Dish #57 - A Bite in the Buttocks.

The Dish: Hey James Cameron, you didn't think you could make a "cool" movie like Avatar, earn billions of dollars, walk around actually believing you were the "King of the World" and actually get away with it, right? Well, here's to popping that little sci-fi/fantasy bubble!

The Third Law: Newton coined it a long time ago: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." Or as I like to interpret it: Karma's a bitch. Emil Malak, a restaurant owner from Vancouver, has filed a lawsuit against Mr. Cameron and his posse (Lightstorm Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. and others) for allegedly using his copyrighted movie material Terra Incognita which Malak wrote many years ago (possibly in 1998) as the base for Avatar.

Too Close for Comfort: Malak claims his script is just too strikingly similar to Cameron's movie. Malak says his story is based on a central bio-life containing the indigenous tribe's memories, humans are the bad guys coming to mine precious rocks and some of his characters have flat noses, yellow eyes and tails. (He didn't mention they were blue though, lol.)

The Best Part: Emil Malak (most likely suggested by his lawyer) has created a website to garner supporters (http://www.journeystl.info/). The website is shabby and contains "relevant" and questionnable information about Malak's work, character comparisons and even letters that Malak had written to James Cameron's office in 1998. My favourite is the cover letter which looks like a page out of an old telephone pad.

Money, Money, Money: It's all really stupid. Mr. Malak has no chance of winning his case. The Cameron party is defending that their script was conceived two years before Malak's...and they have a lot more dough to fight it out until the end.

The Final Word: Take it for it's worth. At least this is more entertaining that watching Kathryn Bigelow get angry at reporters for questionning her ability and right to make violently disturbing movies because she is a women.