If it wasn’t for the big east-coast blizzard Avatar‘s weekend tally would have nudged $80 million, I believe. Or at least made it to $77 or $78 million. Instead the projected domestic figure is $73 million, which is fine. Variety‘s Pamela McLintock is reporting that James Cameron‘s film has grossed $220 million to $230 million worldwide. The domestic tally was the second-best December opening. McLintock notes that “a film normally can expect to gross three times its opening weekend, but year-end films can see multiples of four and five.” Which suggests Avatar could end up in the mid $200 million range or (who knows?) even hit $300 million.

Over the last twelve months 20 winning films opened in theatres, and I’m not sure if people understand this as fully as they could or should. It wasn’t a top-ten year but double that. But yet only three on this list — Avatar, Up In The Air and Public Enemies — have done well at the box-office while the others have had to scramble.

On 11.29 I posted a 2009 sum-up that focused on 13 or 14 peak pleasure films — each with some kind of striking, original-seeming quality and made from deep-seated, rock-solid material — plus four others came close to breathing the same air. With Avatar seen and digested I obviously need to update, and I’m also paying respect to Judd Apatow‘s Funny People, which I left off the list before for reasons that I can’t discern or explain. (I’ve re-used phrases here and there because they’re good enough to repeat.)

We’re talking a new three-way tie between Avatar, The Hurt Locker and Up In The Air. Avatar because it managed to propel a well-structured but familiar story into a super-visual, awe-inspiring, maximum-energy emotional fantasia. The Hurt Locker because it blended a sense of profound existential peril and a completely believable, no-GG, real-world excitement with amazing expertise. And Up In The Air because it’s one of the calmest and most unforced this-is-who-we-are, what-we-need and what-we’re-afraid-of-in-the-workplace movies ever made — and blissfully free of the usual Hollywood bullshit and jerk-offery, and with a kind of Brokeback Mountain-y theme at the finale — i.e., “move it or lose it.”

Followed by (in order of vague preference) Pedro Almodovar‘s Broken Embraces, Chris Smith‘s Collapse, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man, Lone Scherfig‘s An Education, Armando Ianucci‘s In The Loop, Judd Apatow‘s Funny People, Cary Fukunaga‘s Sin Nombre, Michael Mann‘s Public Enemies, Lynn Shelton‘s Humpday, Tom Ford‘s A Single Man, Louie Psihoyos‘s The Cove, Neil Blomkamp‘s District 9, Sacha Gervasi‘s Anvil! The Story of Anvil, James Toback‘s Tyson, Steven Soderbergh‘s The Girlfriend Experience, Paolo Sorrentino‘s Il Divo, and Jane Campion‘s Bright Star (for the production design and cinematography, and for Abby Cornish‘s performance).

All 20 films gave me enormous viewing pleasure (even if an isolated aspect of some of these films was the primary provider with other aspects registering or satisfying less than 100%.) or introduced me to some new aesthetic or style or attitude that I hadn’t really absorbed before but which I felt very comfortable with as I left the theatre.

I don’t believe in whining but yesterday’s Mo’Nique thread (“Keep It Up“) was one of the ugliest of the year for all the name-calling and rhetorical mud-slinging, much of it directed as yours truly. All day I was ducking spears thrown by a pack of hysterical p.c. queens for two perceived sins. One, my decision to use the term “lard ass.” And two, observing that if Precious was about some scurvy white crackers in Alabama or Mississippi it wouldn’t have gotten the traction that the actual Precious has because it wouldn’t have the liberal-white-guilt element propelling it along.

I realize that if you provoke in one direction you’re going to get provoked right back — that’s the game I play on this site from time to time — but imagine what it feels like to express one or two specific opinions only to see aspects or side-angles of these views amplified and distorted and made into a slander meme in which you’re portrayed as a racist. It’s a fairly horrific thing, and I have nothing but contempt for the principal torch-bearers out there. They’re not as bad as the Roman Polanksi haters — by far the ugliest bunch to be heard from on this site — but they park their cars in the same garage. (Or in a garage owned by the same chain.)

And all I did was comment about Tom O’Neil‘s reporting about how Mo’Nique isn’t planning on attending the New York Film Critic’s ceremony. I didn’t open up an old can of worms for perversity’s sake. Tom’s piece was posted and I linked with some opinions and comments — that’s all, big deal. And the shutters flew open and a swarm of p.c. banshees flew out.

One of them, a howler named Renfield, said that I lacked “common decency toward [my] fellow man” and admonished me for that pointing out the racial angle in Precious. He urged me to respect the fact that filmmakers are “individuals” and asked, “Christ, do you really need to be taught this?”

Again — I pointed out the racial angle only to explain the “scurvy white cracker” point articulated above. In my humble but earnest view Renfield is a reprehensible slanderer — a Body Snatcher pod person pointing and screaming the words, “He’s not talking the p.c. talk! He’s not using the right terms….Eeeeeeeee!” I said in response, “I don’t think I need to be taught anything by a tut-tutting sanctimonious p.c. drone like yourself, but thanks for the offer all the same.”

As I pointed out in my 12.11 piece called “Not Right-Wing Friendly,” And The Winner Is blogger Scott Feinberg has stated in a 12.20 posting that “there is a strong political undertone to Avatar, both in words and images.” Feinberg doesn’t give it a name (Avatar is ardently left-leaning) but he does a fine job of describing the currents.

“I have little doubt that the film’s central conflict is actually a metaphor for America’s two ongoing wars in the Middle East,” he writes. “The humans plan to invade Pandora in order to gain access its large reserves of a precious mineral called unobtainium — not unlike Americans invading Iraq in order to gain access to its large reserves of oil, as some believe was the real motive for the invasion.

“The humans are led by a strutting, tough-talking colonel (Stephen Lang) who sells his mission to his troops by stating, ‘Our survival relies on pre-emptive action,’ announces, ‘We will fight terror with terror,’ and then oversees a ‘shock-and-awe campaign’ — not unlike George W. Bush and his effort to rally Americans behind a preemptive attack on Iraq by claiming that Iraq posed ‘a grave and growing danger’ to national security, followed by… a shock-and-awe campaign.’

“The native Na’vi eventually realize that although they lack the military might of their invaders, their familiarity with the terrain on which the war is being fought provides them with an even bigger advantage, allowing them to plan and execute insurgent attacks that initially debilitate and ultimately defeat their invaders — which sounds like a rearticulation of the argument for why the Americans (like Alexander the Great, the Russians, and the British before them) will never be able to win in Afghanistan.

“Finally, one can’t help but look at the attack on and eventual collapse of Pandora’s Hometree, its tallest structure and one inhabited by large numbers of its people, and not think of the attack on and eventual collapse of the World Trade Center, especially as it thunders to the ground, killing many of its inhabitants and people on the ground, spraying dust and debris everywhere as those on the ground flee for their lives on foot, and leaving its survivors in a state of shock, then grief, then anger, and then a desire for retribution — through this turn of events, we come to identify more with the Na’vi than with the humans of the future, which is why we find ourselves cheering the Na’vi’s efforts to retaliate.”

The way I put it: “The political import of Avatar is pro-indigenous native, anti-corporate, anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. Iraq War effort, anti-U.S.-in-Afghanistan (and anti-troop-surge-in-that-country, or strongly against the thinking of President Barack Obama and Gen. Stanley McChrystal). It’s a political tract that cost Rupert Murdoch God knows how many hundreds of millions to make and yet is totally pro-loincloth, despise-the-greedy, hug-the-earth, down with the soulless short-end, down with the us-first, masters-of-the-universe thinking behind the Goldman Sachs/Timothy Geithner culture and up with the eternal/spiritual in all cultures and all corners of the globe. The tragedy of the Vietnam War echoes all through this film. Somewhere Ho Chi Minh is smiling.”

“Something’s not right here,” Bill Moyers began at the top of a 12.18 broadcast of Bill Moyers Journal. “One year after the great collapse of our financial system, Wall Street is back on top while our politicians dither. As for health care reform, you’re about to be forced to buy insurance from companies whose stock is soaring, and that’s just dandy with the White House.

“Truth is, our capitol’s being looted, Republicans are acting like the town rowdies, the sheriff is firing blanks, and powerful Democrats in Congress are in cahoots with the gang that’s pulling the heist. This is not capitalism at work. It’s capital. Raw money, mounds of it, buying politicians and policy as if they were futures on the hog market.”

The video discussion that follows between Moyers, Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi and The American Prospect‘s Robert Kuttner is worth watching (or reading the transcript of).

I missed the 12.17 news of Jennifer Jones‘ passing at age 90. The only film in which her aura came through for me was in Portrait of Jennie (’48) and, to a slightly lesser extent, Since You Went Away (’44) and A Farewell To Arms (’57). Everyone thought she was excessive in Duel in the Sun (’46) but then that whole film was excessive.

Precious costar Mo’Nique, whose performance has been way over-praised but has nonetheless locked an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, is continuing to give Academy members reasons not to vote for her. The latest boner, as reported by Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil, is her decision not to accept her Best Supporting Actress award from the New York Film Critics Circle on 1.11.

A rep explains that “Mo’Nique and her family will just be returning from vacation that very night” [presumably she means Monday, 1.11] and that “she begins taping her TV show in the a.m. on the 12th.”

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. If Mo’Nique had any respect for the NYFCC she would cut short her vacation by a day or so and haul her lard ass up to Manhattan on the 11th. It’s 12.19 today — she’s got over three weeks to figure this out. And who ends their vacations on a Monday? People flying coach and looking to avoid the crowds?

If Mo’Nique is worried about being fresh and well-rested for the taping of her Atlanta talk show, she could probably delay the start of taping by a day. She could certainly hop on a NY-to-Atlanta plane on the night of the 11th and get a good five or six hours sleep, no problem. So she’s full of shit. She’s not attending the NYFCC ceremony because she doesn’t care to — end of story.

And one of the reasons she doesn’t care to, I suspect, is because the NYFCC is being honcho’ed this year by an outspoken African-American critic, Armond White, who thinks Precious is a load of crap. So in addition to “attitude queen” and “show me the money” we can add “coward” to the list of Mo’Nique slogans, pronouns and adjectives.

Response quotes: Yesterday a prominent NYFCC member, speaking anonymously to O’Neil, said Mo’Nique’s snub lends “credence to the story that she wants to be paid to show up for these things.”

Us Weekly‘s Thelma Adams adds the following: “As a NYFCC member, my response is more snacks and drinks for us, and more available seats for more congenial people. My guess is that Meryl will attend.”

The NYFCC ceremony will take place at Crimson in the Flatiron district.

Take this, Mr. Beaks and Devin Faraci and all the rest of the anti-Avatar fanboys who’ve dropped to their knees in praise of all kinds of fanboy-cathedral movies in the past, including the tedious, exhausting, mostly unwatchable Lord of the Rings trilogy:

“Like people who can’t dig the Arcade Fire’s album Funeral, I’d find it hard to respect anyone who can’t enjoy this bloody masterpiece. I think it’s so universal, so human, and so ridiculously beautiful that it reveals a pretty serious character deficiency to not be able to go with it. Saying the story is predictable is like saying the view from Tengboche Monastery of Mt. Everest (the most beautiful view I’ve ever seen) lacks surprise because you’ve seen the photos.” — HE reader Plastique Elephant, posting today.

The curious carpings of Mr. Beaks, Devin Faraci and others aside, Avatar is here and surging upward with fairly big numbers for the weekend (over $70 million) and everyone now realizing that the Best Picture race is down to Avatar vs. Up In The Air vs. The Hurt Locker. Cameron’s story is familiar, but it works. It lays out the elements, marshalls its forces, turns up the heat and pays off big-time in the fourth act.

I was among paying customers yesterday at the AMC 34th and I could feel the film kicking in and holding on, and now the word is flash-flooding as we speak, even among the Eloi, whose reputation rests on their inability to read or sense coolness in any movie that doesn’t have a blatant, dumb-ass, cultural-junk-food hook until very late in the game.

But what people are telling their friends and families and co-workers is that it’s not the CGI and the 3-D sizzle alone — it’s the all of Avatar that makes it play like it’s ten feet tall.

But the “all” couldn’t be sold or even generally described or hinted at, for whatever reason, and so Fox marketing was allowed to only sell the sizzle, and the word-of-mouth that came out of this began to sour in late August and spiralled downward. Face facts and admit what an all-but-total failure the Avatar marketing effort was over the last five months since the ComicCon debut in mid July.

The 7.23 ComicCon footage screening, in fact, was the only unmitigated positive-sell moment in the entire campaign.

The appearance of the first Avatar trailer on 8.20 was the absolute nadir — the wound that never quite healed over the next four months until the finished film began to be seen. This was followed by the Avatar Delgo Ferngully comparisons — more crap in the fan. Then came the good-but-not-great reaction to Avatar Day in theatres, followed by the appearance of Hitler Avatar on YouTube. What a month! By Labor Day the Avatar word-of-mouth campaign was wobbly and against the ropes.

It all kind of simmered in the pan throughout the fall, clucking and crackling like fried eggs but never really changing the downbeat August assessments. The “don’t like them blue people” meme seemed to build and build. And then came the final embarassment before screenings started — i.e., that awful one-sheet with a Na’vi face that clearly didn’t belong to Sam Worthington or Zoe Saldana and which reminded me and others of Thriller-era Michael Jackson, for God’s sake.

And then Avatar was screened on 12.10 and everything turned around like that. But before this happened Fox marketing had everyone and his uncle convinced (myself included) that Avatar was some kind of problem movie, or at the very least a so-so or underwhelming thing.

HE’s Moises Chiullan (a.k.a. Arthouse Cowboy) has posted a favorable review of Martin Scorsese‘s Shuttter Island. “The average viewer has become accustomed to focusing more on ‘figuring out the twist’ than actually watching the movie,” he begins. “This is thanks to so many films of the last few decades hedging all their bets on one gimmicky little MacGuffin.

“Thankfully, Scorsese’s new film keeps you too busy to get very distracted. It does involve a plot twist, but Shutter Island is much more invested in the series of bends in the road that get you there, and the picture is better for it. The turn itself plays more cathartic than revelatory. The real key is to openly question everything from the beginning. You quickly collect so many conflicting theories that you can’t do much other than attempt to solve the mystery at hand along with Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Edward (Teddy) Daniels.”