Before we lock ourselves into a coffin-like pod and emerge, moments later, in the 10-foot-tall body of a blue-skinned contrarian ready to swat away a swarm of bioluminescent helicopter bugs because their incessant roto-fluttering is just too damn magical, let's get this out of the way: We enjoyed Avatar. Greatly. It restored the childlike wonder of the moviegoing experience, we smelled colors and tasted music for hours afterward, etc yada. But this is not to say that upon emerging from our three-hour, $17 ride in our AvaTours host-body we were left two-hundred percent satisfied with everything we'd just experienced. We had questions. Questions that nagged at us a little, even as we spent the rest of that dizzying afternoon trying to plug the business end of our new genitalbraid into an outstretched branch on the Grove Christmas tree, yearning for soul-melding union with whispering, holiday-season moviegoers from eons past. After the jump, we explore some of the issues that will gnaw at our brains until our next viewing of The Titanic Game-Changer That Changed The Game Forever. [WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND.]
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By now, even the most trash-resistant of TV viewers should be aware of Jersey Shore, the new MTV reality series introducing America to the vibrant guido culture now flourishing in the Tri-State area's boardwalk-adjacent beach communities, one that unapologetically celebrates the glory of the hormonally enhanced male body and the surgically bazoomed female form in equal measure. Last night, the Shore achieved its deepest moment of pop-culture penetration to date, when breakout stars Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino and Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi joined a fascinated Conan O'Brien for a thrilling ride on the storied Tonight Show couch. After the jump, video of their appearance and a statistical breakdown that will help us appreciate this watershed moment more completely.
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Fanboys will be delighted this week when Avatar finally kills off New Moon's waning box office. Die, vampire, die! Semper fi, space marines! Hoo-ha. But where does that leave the Twi-hards? Sure, they'll get in line, like everyone else, to see The Movie The Changes Everything, but after that it's about 195 coffin-sleeps until Eclipse. The only solution? The Cold Case, which this week looks back at one Twilight star's even more indelible (if sadly underseen) performance from 2007.
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Virtually every gushing, embargo-busting review of James Cameron's Avatar has paused momentarily from its fusillade of hyperappreciative (but apparently justified!) slobber to note that the visionary director, realizing that the necessary technology did not yet exist to execute his blue-tinged vision, put aside the script some 15 years ago, happy to stall until Hollywood movie magic provided him with a way to project the vivid Pandora trapped inside his blockbuster-addled mind onto a 3-D IMAX screen. But Cameron wasn't just twiddling his thumbs during that time, waiting for Peter Jackson's WETA team to unearth the game-changing performance-capture camera left buried just outside Auckland by a cinematically advanced alien society that would finally allow them to get Avatar into production. After the jump, Movieline's accounting of how Cameron was pushing -- slowly, insistently -- forward with the project during that frustrating time.
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This morning, ABC announced it's launching a new reality show, called Conveyor Belt of Love, in which male contestants are rolled out in front of a panel of hungry women like so many glistening slabs of man-sashimi, for selection or rejection as potential sexual partners. (Unfortunately, it seems that the ladies will not be plucking desirable mates from the moving belt with enormous pairs of chopsticks.) While we applaud ABC's efforts to streamline a dating-show process that's become shocking bloated with unnecessary rose ceremonies, wastefully exotic locations and elaborate, insincere proposals, there's even more exciting things they could be doing to shake up the primetime coupling status-quo. And so Movieline, always willing to lend a helping hand to alternative TV execs in need of inspiration, offers a few more ideas for similarly out-of-the-box shows.
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A mere three months ago, people (OK, people whose own lives are so empty that they immerse themselves in the lives of the people they watch on the television, like, erm, us) could chatter about little else but David Letterman's personal indiscretions, a series of intraoffice sexcapades to which he memorably confessed following perhaps the clumsiest extortion-slash-movie-development-deal attempt in the history of aspiring blackmailer-slash-screenwriters. Letterman, as we all no doubt remember, immediately took control of the situation by dedicating a pair of uncomfortable segments to explaining the extortion plot and (after a long weekend of criticism) apologizing to his wife. This is what crisis-management specialists call "staying ahead of the story." The damage to Letterman, it seems, was mostly limited to hand-wringing about how he'd be able to make monologue jokes about other guys with difficulty keeping it in their pants.
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Your first thought, after silently turning over the words The 40 Year Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It on your tongue to savor its unwieldy mouthfeel, is that this must be a joke, It must! Everything about this, from that strung together sequence of recognizable movie titles, to the straight-to-browser-window production values, signals to your suddenly stunned forebrain that you're watching a YouTube sketch (possibly funded by a Funny or Die or an Atom.com in a lapse of creative judgment) about a theoretical feature that would lampoon successful comedies of semi-recent Apatowian vintage.
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Today's an eagerly anticipated date on the indie film lover's calendar, when Sundance unveils the competition lineup for January's festival, unleashing a flood of tempting contenders upon fans who can't wait to see what movies they'll be enjoying a few weeks hence, if they don't first die of hypothermia in a three-hour queue outside a packed Park City auditorium. But after we've allowed ourselves a fleeting moment to savor these titles on a purely artistic level, the harsh reality is that these are competition films that soon will be pitted against each other on a frozen battlefield high in the mountains of Utah, fighting for the same handful of awards.
In recognition of the skirmishes to come, and more than a little influenced by the looming threat of the awards season soon to rage all around us, we've pored over the list and handed out some preliminary prizes to some of the exceptional members of the 2010 lineup, based almost solely upon a well-constructed logline or eye-catching cast-list. After the jump, the results of Movieline's soon-to-be-much-ballyhooed Sundance Lineup Announcement Awards, which were handed out earlier today in a small ceremony at the Beverly Hills Adjacent Motor Inn:
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Perhaps buoyed by our brave declaration of love for upstart blockbuster New Moon's chances for an Oscar nomination -- we are, to our knowledge, the only non-Twilight site brave enough to seriously consider the nomworthiness of sparkly vampires and shirtless wereboys -- Summit Entertainment seems ready to reinvest some of the film's massive profits into an awards season advertising blitz, trying to capture some gold for the wildly successful film that has thus far produced only green.
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As you know by now, virtually every American of moviegoing age purchased a ticket to see The Twilight Saga: New Moon since its Friday debut, boosting the critically savaged, but fiercely tween-hearted, sullen-vampire-and-shirtless-werewolf epic to $140 million in ticket sales, the third-best opening weekend result of all time. The staggering success of the film just as the awards season is about to begin in earnest means that whether we like it or not, New Moon has clawed (pun deliciously intentional!) its way into the Best Picture conversation, making us momentarily forget all about the cynical Oscar-bait studios are about to dangle before the Academy between now and Christmas. Confronted with this weekend's turn of events, Movieline is now forced to evaluate the Best Picture candidacy of Chris Weitz's gossamer ode to life, love and lycanthropy.
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Today, a sucker-punched nation mourns as the news that Oprah Winfrey, the closest thing we have to the Lord Himself taking daytime TV host form and spreading love and goodness through America's broadcast airwaves, will end her syndicated, culture-changing talk show in May of 2011, giving stunned fans a mere 19 months to come to grips with this life-altering upheaval. To help those abandoned viewers better cope with this long goodbye, Movieline now dusts off its crystal ball (purchased following Oprah's Favorite Things recommendation of 2005, during her brief, bizarre fling with gypsy mysticism) and looks at what the next year and a half will hold for the big O and her show:
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Now that Aaron Sorkin's finished dramatizing the dorm-room intrigue that brought the gift of virtual sheep-tossing into our lives with the Facebook movie, he's ready to return to his first love: TV shows set behind the scenes of fictional TV shows. The mind responsible for the criminally underrated Sports Night and the bizarrely humor-free sketch-comedy series Studio 60 has told TV Guide that he's hard at work on what he describes as "the third in the trilogy" of his show-behind-the-show shows, but refused to say exactly what kind of show he'd be show-behind-the-showing. As is our custom, Movieline now examines the five most likely settings for Sorkin's top-secret new project.
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As far back as I can remember, I have always wanted to go to a drive-in movie. Well, not literally as far back as I can remember. Literally as far back as I can remember, I cried at the school gates, had trouble controlling my bladder at night, and had a curious obsession with Prince Charles. But at some point during my formative years, the bit in Grease where they all go to a drive-in firmly lodged itself in my pubescent brain, and never left.
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It's yet another Monday afternoon, and as such, it's time to take a look back at this week's episode of Mad Men and attempt to make sense of the ups and downs, comings and goings of the gang at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. (As well as the Left Behinds.). After the jump, your Power Rankings for Week Fourteen:
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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....
-- From Avatar director James Cameron's exhaustive interview in the new issue of Playboy.
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