This had to have been the best week, like, ever for the hordes of Robert Pattinson fans out there. His New Moon media blitz is climaxing with the movie's release at midnight tonight, and Pattinson is just everywhere. The Internet should rename itself the Robertpattinsonet. Only blind people and luddites haven't seen him nervously run his fingers through that perfect hair like only he can. So how is Pattinson -- who is famously allergic to his own fame -- coping with all the, um, fame? We've scrutinized, analyzed, judged, and fawned over three of Pattinson's recent talk show appearances -- The Late Show with David Letterman, The Today Show, and Live with Regis and Kelly -- to see how the actor handles himself on camera when he's not working off a mediocre script.

The first batch of Twilight: New Moon reviews have cut straight to the heart of what makes the series such a phenomenon with teens: It's the new Nirvana! In the early 90s, a lost generation of mopey teens attached their pubescent anxieties onto a gravelly voiced drug addict, rendering him so much larger than life that he eventually burst. The same thing is happening two decades later with the Twilight franchise, except that drug addict is now embodied by a self-conscious alcoholic who is equally uneasy with his fame. Of the six New Moon reviews on the net so far, four of them mention "angst" at least once, a word that perhaps best defines Nirvana's most expressed (and expressive) emotion. Following that same angsty logic, Twilight is also the new Kierkegaard, Kafka, Heidegger, Salinger, and Sartre.

Yesterday, a book arrived at our offices. It's essentially a field guide to Pandora, the fictional planet in James Cameron's Avatar. Billing itself as a "confidential report on the biological and social history of Pandora," An Activist Survival Guide actually lists the new species of plants and animals Cameron has cooked up for his epic new movie. In a sprawling New Yorker profile on Cameron, George Lucas had this to say about the ambitious director: "Creating a universe is daunting. I’m glad Jim is doing it -- there are only a few people in the world who are nuts enough to. I did it with Star Wars, and now he’s trying to challenge that. It’s a lot of work. I do believe Jim will take this further out than anyone’s ever conceived of.” I don't know about that, but based on the book, which also features a glossary of Na'Vi terminology, James Cameron is indeed nuts. Check out the best of his zoological concoctions after the jump!

If you've been wondering where Harrison Ford's been lately, the trailer for a horrible-looking movie called Extraordinary Measures has your answer. It's a soppy tale about a family going to great lengths (or taking extraordinary measures!) to save their ill son's life. Those great lengths come in the form of Harrison Ford, a maverick doctor who may be the only person crazy enough to play god. Based on the clip, Ford's line, "Nobody is going to tell me how to run my lab!" will replace, "Get off my plane!" as his new call to action. Shockingly, Ford hasn't had a hit since 2000, with What Lies Beneath -- unless you count Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which you shouldn't. Measures is dead on arrival, complete with cheesy soft rock playing throughout, but matters are made abysmally worse with that whole costarring Brendan Fraser thing. Check out the fall of an icon after the jump.

With 2012, Roland Emmerich has briefly resurrected and subsequently destroyed the disaster film trend he started. After his mega-hit Independence Day made it a guilty pleasure to watch landmarks get decimated, a slew of movies with names like Volcano and Armageddon ended the world as we know it with sociopathic glee. But long after superheroes and sequels took over the summer blockbuster business, every two years or so Emmerich somehow feels the need to seriously fuck shit up all over again (except New York). He did it with The Day After Tomorrow a few years back, and now he's at it again, for what he says is his disaster curtain call. With earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes all in one movie, there's nothing left to do. We spoke to the director about Obama's influence on his movie, the suspension of disbelief, and why he cast Will Smith in Independence Day. (And can we attribute his iffy quote about Smith's African-American-ness to, um, a language barrier?)

If you're Anna Kendrick, you've got to be pretty excited right about now. Your second tour of duty in the Twilight franchise is coming out in a week, and you get to enjoy everything that comes with being involved in a phenomenon without the terrible scrutiny faced by its two leads. But more importantly, your role in George Clooney's next movie is receiving unilateral praise, and the film itself, Up in the Air, is already being called one of the year's best. And for the capper, there's a good chance that come winter, at the age of 24, you'll have your first Oscar nomination. You're no longer just the girl whose face was licked by Robert Pattinson. Here 's the budding star on her proximity to the supernovae that are Robert and Kristen, that infamous photo, and the sneaking suspicion that things are about to change.

For two decades, John Cusack has been everything to everyone. A lovestruck teen in Say Anything, a hopelessly romantic hitman in Grosse Pointe Blank, and strung-out puppeteer in Being John Malkovich. His latest role has him as another relatable man caught in extraordinary circumstances, as a part-time limo driver outrunning the end of the world in Roland Emmerich's disaster opus 2012, out Friday. We sat down with the star to talk about Roland Emmerich's mad genius, and what it's like being the Everyman.

There’s little more than 1,000 days until the end of the world. Or so say the conspiracy theorists who predict global annihilation on December 21, 2012, the day the Mayan calendar ends. That potential doomsday is the premise of Roland Emmerich’s new movie 2012, a cinematic wrecking ball that wallops landmarks across the globe (and has an aircraft carrier belly flop on the White House). Emmerich, who also directed Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, isn’t the only filmmaker to traffc in megadestruction. Since a tidal wave swallowed New York whole in 1933’s Deluge, obliterating iconic landmarks has become a movie cliché. We’ve put together a map of cinema’s most memorable tourist attraction takedowns.

2012 week continues as we celebrate the coming apocalypse with a series of interviews with its survivors. Yesterday we ran an interview with a fiending Amanda Peet, and today we get to the bottom of what a respected stage actor like Chiwetel Ejiefor is doing in a Roland Emmerich disaster movie. After wowing audiences on stages across London, Ejefor made his big screen splash in the grimy thriller Dirty Pretty Things opposite Audrey Tatou. Since then, he's churned out reliably stellar work in films like Inside Man, Love Actually, Children of Men, and American Gangster. In 2012, Ejiofor plays Adrian Helmsley, a government geologist who is among the first to discover the Earth's core heating up to a potentially catastrophic level. Here he is trying to explain the popularity of disaster porn, interracial relationships on film, and working with Angelina in the upcoming Salt.

In about five days, Roland Emmerich will attempt to break his own movie death toll record with 2012, his 400th film about the end of the world. As a lead up to the festivities, we'll be running interviews all week with some of the survivors of Emmerich's cinematic wrecking ball. First up is Amanda Peet, the actress who first broke out as Matthew Perry's wife in The Whole Nine Yards and later rejoined him on NBC's short-lived dramedy Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Even though the actress refused to shake my hand for fear of passing along the dreaded H1N1 to her two-year-old, she did make it clear that she'd spend her last day on Earth whizzing out on Skid.