For a while there it seemed like every environmental group was painting its cause as the real-life Avatar, so much so that I sort of tuned out. In so doing, the Xingu River tribes of the Amazon basin got lost in the shuffle.  But over the weekend James Cameron revealed plans to shoot a 3D documentary on the tribes.  The back story is that last week, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva gave the go ahead to a massive dam project that would dry up a 60-mile stretch of the river, “devastating the indigenous communities that live along it.”  That spurred Cameron to announce his documentary, and makes this a perfect time to revisit the New York Times piece about Cameron’s first visit to the Amazon a few months ago and my God this is amazing:

“The snake kills by squeezing very slowly,” Mr. Cameron said to more than 70 indigenous people, some holding spears and bows and arrows, under a tree here along the Xingu River. “This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be,” he added.

As if to underscore the point, seconds later a poisonous green snake fell out of a tree, just feet from where Mr. Cameron’s wife sat on a log. Screams rang out. Villagers scattered. The snake was killed. Then indigenous leaders set off on a dance of appreciation, ending at the boat that took Mr. Cameron away. All the while, Mr. Cameron danced haltingly, shaking a spear, a chief’s feathery yellow and white headdress atop his head.

Oh man.  Does it make me a bad person for finding that account hilarious?  Honestly, I think it’s a pretty cool move for James Cameron to take time out of his busy schedule sewing runway models to each other for his own amusement in the basement of his yacht to go help prevent an environmental disaster… but would it be too much to ask that the natives worship him like a God and give him a portly sidekick who calls him “Mr. Jim”?  Because that would be amazing.

The original plan for the two-part, Bill Condon-directed, final chapter of the Twilight Saga, Snorkels the Vampire Fetus, was to film in Brazil, the setting of Edward and Bella’s honeymoon in the book.  But after a situation in a Rio hotel over the weekend in which criminals took 35 hostages, mostly foreign tourists, the Twilight crew is getting cold feet. (“Your feet are pale white and ice cold…”).  Twilight star Kristen Stewart was said to be so anxious over the news that all she could do was bite her bottom lip and look constipated.

The real-life drama Saturday of drug gang members taking 35 people hostage in Rio’s Intercontinental Hotel as they tried to escape police has proved scarier to the production crew than the fictional vampires and werewolves they deal with. [*slide whistle*]
After a blazing firefight that killed one person and wounded six others, the gang surrendered. There were 1,550 people in the hotel at the time. About 40 percent were foreigners, though none of them was hurt
Riofilme, the city’s agency for promoting movie production, told AFP that “Twilight”‘s US production company Summit Entertainment was in talks with Rio de Janeiro state officials who were trying to convince them to stay.  The potential loss of “Breaking Dawn” and the one million dollars it was expected to inject into Rio’s economy was despairing [sic] for many in the city. [AFP]

BUT WHERE WILL YOU FILM THE VAMPIRES SNORKELING??  I DEMAND REALISM!

Next summer… a vampire bites a fetus out of the womb and a werewolf tries to f*ck it.

(It’s just not the same without Yakety Sax)

2012 is already looking like the front runner for winter’s best comedy, and here’s a subway ad for it in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.  (I hear the tunnels are where Blanka from Street Fighter hides).  Anyway, pretty cool.  It’s funny, Roland Emmerich didn’t blow up any Muslim landmarks in his movie because he was worried about them getting mad, yet he blew off the famous Brazilian Jesus’ arms in the trailer and they let him put a giant subway ad there.  Gosh, I can’t imagine there’s any correlation between the number of hot, scantily clad women that live in a place and the number of touchy, pissed off a-holes there.

[via SciFiSquad]

This is the trailer for From Beginning to End, an upcoming Brazilian film that deals with “the unconditional love between two brothers, which ends up leading to incest.”  Hmm, I was under the impression that that wasn’t how unconditional love worked.  And I know you’re probably thinking that wanting to F your brother is creepy and gross, but in fairness, your brother was probably never a hot Brazilian dude.  Let he who’s never had a hot Brazilian dude for a brother cast the first stone – it’s in the bible.  In fact, I think this is the Brazilian version of Cain and Abel.  Brazilians are very passionate, you see.

[via ONTD]

Watch the Manda Bala trailer here 

According to Popular Mechanics, the top 5 causes of my boners are:

1. Stiff Breezes
2. Anne Hathaway (NWS)
3. The Elephant Throwing Scene in The Protector
4. Over-the-top, Hyper-Realistic Movie Violence
5. Anything That Reminds Me of City of God

This documentary about Sao Paulo obviously falls into the fifth category. Brazil just seems like an awesome place – gritty beach towns where everyone wears Hawaiian shirts and carries a gun, and goes to sexy parties with girls in bikinis with well-manicured pubic hair.  Much better than Bakersfield, anyway.  Man, that place sucks.   

UPDATE: Turns out people with limited English and Photoshop skills love Anne Hathaway as much as I do.