Friday, December 18, 2009

Movie Fans Ready to Blast Off with Avatar

This weekend audiences will buckle up and take a 3D trip to Pandora as James Cameron returns to the multiplexes with his first film in a dozen years with the much-anticipated sci-fi actioner Avatar which will have no trouble dominating the global box office. Hoping to pick up a few crumbs is Sony with its counter-programming entry Did You Hear About the Morgans?, a new romantic comedy starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant. The overall marketplace is sure to blast past year-ago numbers thanks to the tree-loving blue aliens setting the stage for a robust end-of-year sprint.

Following four weeks of female-skewing movies topping the charts, the boys get their revenge with Avatar which marks the Oscar-winning director's first film since 1997's record-setting Titanic and first sci-fi flick since 1991's Terminator 2. Demand is sky high for this ground-breaking 3D adventure film set in the year 2154. Males will outnumber females, but the PG-13 film's event status should lead to broad interest initially. While not giving away specifics, Fox has what could be the most expensive movie ever made with a production cost estimated to be in the range of $300M much like the third Pirates of the Caribbean pic. Marketing, of course, adds a ton more.


Avatar
Copyright © 2009 20th Century Fox

"Avatar," a live action film with a new generation of special effects, takes us to a spectacular world beyond imagination, where a reluctant hero embarks on a journey of redemption and discovery as he leads an epic battle to save a civilization. James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of "Titanic," first conceived the film years ago, when the means to realize his vision did not yet exist. Now, after four years of actual production work, "Avatar" delivers a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story.

The story's hero is Jake Sully, a former Marine confined to a wheelchair. Bitter and disillusioned, he's still a warrior at heart. All Jake ever wanted was something worth fighting for, and he finds it in the place he least expected: on a distant world. Jake has been recruited to join an expedition to the moon Pandora, which corporate interests are strip-mining for a mineral worth $20 billion per kilogram on Earth. To facilitate their work, the humans use a link system that projects a person's consciousness into a hybrid of humans and Pandora's indigenous humanoids, the Na'vi. This human-Na'vi hybrid – a fully living, breathing body that resembles the Na'vi but possesses the individual human's thoughts, feelings and personality – is known as an "avatar."

In his new avatar form, Jake can once again walk. His mission is to interact with and infiltrate the Na'vi with the hope of enlisting their help – or at least their acquiescence – in mining the ore. A beautiful Na'vi female, Neytiri, saves Jake's life, albeit reluctantly, because even in his avatar body, Jake represents to her the human encroachment on the Na'vi's unspoiled world.

As Jake's relationship with Neytiri deepens, along with his respect for the Na'vi, he faces the ultimate test as he leads an epic conflict that will decide nothing less than the fate of an entire world.


Did You Hear About The Morgans
Copyright © 2009 Columbia Pictures [Sony]

A bickering New York couple on the verge of divorce attempt to salvage their marriage after witnessing a murder and being relocated to Wyoming under the Witness Protection Plan. Meryl and Paul Morgan (Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant) have all the money a couple could want. It's love they're running short on. Upon witnessing a contract killing and being targeted by the triggerman, the couple find themselves at the mercy of the feds, who hastily send them packing for an extended stay in the Rockies. Could a peaceful life away from the city be just the thing to bring Meryl and Paul back together, or will the deafening silence of nature only serve to amplify the bickering couple's painful peccadillos and drive them further apart than ever before? Sam Elliott, Mary Steenburgen, and Wilford Brimley co-star in a comedy from writer/director Marc Lawrence (Miss Congeniality, Music and Lyrics).

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