Word: vi
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...more than any of his previous movies, Avatar is wholly Cameron's world. The 2½-hr. sci-fi epic follows an ex-Marine named Jake Sully as he struggles for survival on an alien moon called Pandora, home to a tall, blue, humanoid species called the Na'vi and to a mysterious resource called unobtainium, which draws humans in a future century to colonize the planet. Jake (Sam Worthington) must inhabit the body of a human-alien hybrid, or avatar, to breathe the noxious air on Pandora. There he falls in love with a Na'vi woman and finds...
...explosion, he boomed a noise over amplifiers, threw foam particles at them and whacked them with a padded jousting pole. To approximate Pandora's moss-covered terrain, he laid plastic sheets on the floor, forcing the cast to walk gingerly. When Zoe Saldana, who plays Jake's Na'vi love interest Neytiri, was "riding" a flying creature, she clung to a giant gray hobbyhorse rocked on a gimbal by grips. For scenes that combined live action with CG, Cameron used a new tool called a Simulcam, which allowed him to see actors playing in exotic CG surroundings in real time...
...Diego's Comic-Con. When the trailer went online on Aug. 21, demand was instantaneous, quickly making it the most downloaded trailer at Apple.com The Avatar footage triggered a record 4 million streams in its first day. But the reaction wasn't all glowing. Some commenters likened the Na'vi to George Lucas' reviled CG character Jar Jar Binks, others to the '80s TV cartoon Thundercats. Those who saw the footage in theaters (it screened in select IMAX locations) were considerably more impressed, but the initial hype and interest that had surrounded the project were giving way to a backlash...
Building on the linguistic science developed by the pioneering semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss became a pivotal figure in the development of structuralism, which holds that universal mental structures underlie the behaviors, social relations and beliefs of virtually all societies in all eras. It was an idea with many critics, but in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, structuralism became a hugely influential school of thought, with offshoots--some of them just barely related to Lévi-Strauss's original thinking--in many other disciplines, including sociology and literature...
...vi-Strauss, who was 100 when he died on Oct. 30 in Paris, also transformed notions about tribal societies. When he entered the field of anthropology in the 1930s, "primitive peoples" were regarded pretty much as just that--mindless and crude. Lévi-Strauss penetrated the intricacy of their myths and cultural practices and found tribal peoples to be sophisticated and intellectually curious, a picture of them he laid out in his 1962 book The Savage Mind. And in his four-volume Mythologies, he showed the immense complexity behind the stories tribal people use to explain the world...