“I spoke to a person who saw Avatar and he said the action scenes delivered everything you’d expect from Cameron, even in this digital form. Visceral, detailed, a ‘first-person shooter’ experience on the biggest game screen ever hoisted.

“The simple, predictable story was deemed as almost perfunctory, as if adding too much storytelling and exposition would have amounted to a sensory overload. After all, no one discusses 2001: A Space Odyssey in relation to its plot. Star Wars either.

“What we have is: Boy meets alien through marines, boy loses aliens and marines, boy fights marines and gets girl.

“And I was also told that despite all the trappings of special effects, blue people and CGI skies, Sigourney Weaver still manages to register strongly with warmth and a commanding presence.” — an HE friend who gets around and knows people.

Tobey Maguire becomes a rage hound when he comes home from Afghanistan in Jim Sheridan‘s Brothers. Consumed with self-hate over having chosen to save his own life over a comrade’s and convinced that his wife (Natalie Portman) has been doing his younger brother (Jake Gylllenhaal), he turns into something feral. His eyes go white and he uncorks it like Bruce Dern did in Coming Home, only more so.

It’s thrilling and terrifying at the same time, like molten lava pouring out of a volcano and people running for dear life, but you can’t turn away. By the end of the film Maguire’s Spider-Man thing has just given up and scampered out the window. At the end you’re thinking, “wow…didn’t know Maguire had it in him.” It’s the best performance he’s ever given.

Otherwise I had believability problems with two major story points in the film.

This remake of Susanne Bier‘s 2004 original is about a younger “bad” brother (Gyllenhaal) stepping into the familial shoes of his older “good” brother (Maguire) after the latter disappears during an enemy skirmish in Afghanistan. My first problem was with the military officially telling Portman that her husband is dead when in fact he’s M.I.A. because — hello? — there’s no proof of death. The military doesn’t provide unsubstantiated information to families of servicemen, period, so this is bullshit.

All Sheridan and screenwriter David Benioff had to do was (a) have the military report him as M.I.A. and then (b) persuade us that Portman and Gyllenhaal believe that Maguire probably won’t return due to his probably being dead. That’s all it would have taken.

The second problem is that I don’t believe Maguire’s character could ever find peace with a deed we’ve seen him commit — something he felt forced to do while a prisoner in Afghanistan in order to survive. Maguire’s is one of those acts that require only one of two responses — suicide or abandoning your family and country and going off to Asia to live like a Joseph Conrad character. At the end of Brothers Maguire confesses this act to his wife, but are we supposed to assume he’ll never tell anyone else?

And why isn’t there a military debriefing scene when he comes back from Afghanistan? He would be shown lying, of course — denying, covering up — but the scene should have been in there regardless.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson reported this morning that the first Avatar screening — i.e., exclusively for the Hollywood Foreign Press — happened last night. And that she was told at the IDA Awards after-party by a person who’d attended (or who had talked to someone who attended, or whose brother-in-law heard from the parking-lot attendant who spoke to an HFPA guy) that Avatar is “a 161-minute movie with fab visual effects and [an] adolescent story.”

Meaning what exactly? I don’t know that it’s fair to call the story of Dances With Wolves “adolescent,” even if you transpose it to a rainforest moon called Pandora and throw in “a furry ballerina fighting off space marines with his freaking organic farm.” And…you know, mix it in with Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, blue cat-goats with tails that stand ten feet tall, Delgo squared, a glossed-up Land Before Time 3, etc. People need to cool their jets and wait for the 12.10 screenings on both coasts.

Cameron says on the Josh Horowitz MTV interview that Avatar has everything he’s always wanted to put into a really cool fantasy movie since he was a kid. A faint chill went up my spine. These words reminded me of Francis Coppola talking about feeling like a young man again during the making of Youth Without Youth and Tetro. I’ve learned to beware when silverbacks talk about re-connecting with their youth.

Cameron also said “and if it doesn’t succeed then we’ll forget all about it,” or words to that effect. In other words, the faint possibility of Avatar not succeeding has entered his mind.

The odd thing is that there’s an all-media of It’s Complicated conflicting with the very first Avatar screening on the evening of Thursday, 12.10. (Nancy Meyers‘ film starts at 6 pm and Cameron‘s begins at 7 pm.) It’s a brutal call, but I’m thinking I’ll have to wait to see Avatar on Friday at 11 am.

Every year I complain about those godawful cookie-cutter scenes in which the hero of a film jumps head-first off an incredibly high building or cliff. The same exact bit has turned up in many if not most of Hollywood’s high-budget action-fantasy-thrillers over the last 20-odd years. As far as I can recall the big-jump syndrome began with Tim Burton‘s Batman. This is a YouTube clip reel, of course.

In any case I just noticed that an “oooh, wow” cliff jump is also in Avatar, and something inside me collapsed when this hit me. My intestines dislodged and did a big splat. Why, I’m wondering, don’t the makers of these event films ever say to themselves, “Jeez, here we are doing another building-jump or cliff-jump scene. This must be the 64th or 65th since Batman…I forget. Some kind in my office has shown me a list. Shouldn’t we try something else? Audiences are going to get sick of this eventually.”

So how did Sacha Gervasi‘s Anvil! The Story of Anvil manage to win two IDA Documentary Awards — i.e., best feature-length doc and best music documentary — last night while not even making the Academy’s feature-doc shortlist? How could there be such a huge disconnect from between the Academy’s documentary committee and the IDA? Especially with Anvil‘s recent nomination for a Best Doc Spirit award?

Is it that the IDA and the Spirit committees are younger, hipper, less stodgy? Except Anvil! is about balding heavy-metal musicians in their 50s afraid of losing their mojo. The film is about struggle, rebirth, redemption. It’s primarily a heart movie. The ending is pure Hollywood. How old and blinkered and plugged up do you have to be to consider Anvil too hip for the room? 85?

Anvil producer Rebecca Yeldham told me this morning that “one of our most amazing screenings was up at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival where the median age was 55. And when it ended we got a rousing standing ovation from an audience of upper middle-class Jews. It’s really a movie for everyone. Hopefully people will open their minds [after last night’s win].”

If exuding a proverbial heart element was a key requirement for a potential Best Picture Oscar nominee, Anvil would be right up there among the potential ten. But I can’t advocate this as I believe in Canadians staying in Canada and Mexicans staying in Mexico. I would nonetheless break ranks and cheer if Anvil was to suddenly gain traction as Best Picture hopeful, unlikely as this may sound.

Yeldham (who wouldn’t mind a Best Picture nomination either) claimed not to know the procedural particulars about why Anvil would score with the IDA and the Spirits but not the Academy. You’d think that the folks serving on the three committees for these groups would be cut from the same cloth, faith, DNA. It doesn’t make basic sense.

I’d understand if Anvil was short-listed and/or nominated by the Academy but didn’t win — stuff happens, get over it. But to not even be short-listed?

This Josh Horowitz/MTV discussion with Avatar director James Cameron and costars Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana went live two days ago. I don’t like questions that include the words “how did you deal with that pressure”? I’ve heard that question 973 times over the last 15 or 20 years. It reminds me that expectation pressure is constant — the biggest headache/nightmare in the world — and that repeatedly mentioning this is tedious and infuriating. The only way to cope with fear is to fly over it with inspiration.