When she’s not going to poverty stricken places looking all wealthy, Angelina Jolie has a sideline in acting. That’s right. She pretends to be other people and other people pay her for it. Like us, she’s paid to lie.

So from being the new Lady Diana to what? Well, she could be starring as Cleopatra in a film that could well be getting made about The Most Beautiful Woman Ever Apparently.

Who says? Well, Oscar-winning director (we’re legally obliged to write that) James Cameron says he has no doubt that Angelina Jolie would be great if she took on the role of Cleopatra in a rumoured big screen biopic.

The Avatar director has addressed speculation that he was planning a 3-D film about the Egyptian Queen, saying:

“It’s a subject that’s always fascinated me.”

Of course, Cameron is not willing to give the total thumbs-up to the project (more of a politician’s nearly thumbs-up) but he’s definitely keen.

Cameron spoke about his involvement in the project, stating:

“I’ve been talking to them about it but no decisions have been made.”

But one thing he is sure about is that Jolie is a natural fit for the role.

“I mean, Angelina Jolie and Cleopatra? To me, that’s like a slam dunk. Whether I wind up doing it or not, I think it’s going to be a great project.”

Here’s a brief snippet of how the film may end up turning out.

It’s long been fairly common knowledge and source of minor irony that O.J. Simpson was originally in the running to play the cyborg in The Terminator, only to be denied by director James Cameron who thought that Simpson was just ‘too nice’.

Is his face red now.

But that didn’t stopped him from blabbing about it all over the TV recently, naturally.
Cameron himself has made little comment on this casting decision until his appearance on 60 Minutes on CBS this weekend. In a statement so massively inappropriate it probably caused severe bleeding to the eyes, nose, ears, brain and rectum of anyone watching, Cameron started kicking himself saying:

“I didn’t know O.J. Simpson. … I didn’t know that he was gonna go murder his wife later and become the real ‘Terminator.’”

We can only assume Cameron feels a massive dumbass for not using foreknowledge to change future events, like what Kyle Reese did.

Well double-dumbass on you Jim, because O.J. didn’t even murder his wife at all! Probably. Well, he was never convicted in a criminal court. He was acquitted, which is next-best thing to actually being innocent.

Admittedly he is now serving 33 years in jail for a crime in Las Vegas with which he was charged with armed robbery, kidnapping, robbery, burglary, coercion and assault with a deadly weapon, so perhaps he’s not exactly the stand-up guy Cameron first imagined.

Let’s not mention the fact that he was recorded during the incident in question shouting “Don’t let nobody out of this room. Mother fucker, you think you can steal my shit and sell it?” which really should carry a prison sentence all of it’s own for being embarrassingly ‘urban’. He was in Naked Gun for goodness sake.

O.J.’s reported response the day after these events? “I thought what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas”. Honestly. Say it to yourself in the Terminator robot-voice.

Cameron probably made the right decision, and shouldn’t be so down on himself.

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Who’s the most dangerous celebrity? Which fiend of myth wields the most power?

Cheryl Cole/Tweedy/Whatever? She’s only beaten up one toilet attendant, and that’s nothing for a Northern Girl, Cheryl Weedy more like. Russell Crowe? Well, there’s his terrible band with the terrible name and he can throw a mean phone, but that’s nothing new. Just ask Naomi Campbell.

No, it’s none of these monsters of legend – it’s Oprah. Oprah has just won the title of ‘officially the most powerful celebrity it the world’. And she won it with an elbow takedown in the fifth round, apparently.

Songs will be written about her, and her legend will live down the ages in poetry and music.  According to legend, she has hands of pure stone with which to smash your stupid face, her thighs are made of the finest brass that resound with a mighty bass ringing when she walks, her nose opens and fires out heat-seeking missiles (as did Michael Jackson’s, he just filled it with a sleeping-gas delivery system and ended up overusing it. Now you know). Frankly, Oprah could probably kill you with just her hair.

Just think, this time last year we were living under the yoke of Angelina Jolie and her multi-ethnic army of children, idyllic times. However, it seems as though the house of Jolie has waned with the lack of fresh orphan blood, and the house of Oprah has risen like a lardy hawk and she has waged much war to take the jewelled crown in what was undoubtedly an awe-inspiring and bloody conflict. The BBC reports from the battlefield:

US TV host Oprah Winfrey has been named the most powerful celebrity in the world by Forbes magazine. Winfrey knocked film star Angelina Jolie off the top spot of Forbes’s annual Celebrity 100 list, which is based on earnings and media exposure.

Oh, so it’s just some poxy back-slapping exercise where net worth is considered in terms of how much you can bang on about your weight-gain on your network chat show, and not about the ease at which you could crush a solid ice sculpture of a lighthouse in your mighty fist? Well, that’s much less exciting.

You know what they should do? Stick ‘em all on a remote island and let them scrap it out, Battle Royale style. I mean just look at the Top Ten, surely Oprah wouldn’t stand a chance? Let’s run down:

10. Madonna – Well, she is quite wirey, but one good punch would probably split her parchmenty, aged skin. Oprah’s got the stones to take that. Lose.

9. Johnny Depp – He’s basically a very effeminate girl. Lose.

8. Sandra Bullock – Good for bluffing her attacks, what with her not being about to move her skin about at all, but then again there’s probably a loss of motor function that comes with that. Lose.

7. U2 – it’s four on one, but Bono will probably sack off the fight to fight climate change in his private jet or something, and no one is really sure the other three actually exist and aren’t just holographic leftovers from the Zoo TV tour. Lose.

6. Britney – Where do you start? Lose.

5. Tiger Woods – Not unless he knobbed her to death (which is quite possible, granted). Lose.

4. Lada Gaga – Are you kidding? She can’t even stand upright. Lose.

3. James Cameron – Frail, elderly man who looks like a creepy lesbian aunt? Oprah literally eats people like that for breakfast. Lose.

2. Beyonce – Apart from the arse, a light snack for the beast that it Oprah. Lose.

Huh, looks like Oprah is the most powerful celebrity in the world, well done Forbes. Let’s hope the reign is a benevolent one. All hail Oprah!

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People have run out of ideas about how to fix the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. That said, they only ever had one idea.

Golf balls. Apparently golf balls don’t fix environmental catastrophes. Who knew? But anyway, now that the lack of a solution has become equally disastrous and embarrassing, the authorities have decided to call in the big guns. That’s right, James Cameron is on the case.

No, not a world-class environmental scientist called James Cameron. James Cameron James Cameron. The Avatar guy. He knows exactly how to repair the broken pipeline because he owns some submarines and he knows a lot about underwater stuff. Or, failing that, he can just plug the hole with his increasingly berserk Helen Mirren haircut. Either way, he’s our new hero!

Because he made an excessively expensive Leonardo DiCaprio snuff film and a really long PlayStation cutscene about a blue hippy with penises in his hair, James Cameron doesn’t really have to give anything back to humanity. But if you cut James Cameron open, he bleeds love. And that’s why he’s helping scientists come up with a way to fix the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. It’s not just because he made two and a half films about some water once and now thinks he’s a poxy expert about it, you cynics.

Why did it take so long for the authorities to call upon James Cameron to help with the oil spill? Simple, it’s because they were saving his expertise for when the evil murder-robots from the future attack us. But in the short-term, the oil spill is probably a bit more urgent. People reports:

James Cameron, the director of Avatar and Titanic, joined scientists and other experts at a meeting with U.S. officials Tuesday in Washington to come up with possible fixes for the leak, which so far has resisted oil company BP’s attempts to plug it… Cameron reportedly contacted BP several weeks ago and offered the company use of his private fleet of deep-dive craft.

That’s… that’s actually quite considerate. Well done James Cameron. And he’s not the only celebrity to offer his help, either. Victoria Principal from Dallas has contributed $200,000 towards the clean-up fund, while Kevin Costner has apparently invested in the development of  a brand-new centrifugal clean-up machine. The only problem there is that Kevin Costner is thought to have stipulated that the machine must be 400 metres tall, made of gold and shaped like Kevin Costner, so it probably won’t be much use.

Apart from that, though, it’s a nice thought.

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Now that it’s April, we don’t have to remember anything about what happened at The Oscars, and it’s beautiful.

We don’t have to remember the winners. We don’t have to remember the forced stage banter. In fact, aside from the speech where Sandra Bullock praised her husband without realising that he’d been secretly boning a tattooed Nazi fetishist on the sly, we don’t remember a single thing about The Oscars at all. But Sigourney Weaver does.

Sigourney Weaver remembers that her film Avatar hardly won any Oscars, even though it was prettier than everything else, more technologically advanced than anything else and had about 30 more offensive blue Jesus-aliens in it than anything else. Why does Sigourney Weaver think that Avatar fared so miserably at The Oscars – simple, it’s because James Cameron doesn’t have a vagina. Obviously.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is undoubtedly one of the most sexist institutions around. Why, Halle Berry‘s Oscar win for Monster’s Ball in 2002 marked the first time that the Best Actress award had ever been given to a woman – up until that point the recipients were all men in drag. Yes, even Gwyneth Paltrow.

You just have to look at the Oscar statue itself to see how sexist the Academy is – it obviously looks like a man. If there was any justice in the world then each Oscar would have giant boobs and a working vagina – and there’d be a Best Ironing category near the start of the ceremony – but oh no, the rich old men in charge don’t want to give the sisterhood that sort of helping hand.

Sure, Kathryn Bigelow may have made history by becoming the first ever woman to win a Best Director Oscar this year – but don’t you see? That’s even more sexist than anything else! No, really, it is… because, um, Kathryn Bigelow is a woman and, um, letting women receive the same treatment as men is, you know, wrong. And stuff. Wait. Maybe we need Sigourney Weaver to come in and help us out here.

She’s worked it all out. You see, even though it’s officially the most successful theatrically-released PlayStation cut-scene to heavily imply that Native Americans were stupid and useless until white people came along ever, Sigourney Weaver’s film Avatar was largely blanked at the Oscars in favour of Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. The reason for this, as Sigourney Weaver told Brazilian news site Folha Online, is because of good old-fashioned sexism. WP reports:

The reason Cameron lost is because the Academy was more interested in making history by giving the award to a woman. “Jim didn’t have breasts, and I think that was the reason,” she told Folha Online, a Brazilian news site. “He should have taken home that Oscar.” Weaver also voiced her disapproval of the Best Picture choice, suggesting it should have gone to Avatar.

We’re right behind you on this issue, Sigourney, and we’ll do anything we can to spread this message. Give equality to women by never letting them win anything! Remove the female vote! Down with girls! Down with girls!

That was your point, Sigourney? Right?

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Each year the Oscars have a theme. Admittedly most of the time the theme is Sobbing Millionaires, so nobody really notices.

But not this year. This year it looks like the main Oscars theme will be Whatever You Do, Don’t Piss James Cameron Off. One movie producer has already been banned from the Oscars for badmouthing Avatar in an email, and now Sacha Baron Cohen has also been told to stay away because his planned Avatar skit might have ended up offending James Cameron.

Not that James Cameron minds. In fact, he’s said that he’d love the Oscars to poke fun at Avatar. Obviously the people responsible for the poking will never work in Hollywood again, and their house might mysteriously burn down in the middle of the night, and all the food they eat afterwards might taste a bit like poison, but that’s all part of the fun, isn’t it?

This might not be especially obvious – what with Avatar quite clearly being a hilarious satire of movies that go out of their way to clumsily moralise about badly-defined issues at every turn and directors who are so in love with themselves that they absolutely lose the ability to self-edit – but James Cameron isn’t exactly known for his sense of humour. We know – it’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Especially with that weird Helen Mirren haircut he’s growing at the moment.

One person who knows about James Cameron’s inability to laugh at himself, though, is Oscars producer Bill Mechanic. He was the boss of 20th Century Fox during the production of Titanic, so he’s probably witnessed enough examples of James Cameron’s self-important megalomania to know better than to jerk him around on Sunday night. That could be why a producer of The Hurt Locker has been banned from the ceremony following an email he wrote about why Avatar shouldn’t win anything. And it’s probably why Sacha Baron Cohen has been uninvited as well.

If reports are to be believed, Sacha Baron Cohen was due to present an Oscar with Ben Stiller on Sunday dressed up as a Na’vi who James Cameron had knocked up on the sly. But producers got cold feet, began to worry that Cameron would stand up midway through the skit and shout “How dare you belittle my masterpiece about the lanky, blue, magic-haired, pterodactyl-riding Jesus alien!” before storming out, and quietly dropped it from the schedule.

But James Cameron says that he knows nothing about the skit. In fact, he says that he’d love it if Avatar got a great big roasting from the Oscars. E! Online reports:

“I don’t know anything about that…I don’t produce the Oscars. If they want to poke fun at Avatar Sunday, that’s OK by me,” said Cameron, “I’m sure we’ll laugh.” As far as he’s concerned, he told me, jokes are just another element of Hollywood’s big night. And he’s fine with it. “The Oscars are a celebration of movies… even the gaffes and out-of-bounds stuff are all part of the fun.”

You hear that, Oscars? James Cameron says that it’s all part of the fun. Now you’ve got two days to bring back everything you banned. Let the Hurt Locker producer attend the ceremony, fly Sacha Baron Cohen in from London to do his Na’vi bit, reinsert all the Avatar jokes into Steve Martin‘s monologue, rehire the naked blue Avatar dancers you hired to entertain the audience during the commercial breaks and dig out that picture of James Cameron’s face with the word ‘SUBTLETY’ written across it that you’d planned to include in the annual montage of people that have died.

He’ll love it. No, really, he said so.

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Last night The Hurt Locker swept the board at the BAFTAs, winning six awards. But screw all that.

Because we were there too. As is becoming gloriously traditional, hecklerspray was invited to cover the BAFTAs red carpet. And, as is becoming equally traditional, we were abysmal. While we may have seen the likes of James Cameron and Prince William and Robert Pattinson from a distance, our freakish proximity to George Lamb from BBC Three meant that most of these people sensibly kept as far away from us as possible.

What follows is a video diary of the night. It’s intended to be a first-hand account of A-list BAFTAs glamour. You, on the other hand, might see it as the painful unravelling of one man’s mind as he slowly realises that he’s desperately in love with George Lamb from Young Butcher Of The Year. Please enjoy, and promise not to judge us too harshly…

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Let’s play a game. Imagine Avatar. Imagine everything you liked about Avatar. Now remove all the 3D.

Now remove the breathtaking visuals. Now remove all the nuanced motion capture performances, the emotive score, the cutting-edge technology and the spectacle of seeing a perfectly-realised alien world come to life in such perfect detail that you secretly wished you live there. You’ve got a slightly gormless environmental story about a lanky blue Jesus who flies around on a pterodactyl having it off with tentacly aliens all the time.

Or you’ve got the Avatar prequel novel that James Cameron wants to write. It doesn’t matter which; they’re just as rubbish-sounding as each other.

There’s no doubt that Avatar was a cinematic game-changer. In the near future, we’re going to be bombarded by hundreds of films that’ll pinch elements from Avatar and claim it as their own. Maybe we’ll see more films embrace digital 3D. Or maybe we’ll see more films experiment with motion capture technology. Or maybe we’ll start to see less of a reliance on flesh and blood actors in the filmmaking process. Who knows?

But what we’re hoping, though – what we’re really hoping – is that Avatar influences other directors to the degree that, once they’ve made their film, they feel compelled to rush out and bang together a bloated, badly-formed, utterly superfluous 900-page novel about the world that they’ve created. Because that’s what James Cameron has decided to do with Avatar. Look, MTV says so and everything:

“Jim is going to write a novel himself,” the film’s producer, Jon Landau, told us. “Jim wants to write a novel that is a big, epic story that fills in a lot of things… it would go into much more depth about all the stories that we didn’t have time to deal with — like the schoolhouse and Sigourney [Weaver's character] teaching at the schoolhouse; Jake on Earth and his backstory and how he came here.”

Oh gee, why not throw in a scene where Colonel Quaritch catches Jake towelling down after a shower and they end up bumming each other in slow-motion to the sound of I Want To Know What Love Is while riding a rainbow-coloured unicorn? Because, you know, if James Cameron wants to have a go at writing some Avatar fan fiction, he may as well go the whole hog.

Seriously, James. Enough’s enough. You’ve already made a three-hour film about the world of Avatar. We don’t need a book to fill in the gaps on top of that. Learn to self-edit. Because you know who you’re starting to sound like? George Lucas. Once you start writing books and entertaining the possibility of sequels, you won’t be able to stop. You’ll start chucking out Avatar spin-offs and cartoons and holiday specials and weird disco-influenced musicals starring Donny and Marie Osmond with barely a hint of quality control.

And you know how this’ll end? With a terrible Avatar prequel that’ll largely revolve about trade negotiation and taxation banding within Pandora’s bureaucratic infrastructure, that’s how. Worse still, you might end up growing a beard and refusing to wear anything but plaid shirts until your neck disappears completely. Honestly James. Put down the pen while you still can.

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What was most offensive about Avatar? Its length? The fact that Zoe Saldana had boobs for no reason whatsoever?

Its GCSE politics? The way that the 3D glasses made your eyeballs start to vibrate inside your own skull? No, you idiots, it was the smoking. Remember how Sigourney Weaver was all like “I sure do love to smoke me some cigarettes!” in Avatar and then she died? That was the most offensive thing about Avatar – apart from, you know, the whole thing being a bunch of gormless hippy bollocks.

In fact, Weaver’s Avatar smoking has riled some people enough to buy ads bemoaning all the free advertising the tobacco industry received as a result. And the tobacco industry has been quick to maximise on this, which explains all the ‘Cigarettes: Now Smoked By Butch Old Ladies Who Turn Into Aliens And Then Die!’ billboards you’ve been seeing everywhere lately.

It’s a well-established fact that, when you see something on a screen, it influences your real-life decisions. That’s why, when you see all the Coca Cola cups next to Simon Cowell on American Idol, you want to punch Simon Cowell in the mouth. Drink Coca Cola. We meant to say that it makes you want to drink Coca Cola. Yes, that’s right.

And it’s the same with Avatar. Why, when we saw Avatar, its complex power of suggestion made us want to demonstrate our Caucasian superiority by flying to another planet – or, if that wasn’t practical, flying to a slightly ethnic-seeming country – and showing all the stupid locals how much better than them we are by passing ourselves off as a sort of spurious Jesus figure as crassly as possible until one of them lets us have it off with her.

Oh, and smoke. Avatar made us want to take up smoking as well. Mainly it was the misinformed Jesus thing, but smoking a bit as well.

And it turns out we’re not the only ones. Members of Smoke Free Movies – a campaign opposed to the depiction of smoking in films aimed at the young – have become so incensed by Sigourney Weaver’s smoking in Avatar that they’ve decided to take out two full-page ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter bemoaning all the free advertising that the film has apparently given to the tobacco industry. The New York Times reports:

Advertisements in Hollywood trade papers accuse the film of providing the equivalent of $50 million in free tobacco advertising. For every $100 million it earns at the box office, “Avatar” will “deliver an estimated 40 million tobacco impressions to theater audiences,” said the ads, referring to scenes involving a cigarette-smoking character played by Sigourney Weaver.

James Cameron has already dealt with these claims in part, making the distinction between advocating smoking and simply portraying it. Which is a fair point – for most of Avatar, Sigourney Weaver is too busy being a simpering blue alien who babbles on about windchimes and dreamcatchers and God knows how many other kinds of pseudo-spiritual mumbo-jumbo to explicitly state that smoking makes you look both cooler and more grown-up. Which we heard it totally does, kids.

However, James Cameron has yet to respond to the latest batch of Smoke Free Movies ads. Maybe instead of issuing a formal rebuttal he should just send them a DVD copy of Ghostbusters. That filmcontains so much smoking that they’d probably end up pooing blood 15 minutes in.

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Avatar, right? Two and a half hours of some big smurfs dicking about in an enchanted forest, right? Right?

Who’d want to see that? Who’d want to see Michelle Rodriguez and that bloke who’s in everything even though he’s not very good twonking around through a pair of uncomfortable 3D glasses that make you want to vomit everywhere? Two and a half hours of that and then Leona Lewis comes along to punish you with a sodding power ballad at the end. Avatar is going to be crap.

Except maybe it isn’t. A bunch of people have already seen Avatar. And apparently it’s quite good. We’ve never been so disappointed.

Remember when everyone said that Avatar was going to be the future of cinema? They said that it’d be such a game-changer that, in the future, all films would be about giant blue aliens who look a bit like Abraham Lincoln running through the woods and making berries sparkle, or whatever the hell it is that’s supposed to happen in Avatar. Plus all films would be in 3D. And all films would take 15 years to make. And all films would have to feature Sigourney Weaver as a wisecracking scientist. That’s how much of a game-changer Avatar was going to be.

And then the Avatar trailer was released. And it was awful. The aliens looked like Delgo. The animation looked like a bad PS3 game. One of the female aliens had tits, for no biological reason other than the fact that tits look quite nice. It smelt like beads and patchouli oil and dreamcatchers. It was going to be the worst film ever made.

But now, since it’s being released this time next week, people have finally been able to watch Avatar all the way through. And, as hard as it is to imagine, it turns out that Avatar is actually somewhere between the most important film in history and the worst film ever made, just like Titanic and Zulu and Caddyshack and Tremors and everything that Jessica Alba has ever been in, except for Good Luck Chuck which actually is the worst film ever made. Turns out that Avatar is just a quite good film. But don’t take our word for it – because we haven’t seen it – instead, here’s what the experts think:

Stephen Shaefer, Boston Herald:

As “Avatar” ran, the crowd laughed at the jokes, applauded briefly for an action sequence and gave a thunderous, prolonged ovation at the end.

Kirk Honeycutt, The Hollywood Reporter:

As commander-in-chief of an army of visual-effects technicians… he brings science-fiction movies into the 21st century with the jaw-dropping wonder that is “Avatar.” … The only question is: How will Cameron ever top this?

Todd McCarthy, Variety:

The King of the World sets his sights on creating another world entirely in “Avatar,” and it’s very much a place worth visiting. James Cameron’s long-gestating epic pitting Earthly despoilers against a forest-dwelling alien race delivers unique spectacle, breathtaking sights, narrative excitement and an overarching anti-imperialist, back-to-nature theme.

Mark Brown, The Guardian:

The film does not make you feel sick and it is not a disaster.

So, based on these early reviews, will you go and see Avatar? We’re still unsure. That’s partly because Avatar would have to be brilliant to convince us to spend nearly three hours watching an alien that looks like he’s been carved out of Blu-Tack reveal that the humans were the monsters all along, and partly because if we go and see it and it’s good, we’ll have nothing to take the piss out of. It’s not worth the risk.

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Thanks to some unfortunate incident called Charlie’s Angels, the regrettably named McG has been tarred with the same brush as his peers Brett Ratner and Uwe Boll.

In fact, his handle on the Terminator story turned out to be a surprisingly decent entry into the muscular Arnie franchise.

McG knew he had much to prove, this would be an Arnie-less sequel for a series he owned from the moment his naked buttocks walked in front of the lens. So, with Bale serving as the ‘name’ on the banner it may come as a surprise that he actually has far less to do here than expected.

Sam Worthington – star of the upcoming Avatar – stands front and centre in this as Marcus. It’s no big spoiler to say that he is a machine – an early model that’ll lead to the hulking Schwarzenegger T-800 we love. Marcus’ mysterious backstory and handle on his own creation fortunately works as a compelling undercurrent to the main story – much of what makes this film enjoyable is Worthington’s performance and his ability to flip from tough action hero to tortured robot.

The film definitely relaunched the franchise from its slightly camp third instalment and instilled it with a grittiness clearly inspired from the likes of Scott, Cuarón and even a generous portion of the excellent reinvention of Battlestar Galactica. It is helped in no small way by Marcus’ journey which serves as a meaty introduction to the apocalyptic landscapes that Cameron could only tease us with in the neon-struck 80s.

Bale does disappoint. We have watched John Connor grow up and here he is trying to become the leader he feels he was born to be. At no fault of Bale he is given little to do here apart from formulate plans and turn in the odd action scene. The most compelling part of Connor’s life seems to have taken place between Nick Stahl’s impish incarnation in T-3 and Bale’s grizzle-toned skinhead here.

This film was meant to serve as a first entry into a new trilogy that would explore the resistance’s uprising against the machine onslaught, and Connor – much like other members of the support cast. – clearly had a lot of room to grow. Bryce Dallas Howard is criminally underused as John’s wife Kate and only shares a few scenes here. What we do get a lot of is Kyle Reese – a perfect capturing of Michael Biehn’s performance from T-1 and here by Anton Yelchin – whose obsession with Connor forms an interesting relationship, given he is his father pre-conception (try to keep up!).

There are nods to the previous entries and McG packs in plenty action spectacle that serves as much popcorn wallop as one would hope. There are a few ingredients that don’t quite mix well; silent child Star only acts as a homage to Newt from Aliens but serves no real purpose. Also, the big cameo towards the end is all too brief and not as well implemented as it could have been.

This film is leagues ahead of T-3 and, given time to expand the story, then a sequel could do for Salvation what T-2 did for T-1. McG may have tarnished his name with his bland CV but with this reinvention of the franchise he has delivered a film that stands alongside its predecessors with ease. It isn’t quite the level of Cameron ingenuity but McG delivers a sequel that makes you barely notice the absence of the Govenator.

The Blu-ray also gloriously ups the ante with the action, providing plenty of bang for your buck in HD. Also, there are plenty of features packed into the discs including a picture in picture commentary from McG and a slightly extended cut which features female heroine’s (Moon Bloodgood) breasts. A director’s cut surely to be as revered as Scott’s Blade Runner!

Hecklerspray rating: 4/5

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Avatar, the new James Cameron sci-fi movie, is currently being spoken about as if it’s already a masterpiece.

This isn’t down to Avatar‘s game-changing adoption of brand new 3D technology, though, or the fact it’s been a decade in the making because most cinemas just haven’t been equipped to screen it until now. No, Avatar is supposed to be a masterpiece because it’s a Michelle Rodriguez film that doesn’t make people want to deliberately hurt themselves.

And now we can see the very first fruits of James Cameron’s Avatar – the Avatar teaser trailer has just been premiered on the internet.

So what does this teaster trailer teach us about Avatar? Well, it’s early days but we think we’re correct in assuming that James Cameron + bleeding edge computer animated motion capture technology + a rumoured production budget of close to $300 million = a MTV2 alternative rock video from 1993. With something that sounds worryingly like a Robson and Jerome soundtrack. This film is going to rule.

UPDATE – OK, there goes our credibility. Turns out this is a fake trailer after all. But the real one had better feature hundreds of library clips of clocks and plants, too, or else we’re going to get punchy.

So far it’s fair to say that this year’s Cannes Film Festival has been all over the shop.

The bulk of the chatter has been about what Angelina Jolie is keeping in her guts and the festival’s biggest two movies – Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull and Vicky Cristina Barcelona – are only gaining interest because people either like a) watching iconic action stars try to recapture past glories or b) watching Scarlett Johansson get off with Penelope Cruz.

And since Sean Penn is the festival’s jury president this year, everything else is probably going to be a barrage of humourless hand-wringing about starving Albanians. And if the thought of that has put you off, we’ve found a way to enjoy the Cannes Film Festival from home.

Actually, we’ve found two ways of enjoying the Cannes Film Festival from home. The first one is to watch the GMTV Cannes coverage while one of your friends whines in a French accent and resentfully jabs you in the kidneys with a lit cigarette every couple of minutes, and the second one involves Skype.

Because not everyone in the movie industry wants to go to a festival that mostly seems to be about Jack Black dicking around with some pandas, Skype is being used in Cannes’ American Pavilion to facilitate video calls with various absentee entertainment notables during important interviews and panel discussions. According to Julie Sisk, founder and director of the The American Pavilion:

“The film community is increasingly global, and Skype helps make certain that the Festival is as inclusive as possible of that entire community.”

So who’s scheduled to appear in these special Skype video conferences? James Cameron’s rumoured to be making an appearance, and so is Vince Pace, executive producer of that recent Miley Cyrus movie that did so well. Thank you Skype – now it’s possible to irritate grown men by asking them a barrage of questions exclusively about a 15-year-old girl’s naked body no matter where they are in the world.