Hello audience
Usually I'd make a blog-related quip here, but I have recently come to the conclusion that a "blog" sounds more like a bottom-feeding swamp creature that survives solely on it's own farts than an interweb based compendium of thoughts. So I'm not going to.
I have recently become rather sick, not in the totally gnarly way, nor the Rage Against the Machine way, but in the way that your throat decides it's going to be hosting some mitotic party for amoeboids who never wish to leave the confines of my tonsils. This wouldn't be so bad if not for the taste, the lack of stomach and the ridiculous pain caused by what I can only describe as the perpetual dance floor of bacterium grinding against one another in a state of drunken ambiguity towards each-others attractiveness so as to cause a whole new generation of bastard bacteria to take up the party once their old-folks (or old-nuclei or whatever bacteria call their ancestors) are long gone. But I digress. Usually, despite this pain, I love getting sick.
Seriously, think about it. Being sick gives you excuses like never before. Watching the entirety of the OC with directors commentary. Pretty sad. Oh, you're sick? WELL! That's OK then. Getting through a large of portion of the extended directors cut editions of both The Fellowship of the Ring AND The Two Towers? Impressive, but not exactly admirably. Oh, your new monkey spleen transplant was rejected? Well then, that seems perfectly reasonable! Playing Magic: The Gathering for the 23th time by yourself? Just...well...just plain dismal. Actually, perhaps being sick doesn't quite cover that one. But my point stands.
It also gives you an excuse to do stuff that you couldn't otherwise do, like begin to write that book you always wanted to, or that song, or that script. There is a bevy of creative outlets for your sickness boredom that can be constructive and conducive to you feeling better than ever once you get your health back. Personally, I've used my sick time to grow a beard. Of course, my ability to grow a beard is similar to an African Elephant's ability to cook a satisfying bacon omelette, but this is hardly relevant. I also use my sick time to catch up on work I really should have done a LOOOOONG while back but never did. It's amazing what the world of sickness can bring you.
The only problem with being sick is you are, well, sick. I was going to be filming this week, which would have been no problem even if I was sick, but unfortunately it turns out my voice went the day I was going to start filming. Just the luck you'd expect of Lewis von Shady. However, I have enjoyed the amount of nothing I've managed to do this week.
I was also pondering the reason for my sickness the other day. While my parents believe it was probably because I have run myself ragged between uni, work and parties, I believe it comes from a different, far more maleficent source.
Because last week, I saw The Last Airbender.
But first, some back-story. I am a huge fan of the TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender. Sure it's techniquely a kids show, but many of the themes are fairly complex, none of the characters are definitively good (Though Aang and Sokka give it a good try) or evil (except, perhaps, The Fire Lord). The scripting was amazing, the story engaging, the animation flawless, the comedic timing without parallel and the action so awesome one can barely describe. It dealt with some pretty heavy characters and ideas, such as Aangs' guilt for the deaths in the war and Zuko's constant search for honour, but never lost it's upbeat attitude and quirky story-telling.
None of these things, unfortunately, have managed to be transferred into the multi-million dollar turd shat out by M. Knight Shyamalan. He wrote it. He produced it. He directed it. He ruined it. This surely seems like the perfect kids mid-year blockbuster. It has colourful environments, a powerful child protagonist, humour and a really cool core idea. What's even better is that he only had to make the first in a trilogy. Now, while fitting an entire season of a TV show into one film isn't easy, it certainly allows a lot more story-telling and character development to take place as you don't have to tie everything up to make it end nicely. What should have been happening in part 1 is a lot of character basing, showing you how each character works, interacts, talks and, almost as important, fights. In the Avatar TV series you really feel attached to just about all the characters. There's not one character that, when they come up on the screen, you fell like "oh god, not that guy, he's so boring" or "she's so dreary" or "he's so predictable".
This movie makes every character seem just about the same with varying levels of anger or fear. You don't really grow attached to any of them as none of them seem to show any sign of a personality, except, surprisingly, Prince Zuko. Dev Patel, in a brilliant casting decision, pulls this character off really well. Every scene with Zuko in it is watch-able, sometimes engaging even. But even then, his problems remain so unexplored he seems almost token at times. His uncle Iroh is almost interesting sometimes, but was horribly miscast as some Pirates of the Caribbean reject so it largely falls on it's face, though interestingly. Everyone else is simply a lump of soggy cardboard pretending to be grief stricken and fearful.
Aang, played by a precocious performing child nobody has even heard of, seems completely unsuited to the job. This kid doesn't look like he knows how to have fun. He also can't act, so I don't know how or why he was chosen.
Sokka, played by Jackson Rathbone, takes everything too seriously and is way to forced. Sokka, voiced by Jack DeSena, was fairly easygoing in the series, and extremely extroverted. He stole every scene he was in! Here, Sokka seems like a tag-along that never wants to be there, a stale character that just shouldn't have gotten past the script editor, let alone given to THAT actor.
Katara...well, there's nothing WRONG with here except she can't act. Otherwise I guess the choice wasn't too far off. Well, not too far off if you go by the movie's arcana. In the series, all the water tribe people were tanned, because they were meant to be tribes of Inuit! In this film we just get a whole lot of white guys posing as Eskimos...It doesn't sit right, I can tell you right now.
The racial differences between the four elements and their respective people also put me off somewhat. The water tribe were meant to be a tanned, strong people able to ward off the harshest environments. Instead we got lazy, white fisherman. The earth kingdom people were supposed to be far more diverse, but in the film they are passed off as purely asian, which always felt wrong. The couple of air nomads I see throughout the film look exceptionally white, when in the series they are by far the most buddhist in their cultural beliefs. I will admit, though, I really dug the Fire Nation being largely sub-continental. That was something that wasn't in the series that actually really worked in the film.
But these are just the casting and ideas decisions that didn't work. There were a whole lot of more practical things that were far worse I can tell you.
The movie is far too short, for the amount of information and story Shyamalabingbong was trying to convey. It comes in at 103 minutes, which doesn't seem exceptionally short, but given he was aiming to include at least 7, maybe 8, episodes of content into this film it really needed a bit more time to develop. Many scenes seem to just skip over themselves before they've reached their conclusion.
The editing is also pretty incredibly choppy, with some jump cuts being made that leave you confused as to what happened and irritated at the direction. At one point, Aang is fighting off a legion of Fire Nation troops in a training circle for airbenders in an air temple. This seemed like it was going to actually be a GOOD fight scene, but as soon as I thought that, it suddenly jumped to Aang somehow on a cliff about to jump off the temple and escape on his glider. I'm sorry, WHAT!? This seems like B movie editing, like what I'd expect as a joke from some grindhouse film or similarly related robert rodriguez mock. Here it just looks cheap and really brings down the movie.
Finally we move to the special effects. Now. If this is an Avatar: The Last Airbender movie, you'd expect the effects to be pretty good yeah?
Well, sir, you'd be wrong, according to M. Knight Shykaka. The effects can only be described as flimsy. When anyone bends any element, it looks like crap. Water looks weak and largely useless. Earth seems like it might as well be air, with no shuddering, no strength. Fire, which fared the worst, looks like you could wave it off with your hand. Air just...well I can't even really see it most of the time. It all just looks really average, as do the benders themselves. Shyamatwain seems to to have just told the actors to flail their arms arbitrarily for a couple of seconds. There is no essence of martial arts, no flow. It just looks stupid. They also stand they're flailing for about 2-3 seconds before anything even seems to happen. Like they're just waking up their awesome elemental powers so they can through another bucket of water at you.
All we can hope now is that the series is renewed under a different director with a team of writers preferably. Maybe we'll get season 2 and 3 given they're own movies as well! A well, a blogger can dream.
See you round folks, this has bee Shady.
