Two pieces of official but not finalized concept art from James Cameron‘s Avatar, taken from the forthcoming The Art of Avatar: James Cameron’s Epic Adventure and passed along yesterday by Marketsaw.

Okay, yes — an intriguing taste of Terry Gilliam‘s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. But where’s the clip featuring Heath Ledger that anyone who’s even half interested in this film wants to see? To think that someone actually thought things through and said, “Yes….this is the clip we’ll make available.”

Listening to conservatives play the race card in attacking the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, I’ve been marveling at just how self-destructive they’ve become,” Arianna Huffington wrote last night.

“Republicans have to know how bad this is for their party — especially given the shifting demographics in America. The Hispanic vote was a deciding factor in Obama’s win, so the last thing the GOP needs is to be alienating Hispanic voters. BUT THEY JUST CAN’T HELP THEMSELVES!

“It reminds me of Robert Downey Jr.‘s quote after his umpteenth drug relapse: ‘It is like I have a shotgun in my mouth, and I’ve got my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of gun metal.’ The GOP attack dogs have an electoral shotgun in their mouth — and they’re addicted to the taste of it.”

Movieline’s Stu Van Airsdale, an admitted smoker with a slight-to-moderate guilt complex, bitched yesterday afternoon about a recently announced Facebook finger-wagging campaign supported by a “voluntary” arm of the American Medical Association. (As opposed to an involuntary arm?)

The idea, as reported yesterday by the N.Y. Times‘ Brooks Barnes, is to “publicly shame movie studios for depicting images of smoking in their mass- appeal movies” with a campaign that asks Facebook readers to send along scorecard reports about movies that feature cancer clouds. “Which Movie Studios Will Cause the Most Youth to Start Smoking This Summer?” is the slogan.

There’s also a low-rent Facebook video that explains it.

Smoking is “deadly as hell” Van Airsdale writes, but this new campaign “still boils down to is censorship, just like every other ratings hassle in Hollywood. And censorship always boils down to asking how much these freaks will deny kids any semblance of agency in their lives, all while absolving adults of any responsibility as parents. A Movie Smoking Scorecard? Are you serious? Who’s the real bad guy here?”

Two years ago I addressed the primary problem with smoking in movies, which is that it often reflects bad acting. It’s not smoking in movies per se that’s so bad, but actors who use constant smoking as a behavioral crutch.

I put it rather well in this April 2007 piece, which I don’t mind reposting:

“Smoking can look marginally cool depending on how skilled or preternaturally cool the actor is, but it becomes extremely tedious and off-putting when done to excess. Cigarette smoking used to be extremely cool but no longer, and that goes for actors in movies especially.

“The only people I know in real life who smoke are (a) young and courting a kind of contrarian identity, (b) older with vaguely self-destructive attitudes, and in some cases beset by addiction problems, (c) serious “party” people with unmistakable self-destructive compulsions and tendencies, and (d) life’s chronic losers — riffraff, low-lifes, bums, scuzzballs.

“The point is that all the above associations seem to kick in every time sometime lights up in a film, and it’s gotten so that I don’t want to watch characters in movies smoke at all. Unless it’s a period film or unless they look extremely cool doing it (a la Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past or Jean Paul Belmondo in Breathless), but very few actors have that ability.

“I smoked for years and years but I don’t any more, and I don’t like the way cigarettes smell unless I’m in Europe. (It’s different over there). Smoking isn’t exactly outright suicide but it’s the next thing to it, and every time someone lights up in a movie it half-pisses me off and makes me think negatively about the film in general, especially if this or that actor smokes all through the movie and looks and acts like a lowlife.

“Criminals in movies are always smoking because of (b), (c) and (d), but I think it’s way too easy for an actor to use smoking as a piece of business. It’s tedious and repellent. It makes me want to see the actor get shot or at least beaten up.

“I think the sun has really set on the sexiness of smoking in movies, and I’m starting to think that actors who light up all the time in front of the camera are second-raters.

“People should be free to do anything they want of a self-destructive nature — cigarettes, booze, compulsive eating, coke, heroin — as long as they don’t hurt anyone else doing it. And actors should be free to do anything they want that will make a performance connect. But smoking has lost its coolness, and actors who lean on it repeatedly or compulsively are boring, and I’m starting to say ‘the hell with them’ when they pull one out and strike a match.

“Deep down I guess I’m acknowledging that I wouldn’t be surprised if I live a slightly shorter life because of my smoking in the ’70s and ’80s, and I’m kind of angry about that possibility.”

Finally seeing McG’s Terminator tonight in Barcelona con subtitles, and this fairly decent mashup piece is getting me in the mood, I suppose. Being out of the timely-screening loop feels queer and relaxing at the same time. The only problem here is that I hated/currently hate/will always hate Transformers.

A friend who’s also looking forward to The Hangover believes that Sam Raimi‘s Drag Me to Hell (Universal, opening tomorrow) will be an even bigger sleeper hit. So far it’s got a Rotten Tomatoes creme de la creme rating of 75% positive with a 93% from the rank and file. “Raimi has made the most crazy, fun, and terrifying horror movie in years,” wrote EW‘s Owen Gleiberman. Too bad it’s not opening in Barcelona tomorrow. I missed it in Cannes but I’ll be back Saturday, etc.

The Wes Anderson Film Festival mentioned in type at the end of this video is hypothetical. The piece, made for a gradate design program, is by Alex Cornell and Philip Mills. It’s not bad. The Rushmore style is dead-on. The pipe is very Max Fischer, granted, but smoking cigarettes also makes it all seem a bit too affected. I don’t know if I’m doing these guys a solid or not, considering the likely drubbing they’ll get from the notoriously savage HE talk-backers.

Wes Anderson Trailer from Alex Cornell on Vimeo.

“Every summer has its surprise hit, and The Hangover is starting to look like this season’s unexpected breakout,” writes L.A. Times reporter John Horn. “Even though the bachelor-party-gone-bad comedy doesn’t open until June 5, The Hangover already is generating such positive reactions that Warner Bros. is developing a sequel — a strong vote of confidence for a movie with no big stars, no comic book tie-in and no obvious franchise traits.

“Just as the R-rated comedies American Pie, Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin transformed excellent word-of-mouth into strong summer ticket sales, The Hangover should benefit from the kind of positive moviegoer chatter that largely has been missing from the summer spell — save Star Trek.”

Note: Warner Bros. marketing would do well to remove this particular Hangover poster variation in all media, for obvious reasons.

Werner Herzog‘s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is going to be hilarious, a must-see cult film. Nicolas Cage vs. old ladies! His insanity levels are growing exponentially with each new performance, and all to the good. Plus his light-brown, blond-tipped rug isn’t bad in this one. I’m buying this on DVD — issue settled.

An Esquire movie-trivia quiz (i.e., 21 questions) that I could have linked to a couple of weeks ago but didn’t. Sample questions and answers: (a) The Wizard of Oz was the first movie filmed in color. Answer: Esquire even asking this tells you what they think of their readers’ awareness levels; (b) “Myth or true — if you watch The Wizard of Oz while listening to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, they sync up perfectly.” Answer: True. (Never tried this!); (c) “Myth or True? Hollywood stardom is a cruel bitch-goddess that entraps even the purest souls into lives of ever-increasing degradations so punishing that the sweet release of the grave becomes but a faint stain in its shadow.” Answer: Better conveyed by clicking through.

A taste of last night’s celebration in Granada following the Barcelona soccer team’s 2-0 defeat of Manchester in the UEFA Championship in Rome. I should have run around and caught more action but I felt too removed in a Margaret Mead-ish sense to get into it. Not my scene.

N.Y. Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has pointed to a morality quiz website that determines the extent of your leanings along liberal/conservative lines. “One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values,” he summarizes. “For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty — and revulsion at disgust.”

There are six questionaires covering six moral areas. Moral Foundations (i.e., what underlies the virtues and issues you care about? Why do you have the political orientation that you do?), a Satisfaction with Life Scale (how happy are you these days?), a Sacredness Survey (what would you do for a million dollars?), Systems & Feelings (which kind of understanding do you prefer?), a Need for Cognition Scale (what is your attitude toward mental work?) and a Relationship Survey (what is your “style”‘ of relating in romantic/love relationships, and how does that relate to morality?).

I filled out two of the forms (moral foundations, relationships). The results didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know before. But it’s interesting to explore the fundamentals every so often in a multiple-choice way.