Traditionally, August is something of a slow news month. Anything, however apparently inappropriate, seems to be used to fill in valuable airtime or column space during the holiday season. You might, for instance, have happened to hear yesterday morning Evan Davies interviewing august cricket commentator Henry Blofeld on the BBC’s flagship radio news programme Today about whether he’d prefer to commentate on the 100 metres at the World Athletics Championships. Today, it seems everyone’s got in a palaver about Avatar, James Cameron’s 3D sci-fi epic of which 15 minutes was shown during a series of screenings rolled out at hundreds of cinemas round the world. Perhaps inevitably with this kind of blockbuster, it’s all about the numbers. Avatar is Cameron’s first film since Titanic, 12 years ago, which took $1.8 billion at the box office. He originally sketched the outline for Avatar in 1994 but held off making it until he thought technology was advanced enough. It has, apparently, cost $237 million. And, as those of us who saw it today at London’s IMAX were told by the head of the UK distributor 20th Century Fox, so far 2,000 people have seen the official trailer, released yesterday, online. It’s perhaps irrelevant to wonder whether Avatar will be remotely good in any field other than the visual effects. Having learned from Hawks, Hill, Carpenter and Corman that characters in certain types of genre films can be defined more effectively by their actions than by exposition, Cameron’s never exactly been one to get bogged down in character and dialogue. Which is why the first 90 minutes of Titanic, before the ship went down, was so woeful and why his best films – the two Terminator movies and Aliens – are action-driven adrenalin rushes. Indeed, based on the five sequences we saw from Avatar, it seems like Cameron is happy to recycle some of his own films, alongside a number of tropes and set-ups familiar from other sources. We open, for instance, with Stephen Lang’s Marine corps colonel explaining to a platoon of grunts that they’re about to embark on a tour of duty on a hostile alien planet, Pandora. “Think of Hell. You might want to go there for R&R after this,” he snarls. Aliens..? Well, maybe. Avatar’s central character, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a Marine, crippled during combat. He’s given access by Sigourney Weaver’s scientist to an Avatar creature, part human and part Na’vi, one of the planet’s many colourful creatures. Now resembling nothing less than a greeny-blue Thundercat, Sully is sent to Pandora where he befriends his fellow Na’vi and love interest begins to take shape with one of their kind, Neytiri. It’s possible Sully is part of a covert military operation: the planet’s atmosphere is poison to humans, but it seems that if successfully immersed in Avatar hybrids, Earth’s military could conquer Pandora. Anyway, that’s yr plot. But, like I say, I suspect the story is really just an excuse for Cameron to unveil his latest, and admittedly deeply impressive, box of tricks. Of course, it looks fantastic. There’s one sequence on Pandora where Sully first experiences the planet’s landscape close-up – a weird, lush, rainforest that looks like it should: totally alien. Gone, we can safely assume, are the days when George Lucas fudged it by getting Tunisia to double for Tatooine. Or worse: quarries near Dorking masquerading as Skaro in Doctor Who. I’m reluctant to get carried away in the hype, but you do get a sense of Cameron’s incredible visual accomplishments here. And this, inevitably, is what Avatar will stand or fall on. Plenty has already been written about how the director helped pioneer “the future camera” developed to capture the actors and integrate them into his virtual world; how the other great technological innovators of the modern cinema age, Spielberg, Lucas and Peter Jackson, were all invited down to check out Cameron’s posh new gadgets. If you find the idea of “the future camera” slightly self-important, then certainly you won’t fall for the talk of how Avatar is going to revolutionise cinema. Certainly, once all the bluster about the 3D technology is out of the way, there’s the simple truth that only 320 cinemas out of 3,600 UK cinemas are digitally equipped, and so Avatar will also be released in creaky old-fashioned 2D come December 18. You can see the trailer here anyway.

Some promo CDs come with a serious layer of security to prevent piracy and leaks: a special watermark which means the music can be traced back to a specific numbered disc if it finds its way onto the internet. You can often see the point of these heavy manners, especially when an album that may well sell millions arrives early in the Uncut office. At other times, though, the security business can look like a sly promotional stunt: to imbue high importance on a band you wouldn’t normally imagine had enough fans to merit such measures. When the sixth Califone album arrived here last week, notably watermarked, it definitely felt like a case of the latter. But then again, there’s a useful flipside: to remind us of the value of long-serving bands we can easily take for granted. I wrote something similar about the problems of consistency with regard to Yo La Tengo’s “Popular Songs” a while back, and a lot of the same can apply to Califone. “All My Friends Are Funeral Singers” serves, though, as a stealthy and powerful reminder of what a fantastic body of work Tim Rutili and his cohorts have accrued through the history of Califone and beyond, back into the days of Red Red Meat. I remember reviewing “Heron King Blues” for Uncut when it came out, and comparing Califone to another more successful band from Chicago, Wilco, who – certainly circa “A Ghost Is Born” – had a not-dissimilar way of balancing arcane folk traditions with a refreshingly forward-thinking experimental approach. Wilco and Califone’s paths have obviously diverged somewhat since then. But still, by Rutili’s recent standards, “All My Friends…” is a pretty accessible album: listening to something like “Ape-Like”, at once somehow distrait and punchy, there’s a potent link to fractionally gnarlier Red Red Meat material from the mid ‘90s (there’s a good argument, incidentally, that their “Bunny Gets Paid” has been one of the most valuable and predictably neglected reissues of the year). But anyway, “All My Friends…” purports to be the soundtrack to Rutili’s first feature film, though it works just fine as a discreet bunch of songs in isolation. There’s a little more focus here than on, say, “Heron King Blues” (and a lot more than the “Deceleration” collections), but Califone’s schtick remains more or less constant. As usual, Brian Deck and the band have managed to create a very subtle blend of very crisp, live-sounding, beautifully-captured instrumentation and more processed noise. Crudely, you can divide what they do into four rough sectors. The opening “Giving Away The Bride” showcases a sort of rusted, clanking almost-funk that’s reminiscent of some latterday Tom Waits. There are brief studio collages like “A Wish Made While Burning Onions Will Come True”. Then the rickety and battered folk songs, for instance “Buñuel”, that update traditional forms in an oblique yet fervid way. Finally, and to my mind best of all, there are the sombre, elegant progressions like "Krill", “Evidence”, nailed onto a resonant piano line, and the outstanding and insidious “Funeral Singers” itself, much in the style of the last album’s “Black Metal Valentine” and as good a song as Califone have ever recorded. It’s all a lot more complicated than that, of course – not least when you factor in the Gil Evans horns on “Alice Marble Gray” or the vague gamelan which ushers in the old weird American hoedown of “Salt”.