“James Cameron is a brick-and-mortar storyteller. As Sigourney Weaver has said, he’s in touch with his inner 14-year-old, and instinctively knows what moviegoers all over the world want to see.” — from Anne Thompson‘s Indiewire Avatar review/video interview with Cameron, posted early this morning.

“While it is unlikely that any movie will unseat Cameron’s last fiction feature, 1997’s Titanic as the biggest blockbuster of all time ($1.8 billion worldwide), Avatar will be huge; I’ll bet this picture, which defines ‘event movie’ and probably cost $300-million (more than any other film) gets past a billion worldwide.”

“As I’ve been suspecting for a while but have now confirmed, we’re looking at an Oscar first,” Variety‘s Todd McCarthy just wrote in a message. “Best Director Battle of the Exes — Cameron vs. Bigelow.”

Hilarious! But he’s right, I think. Cameron is now a Best Director contender, along with Avatar for Best Picture and — believe it — Zoe Saldana for Best Actress.

I’ve just forwarded my revised Buzzmeter calls to Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil and I inserted Avatar as my third most-likely Best Picture nominee (right behind Up In The Air and The Hurt Locker) and put in Cameron for Best Director and Saldana as Best Actress. Seriously, no foolin’, I mean it.

Yes, Saldana’s manner seems a little broad at first but then you begin to settle into her acting style (the CG morphing demands a certain emphasis — almost akin to silent-movie acting — and de-emphasizing of subtlety) and begin to realize that she’s really good, and that she really brings it home at the end. There’s a blending-of-souls, Na’vi-hugs-human moment at the finale between Saldana and Sam Worthington that you don’t see coming but which feels right and true. It’s the big symmetrical emotional-payoff moment in Avatar that stays with you. (And I don’t care if Armond White agrees or not.)

There’s no question that Avatar deserves a Best Picture nomination. It is exactly the kind of film — magnificently made, audience-friendly, rousing, populist, fun factor — that the Best Picture nominee expansion was intended to accomodate. So now we’re talking two “people” movies that are likely to make the List of Ten — Avatar and The Blind Side.

I think once the word gets out on what a rousing and splendorific LSD eyeball-fuck movie Avatar is that the ambivalance will melt right away and the first weekend will indeed hit the low 70s, and maybe higher…who knows? And once younger Eloi females…naah, I take that back. I was going to say that once they see that the loyal and passionate relationship between Sam Worthington‘s Jake Sully and Zoe Saldana‘s Neytiri actually registers and sinks in (okay, perhaps not on a Leo-Kate-Titanic level, but you can really feel it toward the end) that they might start to get into it, but young Eloi women are too shallow and comfort-driven and into nail polish to embrace a mad spirit-of-the-jungle movie like Avatar.

Avatar is primarily a guy movie — let’s face it. We suspected it all along and now the proof is there on the screen. It’s for guys of all ages and X-factor women of all shapes, sizes and cultures. But women who live, breathe and dream about the culture of the mall will feel threatened by it.

The political import of Avatar — and there’s no waving this aspect away because it’s right in your face start to finish, and especially in the third act — is ardently left. It 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), anti-rightie, anti-Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, etc.

Yes, it’s very teenaged adolescent in its super-imaginative wacko visions and exuberant energy levels, but politically it’s pure Che Guevara (more the Motorcycle Diaries or Che-in-Cuba version than Che in Bolivia), Naom Chomsky, Hugo Chavez, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Oliver Stone, etc. Cameron is an earth-hugging lefty from way back (the flagrant despise-the-arrogant-rich current in Titanic being but one example) so this should come as no surprise to anyone. I for one am cheered and heartened.

If Sarah Palin sees Avatar and then sits down and actually thinks about what it’s saying (which is always a dicey proposition, I admit), she’ll hate this movie. Because Avatar hates her and her kind. Some righties will pretend to like it (“great popcorn flick! took my kids!”), but they’d have to be in major denial mode not to recognize that Avatar is much more MSNBC than Fox News. It really spits on the Fox News philosophy/worldview. If Cameron had for some inane reason put a Fox News-type character in the film, he/she would end up with a Na’vi arrow through his/her chest, trust me.

Call it the most flamboyant, costliest, grandest left-liberal super-movie anyone’s ever seen — a political tract that cost Rupert Murdoch God knows how many hundreds of millions to make and yet is totally pro-loincloth, pro-native, despise-the-greedy, hug-the-earth, worship-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.

Cameron explains the anti-imperialist current to John Anderson in a forthcoming N.Y. Times Sunday piece: “I’m…a child of the ’60s. There’s a part of me who wants to put a daisy in the end of the gun barrel. I believe in peace through superior firepower, but on the other hand I abhor the abuse of power and creeping imperialism disguised as patriotism. Some of these things you can’t raise without being called unpatriotic, but I think it’s very patriotic to question a system that needs to be corralled, or it becomes Rome.”

Spoiler: I leave it to the community to decide whether there’s a huge 9/11 metaphor in Avatar or not, but I felt one (although politically it makes no sense in the context of the film.) Call it a reverse 9/11 image. I’m not talking about the destruction of a man-made super-structure but a natural one. I’ll leave it at that and wait for reactions.

I went to a Magnolia Pictures holiday party just after tonight’s 7 pm Avatar screening exited, and then the damn wireless wasn’t working for about 30 minutes when I finally got home. The upshot is that I’m too whipped — it’s 12:35 am — to evaluate the ins and outs of this amazing film, but I’ll tell you right now there are very few outs. It’s half CG, half live action and it jumps back and forth so the dreaded sensation of being swallowed by a cartoon never happens. Avatar is a hybrid thing and a wild one at that.

All the energy and the madness and the money are right there on the screen, you bet, and the “yeah, I guess I’ll see Avatar but I’m in no real hurry” phase is over. This is too much of an adrenalized eye-popper not to see it as soon as possible, and absolutely in 3D and most desirably in 3D IMAX. (Believe it or not, 20th Century Fox showed it to the creme de la creme of New York journalists in a regular non-IMAX theatre this evening, although the 3D quality was perfectly fine.)

This is probably the goofiest, craziest, super-budgeted CG romper-stomper I’ve ever seen. A friend said it was three video games rolled into one instead of a movie, which is somewhat true in that the story and action-fantasy elements are aimed at your inner 14 year-old (whom I’d forgotten about until tonight — now I feel pleasantly re-acquainted).

You can’t say Avatar doesn’t impart a feeling of delirious abandon and wild-ass splendor. You could call it a kind of visual opera — a forest-primeval symphonic naturalist hard-on movie that technically knocks you flat, coheres emotionally, isn’t afraid to be silly or simplistic, delivers visual CG wonder like nothing I’ve ever seen before (really) and pays off like a gotterdammerung Apocalypse Now meets Tarzan meets the best-special-effects-flick-you’ve-ever-seen insanity ride. The two and a half hours just fly by, and the last 30 minutes alone — a truly nutty extended battle sequence — are worth the price.

I was in fact open-mouthed — faintly grinning but pretty much agog — during the big-ass finale. As Bruno Ganz‘s Adolf Hitler said in that YouTube satire, the 3D is so good it’s like your eyeballs are having sex. The only problem (which wasn’t a problem for me) is that it’s aimed at teenagers. I was wishing, in fact, that I could somehow revert to age 14 or 15 so I could see Avatar in the proper frame — then I’d really have something to do double-backflips over. I’m a little older than that, unfortunately, so instead of sending me into wet-dream action heaven Avatar gave me the wet-dream action heaven giggles, as if I’d toked up before it started.

I’ve seen and heard all the stuff that Avatar dishes out many times before — in Dances With Wolves and A Man Called Horse, for openers — but it’s thrown together with such punch and frenzy that it’s like Cameron somehow managed to time-machine himself back to his own mid teens in order to make it. This is one surging rush of a 3-D flying banshee jungle flick, and at the same time a respect-the-earth, Bush and Cheney-condemning political movie. They should be showing this to the climate change gang in Copenhagen.

That’s it, I’m finished…I’ll write more tomorrow morning.

Here‘s an eloquent and highly persuasive four-star Roger Ebert review of Chris Smith‘s Collapse. “I don’t know when I’ve seen a thriller more frightening…I couldn’t tear my eyes from the screen…Collapse is even entertaining, in a macabre sense. I think you owe it to yourself to see it.”

Collapse is making its way around the country theatrically, but the best way to catch it is through movies-on-demand channels via Time Warner, Verizon FIOS, Cox, Rogers, Insight and Charter. It begins on Comcast this weekend.

“I am convinced that the storyline of this year’s Oscars is that a woman will win a Best Director Oscar for the first time,” says director Rod Lurie (Straw Dogs, Nothing But The Truth), “and for a war film!” He’s speaking, of course, of Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow, who’s been steadily gathering award-season esteem and is now only a few steps away from making history.

Only three female directors have ever been nominated for a Best Director Oscar — Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties (’76), Jane Campion for The Piano (’93) and Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation (’03) — and of course none of them won.

“Bigelow has long been one of the unsung auteurs in the business,” Lurie writes. “She is among that elite group of filmmakers who (this is true for me, at least) will get me into a theater based on their name.”

The irony to which Lurie alludes is a powerful one. Wertmuller’s film aside, the two other nominated films listed above were about female characters, which faintly enforces the notion (or prejudice, if you will) that female directors are for the most part inclined to want to make films about women-friendly subject matter with strong female characters in the lead.

And yet if Bigelow wins (and I strongly suspect that she will) it will be for making a kind of movie — war-torn, violent, foreign territory, all-male cast — that’s been the exclusive province of male directors since the dawn of the film industry.

There’s almost a kind of Barack Obama analogy in Bigelow’s situation. Just as the first African American was elected president in part because he wasn’t seen by hinterland yahoos as being especially “black” (with his white mom and white grandparents), Bigelow seems on the precipice of an historic win in part because she didn’t direct a “woman’s film” and in fact dove right into guy territory. And perhaps also because she’s always been an X-factor female director to start with, being strictly from action and sci-fi and nuclear submarines and motorcycles and leather jackets and that line of country.

“Having been in the military myself, I can tell you that I found it astonishing that Bigelow captured something so well — a way of life, an attitude — that she’s been prohibited from experiencing for herself,” Lurie concludes. “I know that directors often make films in worlds they themselves have never entered, but the fact that Kathryn has not only made a war film but one of the best war films in, Jesus, I don’t know how long, is a testament to both her talent and her diligence.”

I’m not as much of an Nagisa Oshima fan as I could be, and so I can’t figure from which Oshima film this black-and-white poster image was taken from. Does anyone know? I’m guessing it’s either from Death By Hanging (1968) or Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief (’68).

Poster currently mounted on a wall at Broooklyn Academy of Music.

Today’s tracking shows that Avatar‘s across-the-board first choice has risen from 16 to 20 — good news. The definite interest among under-25 males is now up to 57 (three points higher than the comparable 12.7 figure) and 59 for over-25 males (five points higher than the same demo on 12.7). The mixed news is that on 12.7 the definitely not interested number for under-25 females was at 9 and the over-25 sector was at 15, and now the same demos in the 12.10 report are 18 and 12, respectively. Under-25 female negative attitudes, in other words, have doubled while negatives among the older, presumably more literate over-25 females have dropped slightly.

The Guardian‘s Mark Brown has technically defied an Avatar review embargo by revealing that James Cameron‘s film “does not make you feel sick and it is not a disaster.

“All journalists watching the movie in Fox’s Soho headquarters had to sign a form agreeing not to publish a review or even express a professional opinion online or in print before Monday,” he writes. “So by saying Avatar was really much, much better than expected, that it looked amazing and that the story was gripping – if cheesy in many places – the Guardian is in technical breach of the agreement.

“It is not a breach, however, to report that other journalists leaving the screening were also positive: the terrible film that some had been anticipating had not materialized. It was good.

“There is, though, a certain amount of suspension of disbelief needed when watching Avatar. Cynics might sneer at the plot. The film, set in 2154, revolves around a paraplegic marine assigned to a planet where brutish humans are forcing the natives from their homes to mine a precious mineral, unobtanium, which is the only thing that will keep Earth going.

“To get it they need to blast away an agreeable species called the Na’vi – 12 foot or so blue humanoids with tails and pixie eyes. Sam Worthington as the paraplegic marine pretends to be a Na’vi through avatar technology. At first he’s on the nasty human military side but he falls in love, gains a conscience and so on.

“Perhaps most surprising was the politics. At one stage the deranged general leading the attack, with echoes of George W Bush, declares: ‘Our survival relies on pre-emptive action. We will fight terror, with terror.’ There is more shock and awe in this movie than almost any other.”

This rave Avatar review in London’s The Sun doesn’t sound like the writer (a.k.a., “the Sneak”) is invested in anything other than crude enthusiasm and wanting to encourage those who are hoping that James Cameron can do it again. He may be telling the truth, but his words sound too cheerleader-ish, too eager-beaver.

I am, however, moved by the following passage: “The final battle scene is 20 minutes long and absolutely mind-blowing. The Sneak still recalls sitting in a cinema 12 years ago watching awestruck as Titanic slipped beneath the Atlantic waves. And your critic is sure that, even when he is pushing a Zimmer, he will remember the moment the main spaceship of the baddie corporation goes down in Avatar.

“It is overwhelming, and that is because you are emotionally tied up in the characters and the story.”