Let’s call it a mixed week for James Cameron.
True, Avatar swept up nine Academy Award nominations including Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Directing, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Picture, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Visual Effects.
But it was also ousted from the top spot at the box office over the weekend by Nicholas Sparks’ Dear John, a schmaltzy, uninspired excuse of a rom-com starring Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried. (Who? Exactly.)
Most critics attribute this surprise takeover to Tatum’s chiseled abs. (Queue quiet snickering, finger pointing, etc.)
No, but seriously, back to the Oscar nominations thing. Along with the Academy’s totally hue-ist snubbing of so many blue-tinted virtuoso performances, there was one category that seemed conspicuously absent from the above list: Best Adapted Screenplay.
Now obviously I’m not the only one who noticed some major similarities between Avatar’s clichéd, paper-thin plot and a handful of other films/stories including (but not limited to) Fern Gully, Pocahontas, Halo, and of course Costner’s 1990 tatonka-and-loin-cloth epic, Dances With Wolves.
But now Ecorazzi is reporting:
[T]he entertainment website Heavy.com is making a case for the uncanny resemblances between James Cameron’s Avatar and a comic book series titled Firekind.
Firekind ran weekly in 2000 AD, a British science fiction comic anthology best known for its Judge Dredd stories. Created by John Smith and Paul Marshall, the comic series features a human botanist named Hendrick Larsen who travels to Gennyo-Leil, a jungle alien world with a toxic atmosphere, large dragons, blue-skinned natives, and floating rocks.
Heavy charted a table of comparison and described the plot similarities noting that, “If you were to sell Firekind or any kind of fire today, you’d be told it was a rip-off of Avatar – even though it predates the earliest 1994 ‘scriptments’ of Avatar by a year.”
Hmmmm. Fascinating.





Today, the IPCC has apologized for being wrong in a study from 2007 about the likelihood of the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035. They are apologetic, yet don’t seem to quite understand why this would reflect poorly on them. Or on the fact that it was this report that won them
If you didn’t catch the three-hour-long Golden Globes telecast last night, you missed out on Ricky Gervais awesomely getting drunk while executing his hosting duties with acerbic aplomb.
Sir Richard Branson is the latest confused climate crusader, hellbent on a scorched-earth approach to saving the planet.

