[Trailer] Last Airbender: what's the appeal?

[IronWolf]

7%? Wow, they found some reviewers who actually liked it. It was still at 0% this afternoon.

It's drifting back down, 6% as I post.

 

[Mark]

I'd love to think I'd Netflix it but I don't have a decent enough screen to make that wortwhile for just an FX movie. I'll have to decide by then if I want to see them bad enough for a $5 early show on a regular big screen. I think given the reports, anything more just seems like encouraging bad filmmaking.

 

[CrimsonReaver]

The more reviews I read, the more I honestly believe the reviews are ultimately going to be vastly more entertaining than the movie itself.

I'm really curious to see what the weekend box office numbers end up being. Sadly, after the scathing brutality of these reviews, I think there will be a lot of people in theaters just out of morbid curiosity.

 

[Piratecat]

"It's bad, as in "Wild Wild West" will no longer be considered the nadir of July 4th weekend releases."

Ouch.

Down to 5%.

 

[Krug]

I really don't have any ill will towards M Night or the film. I was hoping for it to be good cause I loved the anime.

PS: The whole race thing didn't really bother me too much, and I'm Asian.

 

[Piratecat]

Another hilarious review. Some cursing.

M. Night Shyamalan Finally Made A Comedy

 

[Felon]

IGN ranks the best 10 episodes of Avatar.

I think the choice for #1 is quite interesting. I had never really pegged where the series seemed to really get its legs and rise above the level of pure kiddy fare. I'll have to go back and check it out again.

 

[TwinBahamut]

Do the anime fans in this thread agree with this assessment?

To be perfectly fair to Mr. Shyamalan, that is actually pretty true. For all kinds of reasons, anime characters tend to be drawn in ways that make racial identification a difficult task. For the most part, character designs in anime are not meant to make their race identifiable; they are meant to make a character's individual quirks identifiable. If anything, any fan of anime can tell you that anime characters, especially those who are explicitly japanese, don't all look like a stereotypical japanese person.

A term for this that you might want to look up is "mukokuseki".

This is actually something that dates all the way back to the founding "god of anime" himself, Osamu Tezuka.

Anyways, if you want proof of this, take a look at the file I attached. Of the five girls in that image, one is of mixed japanese/caucasian descent, one is an italian-american, and the other three are pure japanese. If you can tell their races apart based on their appearance, I will be very surprised.

Really, I definitely have some sympathy for Mr. Shyamalan's position. You would be very hard pressed to find actors who actually look like any of the characters from that series, simply because they so often have mixed features like dark skin, inuit culture, blue eyes, and distant genetic relation to really weird swamp people...

 

[RedBeardJim]

IGN ranks the best 10 episodes of Avatar.

I think the choice for #1 is quite interesting. I had never really pegged where the series seemed to really get its legs and rise above the level of pure kiddy fare. I'll have to go back and check it out again.

In the art book, the creators explain that "The Storm" was the last of the original run of episodes that Nick purchased, and when they were planning it out they didn't know yet if they were going to get picked up for a full season. So they tried to make an episode that could potentially serve as a climactic endpoint for the series up to that point.

 

[Pseudonym]

"It's bad, as in "Wild Wild West" will no longer be considered the nadir of July 4th weekend releases."

That's saying something. I took a date to see Wild Wild West and spent the rest of the night apologizing. It was the trump card in every argument for the next four months afterward, and Avatar is worse? Shame.