Delectable tea or deadly poison?

[sovay]

Rabbit, rabbit. In re M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender (2010), which opens today:

The first fatal decision was to make a live-action film out of material that was born to be anime. The animation of the Nickelodeon TV series drew on the bright colors and "clear line" style of such masters as Miyazaki, and was a pleasure to observe . . . After the miscalculation of making the movie as live action, there remained the challenge of casting it. Shyamalan has failed. His first inexplicable mistake was to change the races of the leading characters; on television Aang was clearly Asian, and so were Katara and Sokka, with perhaps Mongolian and Inuit genes. Here they're all whites. This casting makes no sense because (1) It's a distraction for fans of the hugely popular TV series, and (2) all three actors are pretty bad.

Thank you, Roger Ebert.

Now go and watch the original.

Comments

[sovay]

Rabbits rabbits! (and here I thought my father and I only did that. We prefer to use the plural, though. "Rabbit rabbit" is reserved for when you're sitting at the campfire and the smoke is blowing in your face.)

Heh. That makes you exactly the second person I've met outside my family to practice this tradition. (gaudior says, "Rabbits!" but she is my cousin and therefore I think doesn't quite count.) Do you have any idea where it comes from? Nobody seems to know.

I had no idea the critical reaction to this film would be so vehemently abrasive. I thought the thing just looked mediocre.

Read Metacritic; even I'm a little stunned.

Someday I ought to drag out the argument or theory or assertion that Ebert is the Damon Runyon of this generation or century or whatever time period we choose.

Please do. I'm not sure Ebert has yet inspired any musicals (although he co-wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which has to count for something), but I should like to hear the full story.

I am too tired to present the full details, but it really gets good when you learn that throat cancer also robbed Damon Runyon of his voice, and that he too communicated solely through the written word for the last few years of his life.

For starters, I did not know that.