loopychew | (no subject)

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Looks like my debate about whether or not to watch the A:TLA movie (over the whitewashing) are completely unfounded, as critics are tearing into it like a steak dinner.

Okay, TOTALLY dropped from the "maybe" list.

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It was difficult to stop laughing when coming across bad review after bad review this morning. I know it's not a movie intended to please critics but it really seems to be even worse than expected. I almost started to feel bad for M. Night. Almost. Seems like this was a colossal waste of effort from start to finish.

What I find nice is that, even amongst all the critical lambasting, the only positive thing to come out of this is that apparently Dev Patel's Zuko is, through acting alone, just as nuanced as his animated counterpart. This pretty much validates my faith that Dev Patel can do anything, as it seems to me that M. Night Shyamalan leaves any scene in which there is good acting on the cutting room floor.

To counterpoint and invalidate myself, I have to note that Signs was my last MNS movie, and I liked it a lot more than the public did.

I'm mostly indifferent towards Shyamalan's movies. Starting with Signs I saw them all on TV. While I mostly tried to avoid spoilers, by then I was aware of their critical reception and partly of what was going on. So I mostly didn't care.
I wasn't even able to enjoy The Sixth Sense since some radio DJ thought it's funny to spoil the ending on the air (the movie was out for a month by then but since I tend to wait a while until I watch a movie I hadn't seen it. Obviously not Shyamalan's fault though).
Even if I didn't totally like the whole movie, what I found very appealing was the story/concept of Unbreakable. I only recently thought I should try to watch it again when there's an opportunity.

Unbreakable was an excellent movie, and I would've liked to see a sequel. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon.

Being a big fan of the original cartoon, I have to say that its design is much better suited for the long-run format. Also, if the movie isn't being done in a way that adults can appreciate, it's not being done right at all, since Avatar is one of the shows where the themes are pretty mature and the characters, as broadly cartoonish as they can be at times, are actually pretty nuanced and human. Which is a lot easier to manage if you're running twenty-odd twenty-minute episodes instead of a 1:45 movie.

To quote my friend Damo, "M Night Shamalan, please learn to say names correctly, as well as normal words. Aang, Sokka, Avatar, Iroh, and Agni Chai, were all said wrong, and painful to hear every time."

I can almost - almost - forgive him the alternative pronunciations as a form of artistic license, but AVATAR?! It's a standard word in the English language, FFS! How do you change the pronunciation of that?!

I'm still going to go see it tonight, just to have seen it, but I don't hold out too much hope...

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