OT: Eeek!

Category 3 Hurricane Earl will apparently be spending Labor Day weekend first at OBX, then up to Cape Cod/Martha's Vineyard/Nantucket, wreaking havoc and ruining the last big weekend for coastal businesses that could have used the money. That's a shame. Hopefully, residents and vacationers will have the good sense to leave. Katrina was a Category 3, after all.

Now, I'm seeing that a crazy man with a gun, a hostage, and possibly an explosive is running loose inside Discovery Communications' HQ in Maryland. Yes, the people who give you the Discovery Channel, Travel, Animal Planet, etc.:

http://www.tbd.com/articles/2010/09/discovery-communications-headquaters-in-silver-spring-evacuated-7172.html

WUSA News 9 in Washington, D.C. has many ongoing Tweets on the situation, including pix of the gunman and his alleged demands:

http://twitter.com/wusa9

Fortunately, it appears all of the employees and the onsite daycare have been evacuated, but it's not known yet if there are any injuries or deaths.

Update: Gunman shot, hostages freed unharmed.

Why "Dances With Smurfs" Isn't Franchise-able

I read not one but two different articles on how the "Avatar" re-release this weekend didn't exactly re-inspire the masses. James Cameron had said prior to the re-release that it was going to be a measure to see if the flick could become a franchise, i.e. spawn many sequels and stuff.

My guess is that despite having two "all-time" box office hits consecutively, Cameron doesn't think he's in the Big Boy's Club unless and until he's able to spawn a Star Wars/Star Trek/Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter of his own. "What about the Terminator movies?" I'll get to that in a minute. But Terminator aside, Cameron has either done just one installment of somebody else's franchise or series ("Aliens," "Piranha 2") or did big movies without a lot of sequel potential ("Titanic"). "The Abyss" wasn't a big enough hit to generate a series and for some reason, nobody ever got around to a "True Lies 2." But I'm not really sure why Cameron thought "Avatar" would launch something like Star Wars, because the potential just isn't there. There's no sense of a bigger universe or a bigger story other than what happens in this film. For example, at the end of A New Hope, we knew that despite the Rebels' victory, Darth Vader was still alive and the war with the Empire still wasn't over. Luke had only begun to learn the Jedi ways. The relationships between the characters had potential to change and grow. At the end of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone," we know Harry's got several more years ahead of him at Hogswarts, with much to learn and many secrets to uncover. In "Avatar," any kind of background is just throwaway exposition and the only thing of importance at all is the big tree on Pandora. And they save it and they kick out the humans. The bad guys might come back. Or they may not. We don't know because the bad guys were mostly cardboard caricatures and the main heavy gets killed. The protagonist in "Avatar" pretty much went through the entire hero cycle in one film. Once he's learned the Na'vi ways, beats the bad guys, wins the blue topless girl, becomes the Big Man On Campus, and transforms into a Na'vi for real, what's there left for him to do? And in my humble opinion, while the planet looked cool, I just don't think any of the other Na'vi characters are interesting or relatable enough to carry any future films. Moreover, the film carries the message that humans and human values, characterized from a completely negative perspective, are unwelcome on Pandora. Virtually all of the human characters die, are expelled, or are literally converted. I don't see how that's going to be an inviting "universe" to return to again and again.

I suppose they could make a sequel, but all you could get is a redux of the first film. Which is just as well because in all of the years Cameron has been making movies, he doesn't seem to be able to focus his attention beyond a single sequel. After "Terminator 2," he walked from it (it probably didn't help that his marriage to Linda Hamilton ended up in the crapper).

Then there's the personality factor. The James Bond movies have always depended on having a guy who women love and men admire in the lead role. People like JK Rowling. People like Peter Jackson; say what you will about the LOTR movies, he is a likable fellow. And despite what you might see from nerd rage online, people like George Lucas. Ditto for Gene Roddenberry when he was alive. Cameron has always had a reputation, but ever since "Avatar" came out, his big mouth and douchebag ways have gone into overdrive, alienating industry folks and fans alike.

Back to the drawing board.