In a piece that summarizes James Cameron‘s Project 880, the 113-page scriptment that eventually became Avatar, CHUD’s Devin Faraci points out a difference in a certain scene that really got me. I’d skimmed through an ADD version of the scriptment two or three years ago, but I’d forgotten this.

In Avatar, the paraplegic Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) isn’t just excited by having the use of his legs again when he first awakens inside his new ten-foot-tall blue Avatar body — he’s exalted and blissed out, and impulsively bolts the laboratory so he can run outside and feel the new muscles. The reigning emotion is “whoo-hoo testosterone!”

But in Project 880, says Faraci, Jake — Josh in the scriptment — “can barely stand, and his motor skills are weak. But when he gets on his feet and begins walking he has a very different reaction than Jake Sully — he cries. It’s a beautiful character revelation. Jake acts like a kid who had finally been let out of a car after a long ride; Josh acts like someone who never thought he would walk again.”

I was impatient and almost irritated with the Avatar version when I first saw it in San Diego, and while I understand Jake’s feelings of exuberance I doubted that he would act so rashly, like some 16 year-old kid driving a muscle car for the first time. But I would have bought his weeping with joy and relief if Cameron had chosen to dramatize this instead. I’m sorry that he didn’t.

The plot of Project 880 is much denser than Avatar‘s, with many more characters and tangents and a fair amount of back-story. As Faraci acknowledges, if Cameron had filmed all of the extra material Avatar would have probably run five hours — and would have probably cost $450 or $500 million to make instead of $300 million or whatever Avatar actually cost.

Faraci’s summary of the Project 880 plot points are as follows:

* Earth and its environmental problems are explored

* There is no unobtainium beneath Hometree. The military just wants to wipe out the local Na’vi to send a message to all the tribes that they must be obeyed.

* We see Josh Sully’s Avatar being born

* It’s revealed the Avatar program exists to train Na’vi to be an indigenous workforce for the corporation, as it’s so expensive to send human workers

* There are more humans, including a bioethics officer on the take, a video journalist, a head of the Avatar program and a second military dickwad

* There is an Avatar controller who is burnt out because his Avatar died with him in it. He committed Avatar suicide because he had fallen in love with a Na’vi girl who had been killed by the military

* The Avatars have a Na’vi guide named N’Deh, who’s slipping the high hard one to Grace.

* Grace survives the soul transfer

* Sully gains the Na’vi trust by being a member of the community. He also excels in a major hunt

* Sully shows his leadership not by taming a dragon but by leading a raid on Hell’s Gate to rescue Na’vi prisoners

* Sully isn’t the only Na’vi to ride a big dragon

* Pandora is a conscious entity that sees the humans as a virus, and which has been mobilizing the plants and animals to attack all along because it wanted to force the humans to leave.

“I would liked to have seen a movie version of Project 880,” Faraci writes. I too would have enjoyed more of what the scriptment has, but not too much more. I mean, I wouldn’t want to sit through a futuristic, ass-punishing Lord of The Rings: Return of the Avatar running four or five hours.

You have to understand where scifi-fantasy geeks like Faraci are coming from. One of the reasons they went hog-wild for Peter Jackson‘s Rings trilogy was its expansiveness. These guys live for length, texture, details, exposition and subcurrents in exotic imaginary worlds. They love layered and dense…yum! The more characters and extra subplots and backstory, the better. Throw it all in there, pile it on, explore the tangents, etc.

“I can’t say for sure why Cameron so severely streamlined his own story, but 880 feels like a Cameron film,” he writes, “while Avatar feels like the footnotes of that.

“Many of the problems I had with Avatar‘s story are addressed in Project 880‘s scriptment. I like Josh Sully better than Jake, although I suspect my biggest problem with the character lies in Sam Worthington. But other characters have more flesh, and the story unfolds at a pace that feels interesting and not like it’s on rails.

“Obviously this scriptment would have made a five-hour movie. Things needed to be cut. I just wish Cameron had been able to keep the decent story and rounded characters along with his deeply designed world. But when you’re spending that much money, it’s the story and characters that get canned before the FX.”

Because a team of airport screeners failed to stop Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from carrying an explosive substance called PETN (i.e., pentaerythritol) aboard a Detroit-bound airliner, the Transportation Security Administration is determined to make worldwide travellers suffer delays worse than ever before. TSA officials are reactive bureaucratic ninnies whose jobs are not precisely dependent on keeping terrorists off airplanes as much as putting on a show of attempting to do same. It’s all theatre and all tedium. I can honestly say this evening that I fear the TSA more than I do Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.

Abby Cornish delivers a vibrant, full-hearted performance in Jane Campion‘s Bright Star, but Greig Fraser‘s cinematography is arguably the film’s most transporting aspect. Which makes it seem odd if not strange that Sony has chosen to bypass releasing a Bluray version on 1.26.10, when the DVD is due for release.

Abby Cornish in Jane Campion’s Bright Star.

What could the thinking possibly be in deciding against a Bluray release? It costs $100 grand, I’m told, to properly master a film in the high-def format but if any film warrants this treatment in terms of visual rewards alone, Bright Star qualifies. My guess is that somebody calculated that the expected home video revenues wouldn’t justify the Bluray expense.

“Due to the surprising performance of Avatar and Sherlock Holmes, the total domestic haul for the 12.25 to 12.27 weekend could surpass the record-breaking weekend of July 18-20, 2008, which saw the release of The Dark Knight and Mamma Mia!,” reports boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino.

Weekend grosses could exceed $270 million by Sunday night, which would easily top the $260 million earned over the Knight/Momma weekend.

By Sunday night Avatar will have made $72 million for the weekend and $209,268,053 since it opened on 12.18. The mostly loathsome and despicable Sherlock Holmes will have pulled in $70,000,000 (two million less than Avatar…hah!), Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel will have $45 million in the bank. It’s Complicated will end up with $22,500,000, and Up In the Air with $13 million for the weekend and a $25,762,000 cume. The Blind Side will pocket $12 million for a $184,658,000 cume.

“Estimates have a tendency to fall on Monday,” Contrino cautions, “which means if some of the weekend’s strongest performers suffer a decline when actuals are released on Monday the ’08 record would hold. Either way, 2009 is ending with a bang.”

Alleged conman Simon Monjack, who’s come to be widely despised in the wake of the recent death of his late wife, Brittany Murphy, has spoken to the Daily Mail‘s Paul Bracchi in a 12.26 article, which has been echoed/reflected in a 12.26 Daily News piece by Soraya Roberts.

Simon Monjack

Both articles use George Hickenlooper‘s HE-posted opinion about Monjack (which appeared on 12.20) as a prosecutorial centerpiece.

People everywhere have been guessing/presuming that Murphy’s death was somehow Monjack’s fault. The thinking as I understand it is that no good can come of a marriage to an overweight scumbag with thinning hair and beard stubble, and that somehow Monjack’s allegedly skanky ways (nefarious wheeler-dealing, stealing from Peter to pay Paul, etc.) poisoned Murphy’s body or soul, and that in some curious roundabout way this contributed to her having a heart attack in the shower and dying soon after.

“My problem is that I do not look like Ashton Kutcher,” Monjack told Bracchi.

And he’s right. If you look like an undisciplined fatass people are going to presume the worst if — a big “if” — you hook up with a slender young actress. People are going to say, “Look at that bloated fat-ass…what’s his story? Why in God’s name would a famous actress hook up with a guy like that? Look at him! What is he, some compulsive cheez-whiz eater looking to advance his prospects by marrying her?”

Hollywood types also “don’t like the fact that [Brittany] married someone who was not famous,” Monjack added. “Here, stars like stars to marry other stars.”

There are reasons to consider that Monjack is some kind of scumbag apart from the fact that he looks like one. The lesson is that if Monjack did look like Kutcher, he’d be a lot better off reputation-wise. People see sloth and they assume the worst.

Listen to this “Old Jews Telling Jokes” guy, Larry Greenfield, take a whack at the old lumberjack joke, and then watch Warren Beatty tell it in Reds. A joke is the most delicate thing in the world. If you don’t tell it exactly right (and I mean with exactly the right attitude and timing and pace), it dies.

It’s nice to hear admiring words about Up In The Air from Indiewire’s Reel Geezers. Because supportive words about Jason Reitman‘s film have been scarce in my circle over the last ten or twelve days. It’s locked, of course, for a Best Picture nomination and there’s also the 90%/91% Rotten Tomatoes rating, but in conversation after conversation I’ve been hearing “overhyped,” “good but not great,” “won’t win Best Picture Oscar” and so on.

I’ve already mentioned the Avatar-rising-as-UITA-falls equation, but something else has been happening — I can feel it. UITA keeps getting diminished or knocked down every time it comes up in conversation. At least as far as people saying it can’t and won’t win the Best Picture Oscar. It doesn’t have to win, of course — what matters is what it is and seeing it for that. But as a major fan who has believed since last September that the odds greatly favored UITA winning, I’m feeling a little bit shocked that this vibe seems to have dissipated like that — that things have turned around so abruptly.

I know that guys like screenwriter William Goldman (whom I spoke to briefly at the UITA party at 21) admire it tremendously, and I recognize that maybe I’m just talking to too many sourpusses. Am I?

Can you imagine being on your death bed, as legendary critic and essayist Robin Wood was recently, and being suddenly seized by an urge to name your top all-time films, and as a friend sits down by the bed with a pad and pen, you sit up slightly and say, for openers, “Top of the list…my all-time favorite…Rio Bravo.”

What is that? You’re about to leave the earth and meet the monolith and the greatest film you can think of is Rio Bravo? A zero-story-tension hangin’ movie that constantly subjects viewers to screechy-voiced Walter Brennan, and which features the very soft-spoken, adolescent-voiced Ricky Nelson singing a duet with Dean Martin?

If Wood is listening from his side of the cosmic fence, let me try explaining this one more time. (I explained it in full on 7.27.07.) Rio Bravo, which I’m moderately okay with, doesn’t hold a candle to High Noon, which is more or less the same film — about a lawman facing up to bad guys who will kill him if he doesn’t arrest or kill them first.

The reason is that High Noon is about facing very tough odds alone, and how you can’t finally trust anyone but yourself because most of your “friends” and neighbors will equivocate or desert you when the going gets tough. That’s reality, while Rio Bravo is a nice dream about standing up to evil with your flawed but loyal homies and nourishing their souls in the bargain — about doing what you can to help them become better men.

High Noon doesn’t need help. It’s about solitude, values…four o’clock in the morning courage. Whereas the action in Rio Bravo is basically about the homies pitching in to help an alcoholic (Dean Martin) get straight and reclaim his self-respect. And about Chance (John Wayne) working up the courage to tell Feathers (Angie Dickinson) that he loves and wants her.

We’d all like to have loyal supportive friends by our side, but honestly, which represents the more realistic view of human nature? The more admirable?

Wood chose Rio Bravo, I suspect, because he was facing the void and he wanted warmth in his heart — he wanted to feel closer to others and selected a film that has always made him feel this. He chose a community solidarity film over a solitary strength film.

A very comforting Christmas Eve service at All Souls church on Lexington and 79th — 12.24.09, 7:25 pm. The choir, I’m told, is composed of professionals, and their singing was awesome. It was like watching a Christmas pagent produced by Broadway’s finest. Only in New York.

The Sherlock Homes of literary legend “has never been much for physical violence,” says NY Times critic A.O. Scott. And Guy Ritchie, director of the corporation-serving, would-be tentpole movie Sherlock Homes, has never been much for “intelligence [in terms of his] interests or attributes as a filmmaker.” But here the twain meets…synergy!

“The chief innovation of this new, franchise-ready incarnation is that Robert Downey, Jr.‘s Holmes is, in addition to everything else, a brawling, head-butting, fist-in-the-gut, knee-in-the-groin action hero. In this vein Sherlock Holmes is kind of cool” and “intermittently diverting…but that’s not really a compliment.

“The visual style — a smoky, greasy, steam-punk rendering of Victorian London, full of soot and guts and bad teeth and period clothes — shows some undeniable flair. And so do the kinetic chases and scrapes that lead us through the city, as Holmes and his pal Watson (Jude Law) scramble to unravel a conspiracy so diabolical that it fails to be interesting.

“It seems that an evil aristocrat (Mark Strong), executed for a series of murders, returns from the dead to mobilize an ancient secret society that he may have time-traveled into a Dan Brown novel to learn about. Doesn’t that sound fascinating? I thought not.

“But there will be a sequel, for which this frantic, harmless movie serves as an extended teaser, and it looks as if it might feature Holmes’s literary archnemesis, Professor Moriarty. No doubt Holmes will break a chair over Moriarty’s head, kidney-punch him and kick him in the face. Wittily, though, like the great detective he is.”