So imagine our horror, when last night we attended a screening of Avatar — and it was pretty spectacular.

Simply put, although it had been foretold that the film is a stunning visual six-course banquet, we scoffed that a bunch of nice colors could serve as the basis for a film. We doubted the ability of a movie to hold us for nearly three hours with just a bunch of pretty alien nature photography. But it does.

Or it does well enough, with enough action/adventure plotting to keep the damn thing moving mostly. Again, much as we hate to admit it, it is so overwhelmingly cool looking, with a serviceable enough story, that the three hours more or less flew by.

Hollywood goes for epic in just about every tentpole it churns out, but somehow the ginormity of a Transformers 2 or a 2012 production, leave them feeling small — with a shrunken spirit and core that quashes their monstrous pretensions. Avatar, while certainly not without flaws, manages to create a sense of true epic scope in which the journey becomes greater than the sum of its effects.

It is going to become to film that everyone — nerds, families, grandparents — will have to see and it will rake in unbelievable amounts of loot; mountains of cash beyond the imagination.

So now it is time to point fingers — at ourselves. How in the heck did we get this so wrong? How did a movie manage to look so horrible and actually turn out to be great?

Well for starters, all the stuff that we ridiculed in the the trailers and publicity campaign — the laughable dialogue, the cartoonish good versus evil plotting, the clunky character names, the silly looking cougar noses — they are all in there, and they are all ridiculous. But what wasn't clear from the trailers is how small a part of the film those laughable/clunky bits would be.

We were basing much of our dread on memories of Titanic — which we still hold was the worst film ever made; thinking that the sins of Titanic, as they reappeared in the Avatar campaign, meant that the same tedious nightmare awaited us, like an iceberg drifting through the dark Atlantic towards our ship of entertainment.

But in Avatar, Cameron managed to reverse the disastrous Titanic equation, letting him play from his strong suit. Whereas Titanic was a drama with bits of action, Avatar is basically an action/adventure movie with bits of drama stuck in. Yes, there is ridiculous clunky dialogue, eye-rolling Dances With Wolves-like worship of the Earth-loving (or Pandora-loving) native wilderness people, a plot that attempts to be a parable of US foreign adventures written with the subtlety of a 12-year-old.

Yes, the irony of making a film celebrating the sanctity of every living organism which revels in exquisitely slaughtering vast number of characters is completely lost on the filmmaker.

All that is there in Avatar and we were right to mock those elements.

But those pieces, amazingly are small and fairly unobtrusive in plot that is mostly a rollicking, visually spectacular adventure (even if it sags a bit in the middle). They provide guffaw-ready moments but unlike Titanic, where the love story went on hour after hideous hour, here it basically is handled in one fairly brief scene.

Trust us, this gives us no joy to write, but this time the tea leaves were off and we must hereby humbly resign our seat on the board of Avatar-Bashing Incorporated.

To all our comrades in arms on the Avatar Sucks barricades. Our fight was brave. Our cause was noble. In some way, I'll figure out later, we can claim this was a moral victory. But the time has come to lay down our arms and return to our pastures and couches. It has been a honor to serve with you all and history will honor our valor and our sacrifice. But the war has ended. And we are losers.

And by the end, you even get used to the cougar noses.

We stand before you today to proclaim, sight unseen that Avatar will suck.

We offer a caveat: When you see this film you may not realize that what you just experienced was a nightmare from the bowels of entertainment. You may be so overwhelmed by the graphic experience and special effects that you walk away thinking that what you just experienced was, in fact, great. In the weeks that follow while you watch the massive box office total rise and rise, you may experience the rush of being on an enormous bandwagon sweeping you away into something enormous.

But somewhere deep inside, a part of you will know you are living a lie. And someday down the line, a reckoning will come. Perhaps it will be a quiet moment, sitting alone late at night four years from now when you catch a moment of the film on cable; perhaps it will be decades hence when you stare in the eyes of your grandchildren, their pain of betrayal piercing your soul as they ask "Did you really like this boring movie grandma?" But the day will come when you will see that Avatar did in fact suck, that you had allowed yourself to be caught up in a mass hysteria, and as a result your every opinion about art and indeed about the affairs of mankind should be considered suspect.

As I write this item, the embargo on Avatar reviews has just been broken and the internet is being flooded by critics proclaiming the film is actually great. Before our eyes we are witnessing even hardened Cameron skeptics, breaking down and falling in line behind the film. These are the moments that test men's souls, but we will not bend.

To begin with, we submit to you the track record. Although we like the early, blowing-stuff-up period of James Cameron, with Titanic he took a drastically wrong turn into the deeply overwrought pretension, and once you have gone down that road, and been so wildly celebrated for it, there is no turning back. And all available evidence suggests that turn back he has not.

In fact to know how the history of Avatar will play out one need look no further than Titanic. Bowled over by the megalomaniacal technical accomplishment, critics and audiences alike suspended all rational judgment and bestowed all the laurels our society has to offer on Cameron's boat sinking blunderbuss. From the Academy of Motion Pictures to mobs of teenage girls, the one thing we as a society could agree on — or else — was that Titanic was a masterpiece.

Only 12 years later are the scales beginning to fall so that sensible people can agree, Titanic was perhaps the worst movie ever made.

The first half of Titanic is the most mind-numbingly tedious tour through Cameron's big erector set driven by romance story that seemed to have been written by a 14-year-old on his first day high school filmmaking class given an assignment to write a new project for a ressurected Joan Blondell. And then came the second half which was essentially an aquatic snuff film in which we spend an hour watching people in olde timey dress get drowned. And then there was a Celine Dion song. And a bookend from the present.

Not having seen Avatar, but judging by the ample footage available in trailers and promotional materials, all the crimes of Titanic look to be present in Avatar: overwrought pretentious themes and infintile storytelling and characterization grafted on to an atomic bomb on a technical achievement meant to bludgeon you into submission with its effects prowess.

Now, we're all for imagineers creating breathtaking new worlds for audiences; and the place where such accomplishments to be beheld properly is on a ride at Disneyland. We'd be delighted to line up for an eight minute "James Cameron's Mission to Pandora; The 3D IMAX Experience." That sounds like just the right amount of Pandora for us.

And we're also all for mindless action movies. It's when mindless action movies attempt to convey big meaningful themes — Avatar is about the environment — that they morph from amusingly stupid to laughably stupid; like having a 14-year-old boy suddenly lecturing you about your duty to the world, as told through a parable of blue space creatures.

And to recap some of the crimes of Avatar we've previously compiled in our lonely truthwatch:

• The aliens have cougar noses and look like Jar Jar Binks.
• The characters have names like Colonel Miles Quaritch, Trudy Chacon, Selfridge, Neytiri and Jake Sully.
• Sample line of dialouge: "every living thing wants to kill you and eat your eyes for Jujubees."
• James Cameron employed a USC linguistics professor "to create an entire functioning language for the tribe of 10-foot-tall blue aliens who inhabit Pandora, the setting for the film's conflict." Which is all well and good that the Na'vi tribe got a functioning language, but raises the question why couldn't Cameron have commissioned a functioning language for the film's humans? Wasn't there any linguistics professor available who could put the kibosh on lines such as "We're not in Kansas anymore. We're on Pandora," whose moldy, phoned-in essences threaten to murder the mother tongue from which their ancestors descended?
• And of course there was this interview in which Cameron detailed the obsessive overtime work his crew did to get the ten foot tall blue alien heroine's boobs exactly right.

Throw in the two hour and 40 minute running time and all we can say is that may be long enough to bludgeon you into submission to Avatar, but is it really long enough to kill off that part of you, somewhere deep inside, that knows very well that this is wrong and someday, somehow, someone must speak up?

Happy viewing space warriors.

While the evidence has mounted that Avatar will turn out to be a laughably earnest ham-handed quasi-environmental parable, there remains the question of how much the big pretty forest canvas 3D images and lots of shooting and fighting could drown ridiculous plotting, characterization and dialogue. Well, not that Cameron ever had anything to worry about but judging by the first rapturous reports from the UK, he really has nothing to worry about and the power of his effects will roll easily over whatever opposition there may be.

The world's first full review of Avatar, breaking the official embargo, comes from an anonymous writer calling himself "The Sneak" in The Sun. The review reads like a fanboy write-up on ainitcoolnews, and gushes

It's a 3D movie people will look back on in years to come to comment on how it transformed cinema.

In recent 3D releases such as Beowulf, the effects were impressive but the computer-generated humans looked far from real.

In Avatar, everything feels real - and it's as if you are immersed in the action.

And what action.

The final battle scene is 20 minutes long and absolutely mind-blowing.

Avatar, out next Thursday, is truly an event movie.

As he the review goes on, however, his praise contains many hidden warnings for those not as enamored of Cameronia. A twenty minute battle sequence..."A voiceover from Sam leads the audience through the alien world in a soothing, laid-back way"... an old-fashioned tale of good versus evil. It's unashamedly populist. Just like Titanic."

In Cameron/fan boy'ese, unashamedly populist = we can make the plot as heavy-handed and laughable as we like, because only snooty PhD's care about craftsmanship and competence in those people are talking parts.

However, writing with a somewhat cooler head, The Guardian, while not formally breaking the embargo, files an article, not a review, in which it reports that people present at the screening did not consider it a disaster. They write:

The film does not make you feel sick and it is not a disaster. All journalists watching the movie in Fox's Soho headquarters had to sign a form agreeing not to publish a review or even express a professional opinion online or in print before Monday.

So by saying Avatar was really much, much better than expected, that it looked amazing and that the story was gripping – if cheesy in many places – the Guardian is in technical breach of the agreement. It is not a breach, however, to report that other journalists leaving the screening were also positive: the terrible film that some had been anticipating had not materialised. It was good.

There is, though, a certain amount of suspension of disbelief needed when watching Avatar. Cynics might sneer at the plot. The film, set in 2154, revolves around a paraplegic marine assigned to a planet where brutish humans are forcing the natives from their homes to mine a precious mineral, unobtanium, which is the only thing that will keep Earth going.

So again, not that the reviews mattered, but at least, from Cameron's side, he now can have a sense that laughability index won't be at movie-killing AI levels. And who knows, maybe Cameron will pull the biggest surprise of all and deliver a sensitive and nuanced drama underneath all the pyrotechnics.

But sensitive or not, what there is certain to be in Avatar is a lot more of it. The Guardian quotes Cameron promising "I have a story worked out for a second film and a third film." Let's just hope he had a story worked out for the first one.

Among the latest twigs on the bonfire:

• This piece describing how director James Cameron employed a USC linguistics professor "to create an entire functioning language for the tribe of 10-foot-tall blue aliens who inhabit Pandora, the setting for the film's conflict." Which is all well and good that the Na'vi tribe got a functioning language, but raises the question why couldn't Cameron have commissioned a functioning language for the film's humans? Wasn't there any linguistics professor available who could put the kibosh on lines such as "We're not in Kansas anymore. We're on Pandora," whose moldy, phoned-in essences threaten to murder the mother tongue from which their ancestors descended?
• 
  
• Then there is this interactive trailer, built around a full Avatar for-download desktop suite which includes direct links to the film's Twitter and Flickr feeds, links to buy tickets and a version of the mind-bendingly boring official trailer which one can stop to watch profiles of the characters, featuring the actors talking about their on-screen roles. If after watching the trailer any interest you had in the film hasn't been drained from your lifeforce, these clips will take care of that; the actors' dead-serious earnest quotes about the world of Avatar tell us perhaps all we need to know about how the Cameron sledgehammer touch will play itself out in this movie.

  Watched closely in fact, the words of Sam Worthington explaining in a bleary, Aussie drawl what happens when his character gets to inhabit a fake alien body: "Even though I'm nine foot tall and blue, it's got my personality. It's got my soul," could clearly be taken as a warning cry to unwitting audiences. Likewise, it would take a very cold, hard soul not to feel for the pain of Sigourney Weaver as she recites like a war prisoner reading from cue cards, the scientific basic of the future Army's avatar program.

• 
  
• And finally Defamer received this communique from a real live entertainment worker who has seen a "fairly large glimpse" of the film. Our tipster, who wishes to remain anonymous, files this report:
  

  I watch a lot of movies, and am especially obsessed with watching horrible films with inflated budgets.  I was delighted to find that Avatar didn't disappoint in the absolutely horrible fetishizing of azure humanoids that James Cameron has obviously been drawing on the back covers of his notebooks since middle school and secretly getting off to in the gym locker room. The new technology they've been using to eliminate the headaches and sickness conducive to old 3D tech has not been used properly in the action scenes throughout Avatar.  The problem is with cutting in between 3D focal points and perspective - the mind cannot adjust to it without a buffer - thus, Avatar is literally vomit inducing. 

  But the movie itself, the story/acting/tone are alienating and weird.  Of course there are very beautiful moments, with great editing/sound/art direction, but overall it's a horrible piece of shit.  The entirety of the Hollywood marketing machine is behind it, however, so it's going to make a boatload (eh I could slip a Titanic ref. whatever) of money.

• 
  

The final point our tipster makes is perhaps the most pertinent; even if Avatar is the most dreadful thing Hollywood has released since Saw 6, its grosses will be effected not at all. Cameron will surely provide enough razzle-dazzle to wow the crowds into their seats. And as Titantic showed, interminable hours of ludicrous ham-fisted dramatics followed by a bunch of people getting killed is not a bad formula for box office glory.

There is little more dangerous than a director pursuing his dream project. One thinks of such classic catastrophes as Coppola's One From the Heart, Scorsese's New York, New York or Spielberg's 1941. A director with too much freedom and a dream can lead to Citizen Kane or it can lead to The Phantom Menace. And thus far, all available signs point down the Phantom Menace path.

For starters, as has been widely commented upon, there are the distressingly Jar Jar Binks-like aliens which populate the planet where the film is set. There is the obsession with technology and its, um, various uses.

And then in the little glimpses we've seen such as the clip below, there are those nagging hints of all those things that made Titatnic so cringeworthy when it wasn't busy drowning people: two-fisted ham-handed over-acting, a laughable two-dimensional good versus evil plotline to tie together all the explosions, dialogue like "every living thing wants to kill you and eat your eyes for Jujubees," and characters named things like Colonel Miles Quaritch, Trudy Chacon, Selfridge, Neytiri and Jake Sully.

And through it all these distractingly zany looking blue cartoons with big cat noses marching around.

Well, perhaps it will all look a lot better in 3D, but in the meantime, we should all strap in and prepare for what could well turn out to be the worst movie you have ever felt obliged to see.

Watch the clip below and see if you don't get that "Uh oh" feeling in the pit of your stomach.

Via Empireonline.com

On that far side, James Cameron has long sat as Hollywood's, raging at all within his grasp, building cruise ships and sinking them; the sort of man whom makes one constantly thankful that film directors aren't allowed to use and shoot off real tanks and bazookas and aircraft carriers and near-future laser weapons.

But while Cameron's mania is well developed version of a teenager's desire to see stuff realistically get blown up and see a cartoon characters supernatural boobs, on a more ethereal level of the spectrum, floating above Cameron, is German director Werner Herzog. Whereas Cameron is incapable of articulating his vision of a world built around things getting blown up, Herzog is a poet of obsession and devastation, who can beautifully articulate his world view, as he did in his documentary Grizzly Man describing nature as "a place of chaos, hostility, and murder."

And while Cameron is on the brink of releasing his zillion-dollar Avatar, enhanced with specially invented cameras to motion capture every pulse of a human eyelid, Herzog's world is about to be nakedly on display in his first dramatic film in years, the low-budget, exploitation-invoking Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. And while the world's press will spend the next month fawning over Cameron's auteur's journey into the world of a bunch of new gadgets, a piece in the LA Times captures the sense of a truly visionary megalomaniac at work with nothing but an equally off-kilter actor and some lizards.

The film which stars Nicholas Cage in his finest performance in a decade as an out-of-control, drug addicted cop in post-Katrina New Orleans. Audiences will have the sense, familiar from late 70's - early 80's films, of being in a film about a world out of control when at some point during the two hours it is no longer clear whether it is the just characters who are drugged out of their mind, or is it the filmmakers, or perhaps, the feeling grows on one, it may in fact be the audience ourselves, you'll wonder as you check to see if anyone has slipped something into your popcorn.

The LA Times piece reveals, however, it being a Herzog set, the director himself asked many of the same questions:

Cage's tweaker technique was so realistic, it caused the movie's director, Werner Herzog — who worked with Kinski on five films — to call into question what the Oscar winner was really putting up his nose.

"We had prop cocaine. Nicolas would sniff it, and I would ask him to shift positions," Herzog recently recalled. "From the moment I would ask him to move, he would be acting erratic. All of a sudden, I had the feeling: For God's sake, has he taken cocaine?"

Within the movie there a couple moments which have caused noted mirth and distress in early screenings when the film switches to the point of view of an iguana. While these moments stood out to many as some obvious candidates for the cutting room floor, Herzog reveals they are the very heart of his vision:

Herzog's epiphany took place at a party about midway through shooting. "Werner had had a couple of drinks," Cage said. "He said in this distraught voice, 'The iguanas are the best thing in the movie. And I must have five minutes of iguana time! And if I don't have my full five minutes of iguana time, I will never make another movie again!' "

Cameron may have his 3D, but until he can see the world as a lizard, he'll always be just a boy playing with toys.

Having built and sunk and ocean liner, were there any mountains left or had humanity been already given all the tools it needed to ensure its eternal contentment?

As we stand on the cusp of revelation, media speculation has focused on the innovations in filmmaking Avatar will bring our suffering world; new digital tools that revolutionize 3D photography, like a "Fusion Camera System" that will perhaps make 3D the multiplex standard for decades to come.

But in an interview with Playboy, Cameron revealed that all this Fusion Systeming and "Facial Performance Replacement" has really been just the nuts and bolts and that the real mission of the Avatar team has always been creating the perfect computer-generated screen boobs for the character Neytiri, a motion-captured rendition of actress Zoe Saldana; a problem so complex and difficult that it apparently took a team of hundreds a decade to solve it to Cameron's exacting standards.

Discussing the film, the interview focused on the mytho-historical place of cartoon women in our society before turning to the matter of Avatar's technological breakthrough:

PLAYBOY: We seem to need fantasy icons like Lara Croft and Wonder Woman, despite knowing they mess with our heads.
CAMERON: Most of men's problems with women probably have to do with realizing women are real and most of them don't look or act like Vampirella. A big recalibration happens when we're forced to deal with real women, and there's a certain geek population that would much rather deal with fantasy women than real women. Let's face it: Real women are complicated. You can try your whole life and not understand them.

PLAYBOY: How much did you get into calibrating your movie heroine's hotness?
CAMERON: Right from the beginning I said, "She's got to have tits," even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na'vi, aren't placental mammals. I designed her costumes based on a taparrabo, a loincloth thing worn by Mayan Indians. We go to another planet in this movie, so it would be stupid if she ran around in a Brazilian thong or a fur bikini like Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.

PLAYBOY: Are her breasts on view?
CAMERON: I came up with this free-floating, lion's-mane-like array of feathers, and we strategically lit and angled shots to not draw attention to her breasts, but they're right there. The animation uses a physics-based sim that takes into consideration gravity, air movement and the momentum of her hair, her top. We had a shot in which Neytiri falls into a specific position, and because she is lit by orange firelight, it lights up the nipples. That was good, except we're going for a PG-13 rating, so we wound up having to fix it. We'll have to put it on the special edition DVD; it will be a collector's item. A Neytiri Playboy Centerfold would have been a good idea.

PLAYBOY: So you're okay with arousing PG-13 chubbies?
CAMERON: If such a thing should ­happen—and I'm not saying it will—that would be fine.

As ever in society, the real innovators will go unheralded. Generations of schoolchildren will gaze upon Neytiri's bosom without ever knowing the names of the heroic scientists who gave ten years of their lives to make the dream of those breasts a reality.

This thing looks faker than that stripper's third tit in Total Recall. Even the real humans look fake! Why would you do that to Zoe Saldana? Why?!

Anyway the movie is about a paralyzed American soldier who takes a job mining on a far away planet that is home to an alien race. The thing is, human's can't live on the planet, so they have to use avatars, clones of the blue-toons that are inhabited by the consciousness of the humans. Of course, our human eventually falls in love with a blue-toon and joins her people's fight to get humans to stop destroying her planet and leave. Colonialism! Environmentalism! See, District 9 isn't the only message movie.

Cameron should have learned his lesson from the Star Wars prequels: if you don't step away from the cinematic easel, you're going to end up with a canvas that is full of pretty doodles and no life. Or in this case, horny blue-toons that like to fight then make out. Well, we're glad our expectations have been lowered, so that the 3-D version might still blow us away. Don't let us down, Cameron. You probably won't have a chance to make it up to us until your next movie in 2025.

1. In the nerd equivalent of heaven, James Cameron and Peter Jackson attended their first Comic-Con, and did a panel together where they talk about the future of film-making and Jackson reveals that a script for The Hobbit, his Lord of the Rings prequel, will be finished in a month. [Zap2It]

2. Lost isn't known for parting with information easily, but they did have some good tidbits at their panel. Characters Juliet and Daniel Faraday will be back for the final season. Also in season six: no more time travel, the return of Charlie and Boone, the backstory for the enigmatic Richard Alpert, and some allusions to what may be alternate timelines. Damn, that shit makes our brain hurt. [EOnline]

3. Warner Bros. tried to roll out the new Patricia Heaton comedy The Middle at their Mom-A-Con. No one showed for the counter programming. Everyone said, "Mom, stop embarrasing me!" [THRFeed]

4. Hayden Panettiere is going to get some girl-on-girl action for the new season of Heroes. Yeah, cause that is what is going to fix this show. [io9]

5. Two scenes from the upcoming Twilight sequel, New Moon, were screened. Lots of girls screamed. [CelebrityCafe]

6. Iron Man 2 is going to fucking rule. Fans were excited by footage that shows Samuel L. Jackson's return as Nick Fury, Mickey Rourke playing new villain Whiplash, and a bunch of awesome special effects. Robert Downey Jr, director Jon Favreau, and new additions Scarlett Johannson (who plays sexy spy Black Widow) and Don Cheadle (replacing Terrence Howard) were all in attendance. That's either an A-List Comic-Con panel or a night at The Waverly Inn. [EW]

7. Ok, Iron Man gets two entries because the sequel is laying the foundation for Marvel's much anticipated (among comic geeks) Avengers movie (not the crappy Uma Thurmond one, this one has Captain American and shit). [EOnline]

8. We haven't seen the last of Battlestar Galactica, Edward James Olmos' career to continue. [io9]

9. You're probably not going to see Family Guy's "Abortion Episode," at least on the air, but it will probably be on DVD. What? Fox suddenly has standards? [LAT]

10. Alien invasion drama Vis back and the geeks love it. Is there anything left from the '80s for us to bring back? Alf, maybe? [THRFeed]

Hm. Some things disappear. And then they reappear again! A lady detective pilot called Exit 19, which was passed on by CBS all the way back in 2008, has been picked up for redevelopment by the Lifetime Network for Skirts. In-need-of-work actors Geena Davis, Matthew Lillard, and Rosie Perez were all in the pilot for CBS, though they won't appear in the Lifetime version. Because they need work, sure, but... c'mon. It's Lifetime for God's sake. [Variety]

Humble little kid with a dream of makin' a picture Jimmy Cameron has unleashed footage of his latest magnum opus, Avatar: The Last Air Bender, Oh Wait No, That's that M. Night Shamahannadoonanna Movie, This One Is Just Called 'Avatar' and Nothing Else. The clip just previewed at this year's Americans Who Will Never Have Sex convention in San Diego. The event is known to some in the Seriously Never Going to Do It, Like, Ever community as "Comic-Con." Apparently people liked the footage, but didn't love it. Had it been a James Cameron-directed movie about them finally making it with Kim from HR, they definitely would have loved it. But it wasn't. So. Dashed. [THR]

Hm. Even though both the main characters died at the end of the first The Strangers (except for Liv Tyler's thing at the end Omigosh! And, no, you get no spoiler alerts here, fools), they're gonna go ahead and make a sequel. The movie was about two people being tormented and murdered in a cabin in the woods. That's what a movie is about these days. Because horror movies have become more akin to one-note pornography than anything else. Ah well. [Variety]

American Idol showrunner Ken Warwick just got a sweet new three-year deal to continue on the show. The package is said to be "well into the eight-figure range." What a jerk. Seacrest just got his big new reup. And now Paula stands alone and un-contracted. The world! So sad! [THR]

Emo Boy is a graphic novel about an, um, emo boy that will now be a movie. Starring every emo boy's blonde-haired dream, Jaime King. Remember when she used to be called James King? Things change. [THR]

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince grossed a magical $58.4 million. It pulled in $22.2 million in midnight shows. Can some one talk to J.K. Rowling about giving America an loan? [ Variety ]

Right now, with it being the End of Days and all, what would you do with $240 million dollars? Finance a James Cameron 3D movie about a band of humans pitted against a distant planet's indigenous population? OBVIOUSLY! [LAT]

Tyler Perry makes Forbes' list of 2008's highest-paid men in Hollywood. The children of Israel round out the list. So they control the movies and the banks! How do they do it?[/Film]

Fox's telecast All-Star Game delivered an average audience of 14.6 million viewers, making it the most-watched midsummer classic since 2002 — even without Jon Hamm's sexy hands gripping a bat. [THR]

Nick Hornby's An Education has gotten some pretty rave reviews. It looks to be poised as a real Oscar contender. The trailer, filled with British accents, does like pretty titillating. [Variety ]

Slated to open Dec. 18, 2009, the production already has been in the works for 2 1/2 years. When completed, Cameron expects "Avatar" to be about 60% CG animation, based on characters created using a newly developed performance capture-based process, and 40% live action, with a lot of VFX in the imagery.

"The way we developed the performance capture workflow on 'Avatar" is we have our virtual camera, which allows me to, in real time, hold a camera — it's really a monitor — in my hands and point it at the actors and see them as their CG chartacters," Cameron said.

The actors wear leotards and a "head rig" with a tiny standard-definition camera that takes an image of an actor's face. "That is going though facial algorithms and going back into the camera as a real-time CG face of the character," the helmer said. "You see it talk; you see the eyes move. It is pretty phenomenal.

"It's this amazing ability to quickly conjure scenes and images and great fantasyscapes that is very visual. We call it 'director centric' because I can use the camera to block the actors," Cameron related."

While it's hard to really picture what these advancements mean for us—the People Who Want to See Shit Explode In Space—without getting a look at some actual footage, we hear what he's captured so far is pretty mind-boggling. (Then again, this is a James Cameron film, and we have yet to hear of any real-time, in-camera dialogue-improvement technologies coming down the pipeline.) We'll just assume we'll see Cameron at the 60% CG/40% live action 2009 Oscars, proudly accepting his trophy as a crowd of virtuastars from the past 80 years, both deceased and living, cheer on his extraordinary achievement.

• James Cameron's 'Avatar' creating tech buzz [THR]

Seriously — $400 million in two weeks. But as we note after the jump, that last hurdle might be taller than it looks.

Observers attribute the record haul-to-date in part to the same repeat viewers who bumped Titanic to No. 1; turnouts among "older moviegoers, families, Latino and African American audiences" are higher than normal as well. And last weekend, anyhow, The Dark Knight enjoyed the advantage of weak competition. Those days are over, though, with the execrable Mummy 3 nevertheless looking at a $50 million opening this Friday and Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder set to usurp their own cuts of DK's marketshare in the weeks to come. By comparison, Titanic had 15 weeks at number one — most in the late-winter studio dumping grounds of early 1998, as Horn points out, and aided heavily by its inexorable march to Oscar glory.

Similar factors could dovetail in unique ways for The Dark Knight, though, as its proximity to both the fertile July market and this fall's more prestigious film crop means Warner can revive its Terry Gilliam-endorsed Oscar chatter just in time to stretch DK's long tail into awards season. Call it Phase 2, even if Warners distribution boss Dan Fellman takes the high road with Horn: "We are honored to be considered in that company. But I think Titanic will hold that record for eternity."

Don't sell yourself short, Dan! Or, more importantly, don't underestimate a James Cameron sabotage campaign — we're already seeing evidence of a conspiracy online. That's when you know you're a phenomenon.

• 'The Dark Knight' enters 'Titanic' territory [LAT]

#10. Mick Jagger & Jerry Hall Estimated settlement: $15 to $25 million #9. Lionel & Diane Richie Estimated settlement: $20 million #8. Michael & Diandra Douglas Estimated settlement: $45 million #7. James Cameron & Linda Hamilton Estimated settlement: $50 million #6. Paul McCartney & Heather Mills Settlement pending: Possibly more than $60 million

#5. Kevin Costner & Cindy Silva Estimated settlement: $80 million #4. Harrison Ford & Melissa Mathison Estimated settlement: $85 million #3. Steven Spielberg & Amy Irving Estimated settlement: $100 million #2. Neil Diamond & Marcia Murphey Estimated settlement: $150 million #1. Michael & Juanita Jordan Settlement pending: Possibly more than $150 million

Hollywood is, not surprisingly, respectably represented, with two superdirectors, three aging leading men, and one father of a calorically challenged reality TV sidekick all sitting within just a few impressive ranks from each other, right alongside the trade-in prices for upgrading to their newer, sleeker wife models. So what can we learn from this list? For starters, that there's nothing like a nine-figure settlement to really hammer home the importance of not skimping on the lawyer who'll draft your prenuptial agreement.

• Most Expensive Celebrity Divorces [Forbes]

Departing from normal procedures, the cable network didn't tout its big ratings win. The network also scheduled a last-minute special that harshly criticized its own documentary, and has yanked a planned repeat of "Tomb."

"This is not one where you necessarily beat the drum, from a business perspective," said David Leavy, executive VP of corporate communications at Discovery. "It's not necessarily about making money, or making ratings, or shouting from the highest office building. Sometimes having some maturity and perspective is more important than getting picked up in all the ratings highlights." [...]

When the Nielsen ratings revealed that "Tomb" averaged 4.1 million viewers - Discovery's largest audience since September 2005 - the network declined to put out a press release touting the numbers, as would be standard practice for a highly successful premiere. The second-season premiere of Discovery Channel's "Future Weapons," for instance, earned a media announcement for its audience of 2.5 million. A network representative, however, insisted Discovery was not trying to bury "Tomb."

No press release on the ratings was sent out, Mr. Leavy said, because of the show's subject matter.

We expect that the communications executive quoted above will soon realize the shocking heresy of his outrageous claims that there are certain situations in which entertainment companies might opt for "maturity and perspective" over "making money or making ratings" (we just soiled ourselves merely retyping those disgusting ideas). There is but one way to atone for this mortal sin against Hollywood: by stripping off his Armani in favor of sackcloth and ashes, crawling over to the Variety office on hands and knees, then personally designing a two-page ad making the rest of the industry aware of the boffo Nielsens they earned by pissing off some Christians.

• Is Discovery Burying 'Lost Tomb'? [TV Week]

Although they may have the same name, the two projects have nothing to do with each other in terms of storylines. Cameron's is a sci-fi action-adventure that he's been working on for 11 years.

Par said it has registered the name of its project with the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

A Fox rep said, "We own the movie title 'Avatar.' There won't be another film called 'Avatar' coming from anyplace."

If this matter can't be resolved amicably and goes to some kind MPAA arbitration (or, God willing, the courts—we love a good legal pissing match between rival studios), don't be surprised to see things get personal, with Fox supporting its claim to the title by asking, "Which Avatar would the public rather see, the one utilizing entirely new special effects technology and directed by a visionary whose last film grossed more than any other in history, or one by the guy who cried when the mean lady from Disney said she didn't like his movie about the chick who lives in a swimming pool?"

• Shyamalan's 'Avatar' also to bigscreen [Variety]

• Director Cameron To Shoot Again [LAT]
• Cameron gets 'Avatar' going [Variety]
• Cameron to follow 'Titanic' with 3D 'Avatar' [THR]