Fandom: "Bad acting. Bad effects. Bad everything."

[nebroadwe]

When even Mr. Popcorn hates your movie, you're in trouble:

"The Last Airbender" is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.

Ouch. Paging Opus the Penguin. I wasn't planning to see this film in any case because of the racebending, but it looks as if that will spare me the pain of enduring a piss-poor adaptation of an elegant story. Time to rewatch the series ...

Comments

[artemisrae.livejournal.com]

Urgh. I have plans tomorrow to see this and if I weren't already apprehensive. My friend is still so excited too, I don't have the heart to tell her.

Ah well, I can credit the movie for making me remember how much I love the real series. It's reminding me that it's been a while since I explored the Avatar universe...

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

This past weekend one of the godchildren who turned me on to the cartoon asked me to explain again why I wasn't going to the movie. Then she asked me, very seriously, "Will you be angry with me if I see it?" And I told her no, because she has to make her own decisions about these things, once she understands them.

So I won't say, "Don't give your money to those tin-eared bastards at Paramount!" -- but I will advise you, as a matter of aesthetics and economics, to refrain from seeing the movie in 3-D, if see it you must. Just about every review listed in the post over at avatar_fans has said that the upconversion from 2-D to 3-D is terrible -- even The Wall Street Journal has panned it.

[artemisrae.livejournal.com]

Well, I originally thought the choice was out of my hands, as I had no RL friends who was into fandom stuff. I still don't have any RL friends who are into fandom stuff, but like, a month before I graduated I did discover a girl in my class loved the series as well - why couldn't I have talked to her when we'd been working together for two years? - and so she's all excited and I revised my decision to just wait until it (inevitably) hits On Demand. (Presuming I'm still living with my parents then, which there is a good chance I might be...)

As odious as I find the casting, I find even more disturbing the fact that M.Night just doesn't seem to get the series, based on a lot of comments he's made. In particular, the one about how his daughter or some other small child is the only reason he included Momo, because they threw a fit when he told them he was going to take the lemur out. If you can't see why the series needs Momo, then why are you directing it? Like, the Race!Fail is just one piece of a whole giant misunderstanding of the spirit of the series. I'm a little frightened, but will provide commentary tomorrow night. (If I ever get around to posting my FMA meta too..)

Definitely not paying for 3D though. Ever. Only movie I shelled out for 3D was for How to Train Your Dragon, and that was only for my 8 year old godson's sake. I'd like to see that again, because darnit, I wanted to write fic for THAT too. So much fic to write, so little time.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness most of my RL friends get fandom -- or at least only tease me gently about my obsessions. Some of them, in the immortal words of my goddaughter, still need to watch more Avatar, though. Hey, kanja_177, how about another movie night? :-)

I hear you about the racefail being part and parcel of a missed boat Shyamalan and his team seem to have boarded early on. He also seems to have missed the boat for Storytelling 101, which is strange for someone with several thrillers under his belt ... and the studio just let it go, which strikes me as bizarre, given the failure of his last self-scripted kids' fantasy project. Didn't anybody at Paramount read the book and say, "Whoa, dude, we need to get a doctor for this puppy right now!" Projects linger in development hell for years on script problems; how did this one get through?

To top it all off, that's 2 SF adaptations of stuff I like DOA this year. I guess I'll have to stop praying for someone to do a live-action version of Megan Whalen Turner's Thief until my luck changes. Grump, mutter.

[artemisrae.livejournal.com]

...Oh god, did you pay for Percy Jackson too?

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Yep. I really, really wanted it to be fun, but it was soooo clunky. And such a waste of acting talent! Let us bewail the fail together!

[artemisrae.livejournal.com]

I FEEL LIKE IT PHYSICALLY HURT ME. Like I lost a fundamental piece of myself! Okay, my expectations weren't THAT high but I wasn't expecting.... THAT. And I did like the actors - except Annabeth, I couldn't bring myself around on Alexandra Daddario - but it didn't even feel like their real characters, considering how the movie butchered everything up. Like, Logan Lerman might have made a decent Percy, in another universe. Where he was actually playing Percy.

You know what? I'm just gonna go reread the books. I have meta to write on Annabeth's mental state in Book 4 and fic to write. And rewatch Avatar. It's been a while since I dusted off Evil Aang AU Fic of Doom.

Seriously, what fandom gods did we insult? there hasn't been any talk of an FMA movie right? RIGHT? (Even if there was, I'm not sure I'll see it. I made a personal vow to never watch That Part with Hughes ever again after I saw the Brotherhood episode.)

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

I FEEL LIKE IT PHYSICALLY HURT ME. Like I lost a fundamental piece of myself! Okay, my expectations weren't THAT high but I wasn't expecting.... THAT.

Ditto. I was expecting something at least middling entertaining, but instead ... It had been a while since I'd paid money to sit in a theater and watch a film that I felt compelled to rewrite throughout. I don't think aging up the characters served them all that well and I'm not sure why the Persephone's Pearls thing provided any more of a narrative through-line than the original picaresque. About the only scene I thought had anything going for it was Percy's conversation with Annabeth beside the motel pool, because it wasn't straining for anything. Just a quiet moment between two people. There are universes in which I am a script doctor and movies like this are much, much better.

You know what? I'm just gonna go reread the books. I have meta to write on Annabeth's mental state in Book 4 and fic to write. And rewatch Avatar. It's been a while since I dusted off Evil Aang AU Fic of Doom.

Ooh, yes, please -- more Evil Aang AU Fic of Doom! (Though I feel a bit guilty for prodding anyone for 'fic these days, given the goshawful writing slump I'm in myself. Even sitting down to Just Do It isn't getting me much of anywhere. Bleah.)

Seriously, what fandom gods did we insult? there hasn't been any talk of an FMA movie right? RIGHT?

Not yet, but I wonder whether someone on the other side of the pond will decide it's worth the investment. That might be ... interesting.

Meanwhile, time to wave a dead chicken or burn a fragrant manga or do SOMETHING to placate the obviously irritated fandom gods. Do you think they'd let up if I sacrificed my copy of Nauscicaa of the Valley of Wind?

[artemisrae.livejournal.com]

Also, Here is M. Night's comments on Momo. (http://avatarthelastairbenderonline.com/m-night-shyamalan-interview-the-last-airbender/#momo) I originally read a transcription but now I cannot find, lame.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Actually, cutting Momo is one edit I would have very little trouble with (though I'd miss him, of course). He's not central to the plot machinery the way Appa is and he'd probably be tricky to CG effectively, as well as being one more green-screen element for the actors to deal with. That's just me, though.

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

Half a star! Wow! I love when Ebert really goes to town on a review of a bad movie.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

He doesn't do it all that often (at least as far as I can tell) so it really stands out when he does.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

that is SO harsh. Guess he just saved me a few hours of my life. (and geez how disappointing)

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

I know! I wasn't actively rooting for the film to tank, because every time a genre film fails, the people who think we're all nuts for enjoying SF become that much less inclined to pony up for another one. And it would have been fun to have the original story translated effectively into live action (I am so looking forward to the live-action Yamato after that last trailer!), but like artemisrae says, the production team seems to have missed the boat completely on what made the original such a winner. Bah.

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

I read the commentary over at cleolinda's post which goes on about Rotten Tomatoes and Ebert and other things.

And the commercials actually made me want to see it.

...guess I'll wait for the library to get it in....

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

I saw her post, too -- can I admit to giggling over the whole "Piggy's head on a stick" tweet in re Eclipse? :-) (And what a world, what a world, when a silk purse gets made from the sow's ear that is Eclipse, while ATLA gets ground up for sausage?)

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

I kind of skim the Twilight stuff so I missed that.

As for your question: Twilight is aimed at YA/A as opposed to ATLA, which is aimed at kids...and very few directors (hollywood in General) have any clue how to do anything write that's done for kids.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the people with a clue seem to end up on the animation side. Still, some rules of good storytelling should apply across the board (like avoiding "As you know, Bob" exposition -- have your characters discover things, not report them!). The other thing that may be afoot here is that the Twilight stuff is a romance (albeit with supernatural elements), while ATLA is straight-up fantasy, and I suspect more Hollywood types are at home with the former than the latter. It wouldn't surprise me if script problems got missed because film executives simply expect expository dialogue and tushery in fantasy films, and figure that the visuals/action sequences will carry the audience over the hump. Bah! And again, bah!

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

yes I didn't agree with him that you can't do bending believable with CGI and would have liked to have seen it work. And I was on the fence about going because of the race issue. Yes have to agree with artemisrae

didn't realize there was going to be a live-action Yamato


ETA - it's not just Ebert - http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/last_airbender/

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

didn't realize there was going to be a live-action Yamato

For your information:


And yeah, I noticed the across-the-board pans at RottenTomatoes. I was waiting to see what James Berardinelli (http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=2110), whose tastes march pretty closely with mine, would have to say, and he's as scathing as Ebert:

Some pundits had voiced the opinion that the route back to relevance for Shyamalan might come through adapting someone else's material. The Last Airbender argues strongly against that line of thought; this trumps anything he has previously achieved in terms of mind boggling awfulness. There are times when one wonders whether he is channeling Ed Wood. Fundamental flaws infect nearly every aspect of the production; it's an insult to viewers, especially those who are fans of the television source material, to charge money for something so substandard that if it was a building, it would be condemned.

Sigh.