How Aliens take a break from wreaking havoc!

[Image via Alan Turing Year Facebook page]

James Cameron's Avatar Interview

James Cameron interview for Discovery News:

James Cameron Speaking on TED

Good timing TED (ideas worth spreading), posting last year's James Cameron talk now, just before OSCARS 2010!

This is the way to impress, not the way Nicholas Chartier, producer of HURT LOCKER, chose - censured for explicit and aggressive campaigning, resulting in a ban from attending the Oscars.

OSCARS 2010: AVATAR & HURT LOCKER Nominated 9 Times Each

My favourite movie 2009-end and New Decade-Tweens, Avatar received 9 Oscar nominations:

Best picture
Director
Best film editing
Art direction
Cinematography
Music (original score)
Sound editing
Sound mixing
Visual effects

Good luck to Kathryn Bigelow, her Strange Days (story written by James Cameron), is one of my favourite movies of the 90s:







Back to AVATAR, I love James Cameron's Pandora:

AVATAR: Biggest Box Office Movie Ever!

While Avatar has broken Titanic's record, Toby Young blogs an alternative view of James Cameron's 3D cine-spectacular. Don't be fooled by the author's comments, Avatar is a timeless, classic tale of the meek inheriting and keeping their wondrous planet




Roll on BAFTA and OSCAR awards!

James Cameron receives 2010 Golden Globes: Best Director & Best Movie- Avatar

Innovative film maker James Cameron receives 2010 Golden Globes for 'Best Director Motion Picture' and 'Best Motion Picture - Drama' for Avatar.

Well done!!!

James Cameron's Avatar is a Phenomenon: Fastest to Earn $1bn Worldwide!

Amazing news, but hardly surprising considering its global appeal (see the official fan page on Facebook), James Cameron's latest cinematic spectacular, Avatar, has earned $1bn so far, the fastest movie to achieve this, phenomenal! Everything James Cameron 'touches' turns to gold.


Pandora world, image: Flickr

From BBC:

"Distributors 20th Century Fox say it has earned more than $350m (£217m) in the US and more than $670m (£415m) in the rest of the world in only 17 days. The 3D science fiction blockbuster was directed by James Cameron, who also made Titanic, the best selling movie of all time.

The latest figures make Avatar already the fourth-biggest film ever made. Ahead of it are Titanic ($1.8bn; £1.1bn), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ($1.12bn; £695m) and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest ($1.07bn; £664m).

Avatar - ... reportedly the most expensive film ever made, with a budget of at least $300m (£186m).

"This is like a freight train out of control," said 20th Century Fox distribution executive Bert Livingston. "It just keeps on going.

"I think everybody has to see Avatar once, even people who don't normally go to the movies, they've heard about it and are saying, 'I have to see it'," he said. "Then there are those people seeing it multiple times."

Avatar has now reached most parts of the globe. It opened in China on Saturday and is due to reach Italy - its final market - on 15 January.

The huge box office takings are partly down to the higher cost of tickets for 3D performances, says the BBC's Peter Bowes in Los Angeles. But as Hollywood enters its traditional slow season, with few big films due for release, Avatar is likely to dominate the box office for several more weeks, he adds."

It has to be seen in 3D, especially in an IMAX, to appreciate Cameron's brilliance and the wonder of his Pandora world.

I love James Cameron's Planet Pandora - Avatar is 3D Awesome!

What a movie! I want to IMAX-enjoy James Cameron's giant blue cat-Navi Avatars and experience the beauty of planet Pandora again and again and again!

"On Friday, Avatar wrangled a stellar estimated $27 million on approximately 7,000 screens at 3,452 sites (including $3.5 million from its midnight start). The picture's 3D presentations at 2,038 sites accounted for 58 percent of the gross. Avatar's first day stands as the third highest-grossing ever for a December release." (From IMDb)

Update January 2, 2010: "during the week between Christmas and New Year, the box office seemed on track to chalk up $500 million for the week, a record, analysts observed. (The previous record was set last year following the opening of The Dark Knight, when combined ticket sales reached $396.2 million.) Leading the field was Fox's Avatar, which added another $18.5 million to its domestic gross on Wednesday, bringing it to $268.9 million after 13 days. (Far more impressive, however, is the foreign gross, which stood at $525.3 million on Tuesday.) " From IMDb

Haunting score and theme song awaken memories of Titanic; scenes reminiscent of Cameron's Aliens, Spielberg's Jurassic Park, Gibson's Apocalypto and Rob Cohen's Dragonheart, Avatar's allegory may not be new, but the 3D epic, in ginormous IMAX presentation, is what cinematic spectacular experience is all about, thrilling, breath-taking wonder. Cheers, whistles, applause from IMAX's audience, energy that transported to a technical, special effects planet of daunting monsters, exquisite creatures, and a proud Navi people entwined within a soft love tale, battling an oppressive invading force, you just didn't want to leave, you wanted to experience it again, and again. Avatar has received four Golden Globe nominations, it deserves them all (for 'Best Motion Picture - Drama', 'Best Director - Motion Picture', 'Best Original Score - Motion Picture', and 'Best Original Song - Motion Picture'). Let's hope it receives those awards, and some Oscar nominations too. Cameron's interview:








Thank you to James Cameron, the cast and all who were involved in bringing Pandora to life through such a fantastic movie!

AVATAR - IMAX: 1-Day To Go

Most anticipated movie this year - James Cameron's AVATAR! One day to go before I get to see the 3D cinematic spectacular at the BFI IMAX tomorrow, can't wait!




Signourney Weaver, botanist Dr Grace Augustine in AVATAR, appeared on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, Monday 14 December, 2009. Catch her on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour here.




Leona Lewis's
"I see You" theme for AVATAR:

YouTube of James Cameron's Avatar Premiere in London

YouTube of last night's London Leicester Square premiere of AVATAR here.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhTyGcKBh

From The Guardian newspaper:

Special praise is reserved for Sigourney Weaver, as "a scientist so unimpeachable that she can get away with smoking on board an intergalactic spaceship".

AVATAR 3D Movie Live Event, Thursday 3 December 2009

Few minutes to go until Avatar Live on Facebook! Director, James Cameron, with actors Zoe Saldana, and Sam Worthington answer questions LIVE!

Link to Avatar Live on Facebook.

MTV Shows

Countdown to James Cameron's 3D AVATAR Release

23 days to go!

Join the Official Avatar Community on TypePad.

From yesterday's Los Angeles Times:

'Avatar' as innovation: 'We were in new territory...there was no road there'
November 25, 2009 | 2:43 pm

"AVATAR" COUNTDOWN: 24 DAYS

"Avatar" may be the most ambitious film of 2009, and here at the Hero Complex we're bringing you coverage that fits this major movie moment with 30 stories in 30 days. Today it's the first installment of a two-part conversation with Rick Carter, one of Hollywood's most celebrated production designers, whose credits include "Forrest Gump," "Jurassic Park" "War of the Worlds," and "The Polar Express.."

GB: You've worked with a relatively narrow group of directors but it's quite the list -- Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis and now Zack Snyder. I would imagine, too, that "Avatar" is already feeling like a career highlight for you just based on its aspirations...

RC: Absolutely. Jim has made an amazing movie. He's quite a talent and when he puts his mind to something it's quite formidable.

GB: Coming into this project, what were some of the specific challenges it presented to you?

RC: I take a page out of the philosophy that obstacles are surmountable opportunities. I'm pretty optimistic because things have gone well for me. Coming into "Avatar," I had only really been working with Spielberg and Zemeckis up to that point. That's twentysomething years. My approach is to orient myself toward the vision of the director and that becomes the sole thing I have to concern myself with. There are many decisions but the one challenge really is to fulfill that vision. Those guys are so strong as directors that it's nice because the process isn't diluted with other concerns, like executives from the studio or even public opinion, which can happen to some degree sometimes. Its about the director's vision, solely, and completing it and realizing it. And at the point where there isn't something there, the task is, "What can I offer? What can people in the art department offer?"

GB: Where did you begin on "Avatar"?

RC: Coming into "Avatar," it took me about 3 1/2 hours to read the script, even before I had the interview with Jim. I really wanted to take my time to "see" the movie. It was clear that what he was doing was not just about a literal translation; you couldn't just piece it together by thinking of things you had seen in other films because it was an entirely new world. As I started reading through it there was a part -- and it's a part, actually, that's not in the movie anymore -- but one of the alien characters says, "When you see everything you see nothing." And I stopped at that and thought, "What does that mean?" And I realized that the state that I was in reading the script was that I was so overwhelmed with all of what I was seeing that I was actually starting to see nothing. I was in a state of what I call whiteout, where everything is in there. I liken that actually to "Pinocchio" and wishing on a white star that comes down and fills the frame of the window and out steps the Blue Fairy and out of that something is created, Pinocchio comes to life. So in a very lyrical way I gave myself over to that idea that there was too much for me to see.

Read more of the interview here.


Watch trailer at Official AVATAR movie homepage.

James Cameron's AVATAR Day: 21 August 2009

At Slashfilm, view the teaser trailer of James Cameron's much-awaited 3-D flick Avatar, described as a "pixar adult movie" (Slashfilm).

From Wild About Movies:

"Avatar is the story of an ex-Marine who finds himself thrust into hostilities on an alien planet filled with exotic life forms. As an Avatar, a human mind in an alien body, he finds himself torn between two worlds, in a desperate fight for his own survival and that of the indigenous people. More than ten years in the making, Avatar marks Cameron's return to feature directing since helming 1997's Titanic, the highest grossing film of all time and winner of eleven Oscars including Best Picture. WETA Digital, renowned for its work in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and King Kong, incorporated new intuitive CGI technologies to transform the environments and characters into photorealistic 3D imagery that transports the audience into the alien world rich with imaginative vistas, creatures and characters."

From The Times Online:

"It is the movie that could change film-making for ever. It has the power to alter your mind. Watching it will be like dreaming with your eyes open .... an immense leap forward for film — the equivalent of the first movie with sound or in Technicolor... But sceptics argue that the importance of Avatar to film studios has less to do with its creativity and more to do with the fact that 3-D movies are hard to copy and therefore, inevitably, attractive to an industry ravaged by online piracy.

Many in Hollywood hope that the Avatar 3-D experience could not only change cinema but save it."

From Guardian.co.uk:

"Friday 21 August, is officially designated Avatar Day, the public unveiling of a full 15 minutes of teaser footage from the new 3D blockbuster from director James Cameron, playing at hundreds of sold-out cinemas across the planet; the date that could come to define how Hollywood frames the world.... Director Ridley Scott claims that Cameron's film is "phenomenal", while his fellow film-maker Jon Favreau describes it as "a game-changer. I think it's the future".... Reportedly budgeted at a whopping $237m (which would place it just one notch below Spider-Man 3's record-breaking $258m) ... In the UK alone, only around 320 out of 3,600 cinemas are digitally equipped, while in the US the ratio is even worse (2,500 out of 38,000)".

Image from: cinemablend.com



Other Avatar movie links:

IMDB
Apple