The Last Airbender

[cinemanarchist]

I'm just glad someone finally made the M. Night to bukkake connection.

[Pubrick]

even gizmodo is calling it bukkake.

M. Night Shyamalon Finally Made A Comedy

That review is amazing.

yeah, his argument is so convincing and backed up with so much evidence i almost, ALLlLLLmost, want to think it's true.

wow. i didn't think this movie would end up being the worst film of all time.. it just came out of nowhere didn't it? who even knew it was coming out so soon (not here). one thing that's missing from every Shyamalan film is his reaction to the abysmal critical reception. that's what i'd really like to see.. after every film he releases i would like to know how he gets the balls to think he could or should ever make a movie again.

and who would let him??? it's not even a joke anymore. the dude makes absolute SHIT movies. his record is so thoroughly damning that we need to reasses even his marginal successes. The Sixth Sense has its haters but maybe it really was the worst film of all time.. Unbreakable struck me as odd cos Bruce Willis doesn't know how to make good movies any more than than M Night does. how can M Douche keep convincing ppl to give him millions of dollars to make his movies which seriously NOT ONE PERSON IN THE WORLD likes or wants to see?

it's not that he's fallen from grace it's that ppl were fooled twice.. and signs was fucking boring and got by solely on wishful thinking by everyone that it would be OK so don't even bring it up.. i take back my weak defense of The Village, it was only a reaction to Bryce Dallas Cutie.. this is beyond cute red heads. i actually saw Lady in the Water cos i thought Bryce might be alright but jesus christ.. there is no doubt at all anymore.. no one can possibly deny it.. even studio heads MUST realise.. M Night Shyamalan is the worst director in the history of cinema.

[picolas]

i love that review so hard. the final paragraphs about the inverted hero's journey make me need to see this movie.

i've been thinking about m night's amazing career arc.. how perfect is it that he has managed to make every movie critically less well received than the one directly before it?? i never would have thought he could go lower than the happening but he's done the impossible. if he manages another crack at directing he's going to have to make a zero-percenter. and then what? maybe you just go back to 100... anyways i've come to the realization that perhaps the most crucial, overlooked piece of the puzzle in his journey to the bottom is that he ripped off an episode of are you afraid of the dark to make the sixth sense. now i'm not saying that all the good in sixth sense comes from the bare premise, but it is a GREAT premise, and it's not his own.

[Ravi]

wow. i didn't think this movie would end up being the worst film of all time.. it just came out of nowhere didn't it? who even knew it was coming out so soon (not here). one thing that's missing from every Shyamalan film is his reaction to the abysmal critical reception. that's what i'd really like to see.. after every film he releases i would like to know how he gets the balls to think he could or should ever make a movie again.

The film looked meh, but I didn't think it would get this bad of a critical reception.  Now I kind of want to see it.

But who decided to give The Last Airbender to Shyamalan of all people?

[squints]

first (and def shouldn't be the last) "are you afraid of the dark" reference on xixax.

how old are we?

[picolas]

old enough.


@30 seconds: watch M. Night awkwardly brag about not paying attention to his daughter!

[Myxo]

I still maintain Unbreakable was the best film he made. I actually enjoyed Sixth Sense as well but Unbreakable just felt like his most genuine work. Everything after that was one train wreck after another. His little "SURPRISE!!" moments at the end of films got preeeetty old fast.

[jtm]

unbreakable is a masterpiece. i love that film so much.

not sure what happened to him since. just bad movie after bad movie.... i've never seen someone fall so hard from grace.

[MacGuffin]

one thing that's missing from every Shyamalan film is his reaction to the abysmal critical reception. that's what i'd really like to see.. after every film he releases i would like to know how he gets the balls to think he could or should ever make a movie again.

Shyamalan OK with Airbender critics 'up my ass all the time'
Source: SciFi Wire

OK, here it is, the final word, for now anyway, on the casting controversy and racism accusations surrounding M. Night Shyamalan and his upcoming film The Last Airbender.

"It's a compliment when everybody is up my ass all the time, it really is," Shyamalan told a small group of reporters, including one from SCI FI Wire, during an interview yesterday in New York. "You've got to look at it as, if they dismissed you, they weren't paying any attention to you. They're trying to dissect you to show you why you're not that great, which is wonderful thing for them to try to do for my entire life. My job is to just keep making movies. It'll go away, or I'll prove them right or wrong, right? So time will tell. I'm fine with that. Your critics are ... you want your hard teachers to tell you, 'You're no good, you're no good because of this and this,' even if they secretly believe the opposite. It's good to be tough on yourself."

Shyamalan, moments earlier, had gone into tremendous detail about his casting choices, reiterating points that he made in a story that ran earlier on SCI FI Wire. He did so frankly, but without any of the anger or frustration that characterized that earlier conversation.

He argued that the subject matter borrows from all cultures, including Indian, Thai, Japanese, etc., and insisted that it's a "small group" of about "5,000 to 7,000 people" that are "very, very vocal" about the fact that he "didn't cast the correct Asians in it."

However, he said, "Anime is based on ambiguous facial features. It's part of the art form. You got a problem with that? Talk to the dudes who invented anime. It's not my issue, OK? That girl [Katara] looks like my daughter. That boy [Aang] looks like Noah [Ringer]. There is no Inuit that looks like Katara. It's not true. It's just not true. She looks like my daughter. My daughter is a dupe of Katara. Our family saw ourselves in it. A Hispanic family saw themselves in it. My daughter's best friend is Hispanic. She saw it, and their whole family thinks they're all Hispanic, and that's true. That's the beauty of anime, [that] we all see ourselves as incredibly ambiguous and diverse. I wanted to be diverse. I wanted to be more diverse. I had to [build upon] whoever came in, the cultures that came in. This wasn't an agenda for me. It was just very open to me."

During the editing process on The Last Airbender, Shyamalan trimmed several scenes set on the Earth kingdom and cut out the entire storyline of the character Suki, played by Jessica Andres. The Earth sequences included stops in a Mongolian town, a Korean town and an African-American town, but the scenes were dropped in part because much of the proposed second Last Airbender film—Shyamalan and Paramount are envisioning a trilogy—would be set in the Earth kingdom.

"I think when we're done with these three movies it will be, without even a second place, the most culturally diverse movies ever made by Hollywood," Shyamalan said. "So the irony for me is if you look at me and say I am a problem, that I am the poster child for racism in Hollywood. ... You look at the movie poster and you have Noah and Dev [Patel, who plays Zuko] back to back, and my name over it, and this is your issue with the state of Hollywood? I'm satisfied."

[polkablues]

His next movie is going to be a revenge film in which a misunderstood genius (played by himself) systematically slaughters every critic who gives him a bad review.  Either that or that's what's actually going to happen in real life.  Regardless, M. Night Shyamalan is just one stiff breeze away from snapping.

[MacGuffin]

Vulture Breaks the News to M. Night Shyamalan About The Last Airbender's Reviews
Source: NY Mag

M. Night Shyamalan returns to theaters today with The Last Airbender, his live-action adaptation of the beloved Nickelodeon cartoon, about a magic 12-year-old named Aang and his dealings with the evil Fire Lord. Vulture spoke with Shyamalan by phone this morning about making his first epic, the chances of a sequel, and the film's conversion to 3-D. We also discussed the reviews.

This is your biggest-ever movie in terms of scope, budget, effects, and just about everything else. How much more work was it than your other films?
It's so much more stress. I didn't realize quite how much a toll this was all going to take. My normal cycle for movies is eighteen months and each part is separate. But with this movie, everything was overlapped. While I'm writing, we're doing preproduction — looks, locations, costumes, CGI. And then preproduction, the amount of things that had to be decided made it more like production. And of course the production is insane. What would be a 40-day shoot [on a smaller movie] — and I would be out dead at the end of that — is like 75 days of intensity and you're just overwhelmed. And then when post starts, you have an incredible time clock of pressure to hand over shots. It's nonstop and it goes on for three years. I think I really underestimated what I would feel like today.

I met Chris Nolan once, and he knew I was doing this, and he just said, "Pace yourself" and it was a sweet thing for him to give me the advice. I fully understand what he's talking about. I'm surprised Peter Jackson is alive at this point. I don't know how he did those three [Lord of the Rings] movies and spent seven years like that.

Were you scared of the time commitment required for a franchise with the potential to turn into a trilogy?
I always tell my kid, "You should spend your life mastering something." It doesn't matter what it is. I chose film to spend my life learning. There's something about when every eighteen months it's something different — it's wonderful in some capacities. But sometimes you want to just study something. Instead of a bachelor's, you want a PhD.

How far into planning the sequels are you?
I wrote the first draft of the second movie, and I was really happy with it. Usually the first drafts I hate, I want to just kill myself, but it came out really strong. That's as far as I've gone. I haven't really thought about how I would construct the third [movie] too much.

When will we know if a second Airbender movie is happening?
In the next few months we'll be able to know whether we have that opportunity or not. It should be an awesome moment.

The movie was shot in two dimensions and converted to 3-D later, like Clash of the Titans was. Some have said that it dims the image and doesn't add much to the experience. What would you say to that?
Really, it's impossible to separate the effect of the CGI and the effect of 3-D in our movie. Every CGI thing is placed at a certain depth in 3-D and has a combination of effects, so when they say the CGI in the movie is amazing, they're actually talking about a combination of the two. It's really just got a bad rap for no reason. It makes the movie more immersive and it has to be handled with great delicacy so that it is invisible. A lot of music is invisible and then sometimes it stands on top of the movie and you really feel the emotion of the music. The combination of the CGI, 3-D, and sound effects, it's just impossible to separate them. It gives you a more immersive experience, and I prefer that.

Airbender's running time is only 104 minutes, which isn't very long considering that it's an adaptation of the twenty-episode first season of the cartoon. Was it hard to pack everything in there?
I'm dying to make a two-hour movie, I just haven't earned it yet. I'm really tough in cutting and I have a style that creates a certain pace, and a way of writing where I try to get nuances in one scene that help other scenes; it creates a very similar pacing in every movie. Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and I believe The Village were all the exact same length. So it's very bizarre. I guess also when I'm constructing the story in the script form, it must be that there's just an inherent kind of "I need to be at this place in the story" driving me. So maybe that's where it's coming from.

Have you read the reviews for Last Airbender?
No, I haven't.

Well, are you aware of the reviews?
No, actually.

Well, for the most part, critics have not been kind. Are you just ignoring them? Will you read them this weekend? Have you just not had time?
Are you saying that in general they didn't dig it?

In general, no. Roger Ebert, who liked The Happening, did not. The first line of his review is, "The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category that I can think of and others still waiting to be invented." How do you react to something like that?
I don't know what to say to that stuff. I bring as much integrity to the table as humanly possible. It must be a language thing, in terms of a particular accent, a storytelling accent. I can only see it this certain way and I don't know how to think in another language. I think these are exactly the visions that are in my head, so I don't know how to adjust it without being me. It would be like asking a painter to change to a completely different style. I don't know.

Critics haven't been kind to your last couple of films. Do you still worry about reviews?
I think of it as an art form. So it's something I approach as sort of immovable integrity within each of the stages. So if you walk through the process with me, there's not a moment where I won't treat with great respect. So it's sacred to me, the whole process of making a movie. I would hope that some people see that I approach this field with that kind of respect, and that it's not a job.

Were you trying to please critics with this film? Did you have an audience in mind while you were making it?
For everybody, actually. It's just a very cool, spiritual, action-y, family film — a family adventure.

Do you know what your next movie will be?
I don't know right now. I'm still trying to figure it all out, excited about a little bit not knowing. Just seeing how the world lays out for the next couple of years. There'll be a lot of exciting things, I'm sure.

[jtm]

Have you read the reviews for Last Airbender?
No, I haven't.

Well, are you aware of the reviews?
No, actually.

Well, for the most part, critics have not been kind. Are you just ignoring them? Will you read them this weekend? Have you just not had time?
Are you saying that in general they didn't dig it?

not only has he become a shitty filmmaker, he's a lying little bitch.

[©brad]

Good christ. This piece of shit still made $52 million this weekend. I hate everyone.

[Myxo]

Good christ. This piece of shit still made $52 million this weekend. I hate everyone.

..yeah, one day someone needs to write a great article about the dumbing down of Hollywood as Americans seemingly get more and more retarded with their taste in movies.

[Ravi]

Good christ. This piece of shit still made $52 million this weekend. I hate everyone.

No competition.  Apparently people who hate Twilight just had to see some new release.