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[beelzebozo]

In some ways it is hard to talk crap about her performance because well, she's doing what she can with the material she's given. When her character is dying, she rattles off not one but two groan-worthy one-liners. She's in Ghostbusters-mode far more than she is in Aliens-mode.

this is actually an insult to her two ghostbusters performances, which are pretty good.

 

[Expendable.]

WKND BO: DearJohn $32.4M, Avatar $23.6M/$630.1M, FromParis $8.1M, Edge/Darkness $7M/$29.1M, ToothFairy $6.5M/$34.3M.

 

[gdt]

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Was hoping Marty would take down Avatar.

 

[Expendable.]

little easier to see:

1. Dear John $32.4M
2. Avatar $23.6M/$630.1M
3. From Paris With Love $8.1M
4. Edge of Darkness $7M/$29.1M
5. The Tooth Fairy $6.5M/$34.3M

 

[Blader]

An Education would have been nominated.

No, it wouldn't have. The five films I listed have all been getting far more Oscar buzz than An Education (which is being hyped more so for Carey Mullian and maybe Alfred Molina, than the film as a whole).

 

[Expendable.]

Avatar sill has the highest 8th weekend ever: http://bit.ly/7ODVHB (no way it will get 9th though...)

EDIT: forgot about President's Day WKND, could it possibly beat Titanic?

 

[jett]

little easier to see:

1. Dear John $32.4M
2. Avatar $23.6M/$630.1M
3. From Paris With Love $8.1M
4. Edge of Darkness $7M/$29.1M
5. The Tooth Fairy $6.5M/$34.3M

Avatar bomba

 

[Chinner]

avatar shall regain its number 1 spot.

 

[gdt]

Yeah, it will.

 

[RevoDS]

Hope Avatar comes back, but wouldn't it be possible that Dear John, being a romantic film, gets a boost from V-day next weekend and keeps #1?

 

[PhoncipleBone]

Hope Avatar comes back, but wouldn't it be possible that Dear John, being a romantic film, gets a boost from V-day next weekend and keeps #1?

Don't Valentine's Day and Percy Jackson start next weekend? That is some tough competition.

 

[gdt]

Yeesh.

Forgot about those movies...Ahbadar's reign is over.

 

[Evlar]

Hope Avatar comes back, but wouldn't it be possible that Dear John, being a romantic film, gets a boost from V-day next weekend and keeps #1?

I think there are is another RomCom coming out next week which may eat Dear John's lunch (Valentine's Day), while Avatar will recover somewhat due to the lack of a Superbowl next weekend. On the other hand, two major releases are coming next week, one aimed at kids (Percy Jackson and the Insufferably Long Name) and the other at 18-35 males and couples (The Wolfman). It's the most competitive weekend against Avatar since Christmas, and it's easy to believe at least one of those may top Avatar.

 

[jett]

Heh next tuesday my local 3D cinema is having a special promotion for Avatar. I shall watch it for a fourth time at half price.

 

[Expendable.]

Yeesh.

Forgot about those movies...Ahbadar's reign is over.

and Wolfman....

 

[border]

Could it not just be that Kate Winslet is hard to deal with? You will never know the answers you are looking for, but you certainly like drawing conclusions based on little evidence,

It's kinda hard to blame Winslet alone when other lead actors like Hamilton have said as much, and many of the ones that haven't spoken have not collaborated again. If you read the entire article you'd see that Mary Elizabeth Masterantonio had a well-known breakdown on the set of The Abyss. Are all these people just "being difficult"? It's just a coincidence that he's going on like 5 marriages?

At any rate, most of what I reacted to was Cameron essentially saying "I'd rather be a great director than a good husband or father." Yeesh, then don't get married and for god's sake don't have a kid.

 

[See You Next Wednesday]

LTTP but I just watched Avatar.

I thought waiting a few weeks after release would lower the ticket price a little.

Went & bought 2 tickets, a total of $28.... $28? TWENTY-EIGHT DOLLARS, NEARLY $30 FOR TWO LOUSY TICKETS?
Just a added kick in the nuts, two small cokes & a small popcorn was $12.

My theater is big too, but the only two options for the movie were the 3D version & Imax version.
No wonder it's breaking all sales records.

 

[Somnia]

LTTP but I just watched Avatar.

I thought waiting a few weeks after release would lower the ticket price a little.

Went & bought 2 tickets, a total of $28.... $28? TWENTY-EIGHT DOLLARS, NEARLY $30 FOR TWO LOUSY TICKETS?
Just a added kick in the nuts, two small cokes & a small popcorn was $12.

My theater is big too, but the only two options for the movie were the 3D version & Imax version.
No wonder it's breaking all sales records.

Ya but it's also beating all movies ticket sales since Titanic (but won't beat Titanics domestic, that is) so it kinda adds up.

 

[Expendable.]

finally posted this list, thanks for your help GAF!

 

[border]

The only movies that can rival Avatar's box office will be those that push some other new technology, forcing ticket prices to rise to $18-$20.

My guess is that it will involve holograms and/or smell-o-vision.

Went & bought 2 tickets, a total of $28.... $28? TWENTY-EIGHT DOLLARS, NEARLY $30 FOR TWO LOUSY TICKETS?
Just a added kick in the nuts, two small cokes & a small popcorn was $12.

This is why I think 3D is such a bad idea for Hollywood, and movie theatres. It means some movies like Avatar will shatter records, but overall it just means I'm going to the movies a lot less and being far more selective than I used to be.

 

[SCULLIBUNDO]

The only film on your list that I think has a shot is Tin Tin.

 

[Solo]

None of them do.

 

[gdt]

The only movie with a real shot is, of course, Avatar 2.

I don't know if it will have the same kind of legs (I doubt it), but it will have, by far, the biggest opening weekend/week of all time.

 

[chubigans]

-Schwarzenegger came out like a stand-up comic, saying he’s there to celebrate a great immigrant story, a man who came to Hollywood and made billions of dollars, became admired by millions of people… but “that’s enough talking about myself. I got carried away! Sorry about that!”

Bwahaha :lol

 

[jett]

The only film on your list that I think has a shot is Tin Tin.

You're such a spielberg fanboy It doesn't have a chance in hell.

 

[GhaleonEB]

The only film on your list that I think has a shot is Tin Tin.

The only thing I know about Tin Tin is that Spielberg is making it, using Cameron's performance capture and 3D camera system. What else makes it have a shot?

 

[Dead]

Tintin should do really well in Europe

But overall it doesn't have a shot whatsoever.

Im afraid it will kind of bomb as well, since no one in the US knows what Tintin even is

 

[Gui_PT]

Really? I thought Tintin was big everywhere =\

 

[border]

TinTin will either be Avatar or it will be Speed Racer.

 

[gdt]

I don't even know what TinTin is.

 

[SCULLIBUNDO]

You're such a spielberg fanboy It doesn't have a chance in hell.

Spielberg going back to make a family adventure movie? That already has serious bank potential. Then add to the fact that its Spielberg using all this new tech and I think it will be something pretty special. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it will come close to AVATAR's box office - but its the only movie on that list that I could see somebody actually giving a shot.

 

[Gui_PT]

I don't even know what TinTin is.

The Adventures of Tintin (Les Aventures de Tintin) is a series of comic strips created by the Belgian artist Georges Rémi (1907–1983), who wrote under the pen name of Hergé

Tintin is a reporter, and Hergé uses this to present the character in a number of adventures which were contemporary with the period in which he was working, most notably, the Bolshevik uprising in Russia and World War II, and sometimes even prescient, as in the case of the moon landings. Hergé also created a world for Tintin which managed to reduce detail to a simplified but recognisable and realistic representation, an effect Hergé was able to achieve with reference to a well-maintained archive of images.
Though Tintin's adventures are formulaic — presenting a mystery which is then solved logically — Hergé infused the strip with his own sense of humour, and created supporting characters who, although predictable, were filled with charm that allowed the reader to engage with them. This formula of comfortable, humorous predictability is similar to the presentation of cast in the Peanuts strip or The Three Stooges. Hergé also had a great understanding of the mechanics of the comic strip, especially pacing, a skill displayed in The Castafiore Emerald, a work he meant to be packed with tension in which nothing actually happens.

 

[DarkMehm]

Toy Story 3 should be in that list. 3D propelled the shitty Ice Age 3 to almost 900 million, so TS really has a lot of potential.

 

[SCULLIBUNDO]

Toy Story 3 should be in that list. 3D propelled the shitty Ice Age 3 to almost 900 million, so TS really has a lot of potential.

Uh, do you know how much AVATAR has made?

3D doesn't automatically triple your average grosses.

 

[gdt]

Toy Story 3 should be in that list. 3D propelled the shitty Ice Age 3 to almost 900 million, so TS really has a lot of potential.

No.

 

[DarkMehm]

Well, I only said that it should be on the list, because it will gross more than many of the movies listed there. I know that no movie has a realistic chance in the next 10 years.

 

[Sanskrit]

I don't even know what TinTin is.

SAY WHAT

 

[gdt]

SAY WHAT

Apparently it isn't big in the US. So...

 

[Meier]

3D propelled the shitty Ice Age 3 to almost 900 million, so TS really has a lot of potential.

Actually Ice Age for whatever reason is a HUGE hit overseas as evidenced with 2 and then eventually even more so with 3. The 3D helped some, but it's not what propelled it to success.

 

[Pandaman]

Apparently it isn't big in the US. So...

what the...?

US just keeps disappointing this century.

 

[Discotheque]

I'm excited for Tintin. Andy Serkis and Simon Pegg? AWESOMEOMEOMEOME

 

[Littleberu]

The only thing I know about Tin Tin is that Spielberg is making it, using Cameron's performance capture and 3D camera system. What else makes it have a shot?

Wow, you just sent me back 10 months, where you could have said the same thing about Avatar.

 

[artist]

Apparently no one wants to be the bearer of bad news ... Actuals in:

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/

Spoiler

Titanic hangs on to the the best 8th weekend record by 177k.

 

[gdt]

Talk about close, eh?

 

[Bit-Bit]

Well AVATAR had a good run.

 

[Gattsu25]

Just saw this in Real3D

Looked amazing, liked that they had some restraint when it came to the 3D-gimmicky stuff. Creature designs warmed on me. Far from smart but very entertaining.

I rate it a One out of One

 

[WillyFive]

You're such a spielberg fanboy It doesn't have a chance in hell.

You are right, it doesn't. But it's Spielberg, not only will it be very good, it will be super popular.

what the...?

US just keeps disappointing this century.

It's true. I never knew what Tin Tin was, and nobody I know knew either.

I am only excited for this because it's a Steven Spielberg/Peter Jackson film. I don't even know what the story is about (some submarine?).

 

[Discotheque]

TinTin will be a very fun adventure film if Spielberg/Jackson don't screw it up. I'm a bit disappointed that they are going the CG Mo-Cap route though, but it should look nice with Cameron's tech. Still I would have preferred live action.

EDIT: Actually...never mind. I don't really envision this being live action at all. It's good they are going the animated route. Anyways this should be an amazing trilogy (I hope it doesn't flop). Spielberg directing the first film, Jackson directing the second and both collaborating for the third. And the cast sounds boss:

Adventures of Tin Tin

 

[SCULLIBUNDO]

That guy who did the Science of AVATAR article at AICN has just done an interview with Cameron.

He's revealed himself to be Andy Howell: http://dahowell.googlepages.com/

Here is his interview with Cameron:

COPERNICUS: Hey, my name is Andy Howell, and I'm covering the festival for Ain't It Cool News, but I'm also a professor of astrophysics here at UCSB.

CAMERON: That seems pretty incongruous, a writer and an astrophysicist. So what do you study, what's your specialty?


COPERNICUS: I do supernovae... and I study Dark Energy.

CAMERON: Oh I do supernovae...


[teasingly, as if I'm being too nonchalant about such an exotic thing... but hey if you do anything for long enough it doesn't seem so hard, and you get quite familiar with it. Later, on the panel Lee Daniels did the same thing to Cameron, saying that he didn't feel worthy up there with Cameron just casually dropping, "On TERMINATOR, on ALIENS... on TITANIC..." That got a huge laugh.]

CAMERON: Dark energy.. and Dark Matter... those are two of the most interesting scientific problems right now.. 98% of what we know is about 2% of the universe.


COPERNICUS: Yes! We're the odd stuff! The "normal stuff" in the universe we've only found out about recently -- we've only known about it for 10 years or so!

CAMERON: Yeah we can only see it indirectly, through gravity... the expansion...


COPERNICUS: Yes, we're making a map of the history of the expansion of the universe, using supernovae, and from that we can work it out. Here in Santa Barbara we're building a global network of telescopes to study supernovae for that, and to find extrasolar planets.

CAMERON: Are they large field-of-view, large-format detectors?


COPERNICUS: No, more like medium format... maybe like half a square degree.

CAMERON: So what's the advantage...



COPERNICUS: Well, with a global network it is always dark somewhere so you can follow anything that varies for weeks continuously, you don't have to be interrupted by daytime. And you get around weather problems. And with northern and southern hemisphere telescopes you can see the whole sky. They don't have to be large format because we're not using them to make discoveries... we're following things up, doing the science.. there are plenty of projects out there making the discoveries for us to follow and confirm. Like, for planets, the Kepler mission...

CAMERON: That's staring at one region of the sky and looking for what varies, right?


COPERNICUS: Yes, many square degrees, but relatively large pixels. They discover stuff, and we can check it out and follow it in more detail.

CAMERON: Is Kepler already making discoveries?


COPERNICUS: Yeah, it is going great, they just announced their first batch of discoveries that the American Astronomical Society meeting.

CAMERON: So you are looking for the light of the star dimming when the planet goes in front? Not looking for the wobble of the star, right?


COPERNICUS: Exactly, Kepler, and we, are looking for the transits, but people can use other facilities to look for radial velocity variations after the fact.

CAMERON: So you have to see them edge-on... so you're only seeing like 10% of what's out there. You know there is 10 times as much that you can't see, but you can figure out what you're missing...


COPERNICUS: Exactly... after all these years we're finally able to constrain a number in the Drake Equation!

CAMERON: Yeah it has like 20 terms! It is amazing how little we know... how thin the scientific constraints are. But even still, it inspires people... people are always asking me, "When are we going to find a Pandora."


COPERNICUS: So I wrote an article on "The Science of Avatar" for Ain't It Cool, and it easily got the biggest reaction out of anything I've ever written, either about movies or science.

CAMERON: It is amazing how it has connected with people.


COPERNICUS: You got all these bloggers and talkbackers talking about science, rather than just pop culture... debating the finer points of convergent evolution...

CAMERON: There's a reason they look like humans, but it hasn't been revealed yet...


COPERNICUS: You mean like in a future film?

[Cameron answered in a way that I took to be affirmative, but I can't remember if he said yes, or nodded, or just smiled]

COPERNICUS: Like they were seeded....

CAMERON: No... well... [I suspect changing the subject because he didn't want to reveal anything.] The real reason is that they have to be similar enough that the audience can connect with them.


COPERNICUS: Of course... but in most science fiction, people have just shown a desert planet or snow, and that has to stand in for something more exotic, but you're really taken us for the first time to a truly alien world. I'm wondering, with the tools you've developed, how far you can push it into the truly alien.

CAMERON: Well we started off like that... we went really extreme... purple skies, different colored plants, but we found that you just didn't buy it.... not for two hours. So we dialed it back, and put more of the exotic stuff into the nighttime stuff, the bioluminescence. But there's an argument to be made that chlorophyll might be out there... that maybe this experiment has been done many times on earth, and chlorophyll is the best way to extract energy from sunlight.


COPERNICUS: Of course it depends on the output of the star.

CAMERON: Yes!


COPERNICUS: But that's why I love the choice of Alpha Centauri -- sunlike stars... similar spectrum... and they are close, space travel is sorta plausible.

CAMERON: Of course the energy requirements are still an order of magnitude out of reach, and there's an argument that we'll never be able to achieve that.


COPERNICUS: Yeah but you have tell your story.

CAMERON: There's also an argument that any civilization you approach might destroy you before you get there. If you come shooting in at 0.75c [3/4 the speed of light], with a spaceship the size that we see in movies -- if you hit the planet, you'd destroy it. They don't know you can stop that thing. Are they going to take the risk?


COPERNICUS: Haha, that's a good point. But I still like how you've made things scientifically plausible.

CAMERON: Well... the floating mountains. A physicist friend of mine calculated that for a pure superconducting mountain, to break it off and float it would require a magnetic field so strong that it would rip the hemoglobin out of your blood...


COPERNICUS: Yeah I started to do that calculation...

CAMERON: But you know science fiction is kind of the opposite of science. In science you start with the facts and figure out the story, but in science fiction you start with the story and then fill in the science...


COPERNICUS: Well, I was inspired to do science by watching movies by you, George Lucas, Ridley Scott, then of course later I got into reading and watching Carl Sagan, but most of my colleagues, at least the ones my age, first got inspired by movies, and then started reading more. So one of your legacies, especially with AVATAR, may be that you inspired the people finding all these planets, including the person who does find the real Pandora.

CAMERON: I was recently asked to pick one of my films to show to 5th and 6th graders. Without question, I picked Aliens of the Deep.


[At this point they started giving directions on what to do to the assembled panel... telling them to get ready to go onstage, but he finished talking, whispering the rest while the powers that be were wrangling them up]

CAMERON: I made that to make science aspirational. I wanted to show young researchers making discoveries, not just old professors in tweed suits.


[I didn't catch everything he said there because of the noise, but he was echoing a sentiment he had expressed the previous night when he got the award, that science has not been well served by the filmmaking community, and he wanted to change that.]

With that, they rushed everyone out to get ready to go onstage. Quint is going to write up what was said on the panel (which was great). But the one bit of AVATAR news is about possible sequels. I think the moderator said Rupert Murdoch has announced sequels but he wasn't sure Cameron had signed off. Cameron said: "There's still some deals to be made... which will be easier now that Rupert's announced it."

That line got big laughs.

It was so cool to get to talk James Cameron about science and AVATAR. So I'd like to thank him, and everyone who helped arrange it. I was quite impressed -- he knows his astrophysics better that just about every non-astronomer I've met. And he's quite a curious guy. I agree with Leonard Maltin, who the night before, when interviewing Cameron, said curiosity is one of the most under-valued, but most valuable traits a person can have.

 

[Count Dookkake]

'Copernicus' is a cool guy.