Michael Cieply at The New York Times reports on the escalating storm of hype and anticipation surrounding James Cameron's 3-D sci-fi movie Avatar, scheduled for a December release. To date, none of the images from the film have been released to the public, not even a single still. However, Time magazine's Joshua Quittner was shown fifteen minutes of footage and subsequently "fed the frenzy when he reported feeling a strange yearning to return to the movie’s mythical planet, Pandora.... Mr. Cameron, Mr. Quittner wrote, theorized that the movie’s 3-D action had set off actual 'memory creation.'” (He told Cieply, “It was like doing some kind of drug.”) Others online have been busting their buttons without access to any actual evidence that the film exists, never mind what it looks like: Cieply has fun with one worthy at the IMDB message board who had had a dream that he saw the movie--on bootleg, no less--and proceeded to share his impressions of how it played in his unconscious. ("The film was unfinished, and the special effects were mostly drawings and cartoons, but they looked 3d still. But it was the best movie I've ever seen, too bad it was only in my dream! I really hope the actual movie is at least half as good as the one I saw in my sleep.") Meanwhile, Dr. Mario Mendez, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine who has used "virtual reality therapy" in working with Iraq War veterans, "said it is entirely possible that Mr. Cameron’s work could tap brain systems that are undisturbed by conventional 2-D movies. One, he said, is a kind of inner global-positioning system that orients a person to the surrounding world."
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