Recently James Cameron indicated that he was going to write a book based on his blockbuster 3D flick, well, we have happened across the possible film sequel to the CGI-laden event.
Yeah, it starts out slow and a tad predictable, then turns disturbingly funny, so you know we totally liked it ourselves.
The Perfessor
Yeah, you read that right, the king of CGI SPFX is going to turn his latest blockbuster into a prose novel.
Cameron said he first considered writing the book when he was filming the movie. “I told myself, if it made money, I’d write a book,” the director said.
All of which simply begs the issue of how he plans on doing that. Well, we here at Cuppa have an idea or two in that regard...
Can you say Pop-up"?
Yeah, we have plenty of time on our hands too.
The Perfessor
P.S. Here is the list of his "source" material for the film (and one would guess) the book as well.
Yeah, that's what we thought too...
I was trying to make a joke here, but then I couldn’t actually think of what I needed to say to turn this into a joke. So I'm going to let it stand.
The Perfessor
Mark Twain once remarked that there were three kinds of lies, 1) Lies, 2) Damned Lies, and 3) Statistics. So whenever I hear someone (even myself) using numbers to prove their point I shudder a little. Case in point; the other day we pointed out that Avatar had passed Titanic as the biggest blockbuster of all times.
Only not so much.
Boxoffice is arguably more straightforward to report than TV ratings. You have this weekly Top 10 list of returns, you compare each movie to the other movies. TV ratings are a murky swamp where one network's hit is another network's flop and context is not just a factor, but often the entire story.
Yet one respect in which boxoffice reporting is pretty odd -- emphasizing ticket grosses yet rarely mentioning ticket sales. That would be like always reporting how many ad dollars sold off "Lost" and not mentioning the number of viewers that actually watched the show. With everybody reporting how "Avatar" is The Biggest Movie of All Time based on grosses ($1.859 billion and counting), it's important to remember how rising ticket prices skew the returns.
So, if we were to use actual tickets sold, it turns out that Avatar drops to #26. not bad, but still a ways off from the top slot.
The Perfessor
Well folks, last night it became official, Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time, eclipsing the previous title-holder, Titanic, by a cool $15.4 million (worldwide; Titanic is still up by $45.8 domestically — but Avatar could potentially do that this weekend.
You can check out the rest of those numbers over at Box Office Mojo, but know this, that in adjusted dollars, the all-time champ is still Gone with the Wind.
The Perfessor
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the movies, everyone wants to take a swipe at James Cameron. yeah, yeah he has produced a couple of the biggest and most beloved movies of all times (Titanic, and Aliens), and has debuted Avatar this year which immediately shot to the top of the charts, but, well, it seems that everyone wants to dethrone the king of the world.
First, you get folks knocking the simplistic nature of the story itself (saying that it is simply fancy CGI laid over an old story) then you have, well nothing short of the Vatican itself calling it “bland”
The
...official Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano gave it the thumbs down in a review which, among other things, faulted Cameron's storytelling as "bland.""By concentrating on the creation of Pandora's fantasy world he tells the story without any deeper exploration," the Vatican paper said.
L'Osservatore also lamented that "there is plenty of stupefying, enchanting technology, but few genuine human emotions."
Talk about harsh.
Still, while we certainly love comparing divergent movies to find similarities, even we were hysterical when we read this:
Yep, it’s tough to be the King
The Perfessor
OK, I just happened across this, and well, I normally don't advocate buying bootlegs, but in this case I'm going to have to make an exception.
Seriously, sign me up!
The Perfessor
I don't think you need a spoiler alert for this, but I'll put one here anyway
Stolen from Celebhijad.com
So, well, all of the early reports are in, and while everyone is totally on board with how fabulous the films looks, they are saying that the story leaves something to be desired.
Still, then there is this, from The Legal Profession Blog...
Cameron and Merchant-Ivory to Remake Remains
Stung by criticism that Avatar is "all effects" with pedestrian plot and dialogue, James Cameron announced today that he is joining forces with the Merchant-Ivory team on a 3-D remake of The Remains of the Day. In the new version, with a script to be written by Cameron and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Stevens, the repressed butler of the original, will become an android in service to Darth Darlington on a space station near Alpha Centauri, and like the original, struggling with an emerging consciousness. Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, will play a computer generated Stevens, with a voice-over to be provided by Anthony Hopkins. Helena Bonham Carter will reprise her Planet of the Apes tour de force, taking over the Emma Thompson role as Miss Kenton, a primate hired as housekeeper for Darth Darlington, to be played by Ian McKellen.
The film will culminate in a typically Cameron-esque action sequence, with Stevens being subjected to the Turing test by the Klingons, Romulans, and Federation representatives who have gathered at Darlington Station to discuss the impending galactic war between the forces of foundationalism and those of post-modern indeterminacy. Daniel Dennett, Roger Penrose, and Stanley Fish have been retained as script advisors.
Sets are currently being constructed in New Zealand, with the opening anticipated for summer, 2011.
[This parody was brought to you by Jeff Lipshaw, and has nothing to do with law, except that it represents one form of procrastination from grading, and reflects one habitual over-thinker's reaction to some of the over-thinking that has gone on with respect to a sci-fi movie, which the over-thinker happened to love.]
Don’t you just love it when lawyers have a sense of humor?
The Perfessor
No, that will come later (I saw it opening weekend, and yes I totally loved it. Yes it is a simple story (Pocahontas gone Dances with Wolves, meets Star Wars, only with a better story and way-better CGI; but I’ll talk more about this later, in another post). Now I want to talk about how well received the film was on opening weekend.
Avatar takes $242m globally in first weekend
Hollywood’s heavy investment in 3D has passed its biggest test yet, analysts and cinema executives said on Monday, as they tallied the takings from Avatar, James Cameron’s 3D epic.
Imax and RealD, two companies behind rival projection technologies, said they accounted for a disproportionate share of Avatar’s $242m of opening weekend sales.
Fox, the News Corp-owned studio, raised its early box office estimates, showing that Avatar beat records for either a “non-sequel†or an adaptation [of a book], with US box office sales of $77m even as northeastern states were battered by heavy snow.
Strong international sales lifted the global total to $242m, $10m more than originally estimated.
(New Moon only took in 140.7 million on it’s opening weekend), so I'm guessing there are more overweight, bearded, balding geeks than there are teenage girls. Either that or it was simply a better film.
The Perfessor
While we’re on the subject of upcoming films, I thought that I’d add this new clip of James Cameron’s upcoming sci-fi videogame ah, movie, Avatar.
Sure, sure it looks all mad-cool and like that, but if our films become more like videogames and our videogames become more like our films, will we ever be able to tell the diofference (and will we care)?
I remember an item from some years back of how George Lucas was trying to get the digital rights to various classic Hollywood actors so that he could completely re-make Star Wars: A New Hope with his dream cast (something like fantasy football, but with CGI actors).
Other than getting Sean Connery to be able to play James Bond to Infinity and beyond, I’m not really sure this is a good thing.
The Perfessor