindle with the man with whom she has such a long history? Can we finally have what we lacked before? She ultimately realizes that the temptation of naughtiness and excitement and passion of Jake, is part of his recklessness, which of course will remain with him because his selfish immaturity means he is never satisfied with what he has and always wants what he doesn’t have. If he reconnects with her, he will eventually do again what he did before, and to his other wife as well, because men like this don’t change. You get what you ask for. The irony is that the “bad boy” that draws women is the bad boy that betrays them. So according to this film, you should really choose the mature man who is the adult and is respectful, not the man child who is passionate and exciting. Of course, Jane realizes this just in time to finally cut it off with Jake and give Adam the chance of building a trusting relationship, which is in this movie, far more wise and deeply fulfilling than the fantasy of passionate romance, which remains shallow, and always carries with it, betrayal.

At the end, the filmmaker draws attention to the fact that Jane does not regret having the affair, as if to indicate a “non-judgmental” attitude toward the morality of adultery, as if it is not a moral issue so much as a wisdom issue.

A romantic family comedy about a 37-year old guy who gets another chance at his unachieved goals in life when he is magically transformed into a 17 year old again. Mike O’Donnel was a 17 year old in 1989 when he had a promising basketball scholarship riding on a game at his high school. The only problem is that he discovers his girlfriend is pregnant, and he decides to walk away from it all and marry her to do the responsible thing. But now in 2009, he has two kids and has never been happy because he’s blamed his wife for 20 years for his inability to accomplish his dreams. So she is divorcing him, and he is staying with his juvenile man-child friend and dork turned software millionaire Ned.

Mike has his magical brush with a “threshold guardian” who turns him into a 17-year old – again — and he considers this his opportunity to relive his dream. Until he goes to school and sees his own son and daughter as he’s never seen them before. He realizes he has been so out of touch with who they are and concludes that he is supposed to save them. He embarks on his salvific journey to build his son’s lost confidence, and to rescue his daughter from a jerk boyfriend who only wants to use her for his sexual gratification.

This movie makes a number of thematic points for the viewer. First, it addresses the universal regrets of unachieved dreams and displeased middle age lives. It shows the journey of a man who has to learn that he should not regret the choice he made for love over personal dreams. This is very unusual for Hollywood movies that tend to prioritize personal dream fulfillment over duty. When Mike gets to the end of his story as a 17 year old again, and he again has the opportunity to get noticed by talent scouts at a game, he is presented with the same exact opportunity. But when he sees his wife, who is at the game, is about to leave, just as she was about to back in 1989, he leaves the game again, this time, not for duty to responsibility, but for love. And it is in his choice that he finally realizes he did not make a mistake when he gave it all up for her.

This was a clever twist on the genre formula, that usually sets up an opportunity in the beginning for the hero, who makes a wrong choice, but at the end, he is usually set up with a very similar opportunity that, because of his journey, he will now make the right choice to find redemption. But in this film, the twist is that the choice he has to make is that he made the right choice to begin with! It is a film that questions his values, but reaffirms them at the end.

Second, it is a pro-life film in that it depicts in positive terms a teenage couple (Mike and Scarlett) choosing to marry over a pregnancy instead of having an abortion, which is the standard advice to pregnant teens. A major argument by pro-choice advocates is that marrying to take care of a child instead of aborting it results in wasted lives and potential for both men and women. But this movie makes the argument that it is not only the right thing to do to accept the responsibility and marry for the sake of the child, but can easily produce the happiness in intimacy that we are all looking for. When Mike chooses to give it all up a second time, he is saying it is the right choice to do so, it is the right choice to place duty over personal dreams.

Thirdly, it is a film that is pro-abstinence. Mike, as a 17 year old again, follows his daughter around to protect her. In a sex ed class, he makes the argument that kids should not have sex before they are adults and in love, and preferably when they are married. As he describes the beauty and responsibility of an infant daughter and how that baby should be protected by a father, he looks right as his daughter, who doesn’t realize who he really is. After his mini-lecture, all the girls are moved and give back their condoms handed out by the teacher, because they obviously want that kind of true love. When Mike is accosted by three girls at a party who literally offer their bodies to him, he holds them at arm’s length and tells them that they won’t get respect if they don’t respect themselves by such offerings. But they don’t listen, and they say, “You don’t have to respect me,” which illustrates modern teen girl’s complete lack of self-respect.

And also, the film addresses the generation gap. But not merely in the sense of Mike learning about his own selfishness through the eyes of being a teen again. But it also shows that the generation gap is also the fault of teens. When Mike gives all his advice to the other students, he is of course, a 37 year old in a 17 year old body. His is the wisdom of age from the mouth of a youth. Of course, kids don’t listen to these arguments from adults, because they just think adults don’t want them to have fun. But through the mouth of a 17-year old, they listen. Which only goes to show that teens are missing out on wisdom because of their own prejudices and ignorance against their parents.

Mike’s journey is to learn how to be a better husband and father by giving up his selfish dreams for the love of his family.

A crippled Marine joins a team of other humans from earth to displace a native people of another planet in order to exploit the natural resources over which they reside. The term “avatar” is a reference to the virtual world of “living vicariously” through a surrogate in another “world.” Thus, when you play World of Warcraft, the character which you play is your “avatar.” In this movie, however, they have managed to genetically create the body of an alien person, and the protagonist, through technology, is able to operate the body as an avatar. His mission is to learn the culture of the people so they can persuade them to move away. It’s a very simplistic moralistic tale with Manichean morality and stereotypical characters who obviously represent different “industrial complexes” of power to the filmmaker. There is the “corporate industrial complex,” represented by a greedy heartless fat cat corporation head who only cares about exploiting the natural resources and damn the inhabitants as savages (the resource material is called “unobtainium” an obvious reference to “unobtainable”). There is the “military industrial complex” symbolized in the mercenary who provides security, and only cares about killing people as his job, and then the “scientific industrial complex” represented in the compassionate scientist who wants to understand the culture and represents the Victorian “naturalist philosopher” notion of discovering the beauties of the natural world.

The story is a multicultural parable about the need to recognize our own prejudices by seeing through the eyes of the other. The Marine begins his mission by being a tool of the military and the corporation, but by the end he sees the world through the eyes of this primitive people (called the Na’vi) and ends up fighting against the humans and becoming one of the natives.

This story is also a pagan myth of Gaia goddess worship. Gaia is the pagan religious belief that the earth is a living organism and all living things are interconnected as “one”, and that “one” is god, a form of pantheism/panentheism. Gaia philosophy is what drives the extreme wings of environmentalism and it carries with it a corresponding hatred of technology as evil, because it depersonalizes life into mechanical functions, thus devaluing life, which justifies destructive selfish exploitation of nature. Technology is the enemy. This view posits human beings (or other sentient life forms) as mere servants of nature, which is worshipped as a goddess. It also believes in the “noble savage” myth of Rousseau, that primitive or indigenious native peoples who worship the earth are peace loving and harmonious with nature, while westernized civilization is what corrupts through science, technology and the destruction of nature in the name of “dominion.” Thus terms like “mother earth” versus “the sky god,” which is what Christianity is referred to as. The movie is an obvious parallel with American Manifest Destiny against the Indians as well as claims of “colonialism” against the West. When the Marine who has become a Na’vi avatar sides with the Na’vi, he says, “There is no green” where he comes from. “They killed their mother.” And in a critical political allusion to American foreign policy, the military leader says they are going to start killing the Na’vi in a “pre-emptive attack. We will fight their terror with our terror.”

In the movie we hear of “Ewa the goddess” of the natives, who makes up all living things,” “A network of energy that flows through all living things,” (standard New Age and Gaia doctrine). “Our energy is borrowed and someday we will have to give it back.” Like Native American religion, these natives kill an animal for food and then talk to their prey as a “brother, whose spirit goes to Ewa, and the body to the earth.” They claim that there is “electrical communication between the trees” that cover the planet such that it is all one big living organism that fights back against the bulldozers and military men. All the animals join in to fight against the exploiters, even the animals who were earlier seeking the Na’vi as prey. So, as in Gaia theory, the earth fights back against the evil human forces of exploitation (A theme also in The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Happening and others). And the image is one of “clearcutting” the rainforests as big bulldozers of the corporation begin plowing down the jungle.

Usually in movies, Christianity is linked up with the Enlightenment scientific industrial complex, as being the source of the problem through it’s theology of man’s dominion over nature. But in this movie, the only reference at all to this residue is the naming of the humans as the Sky People, a derivative of the Sky God of Christianity. But other than that, there is no explicit reference, thus making this more a movie about modern Enlightenment materialistic exploitation of nature versus the pagan mother earth religion.

The community of Na’vi also represents the oneness of existence. When the Marine avatar becomes accepted into the community, he is told he is “born twice. The second time earning a place among the people.” And the ritual is that they gather in a circle and all place their hands on one another, all the way to the accepted one, creating a huge circle of interconnectedness, embodying this theory of oneness, but also of the value of the community for individual identity.

One cannot help but notice the irony of a movie about the evils of corporate greed, and scientific technology in depersonalizing nature — a 3D movie made possible through the advanced scientific technology and greediest capitalist corporate environment that makes the biggest carbon footprint on the planet: Hollywood. In the movie, the “sky people” are criticized as “thinking they can take whatever they want.” But then the Na’vi leader yells his war cry, “This is OUR land. They cannot take whatever they want!” Kinda hard to take seriously a claim to private property, when the entire Gaia philosophy in the film is predicated on the negation of private property.

A feminist coming of age story about a young 16 year old British girl in 1961 England being swept off her feet in a romance with an older man, forcing her to choose between the traditional patriarchal role of marriage and the life of educated independence.

The very first shots of the film show school girls learning posture, dancing, and cooking which immediately set up the traditional notion that even a girl’s schooling is to prepare her for marriage. Jenny wants to go to Oxford to read English. Her parents are traditional in their relationship as well, being depicted as goodly and kind, yet hopelessly anachronistic. So when a dashing young man in his 20s, David, draws Jenny into a world of fun, dancing, restaraunts, art, and travel, she begins to question what the whole purpose of this boring schooling is for anyway.

The examples of “liberated” women are a school marm looking single female English teacher and the principle of the school, another uptight woman who believes education is salvation. They are made to look undesirable and education is made to look undesirable, but only for the moment. Jenny even gives a rather fair assessment from a teen’s perspective of how everyone around her talks of how important it is to be educated, yet everyone in education is boring, boring, boring, so why should she devote herself to a boring independent life instead of really having the fun and enjoyment? Jenny’s father reveals that even his desire for her education is only to make her more appealing to a rich man like David. And David even proposes marriage to Jenny, which she accepts at first, and gives up her education.

But ultimately David is shown to be a deceiver. He makes all his money through questionable, even illegal transactions. He steals, he moves black families into neighborhoods in order to buy old lady’s homes for cheaper when they sell out of racist fear. Oh yeah, and David is also secretly already married to another woman. And this is not the first time he’s done this to other women. He also happens to be Jewish, which makes this movie anti-Semitic in it’s affirmation of “the Wandering Jew” a racist myth from the middle ages of the Jew as satanic tempter, wandering around, making money by exploiting people and tempting them away from salvation. But in this case, salvation is feminist education, making this film anti-semitic feminist theory. Ironic, too, that this anti-Semitic movie would even make a reference to “the Wandering Jew” from the mouth of the father, who is, depicted in this story as ultimately being right.

Jenny is able to get back on track and manages to make it to Oxford, so she is “saved” at the end through education, a myth of the Enlightenment worldview. But it is clear that this movie is about everything not being as it appears. The traditional view of marriage of the man providing and taking care of the woman appears to be romantic at first, but is ultimately destructive seduction. The life of the liberated woman appears to be boring and lonely and uptight, but is ultimately salvation. Every man in the film is either a deceiver or a fool, and every woman who buys into this traditional interpretation is depicted as mindless (David’s partner’s girlfriend who is proud of her shallow ignorance) or a kept woman (Jenny’s mother).

The real education in this film is the education of experience that Jenny has with David, learning that the traditional notions of marriage is a seductive deception that ruins women’s lives by keeping them from independence, and education is salvation.