Hollywood director James Cameron is well known for his heavy use of special effects and techtastic techniques in his movies, which include “Titanic,” “Aliens” and the first–and best–two “Terminator” blockbusters.

In a few weeks, Cameron is hoping to hit geek gold again with a 3-D sci-fi juggernaut called “Avatar.”

Set to come out in mid-December, it is full of all kinds of fancy and innovative CGI animation.

And the use of blue-colored avatars–essentially digitally animated likenesses of the real-life actors–is a big plot point in the movie, which is about a soldier caught in a war between a greedy mining company and a heroic indigenous tribe on a planet called Pandora.

Here’s one of the trailers for “Avatar”:

And, of course, here is a video of a hysterical recent spoof of the movie done by “South Park”–with a little “Dances With Wolves” tossed in, because it is the same exact plot–called “Dances With Smurfs”:

Hollywood is selling the end times hard this week with the opening of “2012,” a blockbuster-style movie about the last days of the world for humanity.

Apparently, we were warned!

It’s based on junk theories about how the 5,125-year-long Mayan Long Count calendar ends on Dec. 21, 2012, which can only mean that so goes the universe.

Why someone would cite this as proof that a massive cataclysmic event is coming is somewhat amusing–maybe the Mayans just ran out of stone to chisel?–although it makes for a pretty awesome trailer for the movie, which stars John Cusack and a battleship falling on top of the White House.

The movie opens Friday, with tons of marketing and advertising online and off and a Web site with the cheeky moniker, www.whowillsurvive2012.

So, until the apocalypse, enjoy a video of the trailer, as well as the original teaser:

Yesterday, a source told me that Flixster, the fast-growing social network for movie lovers, was back in talks to be bought by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp.

Those IAC-Flixster rumors flew about a month ago and were entirely true.

But no deal, it seems. IAC has apparently found the price too high, according to other sources. But, said these sources, others are still in the game.

So if an acquisition deal does happen, two intelligent guesses to the possible winner for the company with 39.5 million user home pages, more than 1 billion user-generated movie ratings and a sassy motto of “Stop Watching Bad Movies”?

Blockbuster or News Corp.

(Sources said Viacom’s MTV unit gave Flixster a look too, but also thought the price too high.)

The former because the video-rental chain has been mightily trying to break into all kinds of Web markets to give it a place to sell online. Blockbuster has been struggling of late, because of its costly battles with Web sites like Netflix and the growth of video-on-demand and movie downloads via the Internet and cable. Its online subscribership is only 3.1 million.

And the latter, because such a site tucks in nicely with some of the media giant’s properties like MySpace and Rotten Tomatoes, as well as its numerous movie and television arms. (FYI, News Corp. is in the process of acquiring Dow Jones, which is the owner of this site.)

The price? I will wager $150 million in cash that had been previously bandied about, although IAC’s offer was likely much lower than that.

Pricey, yes, since Flixster only has 17 employees and was created less than two years ago. It received $2 million in funding in February from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

But its vibrant Web site is booming and is now one of the largest movie sites on the Internet. Flixster is also one of the more popular widgets on Facebook, with more than 800,000 active daily users.

While Amazon-owned IMDb (Internet Movie Database) is larger in terms of traffic, Flixster is growing much faster.

On the site, users have profiles typical of most general social networks, with a laser-focus on movies, actors, directors and movie quizzes and news. Flixster also has video content, both professional and user-generated and relies heavily on user reviews.

Getting a reported price of under $20 million, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, will hardly cover costs of upward of $100 million–even “Ishtar” didn’t do that badly.

The compromised Movielink, the bastard child created five years ago by movie studios (Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Universal Studios, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Warner Bros.) with too-onerous digital rights management claws, lackluster marketing and high prices, has been widely mocked even by execs at the studios themselves.

When I recently brought it up during a visit to one studio, in fact, an executive there did a most excellent rolling of his eyes that needed no further explanation.

But now it is Blockbuster’s problem to correct, which is mainly how to battle online rivals like Netflix and others chipping away at its business either via mail-order rentals or video-on-demand services.