f13.net

Yeah, really early. But this just popped up on my radar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zc1fmeVe1g

I dug the sit out of the series. Will M Knight Shamalamadingdong fuck this up too?


Edit by Trippy: next time trim out all that extra crap from the URL

Looks good but every very time I hear "the chosen one" a piece of my soul die.

That trailer does look really good, but it'll be interesting to see how things play out with all the uproar over casting that's gone on/is going on.

Pika? Shamalamadingdong is doing a movie based on a cartoon? I'm sure it couldn't be worse than the (Nothing)Happening.

So the series worth watching?

I filed that under "kids cartoon" (it was running in the children program over here), but that trailer makes it sound interesting.

Cartoon is excellent regardless of your age. Dubious but hopeful about the movie.

The series is great, I watched it with the kids and loved it.  The choreography for the fights and the bending is about the best you will see anywhere and though most of the tone is young and somewhat humorous when it gets serious it does it extremely well.  Some of the episodes are very poetic and moving.

The movie is going to destroy everything good about the series. I cry a little every time I'm reminded about who will direct this.

They had a preview for this before Transformers 2 and one thing I noticed was that people goraned when M. Night's name came on the screen. He needs to pray that this is a blockbuster.

If this makes money, it'll be quite a twist!

I see what you did there...

the one thing i am very concerned about is the treatment of the tone of the series, when converted to the movie.

Avatar always had a strong running current of light humor through most of the episodes, and if the movie goes and takes itself too seriously, that will probably be the thing that ruins it the most for me.

The series is fantastic, and well worth the time even for adults who don't have kids.

M.  Night Shamwow is almost 100% guaranteed to fuck it up. He has zero demonstrated facility with light or humorous material, which as others have noted is a crucial part of the mix in the stories. He's got no demonstrated facility with action, which is equally important. The casting so far is unimpressive. The people who have developed the show have had a very sure hand with it, so I was really surprised to see M.Night being given the nod to make the film--imho, about the only worse choice would have been Uwe Boll or Michael Bay.

I'm pretty sure it's on Netflix Online currently.

Oh, the comic series was great, which is weird, because it starts out as something for little kids, but then it hooks all the adults.

I mean, real nice shit. Wish I had stuff this cool when I was a kid.

M. Night. Shahamahuahalmahrwefnnowsifh4 is going to turn it into a festering pile of dogshit.

(http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/8113/mnightshamwow.jpg)

Personally I preferred lady in the water to the village.  Lady had a fairy tale quality to it and not much of a twist, it was just a bit odd and not terribly interesting.  I think it would have worked better as a short story/film on a lower budget.  The village however was an ending I saw coming from the very beginning and it's only redeeming quality was opie's daughter who is a Goddess.

M. Night did the screenplay for "Stuart Little" based on the original book; he's got some history in adapting 'light comedy' to screen.

Of course, this was a while ago - 1999.

I just want to echo everyone else and say the Cartoon Series is definitely worth watching. They really crafted a entire world and mythos with it and I am told that the fighting is fairly 'accurate' or however you want to put it. A lot of thought was put into the entire series and it shows. It's also rather clever and just fun to watch  :-)


As to this movie, I am so afraid  :|

Lady in the Water was shit from the moment the director cast himself as the most important character in the movie. God, I wanted to punch bunnies in the throat after watching that movie.

We had Mysterious Cities of Gold, which was cool but not nearly as good as Avatar.


Yeah, it is.  There were a few specials/ short clips about the series as each season started up.  IIRC they did several of these that illustrated which styles and Martial Arts forms they were using for the various 'benders.' 

Thanks to this thread, I immersed myself into the series (which I would never have seen otherwise).

Regardless of how crappy the movie might turn out to be, that was worth it.

The end of the movie will be Aang waking up inside his iceberg, realizing it was all a dream.

Not so much.

BZZZZZZT wrong answer

Time to necropost!

I just finished watching this series with my family, and it's damn good. The movie isn't that far off so I think the necro is fair treatment.

The handling of plot/story was done amazingly well for a US based cartoon. It's far better than anything from my childhood that was US based. No, really, I checked. My memories of a lot of the old shows are far better than the realties.

Airbender was as good to me now as Star Blazers was to me as a kid (and that one still holds up for me, campy but good.).

I'm going to give Mr. Shamalamadingdong a try, because my kids won't care if it isn't quite as good. With any luck this will be his exception film. He needs a change of pace. :)

Well, not sure how well M. Night is going to handle the humor, but the action is look pretty darn good in the Super Bowl trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT2UbiEwKRQ&feature=player_embedded).  The bending effects look really nice and I like that the firebenders seem to need a source (the campfire in one case) rather than just creating fire out of thin air.

There are some teaser posters up as well:

If mister shamalamadingdong messes up The Last Airbender, I hope that we get to fill the streets around his home with a mob and lynch him.

I think we are still trying to get that Bay posse organised for "Transformers".

I don't honestly think transformers ever should have been brought to the big screen, it needed to stay a bad cartoon. The Last Air Bender, has quality writing, and was very entertaining. It can be made into a good movie I think. Shamallama is the worst possible person to give this to.

I am not so sure. The guy needs a serious career reboot. At least he isn't creating the story from scratch which seems to be his doom since Sixth Sense.

I talked with a friend that went to a pre-screening.

Full trailer is out. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iwh70CLHiM&feature=player_embedded)

My hype meter is rising.  I'm tempted to go see that Percy Jackson movie just to see the trailer on the movie screen.  But that's just me. 

Why does Sokka sound like he's British/Irish/Australian/NZer (it's one of those accents.  I have no clue, I'm a lazy American) though?  Katara's voice worked for me for the tiny bit I heard it, we see more of Zuko and Iroh (the scar doesn't show up well enough, IMO from what I can see in the trailer), and Aang's still not talking. 

I'm not feeling this at all, it's just not translating into live action well for me.

Damn the main characters looks like the kid who bends the spoon with his mind in The Matrix.

My only problem with the trailer etc is that every one looks so serious, thats not avatar to me. Hopefully they get the humor conveyed, we'll see though. Having said that I'll see this in the theater for sure. This is one of my favorites to watch with my kids.

I dunno. I think M Knight Shamalamadingdong does great at comedy. That's the only way I can explain The Happening.

By the by, this movie is apparently the latest to be converted into 3D a few months before release.

From what i've read, they at least planned for 3D during filming, so hopefully it works better than Clash. Though, I think I'll probably just see it in 2D anyway.

So the opening is planned for July 1st now, and yet all the TV adverts I've seen (and there have been more than I expected, actually) still say the movie isn't rated.  That's kind of odd, isn't it?

I'm still planning to go see it though, thank the gods for matinees.

Trailer on last night on FOX showed it as PG.

Edit: it

Shyamalama-Ding-dong does nothing for me after 6th sense.   I expect special effects used liberally to mask a crappy job of storytelling.

Who knows since his last movie was about the wind killing off large chunks of the human race maybe his air bender will be a real bad ass.

I'm really dreading this, because the TV show is a huge favorite in our household and I'm getting really bad vibes every time I hear a character in the trailers speaking, particularly Aang.

I'm going to a preview on Tuesday, will let you all know how it is.

You are a brave man, Surly.  I shall sing songs in memory of the sacrifice you've made for us all.

Can't wait to hear how the preview goes.

Eh, I'm going to see the movie regardless, tbh, if only because I want to see the special effects.  I think I'd put up with almost any level of stupid if it had cool special effects.  I mean, I did pay to see League of Extraordinary Gentlemen after all.

Honestly, it doesn't look like a bad movie, and I say that as someone who didn't care for any of M. Knight's movies (Sixth Sense included) nor do I watch the cartoon.

Most of his movies are only so-so but I honestly thought the 6th Sense was good. What didn't you like about it?

"Unbreakable" was better than "The Sixth Sense". There are also few directors who can build dread in a modern setting as well as Shyamalan.

Ultimately a lot of people have wondered what he could do with someone else's script. Guess we'll soon know.

Apparently we were separated at birth.

Just wasn't my thing.  It wasn't bad, it just kinda bored me.  I did like the first half of Signs though before it went full retard.

Yeah, I was pissed about Signs because he did an excellent job of building up creepy creepy dread throughout the first half.  Nothing overt that jumped out and scared you, just subtle shit that really built up the tension. 

Then, as you mentioned, the movie went full retard in a similar way War of the Worlds did.

I loved Unbreakable.

I swore over a year ago that if The Last Airbender didn't suck, I would eat a hat.

That's how sure I was that this movie was going to suck.

It's going to suck.

Well it's Wednesday now.  Surly's never coming back.  That's our answer.

Main kid's face has all the character of a bag of turnips.

I actually thought that even the first part of Signs wasn't creepy. It just drug on, and you could tell the director was forcing the actors to move slowly at the "creepy" points to try to build tension. It got worse with shit like Lady in the Water and the Village. The Village started creepy but drug on and on. And all of them went full retard. Then he made the Happening, which broke his personal record for going full retard in the least amount of scenes with two.

Audiovisual ass.

Just heard a reviewer on NPR saying that the controversy over race in the casting of the film is now irrelevant because the movie is so resolutely terrible in every possible way that it's going to die quickly and be forgotten.

I find it kind of fascinating that companies that own potentially valuable IP decide to sell it off without any creative-control safeguards. So you're Nickleodeon, you've created an appealing animated series with devoted fans that has some serious Harry Potter potential if handled right and what do you do? Hand it over a studio who turns to a director of questionable talents who is plummeting towards professional oblivion and who had never made a film of this kind or shown any interest in this sort of material. It's not quite hiring Uwe Boll but neither does it make any sense.

0/8 so far  Rotten Tomatoes (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/last_airbender/).



:awesome_for_real:

Wow. That may be some of the worst early reviews I've ever heard.

Amusingly, I want to see it MORE now, knowwhatimean?

Man my ass hurts just reading the reviews.

Well at least there's no where else to go but up*

* It's up to 9% now

It's disappointing this movie is getting panned, but not terribly surprising.  I'll probably end up seeing it with the family regardless.

I'm not sure why Avatar couldn't have been left alone as a property.  It's not really one that lends itself to movie format, unless someone's going to commit to 10 or 13 movies.  Three or four movies per Book, then one more movie for Sozin's Comet.  Trying to cram 20 chapters, each with a length of 22 minutes, into a 2 hour movie (guessing as to the length) is pure madness.

No, not even two hours.  100 minutes.

That's a real shame.  The cartoon was really well done, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.  I can only hope that whatever idiot gave the green light to let Shamawhatsis direct this gets shitcanned, and Shamalama never is allowed to make another movie ever again.

Now that I've had time to properly let it percolate through my system, I repeat: Audiovisual ass.

That said, yeah. They killed a really good property with amazing potential stone fucking dead. The kids that played Aang and Katara were there before the screening started and had a lot of people politely cheering and clapping for them before the show. If they'd been there at the end, they might have been hanged. That crowd got positively ugly.

Someone turned that 9 upside down.

 :cry: I rather liked WotW.

The critical hatred for this film is entertainment in its own right. I think it's not just how bad the film apparently is, but also how much people in the movie biz have come to hate M. Night for his preening egotism. But I'm still pretty astounded (and depressed) at the total wasting of a potentially entertaining (and lucrative) cultural property. The film industry is a really curious thing, more feudal kingdom than capitalist business. Vassals get paid off for past fealty to the king rather than giving investments over to be developed for maximum profit by the most competent and far-sighted people. Then again, maybe that's how most capitalist businesses work too, now that I think on it.

Yeah, not good.  I know part of the negativity is related to people's dislike of M.Knight himself and also how he's steadily gotten worse and worse with each film he makes, but I think we can safely say unless he pulls some kind of miracle out of his ass, we won't be seeing much of him in the future in any kind of major studio picture.

I can't say I'm surprised that the film is bad, but I wasn't expecting to see so much criticism of the special effects.  The vibe I got from the trailers was "hey, at least it will look good."

io9's review (http://io9.com/5576076/m-night-shyamalan-finally-made-a-comedy)


Fucking golden.

First, fuck video game loathing Roger Ebert and the rest of the clattering critic class.

Just came back from seeing this, and while it's not a great movie by any stretch, was entertained for the duration.

Yes, buckets of cheese replete with inane dialog. The visuals were over the top too, but I thought they were stunning enough. But I can cut a movie made from a cartoon where the Water Nation is warring with the Fire Nation some slack here (more so than a movie like Robin Hood where the dialog was just as ridiculous or worse).

M. Night doesn't adhere to the Hollywood template, and while it strikes some as amateurish, I believe it refreshing. And I state this as someone, while I liked Unbreakable and thought Sixth Sense was OK, who deemed his last couple of movies (Lady in the Water, Happenings or whatever that monstrosity was titled) completely unwatchable and bereft any redeeming bits.

Final note — 3D was a waste of money, as there didn't seem to be much 3D about it, other than cutout backgrounds.

yup just got back from watching it. Cleared my mind of all bias. Emptied my pre-emptive bias. Disassociated the film, mentally, from my knowledge of the director's tendencies. Went in with neutrality.

Movie was absolutely hideous. Worse than the happening? And they said it could not be done! hurp durp.

This needs to be the end of m. night fartbender's career. he done.

Special effects were meh at best. When you see a fight scene approaching, flip a coin. One of two things will happen.

heads: extras will stand around and wait to get knocked over by a soggy bending effect.

tails: someone will do something dramatic, then everyone will leave before the scene can go anywhere.

the fx are dull and mostly constrained to beautiful vistas in various setpieces that the film careens through at a rapid pace. The entire movie is exposition. Like the entire movie. The movie is actually a ridiculously huge montage that is so massive that it has smaller, clumsier montages orbiting it.

I love the line in the io9 review that the kid who played Aang manages to convince you he's standing in front of a greenscreen even when he's on location somewhere.